Sunday, April 21, 2013
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Midterm reflections podcasts
My first podcasts!
Perhaps I will become advanced enough to not need a script for these sorts of things, but for the time being, I'll need to type my text first to organize my thoughts...
Perhaps I will become advanced enough to not need a script for these sorts of things, but for the time being, I'll need to type my text first to organize my thoughts...
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Am I Connecting with The Connected Educator?
I've arrived at the mid-term of CE5160, and these are my thoughts on the first five chapters of The Connected Educator.
Chapter 1
One of the things that resonated the most with me in this chapter was the difference between cooperating and collaborating with colleagues, and how technology could play a role in my professional learning and practice. In March, just as the Grade 123 team was about to implement our week-long Service Learning Week (see one of the YouTube slideshows here), the Grade 1 teacher broke her wrist and was hospitalized before and after her surgery. Google docs was a critical component in our ability to organize and collaborate with her and the other Specialist teachers in the school, and it provided a means for the Grade 1 teacher to work together with us from her hospital bed as we combined our efforts to create an amazing curriculum.
Chapter 2
I think I mentioned in my VoiceThread comments that as a group, my CE5160 colleagues are collaborating in an activity even though we live and work in different time zones. I've also come to appreciate the diversity of the members of this class, and as I read their blogs, I find myself reflecting on their thoughts and ideas. And sites like Creative Commons (not mentioned in the chapter, but in keeping with the theme of group collaboration) allow people all around the world to share images in the public domain (like the connected globe I found) with others for free; this, therefore, contributes as another form of collaboration - offering others an opportunity to use an image or idea for their own project.
Chapter 3
While this chapter was rather short, I felt that the question posed, "What do you need to unlearn and relearn?" is a rather powerful thing to think about. And frankly, I know I have a lot to learn, especially about technology. Lately, I've been trying to learn more about BrainPop and how I can use it in my classroom, and so I've been learning more through webinars offered by BrainPop. And after watching one webinar on the Quiz Mixer, I developed a fractions quiz for my students. Soon, I'll have another quiz created, and my plan is to create about one new quiz per week through BrainPop to review concepts covered in the curriculum.
Chapter 4
While I've already mentioned how I used Google docs, or more properly, Google drive, to collaborate with a hospitalized colleague, I will admit that Chapter 4 left me thinking a great deal about I will be sharing the vision of the elementary school with new teachers, and how the current teachers are collaborating with the incoming teachers. My school created a ning site to welcome new teachers to KIS and in order to create relationships before we even meet each other face to face in August during teacher orientation week.
Chapter 5
The chapter mostly focused on Web 2.0 resources teachers can use in the classroom, and this course has required me create a Diigo account (and I'm starting to add some of the websites I bookmarked on my laptop so that I have these bookmarks available to me "in the cloud."). I'm also blogging - a feat that my friends back in the States find amazing since I tend to guard my privacy so carefully. I'm using Feedly now, and I have a link on my Firefox browser so that I can quickly access the site and scan article headlines to see what I might be interested in reading about on any given day. I'll be creating podcasts to complete my mid-term assignments, use the wikispace every week for this course, use Google drive almost daily at school, frequently check the KIS ning site for new teachers, and access TeachTube to find supplemental materials for my core academic classes.
Saturday, April 13, 2013
My Voice Thread....And news for classmates from Korea
A supplemental blog assignment:
My Voice Thread....
And an update to my colleagues in CE5160....
I've finally finished with my Week 4 class assignments! Thank goodness Professor Tufts built a catch up week into the syllabus. Somehow she must have known that, when I returned from my Spring Break, North Korea's saber-rattling was going to force me to spend some of my free time working on ways to continue teaching my students even if war broke out.
What I can say, I think, without getting into trouble, is that my boarding school will serve as an evacuation site (since people can stay in the dorm rooms, there is a large cafeteria, the building's solar panel arrays provide electricity), and that teachers will be flown to Bangkok, Thailand. My colleagues and I are still expected to try to teach: provide lessons, assessments, and feedback to students, but who knows how many of my students will have Internet access (or electricity or safe drinking water and food)?
