I have sadly already encountered some of the issues that Grant Wiggins expounds upon after shadowing a student. If I am not either teaching a class or doing school work sitting through a full block period can be quite exhausting, especially if you are doing something similar daily. When I observe in classrooms I usually do not stay for the entire block because the most effective strategies I have observed have been fairly short which keeps students engaged. I will be borrowing some strategies to combat this getting kids moving around the classroom with either an activity or just changing up seating for groups. For my class I don’t ever penalize a student for needing to go to the bathroom in class because they are sitting through over 2 hours of class. Even if the student takes a couple of minutes and just needs to get out of the classroom and doesn’t really need to use the restroom just to center themselves that works too.
One of the most important techniques I took away from this article was setting a timer for yourself so you are not the only one talking in the classroom. I think as teachers that can sometimes be pretty hard to step back and see what you are doing as incorrect and making the change so the students are the ones talking and learning in the classroom. When creating lessons teachers should make sure that their instructional time does not take longer than the activity itself will take. If a student is just finishing a simple worksheet or section in the book there shouldn’t be a preceding lecture that took 20 minutes to complete. I will also from now on keep as much sarcasm outside of the classroom if possible unless of course it is at my expense and is light hearted. I could see students become discouraged if you roll your eyes or are spoken down to. Wiggins, G. (2014, October 10). A Veteran Teacher Turned Coach Shadows 2 Students for 2 days-A Sobering Lesson Learned. Thoughts on Education Blog. Retrieved from https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/ I agree with parts of the philosophy put forth by Thomas Friedman especially in closing when he talks about people/students have a variety of different types of talents and it can come in many different forms. I find this similar to the teaching strategy of universal design for learning or UDL for short. This strategy employs a variety of materials and concepts that allow the instructor to appeal to a wide audience of learning styles so student engagement is high across the board. The use of student choice can be utilized into UDL so a student can use their talent as an artist to critically analyze assessment data and create a great graphical design that employs all the information as a beautiful picture. I have been actively trying to get my students to increase their general cognitive ability through either the use of research practices when it comes to something like close reading for a primary source. I would much rather have a student learn a close reading strategy that can be applied to future material then remember and exact quote from the reading. Creating lasting understanding and showing students new strategies that can be easily employed are fundamental activities that should be practiced by all instructors. I also like his example of ownership because I believe that it is not practiced very extensively in most classrooms especially when it comes to group work and one student ends up doing the entire assignment with little help from others. That student needs to know the importance of humility and make sure the entire group gets to share everyone’s opinion or ideas. Students need to understand why failure isn’t a step backward but rather a step forward in their understanding of a topic which allows them to retrace their steps, fix the problem, and then finish with a now correct solution.
Friedman, T. L. (2014, February 22). How to get a job at Google. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-get-a-job-at-google.html?_r=2 I was shocked to see that today’s students spend only 5,000 hours reading at college age and 10,000 hours playing video games. When I think back on my childhood I was a quite avid reader but I did spend a decent amount of time playing video games but more of a one to one scale then a one to two scale when it came to reading versus video games. Games, videos, and internet access are a part of today’s student’s life and the more they use it the more it shows applications in the classroom. If students spend 11 hours daily for media use make some of those hours targeted toward school work and learning progression. College students are academically adrift, they don’t always know what they want to do in life and some become confused thinking they will never use their degree but only know that it is required for a job. Recall is used to remember answers for a quiz or test but does not help a student progress in their quest for knowledge. Students need to know why what their reading is important and what they can link it to in their daily lives. First two years of college 45% of students show no significant gains in learning which could set that student up for failure their next year or have the students realize that they are able to do the bare minimum in the classroom and still graduate. More students are following the voice of authority and believe that the instructor’s diatribe is more important to their own critical thinking skills. Critical thinking needs to be at the center of learning because anyone can google an answer with a basic question. Become active in your educational experience which is great for this generation with sites like Youtube that allow people to instruct or let their opinions be heard across a large audience. Wesch, M. (2011, June 18). A few ideas… [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrXpitAlva0&list=PLbRLdW37G3oMquOaC-HeUIt6CWk-FzaGp&index=17 The internet lets anyone be able to distribute text to anyone. With the proper security software this should be utilized by anyone and everyone when it comes to the educational world. I think sometimes technology in education gets kicked to the curb because educators or administrators are worried that students using the internet inappropriately which is easily solved with the use of proper technology. One issue with this technology is instead of finding and blocking the inappropriate content it will just block an entire website such as Youtube which is a great tool in the classroom. This is totally different than my learning which partially involved the use of the internet but that wasn’t about sharing ideas it was more a visitor approach to get in, get the information for say a project, and then get out without contributing. Peer production and social production are creating what students need today and more and more students are interacting online creating their own niche. Wikipedia is shunned