Final Reflection
First I would like to start of by saying I loved the use of
blogging for this assignment. I am new
to blogging and this is my first blog that I have ever made and I was surprised
to find that I actually found the process to be very helpful and
enlightening. Wang (2008) says that
blogs engage people in information sharing and reflection and in the case of
this assignment I really feel that from the sharing and input I got from my
fellow class mates I learnt a great deal more that I would of if I just wrote a
essay about technology.
By reading my fellow students comments about my experiences
I found that they gave me a further opportunity to learn further. A Danish philosopher called Soren
Kierkegaard is quoted as saying, “To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner (thinkexisit, ND). I am not a
teacher, only a fellow student.” I class myself as a teacher and I
have always thought that it was my duty to educate the children I care
for. However from this experience of
blogging I have learnt that my peers comments have challenged me to learn more
so I now class myself as a life long learner and I feel with the technology
world changing so rapidly this new out look of being a learner will help me
integrate into this technological world.
I have grown up in a technological
world and I see myself as quite technologically minded. However I have learnt that technology is
everywhere I found it hard to grasp the notion of non digital technology
however after reading Smorti (1999) and
their description of how technology is about making life easier and that
technology can be found everywhere I have started to change my view. I constantly find myself looking around my Centre
trying to find anything that was not a form of technology in some way. Smorti (1999) defines technology as a process
aimed at meeting needs and opportunities to develop tools that are important to
the community at the time. As I look
around the room at my Centre everything that I can see has been developed to
make life easier right down to the children sized chairs which were develop
through Maria Montessori vision of resources being child sized to help develop their
learning.
Maria Montessori’s vision was a
huge form of risk taking and as smorti suggests risk taking as big part to
technology. In order to develop technology
we need to take that risk to want to improve what we already have and from
reading my fellow peers comment I realize that I need to be more of a risk
taker and move with the times of technology.
I have always seen digital technology as something expensive such as
laptops and therefore children should not be allowed to play with them incase
they break them. However I feel I have
started to over come this fight my previous thought of “too expensive” and I now
see myself giving the children more freedom with digital technology. I have also found that he children are more
than capable of caring for these digital technologies and as a result I feel I now
see the children as capable individuals (Ministry of education, 1996). I feel I have come to this realization
through self-reflection and more importantly feedback from my peers through
this assignment process.
References:
Ministry
of Education. (1996). Te Whāriki: He
whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa : Early childhood curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: Learning
Media.
Smorti, S. (1999) Technology in early
childhood. Early Education, 1, 5-10.
ThinkExisit (ND). Learner quotes http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/learner/
Wang, H. (2008). Exploring the
educational use of blogs in U.S. education. US – China Education Review, 5
(10), 34-37.
