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!
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Technology Integration at KIS
I think this video from Edutopia (available on YouTube) summarizes technology integration well...
And when I a saw this visual in the User Generated Education blog article, Schools are doing Education 1.0; talking about doing Education 2.0; when they should be planning Education 3.0
I began to think about my own experiences at the Korea International School, Jeju,
and how my school works to achieve seamless integration of technology.
It has been a bumpy ride at times....
I don't think KIS has achieved seamless technology integration yet, but I do believe it is a goal the administration and teachers strive to achieve. I think there are a few things that hinder integration. Miscommunication is one facet to consider, especially since KIS is an English medium school immersed in the South Korean countryside. Sometimes what is posted in Korean on the website does not reflect the English meaning of words or phrases.
Experience with technology is another factor that can hinder integration. Although we have professional development trainings several times during the year, it does not mean that teachers universally adopt all of the programs. Just because an event is posted to the Google calendar doesn't mean that people won't overlook it or simply not check to see if something else is planned.
Another factor is the 1 to 1 Macbook program. High School and Middle School teachers use CourseSmart for their classes, but because the Elementary School students do not have their own laptop and school email accounts, the ES teachers use technologies at their discretion in their classrooms. The Grade 4 Social Studies is supposed to use an e-textbook, but they can't access it easily at school. Secondary students are constantly creating Google documents, forms, spreadsheets, and presentations, but if I want my students to use Keynote or write emails with Gaggle accounts I set up for them, we need to go to the Mac Tech lab in the basement.
But it's getting better. All teachers use PowerSchool and AtlasRubicon for grading and lesson plans, and parents and students can log into these sites to see assignments, grades, and curriculum. The school is only two years old, and as problems arise with technology integration, there is an effort made to fix things rather than bury heads in the sand. We have another iPad cart, a classroom set of iPads, new laptop charging stations being set up in classrooms, new initiatives like ClassDojo for positive (and negative) feedback, and new faculty specifically designated for tech support and integration in all three schools.
Really, I see a mix of things happening as we grapple with the models (see the chart above again) of an Education 1.0 school, an Education 2.0 school, and an Education 3.0 school. I see myself blending some of the practices on each of the columns.
(Some) technology is confiscated at the classroom door (Education 1.0). I do take the Grade 3 students' cell/smart phones at the start of the day and leave them in a basket so they can't access them during the school day. Unfortunately, some students in other grades have abused the privilege of having a phone, and they maliciously took pictures of confidential information or tried to cheat on assessments, and so we have a policy in place to try to prevent some of this from happening. I also monitor the students as they use iPads and Macs. A firewall and filter doesn't always eliminate inappropriate images from appearring on screens. So technology has some restrictions, but I don't think I would be comfortable with young children just having free-reign online.
My teaching is done, I think in many ways, in an Education 2.0 style. I have a blend of teacher to student and student to student interactions, and I'm looking forward to the end of May (as an end of the year activity) as I try to facilitate a student - technology - student project with our pen pals at Hidden Oak Elementary School. I want the students from both Grade 3 classes to develop a webpage (maybe using a wikispace) comparing and contrasting Jeju, South Korea with Gainesville, Florida.
Parents view KIS as a place for them to learn, too (Education 3.0). I think that is why some parents enrolled their children at KIS in the first place. So that they might get more insight into the American style of education/learning. I can remember one mother telling me at a meeting last year that her son asks so many more questions about things after spending a few months learning in my classroom. As if being inquisitive was a foreign concept! But she learned something from her child. He's more curious about the world than she thought.
I guess my vision for technology would be that as it becomes more integrated into society as a whole, it will make us all start asking more questions and help us to seek more answers. I think KIS is making an effort to produce students who will one day be adults who can cope and adapt to all of the rapid changes in technology and seek answers to tough questions.
And when I a saw this visual in the User Generated Education blog article, Schools are doing Education 1.0; talking about doing Education 2.0; when they should be planning Education 3.0
I began to think about my own experiences at the Korea International School, Jeju,
and how my school works to achieve seamless integration of technology.
It has been a bumpy ride at times....
I don't think KIS has achieved seamless technology integration yet, but I do believe it is a goal the administration and teachers strive to achieve. I think there are a few things that hinder integration. Miscommunication is one facet to consider, especially since KIS is an English medium school immersed in the South Korean countryside. Sometimes what is posted in Korean on the website does not reflect the English meaning of words or phrases.
