Bust a Move

 Get out of the “Classroom”:

                I mean that in the more traditional sense.  One of the things that I found very interesting about David’s presentation is his examination of the traditional classroom.  He noted that students are constantly “plugged in” to technology and we admonish it, yet when we get them into the classroom we are educating what looks to be thirty drones, not students.  Kids are bored, exhausted, literally sleeping, and not absorbing anything.  We are not connecting because we’re not playing the same game.  The term “get on my level” comes to mind.  I think it’s fascinating and exciting that we are finally entering into this conversation now.  It prompts me to think in different ways, and more specifically, about how the classroom is arranged, and where and how the learning takes place (in a more physical sense). Desks don’t have to be in rows and they also don’t have to permanently be in a circle either.  They can move.  If you think they are too loud, buy tennis balls, cut a slit in them and stick them on the bottom of the desk legs to prevent them from making noise or scratching the floor.  Then, I challenge myself to move. ; simply to move my student’s desk more.  I also challenge myself to have them sit on the floor.  Arrange a lesson, even if it involves writing….around sitting down on the floor.   Have them sit on top of their desks.  Have them stand.  Have them move.  Then, I challenge myself to move outside of the classroom more physically.  There is a park nearby that could aid countless learning activities if they are well-planned.

Widen the Audience:

                Technology lends to the idea of widening the audience in a very obvious way.  We can now instantaneously reach millions and billions of people in countless countries at any time (and at the same time).  But what if we widened the audience, not only for the students, but for the teachers as well?  What if I started interacting with more teacher-based learning sites and blogs and programs that lend to my development as a professional?  I think that ties in very well with the notion of Creative Commons and the sharing of ideas and developments and thoughts, and I think it gets at WHY we all want to be teachers at the very start of our careers, for the benefit of the students (no matter if they are in your classroom or across the world). 

Break the Box:

Finally, I am interested in break the traditional box that says technology really lends to the Sciences and not as much to Humanities.  I teach in both realms and I really struggle with moving beyond the PowerPoint and the Video Clip (and even that can sometimes be a challenge) in Literature and English.  I want to push myself to see how I can get outside of that Passive-Learning mind frame for the Humanities and really get our hands dirty in the classroom.  I feel like this is easy to do when you are teaching Earth Science, but what about Figurative Language and Poetry?  Aren’t the themes within this subject  area so broad that they connect us across cultural and religious boundaries?  Why can’t I connect with the themes through technology?  Can’t I find a way to thread the two together?  I think I very well can, and it just will take that push to make it happen.

Technology Professional Development Plan...Just Posting It So It's Somewhere Online!

Throughout the course of this week, especially when watching Karen Cator’s video presentation on the U.S. Department of Education’s Initiatives for Education between now and 2020, I was struck most strongly by the video clip that she showed her audience.  The video, “Digital Media-New Learners of the 20^th Century” created by The Twin Cities Public Television Station in Minnesota, was captivating, to say the least.  The opening line of the video was, “How can we integrate digital media into schools?  We can stop being driven by fear.” I found this especially striking because of how it spoke to my Discussion post earlier in the week.   I am not simply overwhelmed by the amount there is to learn (regarding technology integration), and the amount of time that learning will take, I am also afraid that I will not be able to integrate the standards, and integrate them well. That fear of failure and that fear of the unknown is what I think holds back many educators across the world.

My five goals based on the DOE Standards for 6-8 Grade are:

1.       Skill 1.7: Create, save, open and import a word processing document in different file formats.  I feel this goal is a bit simpler than my other goals, but also as important.  Lately, my students have been struggling with the fact that many of them have versions of Microsoft Word (at home), that are different than the versions we have here on our computers.  As a result, the documents they bring into school on flash drives do not open, causing a big problem.  Oftentimes teachers are conflicted about what to do because remedying the problem quickly only takes up a great deal of class time.  I think teaching my students how to save their documents in compatible formats will help minimize, if not eliminate this problem.  I will hope to complete this seminar (or mini-lesson) for my students before Christmas as well.

2.       Skill 1.23: Use e-mail function and features.  I think the proper use of email functions and features is an incredibly valuable tool because this means of communication is one students currently use regularly and will only continue to use with great frequency.  My students often do not use any proper formatting or have any sense of professionalism when writing emails to their educators.  I know they are only in the sixth grade (eleven and twelve years old), but I feel that at that age I was being taught how to write a proper letter, and I feel middle schoolers should learn not only how to do that, but how to do that electronically.  My goal is to use one of our Study Hall periods to teach a quick How-To Seminar on this with my students (if not the whole school).  I would hope to do this before Christmas.

