Student as Contributer: The Digital Learning Farm reflection:

This article introduces six "jobs" in technology that can be given to students that would help them contribute to the learning community. These jobs are
-tutorial designer: students create their own tutorial videos, that are put together into a databse for students to use.
-official scribes: a different student is the notetaker each day, and these are all collected for the class's online textbook.
-researcher: One student is designated to look up the answers to questions asked in class, instead of the teacher.
-collaboration coordinators: set up discussions with other students/people around the world through skype for educational purposes.
-contributing to society: making "small but meaningful" contributions to society, using the website Kiva.com. For example, helping entrepreneurs in developing countries.
-curriculum reviewers: create podcasts used to review material.

These are all very interesting ways to use technology in educational ways. Students are experts at using technology for social purposes; why not teach them to use these same applications and tools for education? For example, students often use applications such as skype to chat with their friends, but by doing what is described in the article as "collaboration coordinators", students could have conversations and debates with other students from around the world, and learn the similarities and differences between different areas and cultures. They can also conduct interviews with experts and other people they can learn from. This is an example of a technology that can be utilized for both social and educational purposes.

The job that seems the easiest to implement in your everyday lessons would be the researcher. I think it would be interesting to give students the opportunity to look up the answers to questions in everyday lessons. It will help them gain experience in searching the internet effectively, and will give them an important job to contribute to the lesson.

I also think the official scribes job would be interesting to try in the classroom. There could be a class website similar to ours that allows all students to edit it, and they could each contribute their notes. This way they would have a "class textbook" that everyone was a part of and could refer to, knowing they helped create it.

I agree with the author's conclusion that we should try to take the technology students use for social purposes and utilize elements of it for education. Blogs could even be made educational, by giving students a forum to discuss things and comment on each other's posts. Technology can be productive and contribute to learning if it is used properly, and teachers should make an effort to include this in their classrooms. I do believe that not everything should be taught via a computer and not all lessons should be centered around technology, but it is important to include. Students should be exposed to all different kinds of technology and different ways to utilize it, but they should also value old-fashioned books and other ways of learning as well!