Posts
I started by looking at the blog about assigning homework by Mr. Meyer. One thing that I liked about his blog is that he included links to back up some of the things he was saying. For example, he mentioned "assessment reform" and had a link to the site he was referencing. This is better than reading a term paper where the students have works cited because with one click, you're there. Of course for books and other sources that are not on the web, there is no replacement for the works cited. Still, that saved a lot of time and guesswork. I clicked and read exactly what he was talking about. On the other hand, he used offensive language in some of his blogs and I found that unprofessional. The blog definitely had a "conversational" tone that detracted from his credibility. It's not that we're all saints who would never swear, but in a presentation, swearing is a turn-off. There are better ways to express frustration without making a negative impact.
The next site I visited was about brevity written by a student, Morgante Pell. I can sympathize with students to a degree here. Yes, writing a long paper is no fun and it's sometimes difficult to try to come up with more information if they haven't done their research. Finding more to say to fill up space is basically how the student viewed the work for the traditional paper. I liked the comment from this teacher about how testing constraints limit the students' creativity. In my own classroom, I find that students try to write too much and they lack the vocabulary at levels 1 & 2. I think the idea of brevity is definitely useful and should be practiced. Brevity cannot replace all assignments, but getting to the point is a valuable idea.
Joyce Valenza has good points. She doesn't have as much practical information as I'd like, so the posts are a valuable follow-up to her article. What she has here is more like an outline of a study without the particulars. I found the posts to have good comments about what they've seen in PowerPoints that made for good and bad presentations. This is definitely a good site to show students before doing a presentation.
Kris Bradburn wrote an interesting article. I noticed that there were a lot of short comments in the posts showing support, but little else. The responses were often without any real content such as links to other research or any real depth of thought. This would be a good site to show "blogging illiteracy." If I were giving grades for responses to the original post, I would have to give the majority of responses failing grades. There is no real sense in saying "nice job!" if that's all you have to say to an article. All that does is clutter up the site.
The Fischbowl was the last one I looked at. This was interesting because it does not include people's opinions on the blog. Responses may be looked at by clicking a link to the comments. This makes the site look clean and neat. When I clicked on 21cliteracy as a suggested label, I got a hodgepodge of unrelated articles. I don't see how this was helpful in finding more information about the original topic on tech illiteracy. I did like how he had links for other posts he made since if a person likes what the writer has to say, it's easy to see what other comments or original posts he has.
I think that blogs definitely have good social uses. I'm still not convinced about replacing classroom discussion in favor of blogs. Also, I do not support replacing papers with blog-style commentaries since our society is turning away from structured writing in disturbing ways. I've seen e-mails from my mom's work... they're scary. One of my former colleagues would print out e-mails from secretaries, other teachers, the principal, and others that he received and would share/ridicule them over lunch. That makes for a fun lunch, but I would not want my child anywhere near those people's classrooms. In sum, I can see benefits, but there are some definite drawbacks to the style of blog writing as well as the information itself. These examples were nice and from an educational website. Others can use blogs to perpetuate ignorance and intolerance. Like everything, you have to research before you read to see if your source is credible.
I think the most useful way to apply a blog for my classroom would be for tutoring. Many of my students say they would not be able to come in early (bus riders) or stay late (usually bus riders or they're just lazy). They realize they need help, but won't do anything about it. I'd bet a blog would be a good place for them to get help because I could have an original post about the grammar of the week and students could post their own explanations of how they learned the concept or share study techniques.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Thing 1-B : Web 2.0
I just finished reading about Web 2.0 and seeing the videos. Some of the ideas are pretty overwhelming for someone not raised in the culture of technology or who have only had limited access. I'm hesitant to use a lot of tech in the classroom because of these issues. With my ESOL students at my old school, if I took a survey, I'd say about 10% of my students have never used a computer at all (recent immigrants usually) and more than 50% had never done serious work with a computer. We used to take them once a week to the lab just to teach them how to log on, type, and do a search. The other 40% may have a computer at home for games or the occasional limited work because it belonged to a parent. My American students tended to have more experience so that was less frustrating for me, but I'd say there were still about 50% with no computer or no Internet service at home. Anyway, that school was a Title 1 school. Since AHS participates in Title 1 and has quite a few students on free/reduced lunches, I'm feeling that these students might be in similar home situations with the computers.
What that means to me is that if I assign work that a student might not be able to finish in class, this student may require extra time away from class to use a lab. That's not a good situation and that could be avoided by not using technology. As teachers, we have to keep things like this in mind since we're not trying to exclude students when we give assignments.
Now, on a more positive note, I haven't used podcasts before, but my old school had us post lesson plans to a shared server. I could check out what the other teachers planned to do for similar topics. An example: the clothing unit! So, I'm looking for something fresh to do with that and I check the Spanish teachers to see what kinds of things they do. One is organizing a "fashion show" and asking all her students to wear nice clothes, fancy clothes, or ugly, out of style clothing. Then, I check the other French teacher because she usually has interesting writing topics. I've done this kind of non-face-to-face collaboration before and it saves a LOT of time. As an added bonus, I get to avoid the situation of "yeah, sounds like that works well in your class, but I don't really like it/think it will work in mine...."