at the college level as a possible source for research or material but people continuously edit and correct Wikipedia, how often does that happen in a text book? Ten years? The entirety of the output of mankind can now be found digitally thanks to google, and almost all of this information is free (if you include some document subscription services used at the university level). Student learning can occur from something as simple as sharing a link or getting students to be more digitally literate by using tools like Diigo. You could foot note an entire 30 page paper with the use of just links or use google docs and add them in at the end of quotes so the reader can just click that hyper link and see where that information came from instead of just posting a page number that you have to track down in an analog world. Wesch, M. (2011, January 24). Rethinking Education [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xb5spS8pmE&list=PLbRLdW37G3oMquOaC-HeUIt6CWk-FzaGp&index=15 I found Mr. Negroponte’s video quite interesting especially when described how writing code is the closest students can be to learning about learning. Students are able to go back and fix an issue with their coding instead of just throwing the entire code out and starting over again. I found this similar to our program with how our rubrics are set up for our lesson planning. If we make a mistake it is easily fixable by maybe just changing a phrase or matching wording with our learning objectives in mind. That way we are not just throwing out our entire six page lesson but learning what to do for future lesson planning. This is why Mr. Negroponte explains that students that write code are better spellers because they see what they did incorrectly and like our lesson plans they remember why that letter is incorrect and will remember in the future why it is spelled that way. I agree with his three fundamental flaws in the education system especially the way America funds schools versus the rest of the world. By funding our education system through real estate taxes that can lead to a poorer school receiving less funding than a school in a more affluent area. I also know that program improvement schools receive funding on top of those taxes but still a practice that could be changed for better funding overall. Age segregation is an issue because not all students learn at the same pace for different subjects and having students at different ages in the classroom has shown to be a very effective teaching strategy. Schools should not be run like a business with student progress only assessed through massive testing schedules. If schools become more lax on their idea of competition and more toward a mission focus they would greatly improve our school sites. An example utilized was Finland who do not focus on competition by not testing their students to death and focus more on allowing students to accomplish projects on their own creating deeper learning. Negroponte, N. (2015, April 4). Being Educated [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fIuZa_-H60&index=26&list=PLbRLdW37G3oMquOaC-HeUIt6CWk-FzaGp “Hackschooling makes me happy” is a very inspiring video with a young man describing how he receives his education by “hacking” it and creating new opportunities to learn. When I think about how we learn in our program there is a lot of hacking involved as opposed to traditional school schedules. We are in at our school site four days a week observing new teachers daily, assisting in a variety of classrooms, and teaching our own students. We receive strategies from our readings but we all use the internet as well for ideas on lessons and get lesson ideas from teachers that are not even in our field of study. Woodshop for me has been one of the most enjoyable classrooms to observe in because the choice involved in how he accomplishes his lessons is vast and very enjoyable for the students. He makes great use at activating prior knowledge when it comes to new lessons and does so through unorthodox teaching which makes his class very engaged and attentive. That I think is the whole point of hackschooling because it is allowing students to learn what they want to learn and with a couple of basic pointers they succeed. I think what is most impressive was all of the ways Logan had figured out how he would learn about a new topic. Working at his internship he gets to learn the rewards of hard work and creating new designs on hats that would never happen without differentiated learning he is involved in. There are a variety of ways to teach a lesson to a child. It could be a parent showing their child how to change the oil in their vehicle when they are only a teenager. This lesson does not just give the child a great life skill they will need in the future but it teaches them how to be careful when it comes to working with machinery. It also allows a parent to give an impromptu lesson on engines and why oil needs to be changed and how viscosity affects which oil certain vehicles require. Hackschooling opens up a huge opportunity for student engagement giving them the freedom of choice when it comes to their curriculum. I think finding a balance with that in and outside of class would be quite a feat but if it has worked so well for Logan why not anyone else? LaPlante, Logan, Hackschooling makes me happy, TEDxUniversityofNevada, retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11u3vtcpaY&list=PLbRLdW37G3oMquOaC-HeUIt6CWk-FzaGp&index=3 This video showcases why I think that students need to be taught digital literacy from a young age so that they know how to properly use technology to further their lives and the lives of their peers. Students need and should be using digital tools to connect and collaborate with others. By connecting to other students they are learning proper online etiquette, they are learning that their postings can affect other people, and they are learning how to continue their learning online. I really liked how Dr. Wesch contrasted the new television viewing family with the Neil Postman questions and how social change has and can easily be accomplished if a video goes viral online. When using the word easily I mean it in the context that Dr. Wesch used it meaning that it is easy with today’s technology and with a competent computer operator. Considering the average child in America probably has or has access to a modern day smart phone that makes millions of content generators that could be affecting social change as their online selves. I agree with Dr. Wesch’s point of view when it comes to the ability of technology to foster change in society. I agree that some of these points could be adapted to a classroom either by a survey of the students to reveal to them some social issue or having them create a project involving a news story. I think this could work great is a social science classroom