Necessary tie between resource and subject

One of the things we're doing in my class is podcasting book reviews. One group of students is in charge of background music. In order to help them, I have to familiarize myself with GarageBand enough to help them with troubleshooting. The group is being given a total time of 1.5 hours of classtime to do this.

I'm busy getting to know GarageBand. It is fun. But this exploration is not intrinsically tied to learning more about reading skills. Its accessorizing the presentation.

Look, on the other hand, at this example. In a college phonetics and phonology class, we were given the opportunity to mess about with Praat sound recording and manipulation software. We saw the waveforms and spectral images of sounds, changed the pitch so that a declarative utterance became a question, spoke backward and reversed it, cut off phonemes from words, tried to determine the word by looking at the waveforms, etc. It was all very fun in a dorky, explorative way, but it directly led to learning the subject at hand.

Good Media Resource

We found this during a meeting this morning:

http://www.4president.us

This site archives television political ads (presidential ads) from 1952 on. A great resource for anyone doing election coverage, media literacy, propaganda, etc. I'd be interested in other archives that might be useful.

Tech Manifesto

Hmm...probably not the best title to use. Rest assured, I'm not a survivalist headed for the hills.

So...opening thoughts for this mandatory blog:

I'm interested primarily in the ways teachers, rather than students, can use technology in order to create more efficient, engaging, and clearer classes. Technology as a means of facilitating the exchange of ideas.

I am wary of technology becoming the subject rather than the means of exploring the subject. Technological literacy is without question a necessary skill, but every time I think about how to use it in the clssroom I stop thinking about the subject I'm supposed to be teaching. My interest in technology ends when its use impedes rather than assists.