My Bloom's

In my early schooling I experienced a great deal of recall, and application of skills. I attended Career Institute of Technology my junior and senior year of high school. I studied building trades. I learned to apply the use of welding, masonry, carpentry, electrical and plumbing skills. I went on to Penn College for Welding. I studied metallurgical facts and phenomena. I practiced welding skills for hours and hours. In a few courses I applied those skills in a real-world setting.
It wasn't until I attended Penn State my junior and senior year of college that I began analyzing, evaluating and creating ideas. I built my philosophy of education. And developed creative ways of reaching students and assessing their needs. (none of which employed the use of standardized tests)
At Millersville I studied Technology Education. I digressed back to the practice and application of skills. Occasionally I studied industrial concepts and practices. And in a few classes we spent some time analyzing these concepts to create curriculum and lesson plans. There was little reflection or evaluation of technology products or projects. The projects I made were rarely a creation of my own, but, simply a blueprint of an idea that somebody made fyears ago and was a requirement of every Tech. Ed. student that had graced those classrooms for at least 2 decades.
Now my educational journey has brought me to East Stroudsburg University where I have created pictures, images, brochures and documents that are unique and professional-looking. I have analyzed data and evaluated practices and policies in education. I have engaged in creative discussion and heard new ideas from practicing educators and future educators.
I think my experiences were largely memorizing facts and practicing skills because of the paths I chose. I entered trade fields and they requiring a lot of those types of thinking. However, I was sprised that in a field like technology education there wasn't more designing, analyzing, evaluating and creating going on. Many of my classes at Millersville were very shop oriented and not so technology oriented. We should have been anylizing and evaluating current technology. And we should have been creating new technology.

Democracy In Education

The three most important things I got from John Dewey's Democracy In Education are that education is the lifeblood of society, communication is a necessity for education and that formal education is vulnerable to generation gaps between adults and youth. This idea is vital to the existance of civilization. As the gap gets greater communication gets harder and formal education becomes difficult, causing us to digress as a people.
People learn through informal experience and formal experience. Formal education is what separates sophisticated societies from more primitive societies. If formal education breaks down, then we become more primative.
Communication is a vital necessity of education. We cannot educate if we cannot communicate. Therefore, as communication takes place and grows so does education and subsequently our society. Communication is not only the transfer of knowledge, but, the building of ones experience in a formal sense. It is linking knowledge and skill to life experience. Therefore, education is communicated from one generation to the next.
But, as the education of adults increases, so does the communication gap with their youth. As adults gets smarter, they lose touch with young learners. Therefore, as communication breaks down, so does education and then society.

Technology Integration

We should integrate technology into curriculum because educators have always integrated technology into curriculum. Early educaters would sit students in a circle and lecture. Then, as technology advanced, education advanced with it. In 105AD the Chinese invented Paper. In the 15th Century Johannes Gutenberg printed the first book with movable type. In the mid 1800s the first pencil was invented. Each of these technologies are still widely used in education today. Then, as computers were developed in the late 20th century it was almost inevitable that they would be used in education. Now the invention of the internet has brought another fabulous teaching tool. It is only natural that we use this technology and all of it's blogs, wikis, moodles, etc. that it offers.
Why is there even a debate? Did early educators resist using textbooks for fear of being replaced. Did 19th century educators scoff the pencil and eraser because it allowed students to erase mistakes making them more careless? I vaguely remember learning something about book burnings in history class. But, lucky for us, texbooks won out and they opened up a whole new world to all of us. Now computers and the internet are connecting people in different hemospheres. We are transferring information at an alarming rate. Lets not close doors to our students by resisting the use of the technology our world has to offer.