I was pleased with our first attempts at discussion and student sharing. In most classes, it takes awhile for students to feel comfortable discussing and sharing insights and I felt we made good progress in this area. I am hoping that a few more students will share gears of their childhood in our Facebook environment.
Evrim and I did a little more talking than we usually will in our learner-centered environment, but I think this is a necessary part of getting things going. We look forward to active, student centered evenings together and online!
Amanda chose an appropriate resource for our evening when she shared Zapitalism, an online learning environment focused on issues of supply and demand. Her experiences using the resource in her classes were especially interesting. Amanda will lead a discussion of her resource in our Moodle site this week.
I am excited and a little apprehensive about our first online class experience the week of January 31-----our community is beginning to grow face to face and I want our online experience to continue to nurture our connections. We will call this an experience in adventurous teaching and we will approach our online experience metacognitively as we evaluate the ups and downs of the experience together.
I enjoyed our second class meeting and think that you had some very good "talking points" for us to think about. Your idea that our school structures have not really changed in 30-40 years resonated with me. As I think of Ames High school, besides some updates, the school as a whole is much the same as it was back in the day when I roamed the halls. Our schools have not kept up with the fast moving technology and students are often using technology that is old and out of date by today's standards.
ReplyDeleteI also had time to think about your idea that we really don't need to have students memorize things anymore with all the facts at their fingertips. So I thought of a couple questions related to this. Do we mainly have students memorize facts to do well on the standardized tests? How else could we evaluate students/schools so that there were more meaningful assessments of what students truly know?
I really enjoy the atmosphere found in our classroom. The novice and expertise opinions/experiences with technology and as we discussed the lack of technology in the classroom has created an extremely interesting dynamic that I cannot wait to explore more.
ReplyDeleteIn relation to the conversation on memorizing things in class the very first thing I thought of was my eighth grade history class when we had to memorize all of the presidents in order. Of course we did but two days after the test I couldn't have told you the order and today I couldn't tell you the first ten. There has to be better ways to teach students other than memorization but I'm not sure where exactly is the best place to begin.
I am also nervous yet anxious for our first meeting online and can't wait to see how it goes!
I enjoyed our discussions in our last class. Some of the things that were brought up in class have actually been touched on in other classes I have taken and I am able to see a lot of connections which is cool. I really liked how we were given time to actually explore the different blogging resources. Although blogs have been around for awhile, I am just being introduced to them and how to create one. I am looking forward to using them more and finding some on things I am interested in. I think they are a great tool for the classroom and I'm excited to explore those resources more in depth.
ReplyDeleteOur first online class should be interesting. I am excited to see how it works. I like how we have the whole week to get into the discussions and everything. I think that will allow for deeper discussions. Anxious for what is to come!
Thanks to Sally, Haley and Rachel for getting our blog comments going. I found an interesting, short book http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1456458884/ref=oss_product
ReplyDeletethat explores the urgent need for big change in our schools. The authors discuss the rapid changes related to emerging digital technologies and the urgent need for teachers to adapt to these new possibilities. There are some good specific stories of teachers in the book. We will have a few copies in the CTLT library for those of you who would like to read the book or parts of it. It is a nice follow up to our Monday night discussion.
The book is called A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change and is written by Douglas Thomas and John Seeley Brown. You can copy and post the link above to have a quick look at it.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed learning about blogs in our class Monday. This is something I'm anxious to try with my fourth graders. They are incredibly eager to use technology in every aspect of the classroom. Blogs will open another door! I also really appreciate Evrim's links on the moodle page. Very helpful!
ReplyDeleteCarrie Hillman is a 4th Grade Iowa teacher who uses blogs with her students. You can find her on Blogmeister if you go to the Iowa section.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the name! Here is the link in case others would like to check it out:
ReplyDeletehttp://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=291288
I have thought a lot about how schools haven't really changed in the last forty years and how many of the teachers I had my parents also had. In many ways, I believe that the traditional methods of teaching are still working. Because children are learning about technology on their own outside of the classroom, I am not sure how necessary it is to adopt too much technology within the classroom. I really value the face-to-face social community. However, I do believe that technology is good for delivery as well as learning. For instance, I used to love anything electronic, such as Game Boy, and other games. My nephews seem to love Leap Frog toys that are also a form of how technology can be used to teach. So I do see that there are new ways for technology to be used in the classroom to facilitate learning. I am just not sure how much it should be used (maybe 20% of the time). I am just a little wary that technology will change how we learn too much. Children should still know how to learn using pencil and paper and should still practice taking notes from books versus using the internet for everything. The classroom is the one place where they still learn certain methods and strategies that don't rely on technology. It is important not to lose these skills.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Haley's comment... I never really was much of a "history buff." I was great at memorizing things... and I did just that for the tests. I think back to the countless hours I've spent in history classrooms and wonder how many hours I've pretty much wasted. I don't think I've had a "great" history teacher. At least... I can't recall significant dates in history and frankly am horrible about even describing the events. I was never asked to use my knowledge of historical events in a way that would make me think more deeply about them. I just memorized facts... and then forgot them a week later. I wonder if anyone uses technology resources... or their own resources to teach history in a way that differs from the rote memorization that I have come to expect in a history classroom.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed meeting everyone this week, since it was my first class. I liked hearing about how the ed. system ahs not change over the4 past 30 years. Seeing how much the world has changed in the 30 years I find this surprising and say i think it is about time for a change. I also think that if we are going to be using the internet in the classroom it is our responsibility as educators to teach our students about safety and the internet.
ReplyDeleteI also remember watching this video in one of my class last semester it is kind of long but interesting it is about growing up on the internet and if I remember correctly there is a segment about how they are using tech. in schools
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid
I agree that it would be great to see our education system updated, but I also agree with the comment above that this should be done in a very careful way. There are things that are no longer necessary for people to memorize, but at the same time there are skills that are still necessary for students to learn because the purpose of learning them is not to know the facts, but to understand the processes that lead to those facts.
ReplyDeleteNicole, PbS's KidsOnline resources and the videos are very interesting especially looking at how technology is so integrated students' everyday life but not much to the classroom environments. I just purchased a book "Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other" by Sherry Turkle and it is a pretty interesting reading. I think the main idea in the book is that yes we embrace technology but do we also think about the critical implications? I think it is a nice reading with different perspectives to the technology use both from the positive and negative sides.
ReplyDelete