3.       Skill 1.3: Demonstrate Keyboarding skills between 25-30 wpm with fewer than five errors.  This is one of the skills that I am a very high advocate for.  I know that I have the ability to do this, but I have great worries that my students will never learn to property master the keyboard the way that I learned in high school.  Because so much of their work is done on the computer,  and has been done on the computer since a very young age, I think there is an expectation that they have learned how to type correctly; however, I have found that that is not the case.  I think my students would be able to spend less time trying to type up their work, and far more time improving it.  I think it’s a great waste of their time for them to continue at the pace they are at with the amount of work they are doing.  My hope is to speak to my principle about integrating a Typing Class into the curriculum for 6^th or 7^th grade students (perhaps even 5^th grade) by early January, have it integrated by late Spring, and have the curriculum prepared and ready for activation for the fall of 2012.

4.       Skill 2.14: Describe how cyber bullying can be blocked.  I think this is incredibly important.  Oftentimes, I will walk into the classroom and find that my students are in completely different social groups than they were in, just the day before.  I was at first shocked by this until one of my co-workers told me very simply, “Well, the internet.  You don’t know what’s happening on the internet between 5:00 p.m. on one Tuesday, and 8:00 a.m. the next Wednesday.  You don’t know what they’re saying to each other and what is happening.  It affects a lot.”  I think cyber bullying is just as important an issue to address as the bullying that we see in front of us in the classroom and in the recess yard.  I would love to have a speaker come in and talk to our student body before the end of this academic year (before the end of May 2012).  I feel like that could create an awareness that our students do not currently have.

5.       Skill 1.8 & 1.9: Describe the structure and function of a database, using related terms appropriately.  Create a simple database, defining field formats and adding new records.  I feel this is highly important.  Students are fairly proficient with Microsoft Word, but I think many of them have hardly ever used Microsoft Excel.  This is a tool that is used with great frequency in the real world.  The more time students have using it, the better.  I think that introducing it and its usefulness through my 6^th grade Science curriculum would work well.  In the Spring we are going to be doing more hands-on lab work and data collection, and I would like to see them taking their data and transferring it into an Excel Document.  My hope is to collaborate with my co-teacher on this project and have it in motion by early February 2012.

Comment on Entry #2 for Ellis Educ5701

As my internet, and Blogger it seems, will not allow me to comment on Summer's blog entry, here is my comment for now. (I still cannot access Christine's blog!)

I think the idea of having a Blackboard-type system, as well as instant computer access for all students would be SO helpful for middle school teachers.  Students are at the age where parents are trying to let them take some responsibility for keeping track of their school work, while also wanting to still monitor what they are doing.  I think having a database of information that pairs with internet access could greatly benefit a parent who wants to do a "quick check" on what their students is doing and how they are doing, while not hovering too much.

The Report on the Horizon

In the Horizon Report’s write up of “Technologies to Watch,” I was fascinated to find many ideas applicable to our current school district, grade-wide curriculums, and student population.

The first notion of Mobile Computing, can be easily integrated through the utilization of the ever-present Smart Phone.  The majority of our student body already carries these devices, and with the creation of our very own “Regional School District 17 App,” we will be able to connect with our students with even greater ease.  This App will only add to what we already offer students through both our email system and our district website.  Those students who do not own Smart Phones will not lose out to their peers who do own them.  Rather, this will only create a unifying, mobile platform that we can hopefully one day all meet equally upon.

The concept of Open Content is something that is spreading through higher level education and can be easily integrated here as well.  Sharing our curriculum, mission, methodology and lesson plans through an online file sharing network could easily link us to other school districts in the county and even the state.  From there we can see where our students fall in comparison to their peers both on a state and local level.  Hopefully this file sharing can reach a national and even global level one day as well.

Electronic Books are sweeping the country.  Borders is going out of business and paper back books can only be purchased through online merchandising warehouses like Amazon and Half.com.  Hard-copy text books have always been the bane of every student’s existence.  Rather than continually re-modeling the book-bag, why don’t we re-model the book?  Integrating electronic text books into our district curriculum through the pilot programs being offered by Apple and Amazon would allow us to avoid the physical ramifications of young students carrying heavy books, and also decrease the amount of waste we produce.

Simple Augmented Reality refers to those “applications for laptops and smart phones which overlay digital information onto the physical world quickly and easily.”  Similar to what I mentioned earlier in regards to Mobile Computing, this level of technology would be delivered in the form of a district-wide Application that would allow students to access their course schedules, homework, rules, regulations, and district-wide announcements.  Different portals could be created for each school, and even each classroom so that specialization could be ever-increased.

Gesture-Based Computing is something that we are going to integrate into our Physical Education curriculum at all levels.  The monitoring of a child’s health through the use of various “gesture-based” games would allows us to have a more objective approach to evaluating child health.  Various games can be implemented using these consoles (similar to Wi-Fitness and other devices), and then reports on the performance of different students in these games can be streamlined into one database that will be able to compile the data and evaluate with students are struggling in which areas of personal health and grow.  The development of hand-eye coordination, more complex motor movements (for younger children), and varying activity levels can be managed through the use of these consoles and this technology.

