The Teaching Textbook

How do I know if I’m doing it right? This is a question that I know I have been guilty of asking many times throughout my student life, as I suspect many other students have and will continue to ask. This question is especially important for how it relates to technology and digital spaces. I often find myself delving into these new digital spaces, trying to interact and engage with them, before being hit with those initial thoughts of “What am I doing? Is this right?” So that leads me to the question of how can I, as a future teacher, ensure that my students can answer these questions on their own? Recently I have been learning about using, analyzing, and creating in different spaces, understanding that to work effectively in digital spaces, we must ask questions about the tools we are using to better understand their benefits. This ability to ask questions is what I have come to know as the process of analyzing (Heinrichsen & Coombs, 2014, p. 9-11). Analyzing takes place before

The topic of how to teach students to use technology and attain meaning from it is often circling throughout my brain in one form or another. I find myself questioning how I’ll be able to teach with technology if I don’t feel comfortable enough using it on my own. Sure I consider myself to be relatively “techy,” when it comes to my personal use of technology, but how does that translate into my ability to incorporate it into the classroom? Over the past couple of weeks, I have discovered two key terms that can help in my ability to use technology in the classroom. Code breaking is the ability to understand how a technology works. This idea is closely tied to meaning making in that we have to understand the ins and outs of how a technology works before we are able to effectively find and take away meaning from it. To put these concepts into practice, I have spent some time creating in various digital spaces that were unfamiliar to me. I started off with creating a Bitmoji cha