I am not writing that often in this blog. I am doing most of my writing in my School Blog. I felt I was duplicating many items over here. Perhaps things will pick up later in the year. If you are a regular reader of this blog, please switch your links to the above blog.
Thanks.
cross posted on SHS Web Design.
There is an interesting article in the NYTimes. A teacher in New Jersey is assigning homework to his students and their parents. The parents need to log-in occasionally (once per week or so) to comment on the topics in class. Research is clear that meaningful parental involvement in school is very important for student success. This article seems to show that the teacher is providing thoughtful and productive assignments. I am certain that if teachers, parents, and students learn together it is a far more productive environment.
Shouldn’t our expectations be:
If only the student is learning something new I think it is much less fun, productive, effective, or efficient. Modeling life-long learning is probably the most important thing we can do in a world that will be changing drastically. Remember, we are training you for jobs that don’t even exist yet, to solve problems we don’t even know about yet (for example, the internet industry is HUGE; but didn’t exist ten years ago).
A parent in this article says “I’m too busy, and I’m done with school! I graduated.”. Lets accept as a truism that successful parents and student are way too busy. I agree. I also obviously agree that any “assignment” must be truly collaborative and meaningful for all.
But, shouldn’t parents be very involved in classroom work? Is this type of parental involvement more meaningful than helping with fundraisers or other activities? What do you think?
David Warlick is heading to Connecticut to give our opening address next Tuesday. I heard David last Fall as I began teaching these new classes and he certainly pushed me in a certain direction. The blogging we started in our classes was very productive from a quantity standpoint (16,000 entries!!).
That is a huge amount of data and assessment for a teacher to absorb. But I really think I had a deep understanding of each of my students because of this writing (and best of all–its still there for sharing, not in the dumpster like paper assessments!). As I approach the new year I am becoming more and more focused on my “UBD” concepts and I truly have little idea of the “what” that I will be teaching as things are coming out so fast (Lulu? Weebly? Zoho?). I know exposure to these tools is a huge void I need to fill and through that exposure I hope to foster inquiry, debate, and awareness of the world.
As a music teacher the best skill I developed was making connections with experts. These tools I use in my new field of web design enable to me to connect with people I have never met. David and I communicate by email/blog/wiki on a fairly regular basis (mainly for him to fix bugs that my kids create in the classblogmeister), but I would really value 15-20 minutes of discussion with him. I find it interesting that while the quantity (like our 16,000 entries) have greatly increased we still need to improve the quality. That’s the task for this year.
I can’t wait to hear the reaction of our staff. Should be interesting….
Technorati Tags: Warlick Seymour Schneider k12 education technology
We have been preparing for the year end Tech Fair at our school. As this is my first year at SHS I really have no idea what to expect. I do know that the Board of Education members visit along with some parents. I do know how to perform, however. So we are pulling out all the stops. Instead of signs pointing the way we reserved three laptops that will play student created Flash movies saying “Go this way!”.
We don’t have web server space at our school, a situation that proved difficult at the beginning of the year has largely become irrelevant. This weekend I read about internet start-ups in NewsWeek. So on Friday we tried out weebly. Weebly offers a seriously easy WYSIWYG editor and its free. It looks like any professionally created page.
This obviously has huge implications for curriculum. You can now blog, publish (Lulu), and have your own website. My students just took a year of web design so they were able to start their pages very fast. But I think any third grader could do this.
Check out our pages as they develop. The assignment for the tech fair is listed there as well.
Yesterday’s tragedy in Virginia outlines this dichotomy between school and student life. Students needed access to information and used their laptops to access Facebook, wikipedia, and other user edited sites. The growth of the wikipedia entry about the massacre is amazing. Serious discussion about sources, citations, resources is going on in real time.
Students used their phone to videotape the incident. Journalists from around the world used these websites and video as primary sources. Anyone, anywhere, at anytime can be a journalist, editor, and creator of documents. In almost all high schools today we ban phones, Facebook, editing wikipedia, even though society recognizes these skills as essential. This is how schools are risking irrelevancy.
Have students become the educational leaders? Have they left us behind?
A teacher asked me today:
“The school is requiring me to post my lesson plans on the school website. Who holds the copyright for the lesson? Does the school, or does the teacher?”
An interesting question. Can a school publish what you do in the classroom? Should the teacher be able to choose who they collaborate with? Or are all teacher lesson plans “open source”?
Any answers?
Just got word that I will be presenting at the 2007 CECA (CT-Computer Assoc.) conference on October 23. This is my third time presenting there. I will present about making writing a social event through blogging.
Check out our class blogmeister. My work with the blogs has not been perfect. I am learning more each day. I have found that the students are reading each others work and they are reading the “experts” much more (Richardson, Warlick, etc…). I have not gotten them to increase the amount of comments and thus value the “conversation”.
Mike Wesch and Scott McLeod recently posted about anti-teaching. Stepping away from lecture delivery systems and encouraging more student responsibility in learning. David Warlick talks about this often. Creating conversations.
I think of my own education. The teachers that I learned from the most were incredibly disciplined, but there was no question that the student was leading the way. I have a music background. The best ensemble directors asked us to surprise them. To create someting new and exciting in a piece of music that had been played countless times before.
In many of our classes the same worksheets are passed out each year. The lecture on the Civil War is the same lecture that was given in 1980. The textbooks were written in 1995. And many of these teachers wonder why their students don’t get excited about the subject they teach. Many of our schools are not set up for innovation. Many schools frown upon it. Many students rebel and think “anti-teaching” is “not-teaching”.
How can we effect change on a level outside of our classroom? There is study after study about the inability for educational reform to penetrate at the classroom level (the only level that counts). Will it take a “revolution” by the students? What if they rebel and just start blogging with their phones, uploading video, creating content during school? Will students make us change?
I’ve been taking some time to read through a lot of the posts on the blogs and came across this Will Richardson entry about blocking software and how frustrated some of us can get. I’ve been trying to start the discussion at my school and havent gotten that far. SO much of what I find is blocked. I agree that students can find “bad stuff” if they really want to, and that we should work to prevent it.
However, with the pace of change moving so fast it is hard for us to keep up. Are there model programs out there that could post their strategies?
I am new to the web 2.0 blogsphere. I have taken a break from the relentless world as a music director and I am teaching web design this year. It has been an interesting year. I finally have the time to really investigate my content area and the blogs have been a great resource.
I started with David Warlick who I saw at the CECA conference in October. That drew me to several other blogs, my favorite being Tim Lauer (check out Lewis Elementary). The last few months in class I have thrown a lot of new ideas at my students and they are starting to respond. The blogs have been a great resource for that. The kids are starting to do this investigation on their own, at least thats what I am trying to get them to do. As a band director I would always say “I can’t practice for you..”. As a track coach I would say “you need to run the miles….”. I think “regular” teachers often spoonfeed their students too much and dont allow for students to develop self-reliance and self-direction. I havent figured out why, there is certainly more pressure in a coaching environment or music director job.