Experience with technology is another factor that can hinder integration. Although we have professional development trainings several times during the year, it does not mean that teachers universally adopt all of the programs. Just because an event is posted to the Google calendar doesn't mean that people won't overlook it or simply not check to see if something else is planned.
Another factor is the 1 to 1 Macbook program. High School and Middle School teachers use CourseSmart for their classes, but because the Elementary School students do not have their own laptop and school email accounts, the ES teachers use technologies at their discretion in their classrooms. The Grade 4 Social Studies is supposed to use an e-textbook, but they can't access it easily at school. Secondary students are constantly creating Google documents, forms, spreadsheets, and presentations, but if I want my students to use Keynote or write emails with Gaggle accounts I set up for them, we need to go to the Mac Tech lab in the basement.
But it's getting better. All teachers use PowerSchool and AtlasRubicon for grading and lesson plans, and parents and students can log into these sites to see assignments, grades, and curriculum. The school is only two years old, and as problems arise with technology integration, there is an effort made to fix things rather than bury heads in the sand. We have another iPad cart, a classroom set of iPads, new laptop charging stations being set up in classrooms, new initiatives like ClassDojo for positive (and negative) feedback, and new faculty specifically designated for tech support and integration in all three schools.
Really, I see a mix of things happening as we grapple with the models (see the chart above again) of an Education 1.0 school, an Education 2.0 school, and an Education 3.0 school. I see myself blending some of the practices on each of the columns.
(Some) technology is confiscated at the classroom door (Education 1.0). I do take the Grade 3 students' cell/smart phones at the start of the day and leave them in a basket so they can't access them during the school day. Unfortunately, some students in other grades have abused the privilege of having a phone, and they maliciously took pictures of confidential information or tried to cheat on assessments, and so we have a policy in place to try to prevent some of this from happening. I also monitor the students as they use iPads and Macs. A firewall and filter doesn't always eliminate inappropriate images from appearring on screens. So technology has some restrictions, but I don't think I would be comfortable with young children just having free-reign online.
My teaching is done, I think in many ways, in an Education 2.0 style. I have a blend of teacher to student and student to student interactions, and I'm looking forward to the end of May (as an end of the year activity) as I try to facilitate a student - technology - student project with our pen pals at Hidden Oak Elementary School. I want the students from both Grade 3 classes to develop a webpage (maybe using a wikispace) comparing and contrasting Jeju, South Korea with Gainesville, Florida.
Parents view KIS as a place for them to learn, too (Education 3.0). I think that is why some parents enrolled their children at KIS in the first place. So that they might get more insight into the American style of education/learning. I can remember one mother telling me at a meeting last year that her son asks so many more questions about things after spending a few months learning in my classroom. As if being inquisitive was a foreign concept! But she learned something from her child. He's more curious about the world than she thought.
I guess my vision for technology would be that as it becomes more integrated into society as a whole, it will make us all start asking more questions and help us to seek more answers. I think KIS is making an effort to produce students who will one day be adults who can cope and adapt to all of the rapid changes in technology and seek answers to tough questions.
A Portal Into My Classroom
In the first parts of Professor Wesch's rather "old school" presentation
(with an audience in rows not interacting with the teacher who lectures in the front of the room), I found myself reflecting on the question Professor Tufts asked us to ponder...
What message are you hearing and seeing?
In addition to noticing the format of his presentation (almost the antithesis of what he is proposing teachers should be doing in their classrooms) I did think about how he spoke about the need to move students away from the "How many points? How long should this paper be? What do I need to know for the test?" type questions and start asking "Why?"
In my own classroom, I think I've done a fairly good job at moving my students away from asking "Will this be on the test?" (especially common at the start of the school year) to the more interesting questions of "Why do we have assigned seats?" or "Why would anyone threaten to kill a little girl like Ruby Bridges?"
But perhaps I need to do more. Professor Tufts also posed the questions:
Do you think your students are bored or tired of your same lessons? And...Do you accept this or do you think it is a call for a challenge to make your lessons better by possibly enhancing them with some form of technology?
I think Math might be the most tedious subject I teach, and I think, in part, because I don't like the spiraled aspect of the Everyday Math curriculum (exactly the sort of scripted series Wesch warns about), nor do I think the text is particularly challenging to students accustomed to working on memorizing their multiplication tables at hagwons.
Perhaps I have become complacent in using the series because I spend many hours planning interesting Social Studies, Language Arts, and Science lessons (since I am the only Grade 3 teacher at the school), and by the time I get around to prepping for the Math units, I am burned out. There was a time when I only taught 5 sections of Grade 6 Math with classes of 30 students, and I used to make the students create animated math videos using our school laptop cart. Or we'd go on math scavenger hunts (yes, the whole class) around the school grounds to learn about concepts like pi. <sigh> I need to recapture some of that joy and wonder in my math lessons.
And so, yesterday, our Professional Development Day transformed unexpectedly into a Prep Day, and I thought about how I might incorporate one new technology into my classroom for this quarter. Since I like for my students to create simple quizzes at the end of their country Keynote presentations, I thought I would experiment with a new tool I had learned about through a webinar, but I had not yet used in my classroom, the BrainPop Mixer.
When the students return from Spring Break on April 8th, I will start a fractions unit. Since we are in the Mac Tech lab two days a week, and since every student in my class has a computer and Internet connection at home, I will tell them to check for their understanding using a personalized multiple choice quiz. You too can take this quiz. I used the students' English names (unless they haven't picked one yet), but you need an access code to log in. It's prugh001. The first of many personalized quizzes. I think I will start to use them as reviews for assessments and as a way to pose more open ended responses (also an option).
I'll let you know what sort of feedback I get from this activity. While my students are not yet ready to engage in a world simulation activity like Dr. Wesch's anthropology students (with a game outcome that left me somewhat depressed), I do think I can rise to the challenge of adding some more new technologies in my classroom in order to create more "knowledge-able" students.
(with an audience in rows not interacting with the teacher who lectures in the front of the room), I found myself reflecting on the question Professor Tufts asked us to ponder...
What message are you hearing and seeing?
In addition to noticing the format of his presentation (almost the antithesis of what he is proposing teachers should be doing in their classrooms) I did think about how he spoke about the need to move students away from the "How many points? How long should this paper be? What do I need to know for the test?" type questions and start asking "Why?"
In my own classroom, I think I've done a fairly good job at moving my students away from asking "Will this be on the test?" (especially common at the start of the school year) to the more interesting questions of "Why do we have assigned seats?" or "Why would anyone threaten to kill a little girl like Ruby Bridges?"
But perhaps I need to do more. Professor Tufts also posed the questions:
Do you think your students are bored or tired of your same lessons? And...Do you accept this or do you think it is a call for a challenge to make your lessons better by possibly enhancing them with some form of technology?
I think Math might be the most tedious subject I teach, and I think, in part, because I don't like the spiraled aspect of the Everyday Math curriculum (exactly the sort of scripted series Wesch warns about), nor do I think the text is particularly challenging to students accustomed to working on memorizing their multiplication tables at hagwons.
Perhaps I have become complacent in using the series because I spend many hours planning interesting Social Studies, Language Arts, and Science lessons (since I am the only Grade 3 teacher at the school), and by the time I get around to prepping for the Math units, I am burned out. There was a time when I only taught 5 sections of Grade 6 Math with classes of 30 students, and I used to make the students create animated math videos using our school laptop cart. Or we'd go on math scavenger hunts (yes, the whole class) around the school grounds to learn about concepts like pi. <sigh> I need to recapture some of that joy and wonder in my math lessons.
And so, yesterday, our Professional Development Day transformed unexpectedly into a Prep Day, and I thought about how I might incorporate one new technology into my classroom for this quarter. Since I like for my students to create simple quizzes at the end of their country Keynote presentations, I thought I would experiment with a new tool I had learned about through a webinar, but I had not yet used in my classroom, the BrainPop Mixer.
When the students return from Spring Break on April 8th, I will start a fractions unit. Since we are in the Mac Tech lab two days a week, and since every student in my class has a computer and Internet connection at home, I will tell them to check for their understanding using a personalized multiple choice quiz. You too can take this quiz. I used the students' English names (unless they haven't picked one yet), but you need an access code to log in. It's prugh001. The first of many personalized quizzes. I think I will start to use them as reviews for assessments and as a way to pose more open ended responses (also an option).
I'll let you know what sort of feedback I get from this activity. While my students are not yet ready to engage in a world simulation activity like Dr. Wesch's anthropology students (with a game outcome that left me somewhat depressed), I do think I can rise to the challenge of adding some more new technologies in my classroom in order to create more "knowledge-able" students.
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