Shari's Teachnology Statement

Although I have presented my Remixed form, I wanted to present my full Teachnology statement on the blog (I think it is short enough to do so). Although many of you have read and commented on it, feel free to post a comment to help me develop the Statement more. I added the last paragraph after some great discussion today! :)

I strongly believe that students should walk away from their University or Community College experience with the ability to utilize various technologies in order to succeed in our high-tech world. This reconceptualizes the ways in which technology should function in a classroom, in that it recognizes the usefulness of adapting social media and web-based tools for classroom use. It also means that we should teach students the tools for using these technologies, rather than the technologies themselves. Although these technologies will inevitably change, those that I currently use for teaching digital writing and with technology in the writing classroom are imovie, Windows Movie Maker, Creative commons licensing for copyright information on digital works, youtube, and facebook. A few technologies which have become highly integrated with the research process (for example, differentiating between simply doing a google search and using googlescholar or a library’s scholarly article database) are those which are highly important to my curriculum.

Thus in practice I strive to know what students bring to the classroom, technology- wise, and work to bring them to a higher level of understanding both of evolving technologies and the tools of navigating technology moving forward. This also means that I will be learning as much from my students as they from me as the digital world continues to evolve. For me, this is one of the most exciting aspects of being a writing teacher and an area of interest students will continue to educate me on.

My teaching is not divorced from my research, and as my research focuses on the ways in which first-year writing instructors can teach against linguistic imperialism, what my students have yet to teach me (or what I have yet to collaborate with my students on) is the way that this goal can be achieved in the digital realm. As social media is increasingly becoming the way to reach not only the world at large but academic audiences (some might say, even more than conferences and some print journals), my digital knowledge and experience is of, and will continue to be, high priority on my agenda.