Post 7/30 reflection

Wow, it's funny how with not having class this week it slipped my mind that I should write an after-class post. So, here it is (a few days late). I really enjoyed having the SMAC alumni speakers. I don't know if it was planned, but they seemed to cover a wide range of teaching environments, student backgrounds, and in-school technology availability. It was especially interesting, to me, to hear how Lauren was dealing with the almost complete lack of computers in her school. It was completely new to me to hear about the clicker devices. Since I'll be at Huron where Daver teaches, I'll have to find him and see what I can learn about possible applications. The talk about writing grants for classroom equipment was also new to me.

The video we watched was illuminating, although I think it was certainly clearly pushing an agenda. No matter what we may think about the usefulness of some of the new education technologies, in order to be effective teachers I think we have to put ourselves inside the heads of these tech-savvy kids and figure out what they need to most effectively learn.

And the discussion about teacher unions is very relevant one that should be continued in the fall. I won't repeat my thoughts stated in a response to George's blog other than to say that I'm very unsure about whether I'd want to teach in a public school system with a union and a poorly constructed teacher assessment program.

ruminations on an edublogger

I've been reading the Art of Teaching Science blog authored by Jack Hassard. In his last couple of posts he has discussed the Common Core Standards that have been adopted by Michigan, Massachusetts recently, and many other states. He points out that the same Billionaire Boys Club (remember Diane Ravitch's interview video we watched in 649) is funding both groups that are pushing for national standards, such as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and organizations, such as Achieve, Inc., that are deeply involved in writing and advising on the standards. As with most anything that involves politics in this country one has to "follow the money". The homepage of Fordham Institute's website is covered with headlines and links touting charter schools. Could their goal in pushing these national standards be to see more public schools fail so that under Race to the Top public money would shift to charter schools and back into their pockets?

Reflections on "The Wired Life"

This week we read "The Wired Life", a chapter from the book Teaching Generation M by Cvetkovic and Lackie. This chapter examines, in more detail, much of what we already know about today's teenagers: they are more "wired" than any past generation. In fact, the authors claim they spend 6-8 hrs a day in "multitasking mode". This actually seems a little low to me, especially if you add in texting to others while in the classroom. But maybe the authors assume that most schools successfully keep students from doing this! Anyway, I question to some degree whether today's teens multitask any more than teens in the past. However, I would agree with the authors that teens today are much more connected to the large world and therefore their multitasking activities are broadcast to a much larger audience.

I thought it was an interesting point that teens today do not consider it rude to be in the same physical space with one another, but be texting, Facebooking, twittering, etc. with friends somewhere else. I think there is definitely a generation gap issue here because I've been out with friends and felt it rude when I or one of my friends is playing around with their iPhone and not paying attention to the conversation.

Developing and experimenting with one's self-identity has always been part of being a teenager. I can remember going through this phase where my group of friends, the way I would dress, or the music I listened to would rapidly change from one year to the other. The difference with today's teens is that the easy accessibility and wide variety of media outlets makes it easy to broadcast this self-identity experimentation to a much larger audience. I can remember thinking it was really neat when MySpace started becoming popular that people now had such an easy format for developing and broadcasting their individual creativity.

I do worry that the easy access of the web has made it too easy to acquire "celebrity" status, through personally demoralizing activities. I know that there is freedom of expression, etc., but it seems to me that too many teens put too much of their mind and bodies out there and that they may at some later point regret this.

So, what does all of this mean to education? As the authors point out, teens really seem to want to be involved in social activism and they want to be involved in a way that blurs the lines between local and global. So, teachers could design projects to teach core subject content through means of working on social activism projects. It would seem that such projects would engage students in a meaningful way, while at the same time helping them learn core content.

yeah! I did a podcast!

I was really impressed with myself for figuring out the GarageBand podcast software while still in class last Friday. Usually, new stuff like that requires me to work on my own after class to really "get it". But I figured out how to record myself, add in the jingle track and post it to a wiki page all before the end of class.... yeah! I look forward, now, to working on the podcast assignment for this Friday. And I even went out and better an external microphone to play around with.

