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.