"Better, Faster, Stronger"

I'm going to apologize in advance. I'm not going to talk about a Web 2.0 technology I could use in my classroom. Every sector of my being is exhausted, stretched to the limit, and beaten. I'm in a little bit of a wider ranging, philosophical mood tonight.

We have all this technology and yes, it's fantastic. We can do things we've never done, see places we've never seen, meet people we might have never met, and interact in ways we never thought we could interact. When we're using it constructively in our classrooms, we're giving students a tool to expand on and extend their cognitive capacities. They are engaging in topics and problem solving in new and meaningful ways. Fantastic. Three cheers for technology! Everything is, to borrow from a Daft Punk song currently sampled in a Kanye West song (how's that for Web 2.0?), "better, faster, stronger."

Is "better, faster, stronger" always a good thing? Is it something to which we should aspire?

An underlying assumption about wanting to do something faster is that however long it's currently taking is taking away time from something else a person could be doing. So we get things to go faster. Things move faster and we find ourselves with more free time to enjoy the things we didn't have time for before. What happens now? For many people, they start filling that free time with new things. Once they fill that time, they begin to fill harried again and look for ways to make stuff "faster." See the cycle? What are we filling that free time with? Better stuff? Is the stuff that has gotten faster better too? Do we just keep pushing ourselves until we give out?

I don't know if much of this is making any sense, but I needed a release this week. I know that there are holes you could drive a space shuttle through in my explanations and logic. This was kind of a dumping of thoughts. I may come back to this next week, when I will, with luck and divine intervention, be calmer, saner, and more well-rested. I might not. Probably not.

So thank you for your patience with me this evening. You've been a great help, whether you realize it or not.

Until next week...

Thinking about technology and parents...

I just finished the first round of conferences last week and I think I'm still tired. Conferenences have actually gotten a bit more pleasant since I started here two years ago.

During my second year at "The Grove," parents were encouraged to sign up for ParentView access to my online Gradebook. At first, I was really quite nervous about this whole situation. Was I oing to have parents emailing me day and night, wondering I hadn't posted the scores of the tests I'd given that morning? Was I going to get angry emails and phone calls if I didn't update grades in a timely manner? These fears were shared by many in the building.

ParentView was implemented and although I did get a few of those emails from die hard "helicopter parents," it was mostly business as usual. The place where I've felt the greatest impact is in conferences. I no longer feel like I'm ambushing parents with their students' grades. Most parents walk in with a copy of the ParentView printout, prepared to hear what I have to say and more interested in talking about what the student needs to do to improve than yelling at me. Conferences have become more productive as well as pleasant.

I started thinking about this during Dr. Lopez's lecture last week in class. I thought how useful Web 2.0 tools like websites, social bookmarking sites, and blogs would be for communicating with parents. I think this could also serve to improve student learning by making sure that they're getting support, encouragement , and sometimes a well-needed kick in the rear at home as well as at school.

I really enjoyed Dr. Lopez's lecture last week and I feel like I learned a lot about these newer Web 2.0 developments. I'm starting to think about how I could use a social bookmarking site to help students with their writing or provide them with resources for a project or samples of a certain kind of writing or genre. Another neat idea would be to have kids create a fake Facebook or Myspace page for a character from a book. Filling out the sections like interests, place of employment, and so on would encourage them to really know a character. Then, they could role play conversations through postings on each other's Walls. Wow! That idea came to me just now and I really kind of want to use it for my next novel. :)

At any rate, I think there are a lot of possibilities for using Web 2.0technologies in the classroom. I have notihng left to say about them right now though, as I'm pretty exhausted.

Until I post again...

Moving Closer to Surrender...

So here we are, week number whatever, and I'm still struggling with constructivism. So what else is new? What is new is that I think I'm getting closer to that point of surrender when I stop being so critical and start just embracing the ideas and concepts wholeheartedly. I really do think that constructivist classrooms are the way to go. When students can see the immediate implications of what they're doing, their interest, involvement, and motivation skyrocket. And who doesn't want that? The thought of crafting authentic learning experiences, while still daunting, is also beginning to seem more exciting and definitely more worthwhile.

The point that I continue to wrestle with is what my classroom would look and act like in a constructivist model. I think Sprague and Dede did a nice job in the article of showing the differences between the instructive and constructive models. I really liked that the classroom in question was a middle school classroom, as so often examples of these ideas seem to come only from elementary classrooms. But now I want to know the nuts and bolts. How much time did the constructivist teacher have with her students? How many days a week did she see them? What does her classroom management plan look like?
I guess what I really want is a blow-by-blow manual of the preparation and process for implementing this in a classroom. I realize though that there probably isn't an article out there that does that. (If there is, let me know! :) ) I'm beginning to believe that creating a constructivist classroom is a constructivist act in itself. You just dive in and muck around and figure it out and create understanding as you go.

I guess what I'd like to hear from people about is what they think the "nuts'n'bolts" of constructive classrooms are. How does a constructive classroom operate? What does the classroom management plan look like? What groundwork needs to be done to establish the conditions in the classroom and in students that allow this concept to fly rather than crash and burn? I don't necessarily expect that any of you will understand this any better than I do, but it might be beneficial just to bounce ideas and share.

That's it for me tonight. I won't be in class on Thursday as I have conferences (boo!) and then I'm going to see Ian McKellan play King Lear at the Guthrie.... yeah, you're drooling a little now, aren't you? Full report on Gandalf as Lear next week! Take care! :)

Abstract is Constructivism Random

I've been doing some thinking about constructivism and constructivist teaching. I've also been doing some talking with classmates. I've been doing this because constructivist teaching still confuses me... the topic and the practice. I think, perhaps, that I am a bit more concrete-sequential than I originally thought. I don't think I was always that way, but I think I've gradually moved a little in that direction. Let me explain.

I've been rolling over the Power Point assignment in my mind for a week now. I "get" the assignment on a basic level. I struggle, though, with the non-linear requirement. As someone who has never used Power Point in that manner, it is difficult to conceptualize. I realize that the assignment was designed that way purposely. I'm going to have to get in there and muck around with Power Point to figure out technically how to do that. I have no problem with that. I love mucking around in something. What is making me, I confess, a little nervous is the organization of the information. As in any true constructivist experience, I've really got to know and understand my subject matter to create a non-linear presentation/construction of it. The idea that there is no one there saying, "first do this, next do this," etc is more than a little scary. I have relied for so long on others feeding me info and steps, I realize that I've stopped thinking. Starting to think again is exciting but also unnerving. What if I'm bad at this? What if I don't know as much as I think? This could be very daunting for students, especially those who are concrete-sequential processors. Constructivism seems, almost by nature, to be a very abstract-random process.

I guess I'm wondering how other people see it. Is constructivism more concrete-sequential or abstract-random? Does that distinction change how we think about it? If so, how does the thinking change?

I'm still not sure about this, so I'm going to take this up this week as well and will be back next week with hopefully deeper understanding.

Til then....