What new thinking I took from class today.

Today I learned from the creative grouping is a good option in our discussion presentation, but make sure you assign where in the room to go to.  Also giving groups power in the learning; not a review, let students establish what was important, but facilitate when groups get off track. I also got a chance to look at Scratch and get a idea of what to expect about the difficulty of the IRLO assignment.

Reflection: Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology Chapter 5

What has changed on my thinking on technology in regards to education is the level of autonomy that the world is achieving away from the “brick and mortar school.” I guess I have noticed in the past the level on increased opportunities for learning outside schools, but reading this section brought it all together for me. One of the surprising aspects that I found out was that home school children tend to do better on tests overall than traditional universal schooling students. I can see how that the parents acting like a coach, as the authors describe, can be effective in getting their children to learn. However, I think that there is some limitation when it comes to working with more specialized content; I think that coaching can only go so far and there comes a time when more specialized experience is needed in the child’s education. I also agree with the fear that by having more and more students outside the universal school there is a risk of losing the shared identity in American culture. Polarization seems to be growing and I think this may increase it to some degree. Something else I didn’t realize to the degree that companies will seek to train future employees or current employees in the community to have them trained for their needs. I had heard of a number of companies in Milwaukee investing money into training students in the tech ed. and trades programs in Milwaukee schools, but I didn’t know it was a national trend. Another thing that I learned from this chapter is that since there is a growing autonomy of older students, middle school and high school, more and more may be turned off from traditional schooling or move into virtual schools. As a future secondary teacher this is definitely a concern. Unless I can make my teaching relevant and engaging my students may have the option to leave.

I think one of the ways that this new thinking will affect my future teaching is that I will definitely have to focus on making my teaching effective for students and be addressing their future needs. If students can have the option of leaving to attend a virtual school they may ask “why do I need to be here if I am not learning anything I will ever use”.  So I feel it will be an important part of my job to illustrate to them why something is important, and more importantly get them to feel the same way.

Blogs, Wikis Chapter 6 Reflection

After reading this chapter I think what has changed in my thinking about technology in teaching is the use of Twitter. Before reading this I hadn’t really thought about its uses in a school setting. Previously I thought of kind of a mix between a social network site and blogging that was really used to for people to keep track of each other, follow news, or just to find funny stuff to read about. I still have to admit I think that it is a waste of time. The collaboration ideas I hadn’t thought before how it could be used to run through ideas and get others feedback. I can see how it could be useful in the right situation to have students tweet questions to you that they may not want to ask in class. They then could get feedback not only from you, but potentially other students in the class on whatever is they ask or it could be a thought they propose perhaps on their analysis of the meaning of a passage in some literature. I had never really heard of the Diigo site until this chapter and for that matter Delicious until this fall. I have a bit of experience with Digg and I wonder if they are related in some way to each other, however with Digg you just placed comments on links or used a function similar to the like button on Facebook. Diigo seemed kind of neat in the way that you can annotate websites, in that way it is an improvement over Digg. I can see the value in that particularly if I assigned students to look at a website and I wanted them to key in on certain areas. On the other hand they could give feedback to me and the rest of the class what areas of confusion were or questions and comments they had. My experience with Delicious so far has mostly been just in the form of collecting links for the assignment, I have yet to really delve into using for retrieving from to heavily, but I can see down the road this semester and most like next it may come in handy.

I think how this has affected my future teaching is that sites like Diggo I may be able to use to clarify and guide my students while using the web. They will also be able to get feedback to me and other students on what their thoughts are. I really don’t think that reading this will change my view on the use of Twitter in the classroom yet, but with some possible convincing I may be open to changing my mind on the whole thing. The “wild west” as the book puts it still frightens me a bit in the accountability terms in regards to using it in school.

What I took from class today

Something that I took from class today from the discussion was there are really many options to the current system we have in place. Overall, what I took from how to my own discussion better is to make sure groups are organized in ways that cohesive work can be done with members, and to make sure that as my group presents we should listen carefully what class members say and redirect them if they get off track in the discussion.