Outside of my personal example here, I can see that some of the tools have been helpful and some are absolutely hurtful to our students. Yes, they have a lot more information available and they can get that information quickly. Hurtful because in some situations, students need to know the FACTS and what they're reading are someone's OPINIONS. This leads to students getting the wrong information and then they think that information is correct because someone posted it on the web and that page gets a lot of hits. Their ideas of validity are completely different than ours and they don't always use good judgement or are unable to make good decisions yet. I attended the workshop on Cyberbullying last year. That is an excellent example of a good idea gone bad. The worst part about all these tools being available is that the potential for abuse is incredible and there is really no way to monitor everything the kids are doing or to correct/stop them when they get caught. Yes, I have seen pics of kids mooning their friends' camera phones...
As a sometimes English teacher, I was horrified at the thought of kids not discussing, but writing blogs about a reading assignment. So, what were they using the class time for if they were blogging their discussion outside of class? Or maybe they were using a lab and blogging during class? Typing takes more time than talking. Sounds like a waste of time, but they weren't clear in the article about how class time was being used. Also, there have been many times where I have had to write formal reports, letters, etc. in everyday life. I do not see a benefit of having students avoid the formal paper techniques just because writing a paper is boring. They still need to know how to do it! Also, they do not get enough practice using formal speech. Getting to college and not knowing how to write a paper is completely unacceptable. Writing correspondance to your boss like you're writing a casual e-mail to a friend is completely unacceptable. I can support teachers wanting more student involvement, but there is a limit and we cannot always go down to their level. Sometimes they have to be pushed to meet ours.
Another thing that disturbed me about the podcasts was the potential for community involvement. Yes, we want parents to be interested and to participate, but what happens if you've already told parents to tune in and your class discussion turned to a controversial topic that you didn't intend? That one incident may ruin your reputation as a competent teacher. I almost get the feeling of BigBrother invading the classroom. :) Again, there is a great potential for sharing, but we need personal space, too. I have parents sometimes asking why we're teaching this topic. There's not much I can do besides say "It's part of the curriculum and it's useful." I don't need parents making my job harder by challenging what we're doing in the classroom on a daily basis or asking why we're not doing a presentation some other way or using different teaching techniques or or or... I trust people in the community to know how to do their jobs, so they should respect that I know how to do mine. Unless there was a real concern about students failing or needing some kind of monitoring, I just find that podcast idea invasive. I can see students sharing projects with the community and parents saying their work is not to their standards when our teaching goals are very different from the parents' standards. Here's an example from a colleague: She was teaching a unit on houses in Mexico with the goals of basic vocabulary and colors. The bedroom is big and blue kind of stuff. One of the administrators walked in for an observation and later marked her down for not introducing more cultural aspects like discussing property taxes in Mexico. hehe We laughed about that one for weeks because it came from a person who is supposed to know what we're doing.
Personally, I think it would be great to use tech to correspond with keypals rather than waiting weeks for penpal letters to arrive. It's great to pull videos from different sources to enhance lessons. It's fun to make classroom videos and show those to friends/other classes. A thing to consider, though, is that sometimes the tech takes time out of classroom activities where students are spending too much time doing "setting up" work or just "making it pretty." This usually means a lot of monitoring on my part with encouragements of "hurry it up, we've got 2 minutes left!!!!" My favorite is "Omg, my project didn't save!"
Anyway, I can definitely see where Web 1.0 is still useful, but I realize that most of our students are into the interactive parts of the web. Blogs and other things are great for exchanging ideas, but we really need the 1.0 for things we don't want our children to find and change (like the report on the real Titanic where Captain Leonardo da Caprio went down with the ship, copied and pasted from Wikipedia). I'm not saying that's not a great tool, but too many cooks spoil the soup sometimes. Someone was messing around and changed a single line of the text to include Leonardo and of course my clueless (and lazy) ESOL student decided to write about that.
What that means to me is that if I assign work that a student might not be able to finish in class, this student may require extra time away from class to use a lab. That's not a good situation and that could be avoided by not using technology. As teachers, we have to keep things like this in mind since we're not trying to exclude students when we give assignments.
Now, on a more positive note, I haven't used podcasts before, but my old school had us post lesson plans to a shared server. I could check out what the other teachers planned to do for similar topics. An example: the clothing unit! So, I'm looking for something fresh to do with that and I check the Spanish teachers to see what kinds of things they do. One is organizing a "fashion show" and asking all her students to wear nice clothes, fancy clothes, or ugly, out of style clothing. Then, I check the other French teacher because she usually has interesting writing topics. I've done this kind of non-face-to-face collaboration before and it saves a LOT of time. As an added bonus, I get to avoid the situation of "yeah, sounds like that works well in your class, but I don't really like it/think it will work in mine...."
Outside of my personal example here, I can see that some of the tools have been helpful and some are absolutely hurtful to our students. Yes, they have a lot more information available and they can get that information quickly. Hurtful because in some situations, students need to know the FACTS and what they're reading are someone's OPINIONS. This leads to students getting the wrong information and then they think that information is correct because someone posted it on the web and that page gets a lot of hits. Their ideas of validity are completely different than ours and they don't always use good judgement or are unable to make good decisions yet. I attended the workshop on Cyberbullying last year. That is an excellent example of a good idea gone bad. The worst part about all these tools being available is that the potential for abuse is incredible and there is really no way to monitor everything the kids are doing or to correct/stop them when they get caught. Yes, I have seen pics of kids mooning their friends' camera phones...
As a sometimes English teacher, I was horrified at the thought of kids not discussing, but writing blogs about a reading assignment. So, what were they using the class time for if they were blogging their discussion outside of class? Or maybe they were using a lab and blogging during class? Typing takes more time than talking. Sounds like a waste of time, but they weren't clear in the article about how class time was being used. Also, there have been many times where I have had to write formal reports, letters, etc. in everyday life. I do not see a benefit of having students avoid the formal paper techniques just because writing a paper is boring. They still need to know how to do it! Also, they do not get enough practice using formal speech. Getting to college and not knowing how to write a paper is completely unacceptable. Writing correspondance to your boss like you're writing a casual e-mail to a friend is completely unacceptable. I can support teachers wanting more student involvement, but there is a limit and we cannot always go down to their level. Sometimes they have to be pushed to meet ours.
Another thing that disturbed me about the podcasts was the potential for community involvement. Yes, we want parents to be interested and to participate, but what happens if you've already told parents to tune in and your class discussion turned to a controversial topic that you didn't intend? That one incident may ruin your reputation as a competent teacher. I almost get the feeling of BigBrother invading the classroom. :) Again, there is a great potential for sharing, but we need personal space, too. I have parents sometimes asking why we're teaching this topic. There's not much I can do besides say "It's part of the curriculum and it's useful." I don't need parents making my job harder by challenging what we're doing in the classroom on a daily basis or asking why we're not doing a presentation some other way or using different teaching techniques or or or... I trust people in the community to know how to do their jobs, so they should respect that I know how to do mine. Unless there was a real concern about students failing or needing some kind of monitoring, I just find that podcast idea invasive. I can see students sharing projects with the community and parents saying their work is not to their standards when our teaching goals are very different from the parents' standards. Here's an example from a colleague: She was teaching a unit on houses in Mexico with the goals of basic vocabulary and colors. The bedroom is big and blue kind of stuff. One of the administrators walked in for an observation and later marked her down for not introducing more cultural aspects like discussing property taxes in Mexico. hehe We laughed about that one for weeks because it came from a person who is supposed to know what we're doing.
Personally, I think it would be great to use tech to correspond with keypals rather than waiting weeks for penpal letters to arrive. It's great to pull videos from different sources to enhance lessons. It's fun to make classroom videos and show those to friends/other classes. A thing to consider, though, is that sometimes the tech takes time out of classroom activities where students are spending too much time doing "setting up" work or just "making it pretty." This usually means a lot of monitoring on my part with encouragements of "hurry it up, we've got 2 minutes left!!!!" My favorite is "Omg, my project didn't save!"
Anyway, I can definitely see where Web 1.0 is still useful, but I realize that most of our students are into the interactive parts of the web. Blogs and other things are great for exchanging ideas, but we really need the 1.0 for things we don't want our children to find and change (like the report on the real Titanic where Captain Leonardo da Caprio went down with the ship, copied and pasted from Wikipedia). I'm not saying that's not a great tool, but too many cooks spoil the soup sometimes. Someone was messing around and changed a single line of the text to include Leonardo and of course my clueless (and lazy) ESOL student decided to write about that.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Thing 1-A : Post 1
Bienvenue! My name is Valerie and I teach French at AHS. This will be my second year there, but I have 10 years of experience from Meadowcreek HS in Norcross. Besides teaching, I will also be sponsoring a new club- The Foreign Language Club. My department colleagues and I wanted to promote our languages to students who are taking French or Spanish. We're hoping to find opportunities for students to experience culture and practice their language skills outside of the classroom. I've got some ideas for starter activities, but if you know of any upcoming events, great restaurants, etc. that students would love to see/visit/experience, let me know!
Now, why did I sign up for this course? Well, I like computers and technology. Unfortunately, we don't get much time in the computer lab. So, I'm hoping to find new ways for my students to access information quickly and meaningfully. I know that a lot of students are still intimidated by computers, so the more I know, the more I can help them. This course offers a lot of different ways to present and access information. Also, I'm sure the students know about these things and I certainly don't want to be left out of the information loop!
Now, why did I sign up for this course? Well, I like computers and technology. Unfortunately, we don't get much time in the computer lab. So, I'm hoping to find new ways for my students to access information quickly and meaningfully. I know that a lot of students are still intimidated by computers, so the more I know, the more I can help them. This course offers a lot of different ways to present and access information. Also, I'm sure the students know about these things and I certainly don't want to be left out of the information loop!
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