So it's not like the school is pretending that there is no threat whatsoever (some planning for war has been done). We also have had to think about things like moving cash from our Korean bank accounts into our US accounts or making sure to have copies of important documents gathered together in a safe place. But you make those sorts of preparations in Florida when you have a hurricane approaching too. And in my elementary school days in the 1980s, I lived with the threat of the USSR launching nuclear warheads towards the US. Of course, that was a case of 2 superpowers with nothing to prove.
Since there are direct flights to Japan, China, and Taiwan, we will probably go through these countries to flee, but I can imagine it will be quite insane at the airport. And I'm sure jet fuel will be reserved for the Air Force planes which would be parked on the tarmac. We would be evacuated only if the US Embassy in Seoul tells Americans to leave South Korea; however, if the North just goes insane and launches an attack, I doubt there will be days of advance notice (unless that's what all the bellicose posturing right now is, a prelude to an attack).
Also, I will say (because it's definitely public record at KIS, at least) that the Grade 123 team agreed that we would use Edmodo accounts (thanks again, Professor Tufts for this suggestion) to give the students one place to go (rather than jumping from sites like BrainNook, BrainPop, Weebly, Skype, Starfall, or TurtleDiary). Hopefully I don't need to teach with all this Web 2.0 technology because of war, but rather, I can continue trying to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into my classroom on Jeju - "Korea's Island of Peace."
My Voice Thread....
And an update to my colleagues in CE5160....
I've finally finished with my Week 4 class assignments! Thank goodness Professor Tufts built a catch up week into the syllabus. Somehow she must have known that, when I returned from my Spring Break, North Korea's saber-rattling was going to force me to spend some of my free time working on ways to continue teaching my students even if war broke out.
What I can say, I think, without getting into trouble, is that my boarding school will serve as an evacuation site (since people can stay in the dorm rooms, there is a large cafeteria, the building's solar panel arrays provide electricity), and that teachers will be flown to Bangkok, Thailand. My colleagues and I are still expected to try to teach: provide lessons, assessments, and feedback to students, but who knows how many of my students will have Internet access (or electricity or safe drinking water and food)?
So it's not like the school is pretending that there is no threat whatsoever (some planning for war has been done). We also have had to think about things like moving cash from our Korean bank accounts into our US accounts or making sure to have copies of important documents gathered together in a safe place. But you make those sorts of preparations in Florida when you have a hurricane approaching too. And in my elementary school days in the 1980s, I lived with the threat of the USSR launching nuclear warheads towards the US. Of course, that was a case of 2 superpowers with nothing to prove.
Since there are direct flights to Japan, China, and Taiwan, we will probably go through these countries to flee, but I can imagine it will be quite insane at the airport. And I'm sure jet fuel will be reserved for the Air Force planes which would be parked on the tarmac. We would be evacuated only if the US Embassy in Seoul tells Americans to leave South Korea; however, if the North just goes insane and launches an attack, I doubt there will be days of advance notice (unless that's what all the bellicose posturing right now is, a prelude to an attack).
Also, I will say (because it's definitely public record at KIS, at least) that the Grade 123 team agreed that we would use Edmodo accounts (thanks again, Professor Tufts for this suggestion) to give the students one place to go (rather than jumping from sites like BrainNook, BrainPop, Weebly, Skype, Starfall, or TurtleDiary). Hopefully I don't need to teach with all this Web 2.0 technology because of war, but rather, I can continue trying to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into my classroom on Jeju - "Korea's Island of Peace."
Friday, April 5, 2013
Reflections on New Learners of the 21st Century
After viewing New Learners of the 21st Century, I spent several days reflecting on a few things mentioned in the video (and some things that were not mentioned, but I felt related in some ways).
Initial thoughts....
