My Experience with MS Word + What is the ISTE?

 Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog! <3

    For my second blog post, I will first start with telling you about my experiences with Microsoft Word. Honestly, I do not really use it all that much, but the times I have used it, I have never had a problem with it. I never used it throughout elementary or middle school – we never really required computer use for assignments – but during high school is when I started using Microsoft products more often, specifically Microsoft Word. It wasn't even until my junior and senior years that I started using Word a lot more frequently but I soon stopped after I used Google Docs. Quite frankly, I really do prefer Google Docs a lot more. The interface seems to be a lot simpler, in my opinion, just because there are fewer options that are presentable to you in the top bar. Sometimes, whenever I do an essay or any other type of assignment on Word, I get overwhelmed with all the extra buttons and tabs that are presented to me right away. Google Docs just seems to be easier if all I have to do is an essay in a standard format. I will however use Word if I have to use a table to fill out information or do something with pictures; in these situations, it seems easier to me when I am using it for creative purposes for an assignment. Generally, though, it's really situational when I prefer a program but for the most part, Google Docs is my go-to.

    As a future educator, I have been on a journey of learning about new resources that will come to my benefit throughout my prospective career. Part of these resources is the International Society for Technology in Education, or otherwise abbreviated to the ISTE. Providing many standards for different groups of people regarding the education field, the ISTE specifies seven different standards for educators to abide by; these standards are: learner, leader, citizen, collaborator, designer, facilitator, and analyst. Thinking ahead into what kind of person I currently am and what kind of teacher I want to be, the collaborator standard really stands out to me. As defined by the ISTE, the collaborator standard means that educators dedicate their time to collaborating with not only their colleagues but also their students so that they can improve & practice their teaching, discover new resources & ideas and share them with said colleagues and students, and solve any problems that may arise in any situation. This standard is the most meaningful to me because I know that in any situation, I don't really like working alone; I love to hear new ideas and bounce my own ideas to develop them into better ideas from other people. Becoming a teacher requires collaboration with your colleagues, mostly so that you can all help to provide a safe and healthy environment for the students, but also to provide the best teaching and learning experience for the students. A teacher does not automatically know everything just because they are a teacher, so collaborating with as many people as possible can really help to develop one's skills as an educator.

    Being a part of Gen Z, born in 2001, I have lived my entire life being exposed to technology in some form or another. As a child, I used to play with V-Tech all the time, playing multitudes of educational games before even going to preschool. When I was older, my parents gifted me with an iPod Touch, a Wii, a Nintendo DS, even my first phone and laptop in middle school! I one hundred percent agree that today's youth is most definitely considered to be digital natives. Most of us who were privileged enough to afford these technologies at home have most likely never known what life was like without all of these personal technologies. Even if some kids weren't privileged enough, they were still most likely exposed to technology in school, whether it was through using laptops, desktop computers, iPads, ELMOs, SmartBoard, you name it. Regardless of home-owned or school-owned, using technology throughout our lives in this rapidly developing technological era, our education has been significantly impacted; personally, I believe that it has made my learning experience more fun, as we had access to so many fun educational games, as well as making it easier for us to connect with our teachers from home through programs such as Canvas. Although we have been heavily exposed to this technology, I have noticed that it's been a bit of a challenge for many of my teachers to become adapted to this new era of teaching and learning; it's been quite a learning experience for the older teachers, as they grew up knowing life without technology, thus making them digital immigrants in contrast to us. The technology we consider to be basic was seemingly considered difficult or too high tech to them at the time – sometimes even to this day, I see some older teachers still have difficulty. Its been a lot more prominent in the past year seeing how difficult it is for older teachers to adapt to technology in the educative scene through zoom. Many of the features that personally I see as easy to understand and figure out has been a challenge for my professors to figure out during class. While I may say it now that technology is easy to figure out and I will always be able to figure how to use things for class, I may end up in the same boat as my older teachers maybe ten to twenty years into my career. Technology is quickly advancing and as I get older, I don't have as much time as I used to being on my phone all hours of the day, constantly learning new tips, tricks, and lifehacks through youtube videos, so presumably it may be challenging for me to learn whatever new technology is developed by then, but I hope my students are just as patient with me then as we are with our professors now. :)