The discussion of video games in classrooms is still very much on my mind. I was thinking over the weekend about how many students there are that become very good at video games, but have felt very little success in school. And instead of integrating their skills at video games into school curriculum, their parents and teachers forbid them from playing video games unless their grades improve. No wonder so many kids exhibit such little passion for their education! Similar to the way the Morrell article we read in 402 proposed using pop culture as a context for improving literacy, couldn't we use video games in a similar way? Think of how much better students who perform poorly in traditional academic assessments may feel about themselves if they could begin to recognize the sort of higher order thinking skills they use in successfully playing video games.

Video Games in Education

I would be interested to read what the naysayers to using video games in education would say. I say that because James Paul Gee makes some pretty compelling arguments in favor of using video games in education. Clearly, too many students are completely turned off by our current curriculum. So, why not try something new? John Dewey said we should ground a student's learning in their social environment. Aren't video games a large component of many students environment?

Gee lays out 16 important skills, many of which fall into the realm of higher order thinking, that students develop from playing video games. Aren't these the kinds of skills that we want our future to learn? The key thing is that teachers have to guide students in "unpacking" the skills they are learning from video games. Then, teachers must develop lessons that take these skills and transfer them to solving problems in math and science. And I'm probably missing here that these skills are transferrable to other subjects, as well.

One point that really struck me in the Gee video is when he mentioned that if our only goal is to educate students to pass standardized tests, then that could be accomplished much more cheaply in other countries. In other words, with our cost structure in this country that is a competition we cannot win. Our only opportunity to win is to produce students that can lead in "innovation".

Twitter, webinar problems, and cheating (reflections on 7/16)

Overall, I thought it was a really good class last Friday. Count me among the folks who swore they would never use Twitter. But it's like your mom forcing you to eat stuff you hate because "it's good for you" ...... sometimes she was actually right! I don't honestly see myself using Twitter for personal stuff. But I can understand (or at least would like to explore) the value in it for developing a PLN of Physics and Math teachers. One thing I've learned in life is that I shouldn't need to have all the answers, but rather I should know how to ask good questions and who to ask those questions to.

The whole thing about there being a conversation going on Twitter during the webinar was strange to me. I don't think I would except it in a high school classroom, at least at this point, that some of my students may be following Twitter instead of paying attention to the lesson of that day. Also, I would worry that this side conversation on Twitter may show some great insights that anyone not on Twitter would miss.

Finally, the different perspectives in dealing with the video difficulties during the webinar got me thinking more about what forms of communication were most important in that context. I concluded that video was really not needed for that conversation; only audio and text in the chat room were necessary. So, I feel like the lack of video did not hinder my comprehension of the school project in any way.

I guess one thing that really helped me feel comfortable about the lack of video is that I am used to audio only conferences at my engineering job. When combined with file shared-viewing software, like NetMeeting or AppShare such meeting can be very effective. And one of the best features with the webinar software was the scrolling chat that is recorded and sent out to participants later. I think I would be interested to learn how webinars could also potentially help me in developing my PLN.

Twitter, blogging, web 2.0, PLN's, NING, NetVibes, "presentation Zen" style, blah blah blah

Basically, my summary of the Media 21 project report goes like this: the kids did projects on Africa using a bunch of web tools that I've never really heard of or have any clue how to use. But the overwhelming majority of kids seemed to get a lot out of the academic content and enjoyed themselves while working on it. And the project seems like it wouldn't have been successful without a librarian literate in all the latest web tech tools. So, if I want to do something like this in my school I better hope there's tech savvy librarian or media specialist there.

And the thought of using twitter for building PLN's is a challenge for me. I think I get the concept of PLN's, but I've never had any real interest in joining Twitter. I am interested to learn how to use Twitter so I can begin to decide for myself whether it may be useful to me. It seems that pretty much everything in this course is knew to me. So, I have a steep learning curve .

The reading about cheating on multiple choice tests asserted a provocative idea: don't use multiple choice tests. This is a really good point, considering everything that we're learning about the need to move students towards HOT. And I wonder if academic dishonesty and plagiarism are truly more prevalent today than in the past (is there any research that corroborates this assertion?). I lean towards thinking kids are no more dishonest now than they were in the past. I just think the ways in which they do it have changed.