Final Reflection

If I hadn't believed that the education will completely rely on technology in just a few years from now, I wouldn't have chose this course. I don't want to reject the traditional methods used in education, but I think that Teaching with Technology doesn't necessarily mean alienation of students from eachother, it's just the opposite: it can enhance their curiosity, motivate them to work in groups, but also to help them to communicate with eachother in an easier and more effective way.
Although I wouldn't used all of the programs and methods suggested on this course, I'm glad that I was provided with variety of choices and see for myself what are the exact methods, exact programs and ways of improving student's performance while studying and using Technology.
The Powepoint presentations, for example, are a great and interesting way of expressing your ideas in a clear and persuasive way. Besides that, students are required to go one step at a time while preparing the presentation, in terms of elaborating their ideas and bringing them to life, which means choosing the topic they want to talk about, putting an emphasize on the most important things by including it to their Powerpoint material, but also take care of the impression they will make on the other students by their choice of details in Powerpoint. The method is quite good because it requries an effort which is interesting enough to make, and it is student centered, because you can get the opportunity to adress directly to your colleagues and enable them to follow your presentation through the interesting visual material that the Powerpoint provides.
Although I disliked couple of programs, e.g.the Painter, which is pretty boring, slows down the working process and and decreases the motivation, I think that the students should be introduced with it because education is all about giving different choices, several of which can be combined to get to your goal.
Modern educational methods, which are inevitably connected to Technology, require intensive and interesting group work, as well as a very self-motivating individual work. That's exactly what the Teaching with Technology provides: a great amounts of motivation, based on interesting, vivid, visual and audio experiences, leading to the enthusiasm that we all need in order to be sattisfied with ourselves and what we do. Webquests were a wonderful example of that, because they included group work, exploring, investigating, thinking and combining different information and details.
As I said in the beginning, Technology was not invented to alienate people from themselves and stick them to their PC's, mouses and make their PC programs their only friends, it's just the opposite: using Technology in education processes will definetely save some time, lead to effective work with valuable results and create people who will definetely enjoy they job because they will be challenged and motivated enough.