The key to any IRLO is the interactive portion of it. The user has control of their learning and gets feedback on their performance.  Something that I also learned about the IRLOI will be working on is that Scratch the program we will be working with, is coded in a visual coding.  

Rethinking Education the Age of Technology Reflection Chapter 4

I thought that this chapter was fairly interesting.  I found it surprising to see the journey from where we started to where we are now. Something I hadn’t really considered before reading this chapter was the reason for schooling starting up during the industrial revolution. It hadn’t occurred to me previously that one of the reasons that schooling was pushed for was a way to keep juvenile crime down after child labor laws had been implemented. I had always thought it was put forth mainly for ideological reasons for example some of what Horace Mann proposed like building cohesion in the democracy. Something that I kind of felt the authors were suggesting is that the switch from apprenticeship into universal education may have had some flaws to it. It seems like now that perhaps we all need to become apprentices in working with technology, as that future generations will be required to be increasingly fluent in it.          

I am not positive how I will use this new thinking in my future teaching. After reading this chapter I mostly took it as placing a setting on why American schools are the way that they are and will probably explain what is needed to be done to have them succeed in the future.              

Blogs, Wikis Chapter 5 Reflection

What changed in my thinking about technology after reading this chapter is basically learning what and RSS feed was. I noticed it on a lot of web pages that I would frequent for example CNN and I really never knew what it was until now. I can see how this could be a useful tool, not just as an educator but as a time saver in general for yourself. It seems kind of cool what it does bringing the information to you as it is new. I can see how this could really be helpful if you were manages blogs or wikis for a class, I was kind of wondering how to manage student blogs before reading about RSS feeds. I was kind of concerned about how you would know when students would post or if and when they posted information. Actually that was one of the reasons I thought that using blogs and wikis for classes could be very time consuming for a teacher, but with using RSS I can see that it would not be as much of a  burden on your time.

I think that in my own classroom in the future I may use RSS. I definitely want to try using it first for awhile before I make my decision on whether I like the tool or not. I think the best way to try it out is just using RSS mainly for personal use keeping track of the few websites that I frequent most days and  see how it affects my time management on the web, for example with weather, CNN, and a few other online publications I read like the Onion.  I could see myself using the RSS for keeping track of student blogs and a class wiki. Some of the other uses I am not so sure on, but in addition to keeping track of student weblogs. I think that having them set up a RSS to keep track on a certain event or subject could be a neat semester long project for them to work on. I could see how it could be incorporated into a current science events section at the beginning of every class for example.

Blogs, Wikis Chapter 4 Reflection

I think one of my views that has changed after reading this chapter was my view on how reliable the information that is found within a wiki can be. Previously I had always been told, never to use sites like Wikipedia as a source or to allow students to use at a source, but that thought has been challenged. I can see how with everyone editing, most with the intent of providing good, reliable information can be a trusted source. At the same time at any one moment the information may be wrong and has yet to be fixed, so I think that I would have to encourage my own students in the future to double check their sources or at least cross reference things that they are not sure of. Another new view I took from this chapter is some of the ways that wikis could be used. The idea of the virtual textbook put together by the class as the semester progressed I think was a novel I idea. I can see how that would be a very good way for students to practice collaborating with each other and would likely be good practice for the future. I had used a system like that for collaboration when I worked at a job that we wrote reports. We used the editor function in Microsoft Word. Three or four of us would be working on a file saved on our center database and would edit a report each of us making changes to the final report. At times we would simply edit the report or we would use the track changes tool to accept or reject changes. In a way this was similar to a wiki on a much smaller scale.

In my future teaching I would like to try to use wikis if possible in the classroom. I still may not accept Wikipedia as a source from some assignments, but for other I can see the value in a having quick access to precompiled data. Hopefully the school I work at will have sufficient computers or my students will have sufficient computers to allow me to use wikis. The virtual textbook idea is something I could sink my teeth into. It would be nice to have students using a variety of sources for their studies versus one textbook. Also I think it would be a great way to introduce students to the idea of peer review and critical thinking. These are important in science and I think to effectively prepare students they are important to be able to do.