Wes Fryer Chapter 1: Why?

“Playing with Media” offered an interesting perspective on how the use of media is important to our schools. However, when reading there were parts throughout the chapter that caught me by surprise or that I did not agree with.

It was interesting how much emphasis Fryer put on cellphones, because honestly I cannot envision them in a school setting. When he said that educators should “embrace them” I could not disagree more. Cellphones in a school setting are nothing but a distraction to students, and that is coming from the student perspective. As a future teacher, if there was an app beneficial to my classroom, I wouldn’t use it because my students would be busy doing other things like checking emails or text messages. I think that its completely ridiculous to use them in a school setting because there is no way for teachers to monitor or restrict the use of cellphones.

Another point Fryer made that I did not agree with was how students need media to be creative and/or create. I think there are many other different ways to be creative and that technology is one of those ways, but it is not the only way. It is important for students, especially children, to express their creativity. It’s a little over the top to say that we need to depend of technology for that.

At the beginning of the chapter, Fryer expressed the importance of images. I thought it was interesting how we learn more through pictures than through text, and personally I can relate because I am more apt to learn that way as well. Fryer writes that: “learning experiences in our classrooms for students should be filled with visual media created and shared by students as well as teachers” because if we learn through images, a classroom should be bright, colorful, and engaging to make students more willing to learn the subject at hand, and more inspired to unleash their creative side.

Apps for a Personal Passion

My apps that I searched for are for my passion of baking. Most of the apps I found were kitchen games, but I mainly focused on apps that would be of use to me in the kitchen, essentially to improve my different baking techniques. 

1. Kitchen Stories - I would rate this app a 4/5 because although it had very interesting features like how to videos, it was a little hard to maneuver, unlike my favorite app, In the Kitchen.

2. In the Kitchen - I thought this app was by far the coolest, and the most variety in recipes. It comes from the Food Network, so it comes with celebrity chief advice, and allows you to customize a grocery list or run multiple timers at once. Definitely a 5/5.

3. Baking w/ Dorie - I did not really care for this app, it did not have many different recipes and you had to pay for the individual recipes, instead of getting them for free like In the Kitchen!

4. Muffins - I would rate this app a 3/5. It came with interesting recipes and was easy to control, but for my passion, I would not like to limit myself to just cupcake and muffin recipes.

5. Craftsy - Along with Baking w/ Dorie, I did not care for this app. All recipes you had to purchase. It looked interesting if I had the money to spend on it, but actually paying for the recipes was a downside to this app, and after that discovery led to disinterest.

SAMR Model

One model of enhancing technology within the classroom is TPCK. TPCK stands for pedagogy, content, and technology knowledge. All of these subjects are interwoven together, for example, there is content knowledge, or pedagogy technology knowledge. However, when they are all combined, they are important for the benefit of a teacher’s students. The second model is SAMR. There are four stages of SAMR which are divided into enhancement and transformational. Substitution, and augmentation fall under the category of enhancement and modification and redefinition fall under the category of transformational. It is easiest to think about SAMR as how a teacher can incorporate different levels of technology into a classroom.

Once example of the SAMR model that I have had personal experience with is substitution. During a precalculus class in high school, my teacher instead of writing problems, formulas, and examples on the board, wrote them on a note pad, hooked up to his computer and projected it to the class room to see. This is substitution because he did not use any other features  in the program. His reason for using it was so if someone was absent in his class, he could send them a copy of his notes and examples, instead of students relying on other students.

SAMR can also be found in many technologies today. For example I have an app on my phone, Triviacrack that allows me to play my Facebook friends in a trivia game ranging over topics of history, art, entertainment, science, geography, and sports. This takes the highest level of redefintion because the app allows you and other users from all over the world add questions that all players of Triviacrack can answer. It also allows you to be social in an educational way with classmates or friends.

Googledocs is a program that I used frequently during the first semester of college for my writing seminar. For the editing process in writing, we would share our papers with three other people in class. When editing a paper, they could highlight text, leave comments, and rearrange different parts of a paper to make it flow better. All of there edits were logged, and they could make their edits on their own time, which allowed us to not be obligated to schedule meetings with each other for editing. Googledocs falls under the stage of modification because it transformed the actual process of our paper editing for that class.

Another example of the SAMR model in real life was an app I used when I went camping with my friends. The app made lists of things that we needed for our trip, so we wouldn’t forget anything important. It easier bringing my friend’s tablet than a notebook and a bunch of pens. So this example is based off of the level of substitution, because we were simply switching paper out with technology to make our lives, and the stress of packing easier for our group of friends.

Lastly, an example of the level of augmentation, was when my history teacher changed his lecture style of make class more interesting for us. Instead of just lecturing and us taking notes, he started to make slide shows. He said his special slide shows kept us more lively, and less likely to doze off in the middle of a lecture. He started to incorporate special features such as links to short videos, photographs of places and people, and interactive maps of battles we were learning about. It was a drastic change from him standing up and lecturing all class, and I found myself more captivated with the help of his technological changes.

"TPCK and SAMR: Models for Enhancing Technology Integration" by Ruben Puentedura