Very early into the program (about 2 minutes into it, actually), I found myself stopping the video after Henry Jenkins, a media scholar at the University of Southern California asked people to consider the meaning of addiction. He posited that we (as a culture) find it commendable for a child to be so interested in reading that he or she stays up late into the night reading a book, but if a child spends many hours playing a video game, we are critical and consider the child's obsession to be addictive.
It made me think about my own bias, and how my personal experiences have formed that bias. I'll share an example of two different, intelligent students, both of whom, based on his views, were interested in their respective media (literature and computer games).
The first example, a female student from Rio Grande City, Texas, whom I taught at Ringgold Middle School, was so enamored with reading that she frequently would hide in a colleague's classroom during the weekly pep rallies in the gymnasium, buried her head in a book a lunch and recess, and usually ignored her other teachers in favor of reading a book in the back of her classroom. Most of her teachers were annoyed by her obsessive reading, but she maintained a straight A average in her classes (except PE).
She told me she read to escape the monotony of the lessons in other teachers' classes, the monotony of life in South Texas, and the tediousness of poverty. She read voraciously because she wanted to learn more about the world, and I thought about her almost immediately after Jenkins spoke in the video. She has since graduated and was accepted on a full scholarship to Brown University, and she will be the first in her family to earn a college degree.
The second example, a male student from Seoul, South Korea, whom I worked with last year while covering my boarding school responsibilities, was so enamored with StarCraft that he spent hours a day hiding in empty classrooms, playing through lunch and breaks, and staying up through the night (when his laptop was not confiscated) to play. Most of his teachers were annoyed by his obsessive playing, and he maintained a straight F average in his classes (except Art).
He told me he played to escape the monotony of the lessons, the monotony of life in South Korea, and the tediousness of wealth (his parents had started him in boarding school life at age 8, and he rarely saw his mother or father except on major holidays). He played voraciously because he wanted to improve his ranking in the game. He has since left KIS because he was unable to maintain the minimum grade point average.
So when Jenkins spoke, I realized how strongly I held this cultural bias, and perhaps I needed to rethink some of my own prejudices if I want to effectively prepare my students to be new learners.
Other thoughts....
I really like what Nicole Pinkard, founder of the Digital Youth Network, was doing with the older students in the program. Using high school seniors as teachers is similar to a program I helped to develop at the Korea International School, Jeju. At KIS, middle and high school students in the SLAM (Students Leading And Mentoring) program collaborate in their advisory groups in order to create lessons to teach the elementary students about concepts like leadership, fair play, and teamwork. I was pleased to see students, like a high school senior, teaching middle school students.
And finally....
As a History major, I was troubled to hear, in Diana Laufenberg's History class at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the discussion she was having with a student working on her "What If?" project. They were talking about the Spanish not wanting to sell the Louisiana Territory to the US, and the impact this might have created for the development of the fledgling United States.
WOW! History certainly would have been quite different if the lands were Spanish "possessions" (quotes are used because these European powers did not have title to the lands owned by the Native American nations living in these areas), but, in fact, it was Napoleon Bonaparte of FRANCE who made a strategic choice to "sell" this territory. And with Napoleon focused on Europe (and military campaigns financed, in part, by the sale of these lands), world history was dramatically changed. At this point, I had to stop the video too because I was upset with the teacher, Diana.
To some people, perhaps, it might not seem like such a BIG deal to make a mistake over "ownership," but I hope in some course of the research, this student (or the teacher) discovered this HUGE mistake; otherwise, the students in this class will learn erroneous historical information from a peer. I'll likely rant about the dissemination of wrong information online in another blog posting and refer back to this example. But this example, in the very least, is a case of a facilitator (the teacher) needing at least a minimum foundation of knowledge to teach this subject, and of a potential downside of peer to peer teaching.
I think, though, I'm going to continue to think about this PBS video, and consider how teachers as facilitators of knowledge and learning fit into the new learning paradigm of the 21st century. And that, I suppose, is the point of this part of the Week 4 lesson: to make me think!
Initial thoughts....
