Chapter 8 Rethinking education

This was an interesting chapter in the fact that it was bringing together three big ideas that technology is going to bring about in education.  Those three big ideas were performance-based assessment, New curriculum design, and new approaches to equity in the digital world.  These new aspects are going to bring about change in the way we think of education.  With performance-based assessment the whole idea is to assess the student in specific areas academic, generic, or technical.  They want to assess students and then give them certain credentials in each specific category.  This is a lot different then education now because we judge on an overall status with GPA and bringing all the areas of learning together.  With technology the way it is I think it would be easier to assess like this but I feel that students need to be well rounded.  The book also talked about how students are able to learn what they are interested in and want to learn.  I feel that this could be a good idea but what if students only want to learn about one thing like dinosaurs and not anything else.  All little kids love dinosaurs, does this mean that we will have a bunch of 1st graders only learning about dinosaurs.  I am all for specialization but for specialization to happen I think the students need to be well rounded.  I also think that it is a good idea for students to have many credentials that they can use which would be easier for jobs to find what they are looking for.  These credentials just have to be considered legitimate and I feel that it could be a good idea.  I do agree that the curriculum needs to be changed but maybe not too drastic.  I feel that students are expected to just scrape the surface because they are learning so much but nothing in depth.  This is where specialization would help because they students could learn very in depth aspects of what they are studying.  Like I said before though is you can't have so much specialization that the students arn't learning what they need to get through life.  The part about new approaches to equity in a digital world talks a lot about technology being used to help students learn in multiple ways.  The idea that students are able to learn when they are not even near a school is a great thing in my opinion.  Some students don't have the benefit of this.  With more and more technology coming I think it is great that more resources are going into helping students learn.  As a future teacher I have to be able to integrate these new ideas and be optimistic to help faciliate learning.