Musings on random stuff from week 3...

Week three has come and gone. Nothing terribly earth-shattering this week; there were just a few things that stuck out to me this week.

1. In regards to the constructivist ideas we read about last week, I'm currently debating something related to that. I'm preparing to teach the narrative essay in my sophomore classes, and I'm looking at the collection of materials I've accumulated over the past two years, and the usual fret and worry appeared in their usual form: the question "What am I even doing? This time though, the meaning of the question had changed; the question carried more weight. In the past, it meant "what activities and strategies am I going to use to teach this/fill time?" This time it morphed into "What is the purpose of what I'm doing?" That is, what is the purpose of teaching writing in schools? What is my purpose in teaching the narrative essay? Is it merely a tool to accomplish something else, like understanding and applying conventions, or is it for the content, giving students the opportunity to write about an event so as to "construct " their own understanding of the event.? I'm not sure yet, but I put the question to my fellow sophomore teachers and I hope we'll discuss it.

2. I found the article of teachers using machines to be very insightful. I sometimes get frustrated, as a practicing teacher, with non-educators recommending ways of doing things because they so often seem to lack a sense of reality. This author was the opposite. He put forth some cool, interesting ideas, but he didn't do it at the expense of reality and taking into account the systems and structures that exist and how they influence our practices. I enjoyed his article a great deal.

3. In our staff meeting today, our principal demonstrated a new technology that's like a quiz game, kind of. Everyone has a remote with letter/number buttons. Questions are put up on the screen via Power Point and you answer the question by pressing the corresponding button on your remote. The votes are tallied on the screen and you can even see how many people chose each response. Our principal described it as a great way to check for understanding quickly during a lesson. It seems pretty cool, and we as a staff had fun with it, but I'll be interested to hear how my colleagues use in their classrooms once that happens.

That's it for this week. More to come next week....

Musings on tools and construction...

Week 2 is down and I have spent the evening reading our required articles for class on Thursday. For the most part, I really got a lot out of the articles and the points the authors made. The biggest shift in thinking for me occured with the concept of constructivist learning and thinking about programs and features as more effective when they act as tools for organizing and analyzing information rather than information-distributors.

I think the constructivist model was and will continue to be such a shift for me because, like pretty much everyone else, I as a teacher am a product of how I was taught as a learner. It is easy to see why teachers rely on instructive strategies rather than constructive: the district gives you a set list of outcomes that the students must achieve, your grade-level or departmental team decides what skills/information must be attained, there is pressure from parents and administrators, and there is always the ever-looming presence of standardized tests. It seems much easier to just tell the kids what they need to know rather than allow them to construct the knowledge on their own. Also, many teachers become teachers because they were successful in school; that is, the instructive strategies used by their instructors worked for them. Thus, teachers think, "If it worked for me as a student, it should work for my students now." The idea of constructing knowledge seems much more powerful though. As the authors stated, it isn't just memorizing facts or regurgitating what the the student thinks the teacher wants to hear; it is a process where students engage in the material and assign it meaning based on their personal experiences and come to a deeper, more complex understanding of a concept or idea. I think my struggle will be with understanding how I can create a constructivist environment in my classroom while still adhering to guidelines and expectations set out by my district and building, especially when I don't have a lot of experience in constructivist classrooms.

I also really liked the idea of computer programs and features as tools for demonstrating and constructing knowledge rather than as distributors of pre-determined knowledge. The idea of students using a Hyper-Media Authoring System to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of a topic sounds very valuable, very useful, and very likely to rouse and sustain my students' interest. I need to finish reading this yet, but I'll probably comment more in the discussion area when I'm done.

That being said, I think I'm "thought out" for tonight. Till next week...

Musings from the first day of class

This is actually very exciting. I like the idea of using blogs to discuss stuff in class, but I must admit, I find the idea of blogging about daily life a little self-involved. My thinking on that might and probably will change though as I work through this. :)

I'm excited about what we're going to learn because it's going to have a huge effect on how my students are learning and achieving success in my classroom. I think my students learn very differently than I did because they have grown up using these technologies, and that has shaped their learning styles. I think that using modes of communication that they are already somewhat literate in will allow them to engage more in the learning process.

That all being said, while my students are a little more technologically literate than I am, I can't call them completely literate because I think that part of literacy involves analyzing and evaluating. From my experience, students have great difficulty analyzing the text and sounds and images that fly at them on a daily basis for meaning, purpose, and intent, and they struggle to evaluate the validity and credibility of information they find on sites. The recent focus on Wikipedia as a credible source demonstrates this nicely enough. I'm eager to find ways to help my students learn how to effectively analyze and evaluate content they find on the Web.

I guess maybe that's it today. :)