because you will have the ability to blend in sociology and humanities to create a great lesson plan involving an action plan for social change. Maybe your students pick out a law they do not agree with and they can all tweet its author daily with reasons why they find it faulty. Or they could collaborate with another classroom around the world and create a social action plan or just a video that states their point of view on their topic. The great part of this connectivity is that the possibilities are almost endless with new programs and apps being made daily. Overall this was a great video and I hope to learn more from the TED Talks video series in the future. Wesch, M. (2010, October 12). TEDxKC-Michael Wesch-From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeaAHv4UTI8 I found Dr. White’s theory quite interesting in his breakdown of the online resident versus visitor theory. I liked his take on digital residents having a large online space and show casing their work to their viewers but not collaborating very much. While I think that statement is partially true I have to step back and think about sites like Youtube or Twitter that have led to a lot of collaboration in their respective communities. I agree with his statements regarding digital residents have to a put out a lot of material to keep their “brand” alive which is in essence either an online persona or just their personality. I do use Youtube for a bit of my online entertainment so I have seen this “brand” idea slowly evolve for some people I follow and it is even more interesting when they talk about their brand in a video. For the digital Visitors, who I probably fit into a bit, online can be a scary place where someone could accidentally reveal too much of their life to too many people. They see digital learning tools and just that, a tool they use for a specific purpose but they never contribute to the digital community because they believe that people online are just there to glorify themselves. They don’t see the need to talk to others online because they have already found their tool, finished their task, and put it back. It is kind of sad that these visitors are creating a mastery of a tool but never using it to help anyone but themselves. What it really comes down to is learning strategies that were brought up in our last blog post. Are you going to create a new way of learning with technology or are you just going to create another generation of learners doing the exact same lesson plan just instituting their digital tool for a textbook. Visitors don’t really understand that online their authority can be diminished by a student if they are asking too much or the wrong questions. I really liked his tutor example when the tutor realized that their instructions weren’t creating engagement they eventually backed off and started learning with the student. It ends up being all about digital culture and motivation and how we as teachers will be motivating students online. For me I would probably say I am a digital resident with some visitor features. Through this technology course hopefully I will be able to not only learn new tools online but to learn how to properly share them as well. White, D. (2013, May 31). Visitors and Residents [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sFBadv04eY I enjoyed “Why School?” so much I made my wife promise that she read it. It is a great expose in what angle technology in the classroom is now being pushed on teacher to keep archaic teaching methods. The one way technology could be used in the classroom are based around using technology to enforce the old standards and ways of teaching which limit creativity and engagement. The other example was based around not changing technology to fit the standards but much rather changing the standards to fit our technology. Today’s students are all digital natives that use multiple devices in their daily lives. To exclude the use of the computers in their pockets seems like a rather weird idea since it is just another tool. I think the issue is starting students very young on how to be a digital native that way there aren’t problems later on with them misusing a tool like their phone or the freedom given to complete their assignment. I definitely agree with the second school of thought that allows for assessments to be modified allowing for the use of technology and creativity in solving a problem. I definitely remember in school doing an assignment I knew I would never replicate again in my life. Why not let students take an active role in their educations and learn how to generate a report on an environmental issue that directly affects them. One of my favorite projects from college was based around finding out why/how certain parts of San Diego were not bulldozed and turned into track housing but instead became nature preserves. Granted this was before a lot of records became digital so I had to sort through hand written letters and microfiche of the Union Tribune so that took some time but it was very rewarding. The ideas that Mr. Richardson presented that I feel the strongest towards is “Talk to strangers” and “Be a master learner”. There are so many resources out there that our students have access to but in this culture that everyone assumes meeting a stranger as a bad thing versus meeting a stranger and learning something you never would have if you hadn’t met them. If you want to model behavior of a good learner to your students you need to show the importance of getting someone else’s opinion. If you are doing a project on the renaissance why not go to a renaissance fair. Once you get past all the cheesy parts one of your students will definitely remember experiences and facts from that day. The learning/unlearning Idea I would have the greatest struggle with would probably be sharing everything, not because I am adverse to that I just haven’t had to do so in the past so it feels a little foreign to me. But that is the main reason for taking our technology course so we can build a great big PLN that will allow us to make connections with many other instructors from many different backgrounds. In the last 25 years there has been massive change in technology to which business and normal life became drastically different. If everyday life is changed for the modern student schools must follow suit and use technology to change assessments. If the example from High Tech High is any indication how introduction into greater use of technology properly I believe all schools should follow suit and work with students to create greater lesson plans and assessments. Richardson, Will. Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere. TED Conferences, 2012. EPUB file. |
Bryan AndersenJust a teacher candidate that is super excited to impact students lives Archives
May 2016
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