More independent, project and problem-based learning can be easily implemented in the classroom through the use of Visual Data Analysis.  This technology offers us a way of moving through large mines of data to better understand their value and meaning.  Students could use this in almost any subject area.  Multi-screen computing with emerging education-based programming would allow for any Art, Science or Social Studies student to interact with a painting they are studying, a chemical equation they are writing or an archeological dig they are uncovering.

The World is Sort of Like Montana

After reading much of what Thomas L. Friedman had to say in the third edition of his book "The World is Flat," I am struck by the specificity with which he hones in his very board, but very powerful thesis.  As he states in the Introduction, "Whenever you opt for a big metaphor like 'The World is Flat,' you trade a certain degree of academic precision for a much larger degree of explanatory power." (Friedman 2007)  It is clear that such a title allows for limitless imagination, exposition and originality.  Friedman does not fall short.

The first of the three "learning/insights" that I picked up from the reading was based around the first of the ten, "Forces that Flattened the World," Flattener #1...The New Age of Creativity: When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up.  Here Friedman discusses the power of common standards in the world of technology.  With these common standards, people were able to meet at the same level, author their own work, and become participants in a global shared experience.  The microcosm of this idea, when placed in the classroom, could be channeled through the use of rubrics in grading any subject.  Very simply, this places students on a level playing field.  As a co-teacher of mine stated recently, "I want and believe that if my students follow the directions I give them, my students will earn themselves an A."  The expectation is no lower.  The rubric and/or the directions are not a standard that one must superceded in order to move to the top.  They are standards that allows for a sense of community and commonality in a group of individuals however large or small. Rubrics allow this same sense of achievement by giving all students open expectations and standards.

In the sub-section entitled: Flattener #2, The New Age of Connectivity: When the Web Went Around and Netscape Went Public, I was able to connect Friedman's larger thought regarding the inter-webbing of different servers, programs, and web-based communication, with the inter-webbing of different subjects within one child's curriculum.  As a writer and a Humanities-based academic, I firmly believe in the concept of "Writing Across the Curriculum."  At my place of work, during our summer orientation before this fall school year began, we discussed how best to weave this into our classes.  I have the added benefit of teaching several subjects (English, Literature, Social Studies and Science) across one grade, and as a result I have been given the opportunity to make connections across subject-lines that are normally not crossed.  Just this week in Science class we began discussing Natural Disasters, and more specifically, Volcanoes.  Pompeii inevitably arose in conversation.  The fascination and questions flew, and as I spun around on my stool in the middle of the room, trying to field each curious question with careful thought, I realized that we were beginning to discuss the building of early cities in their Ancient History class that same week.  A class where Pompeii's social structure, economy and geography could easily be incorporated into the curriculum.  In addition, on my run along the Charles River this evening, I found myself looking into Boston's Museum of Science and seeing a huge sign for the "Pompeii Exhibit" that was to be on display until mid-February of next year.  The integration of Art and Literature through this kind of museum experience could certainly enhance the learning of students.  This cross-section emphasis adds a more holistic approach to education that I hope to enact specifically in regards to Pompeii, and more generally in regards to all of the subjects I teach.

Flattener #6: Offshoring, Running with Gazelle, Eating with Lions, is a section that I think speaks to all of the Charter Schools, Private Schools and Uncommon Schools that exist around the country.  In these schools, children in poor, and/or either extremely rural or extremely urban communities are given the opportunity to learn at the same level as those children that live in wealthier communities.  As a result, all children (rather than some children) have access to a solid education.  In the school I currently teach, girls from low-income families are given the opportunity to attend a private, non-profit school for little to no cost.  Where our institution lacks in funding, we are able to compensate with more one-on-one attention for our students.  In what some would see as a loss, we have found a gain.  In essence, moving this type of "any and every child, can-do" attitude, into places where it does not currently thrive, stimulates competition between groups and locations where it wouldn't have previously.  Similarly, Friedman writes that such actions on a more global, economic scale have, "created a process of competitive flattening, in which countries scramble to see who can give companies the best tax breaks, education incentives, and subsidies on top of their cheap labor, to encourage offshoring to their shores," (Friedman 2007,140).  To scale it back down again, the more we are able to level the playing field for students from every background, the more competition will grow between them, and the greater the incentive for students to push themselves harder.  Though difficult to instill on a concrete level, I think offering my students a general awareness of the quality of education they have access to, while not making them feel "less than" their wealthier counter-parts, can create a sense of healthy competition and drive within them, which could later lead to acceptance into a high-quality high school and then later on, acceptance into a competitive college.