Educators Must Know!

The reflection assignment reads, "Turner presents a set of skills she believes every educator needs. In considering your own classroom and your own professional development, identify two critical skills necessary for educators and the meaningful integration of technology. You can agree with skills Turner presents, or you can determine two of your own."

Personally, I find this assignment to be mind boggling only because there are so many other skills that educators need to have when integrating technology into their classroom. These skills are mainly in the classroom management area. It also depends on how technology is being integrated and what level of technology is being integrated. However, I do feel that there are some very important skills that educators should master when integrating technology into their classroom. I don't believe I can break it down to just two.

Word Processing Skills
Word processing skills are the most essential skills that an educator should have. There is nothing worse to me than a teacher trying to educate students through technology when the educator can't even type skillfully. I understand that there are a number of things that educators can teach out there without having the ability to type well, but word processing is such a basic skill to acquire. We even have a Career Technology class in my school, where very little word processing is needed, but the students seem to respect their educators more if they have the skill of word processing. It really seems to be something that the students will look up to.

Storage & E-mail
Another two skills that I feel an educator must have are in Computer-Related Storage Devices (Knowledge: disks, CDs, USB drives, zip disks, DVDs, etc.) and E-Mail Management Skills. I find this to be so important because these two skills are essential ways through which the students and educators can provide communication to each other. If the educator has these skills, the doors have been opened for students to be able to provide the educator with products of their work whether it be through e-mail or saved on a storage device.

These are just a few skills that I find to be essential for an educator to know. I agree with most of the things on Turner's list, but I was able to narrow it down to these three skills.