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 20th 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 6th or 7th grade students (perhaps even 5th 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 6th 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment