I think the ITSE standard I am most equipped to start off with is "Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest".  Throughout my years of school, I've gone through a lot of different technologies and feel pretty well equipped to diversify even further.  I'm pretty comfortable with incorporating new things into my techniques and methods as long as someone shows me how to do it.  Also, students get bored pretty quickly if you constantly show them the same content over and over in the same formats.

The standard I'm least equipped for is "Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information."  This blog is my first venture into online writing, and it's not collaborative.  I can't even imagine the issues that would come from any kind of group collaborative writing project done by students.  It's bad enough separating them into groups for normal assignments.  You run into the exclusionary practices of kids toward each other, fighting amongst each other.  I would love to see someone show me how this process works in a normal (non-AP type) class because I simply don't see it as being helpful at all.

CPALMS is one of the best educator resources available online.  It has thousands of standards, lesson plans, teacher and student resources, tutorials and more for any grade level and field.  In my case, since I would like to teach high school level history, I would personally use resource ID# 169158, which is a video discussion titled "Slavery and the Missouri Compromise".  This is a Kahn Academy video, and it does an excellent job of outlining the issues of slavery and the compromises that delayed the split of the U.S. as long as it did.  I enjoy how it's done as a question/answer format.  I know many students don't want to ask questions in class, so having someone else ask the questions that they may have in mind but don't want to ask could help a good bit.

I actually enjoyed the newsletter assignment.  I can't say I learned too much from it, aside from some formatting things, such as the fact that adding a clickable link to a footer is impossible, and that deleting a page from an established template is a royal pain in the rear.  It was fun trying to consider just what might be going on in my imaginary classroom and what the class would have studied at this point, what we might be doing, and making up names for all my great students who have done well.

Blog Journal 2

I did not use MS Word until I was in college the first time around in 1993.  As a student, Word has been used merely as a simple word processing program, used to type papers and do simple grammatical and spelling checks.  In fact, I’m typing this in Word now.  Teachers have used it in a similar way from what I’ve seen, as a word processing program to set up handouts and tests.  I believe my experiences missed the greater part of its use, as in High school, it wasn’t much of a thing, and now, most items from teachers are done using PowerPoint, Excel, and other more graphical programs.

I have literally no experience with the use of copyright and fair use in an educational sense that I am aware of.  I know the general idea, that copyright can be waived in educational use or for parody, but that is pretty much the extent of my knowledge.  I assume that the material would need to be placed into an educational context and adjusted as such, that straight plagiarism would still be off limits.  In general, I think it would be helpful to try and stick to creative commons things for education, which would pose no problems at all unless you intended to profit off their use.

Academic honesty – This is becoming much simpler and more difficult at the same time.  Easier, because there are literally hundreds of plagiarism checking programs like TurnItIn and Viper available, and many for free.  Also, it can be hard though since there are so many more sources available for free on the internet, that students can pull information from sometimes very obscure sources.  Also, the programs all depend on algorithms, and some are better suited to different uses.  As for cheating, again, this is getting harder to control these days with the proliferation of small internet-connected devices.  From my time observing classes, the most common reaction seems to be to roll with it and make many tests open-note.  I have seen teachers erect barriers between students, though that seems to make using a smart device for cheating even easier since the view to the teacher is usually blocked also.  I am unsure of how to combat this to be completely honest.  An easy partial solution, since I plan on teaching history, would be to have more essay tests, where the use of such devices would not be either as easy or as helpful as multiple choice or fill in the blank tests.

Privacy – Privacy is a serious issue in this day with the massive increase in social media sites that are often either hacked or willingly sell their user data to other companies.  The irony of the great wide web, free and anonymous, is that it is rapidly becoming neither of these things.  Too often your info is getting out there, regardless of your intentions.  In the classroom, with the rapidly expanding use of internet-based interactive activities and homework, you run the risk of exposing your student’s data to unscrupulous people.  There are partial defenses such as VPNs, but these are only partial solutions and the only sure-fire way to maintain your student’s privacy is to not use the web-based resources available.  Perhaps the best solution to this is to use the resources, but to do so using a single classroom access point.  You can use a classroom login that contains no student data at all.  You would lose the personal interaction that students could get with programs, but still gain the benefit of the programs overall.  

Blog Post 1

The question of what inspires a teacher to use technology in the classroom is a simple one to me.  You have to connect with the students in some way and get them to reach their full potential in the classroom, and the easiest way to do that is to give them content and learning tools in a form that they are most comfortable with.  For this generation and the next, that will be through technology.  This is a difficult proposition for a lot of teachers because school funding can only stretch so far, and all of the nifty gadgets that are designed for the purpose of reaching the new technologically driven students are pricey.  Relying on students to use home computers to complete assignments can also be tricky depending on where you teach because, while home computers may be nearly ubiquitous in this age, the level of computer available, and access to it can vary wildly from student to student.  It can be hard to find a happy medium where all of the students can be involved without excluding any or holding others back.  The simplest solution is to only use technology for the teaching side, and not relying on the students to have anything themselves.  That can work to an extent, but you will also lose out on some interesting teaching and learning programs if you do.

The ISTE standards are general guidelines for teaching and learning in the technological age.  As general rules of thumb, they are an excellent baseline for students and teachers.  They can be used and tweaked to fit any individual classroom and should be read and understood by any teacher who is trying to incorporate more technology into the classroom. 
The one that seemed particularly apt to me is the Educator as the learner.  It is important to keep up to date with as much as possible, and this is particularly important in a field like educational technology where the pace of change is rapid and as soon as you get new toys, they may be considered obsolete by your students.  You need to be able to learn new technologies and techniques rapidly to keep up with other teachers and your students.  One thing the standard did not mention is that sometimes, the learning you do will come from your students, as they will likely be more familiar with what you're trying to use than you or your peers. 
The one I think I definitely need to work on the most is Teacher as Designer.  I am not a terribly creative person, and it can be a struggle to learn new techniques and methods of doing things.  I will definitely need help from other sources to learn how exactly to use some of this technology in a teaching fashion, but there should be plenty of help out there to do so.

I think, as a generalization, "Digital Native" works, though the phrasing of this question kind of excludes me.  I would not be a digital native, but am in the group of older people who generally take to technology well.  And there are (Again, in general, there are always exceptions) differences between the generations, and technology has an effect on the brain.  I don't think there's even a question about that.  The shorter attention spans are a thing, and it doesn't only affect the students today.  I can see changes in myself from the time before I was using the tech all day and when I wasn't.  If I step away from the technology for a while, as I like to do on vacation, my attention span and ability to concentrate increase considerably.  When I'm immersed in technology, even reading a book, which used to be one of my favorite past times, is a chore.  I don't see this issue going away, as the advances keep coming further and faster.  I imagine we're not too far off from implantable tech that will allow people to be constantly hooked into everything.  It will pose some interesting dilemmas for teachers in the future.