I had a lot of fun planning this unit with Addie! We both like to read and thought it would be fun to do a multicultural unit including a book we read as students. The House on Mango Street is a unique book in the sense that it can be used in classrooms of many ages and can be analyzed very deeply or read for its surface value story. I would say our first success with this unit was going with an idea that we felt passionate about and were excited to teach!

It had been awhile since we had last looked at The House On Mango Street, so we re-read the book to bring our content knowledge up to par. At this point in the teaching program, I feel very comfortable planning lessons and knowing all the steps of a lesson I need to touch on when instructing students. However, I do think that I am still struggling with natural technology integration in my lesson plans. The more I observe and see it done, the easier it becomes. At the same time, when I am planning lessons I reflect a lot upon my own experiences as a student (because I was a student that loved school) and the ways in which I learned. However, technology was not included as much in instruction when I was in middle and high schyool and therefore, my reflections do not always bring the greatest lesson ideas to mind.

I would like to get to a point where I naturally incorporate technology and different technological devices into my lesson plans (depending on my future classroom resources). I find myself often planning lessons and then going back and incorporating technology in once I have the core structure of the lesson done. Sometimes its hard to go back into an already-made lesson and try to incorporate technology into it, and many times it causes you to cheapen the level of technology used and this is something I definitely want to avoid doing to my students. I think it would be great if I could become a teacher that always included technology into my core planning and instruction.

Media in the lives of 8-18 year olds

The findings in the article discussing media present in the lives of 8-18 year olds does not surprise me one bit! I have a cousin who just graduated from 8th grade and I am perplexed at how the youngest member of my entire extended family knows so much more about technology and the different venues in which technology is available than do all of my adult family members. I actually would have been more surprised if the usage of media by children and teens was less than what results showed in the Key Findings section of this article. 


I think that the growth of technology in the last 10 years has had possibly the most significant impact on the development of young people today. I often discuss with my family how my parents use to have to sit in a public spot at the one phone in their house to call their friends. Now, children and teens are in constant contact with each other through the available use of cell phones - texting and calling, the internet - social networking websites and chat friendly applications, and interactive video games. I think this has created a more comfortable and much stronger connection between members of the American youth, however, I think it has also crippled this group of people because they no longer have to encounter a face to face situation if they do not want to and therefore are less prepared for these events. 


There are both good and bad aspects of this increase in usage of technology among youth today. The good thing is so many people are connected in a way they have never been able to be connected before. Students are able to be much more aware of what is going on in the world through the use of the internet, they have the capability to meet and make friends much easier than that of yesteryear, and the resources available to students has increased tenfold. However, do students and youth necessarily take advantage of all of these opportunities? Of course not! Even though there is so much more available to the group of 8-18 year olds because of technology, much of their focus is spent on the "social" part of technology. With the capability to find out what happened across the world only ten minutes ago, students rarely capitalize on the opportunity to become aware. On top of that, even though things have been made so much easier for them through the use of technology, students are still not motivated enough to bring that aspect of technology into their academic curriculum in some cases, but would rather use technology for music, video games, t.v., etc. 


Being aware of this, whenever I bring technology into my classroom for my students use, I will make sure to highlight out the ways in which technology can really enhance their learning and their opportunity to find resources so quickly. I will hopefully be able to spark their interest and make them aware of how so much of the world is right at their fingertips.