Very early into the program (about 2 minutes into it, actually), I found myself stopping the video after Henry Jenkins, a media scholar at the University of Southern California asked people to consider the meaning of addiction. He posited that we (as a culture) find it commendable for a child to be so interested in reading that he or she stays up late into the night reading a book, but if a child spends many hours playing a video game, we are critical and consider the child's obsession to be addictive.
It made me think about my own bias, and how my personal experiences have formed that bias. I'll share an example of two different, intelligent students, both of whom, based on his views, were interested in their respective media (literature and computer games).
The first example, a female student from Rio Grande City, Texas, whom I taught at Ringgold Middle School, was so enamored with reading that she frequently would hide in a colleague's classroom during the weekly pep rallies in the gymnasium, buried her head in a book a lunch and recess, and usually ignored her other teachers in favor of reading a book in the back of her classroom. Most of her teachers were annoyed by her obsessive reading, but she maintained a straight A average in her classes (except PE).
She told me she read to escape the monotony of the lessons in other teachers' classes, the monotony of life in South Texas, and the tediousness of poverty. She read voraciously because she wanted to learn more about the world, and I thought about her almost immediately after Jenkins spoke in the video. She has since graduated and was accepted on a full scholarship to Brown University, and she will be the first in her family to earn a college degree.
The second example, a male student from Seoul, South Korea, whom I worked with last year while covering my boarding school responsibilities, was so enamored with StarCraft that he spent hours a day hiding in empty classrooms, playing through lunch and breaks, and staying up through the night (when his laptop was not confiscated) to play. Most of his teachers were annoyed by his obsessive playing, and he maintained a straight F average in his classes (except Art).
He told me he played to escape the monotony of the lessons, the monotony of life in South Korea, and the tediousness of wealth (his parents had started him in boarding school life at age 8, and he rarely saw his mother or father except on major holidays). He played voraciously because he wanted to improve his ranking in the game. He has since left KIS because he was unable to maintain the minimum grade point average.
So when Jenkins spoke, I realized how strongly I held this cultural bias, and perhaps I needed to rethink some of my own prejudices if I want to effectively prepare my students to be new learners.
Other thoughts....
I really like what Nicole Pinkard, founder of the Digital Youth Network, was doing with the older students in the program. Using high school seniors as teachers is similar to a program I helped to develop at the Korea International School, Jeju. At KIS, middle and high school students in the SLAM (Students Leading And Mentoring) program collaborate in their advisory groups in order to create lessons to teach the elementary students about concepts like leadership, fair play, and teamwork. I was pleased to see students, like a high school senior, teaching middle school students.
And finally....
As a History major, I was troubled to hear, in Diana Laufenberg's History class at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the discussion she was having with a student working on her "What If?" project. They were talking about the Spanish not wanting to sell the Louisiana Territory to the US, and the impact this might have created for the development of the fledgling United States.
WOW! History certainly would have been quite different if the lands were Spanish "possessions" (quotes are used because these European powers did not have title to the lands owned by the Native American nations living in these areas), but, in fact, it was Napoleon Bonaparte of FRANCE who made a strategic choice to "sell" this territory. And with Napoleon focused on Europe (and military campaigns financed, in part, by the sale of these lands), world history was dramatically changed. At this point, I had to stop the video too because I was upset with the teacher, Diana.
To some people, perhaps, it might not seem like such a BIG deal to make a mistake over "ownership," but I hope in some course of the research, this student (or the teacher) discovered this HUGE mistake; otherwise, the students in this class will learn erroneous historical information from a peer. I'll likely rant about the dissemination of wrong information online in another blog posting and refer back to this example. But this example, in the very least, is a case of a facilitator (the teacher) needing at least a minimum foundation of knowledge to teach this subject, and of a potential downside of peer to peer teaching.
I think, though, I'm going to continue to think about this PBS video, and consider how teachers as facilitators of knowledge and learning fit into the new learning paradigm of the 21st century. And that, I suppose, is the point of this part of the Week 4 lesson: to make me think!
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