The end is near

The most exciting aspect of this class that I learned about is open sources. I recently came across this amazing open source called Phun. It's a program that allows me to set up simulations with gravity, forces, and other aspects of physics. If I hadn't been aware of open sources I never would have come across this program that will enhance my physics classes. The great thing about this program is that it's not just for physics junkies like me, it's really phun to play with! If you have a spare minute (who am I kidding, its way to phun, you will need a lot more than a minute to play with it), I highly suggest checking it out.

(check out the video on youtube: its a demonstration of phun)

As I move forward in my teaching the most difficult thing for me, after this class, will be the frustrations in not having enough technology for all of my students right now. My school has started a laptop program however it will be 3 more years before all students have laptops. Once every student has a laptop I will be able to use a whole lot more technology in my classroom. I have been researching LabPro interfaces for lab use in my chemistry and physics classes. I look forward to the future when data will be able to be collected on the computer and analyzed by the computer. I hope that in 4 years I will be on my way to having many more labs on the computer.

R-Directed Thinking

The R-Directed adaptation that I am going to have to most focus on is Pink's 2^nd sense, "not just argument but also STORY." This is something that I already put a bit of focus into when I am creating my lessons, however I feel I have a long way to go. My problem is that I teach science. In science it is important to have a story, very important, in fact, however it is not always easy. It's often easier to simply teach the students how to do a chemistry problem, but to neglect why we do it that way. It's easy for the students to memorized procedures but difficult for them to comprehend some of the complex chemistry or physics that is a fundamental part of the foundation of that procedure.

I think what I need to do in order to become better at giving my students the whole story is to have more faith in my students' abilities to understand complex concepts. I also need to spend more time on breaking that complex information down into simpler, visual examples that the students can easily understand. My students are all extremely hard working, focused, and intelligent. I know that they could understand the story if I just take the time to sit down and tell it. I know that telling my students the story will make me a better teacher.

How could multimedia have assisted my lerning?

When given this weeks blog prompt, "Think back to an educational experience that you had that was NOT well designed. If you now had the chance to re-design that experience using multimedia in your lesson design, what would you do differently and WHY? Remember to include some ideas about assessing multimedia learning in your design."
I remember a pre-calculus course from high school that was terribly ill designed. The teacher would teach us for about 5 minutes at the beginning of the class and the remainder of the time was spent with the students trying to teach themselves the material while the teacher sat at his computer. This class was extremely difficult because the teacher did not really teach, so we had to rely on the poorly designed and confusing book to teach us trigonometry and other important mathematical concepts.
If we as students had had access to some of the open source software that is available now, like The KDE Education Project, I feel that we would have had a better time at teaching ourselves. If the teacher could have used the computer to teach us about sines and cosines I think that we would have had a better time at visualizing the material. Any type of multimedia would have been better than the brief lessons that we got.
Teachers should use multimedia as a resource to help themselves and students in the learning process.

Thoughts on "After the Bell, Beyond" by Eric Langhorst

While I do feel that this article gives some wonderful suggestions as to how technology can be used outside of the classroom, I feel that it did not focus enough on how technology can be used in the classroom. This article discussed how the author enhanced book discussions and study sessions by using technology like podcasting and blogging. I find it difficult to understand why this educator neglected to discuss how these technologies could be used within the 'limiting' 45 minute time slot.

Forty five minutes can certainly be limiting, however how do we use those 45 minutes to their greatest potential. This educator seems to be neglecting technology use in the classroom, for he states "the brick-and-mortar school, along with teachers should be the core for learning" (p 77). This gives an image of old fashioned classrooms that are not technology based. I feel that students first need to be taught to use technology productively for education in the classroom before exploring the technology on their own time. Yes, certainly many students are technology use experts, however it cannot be assumed that all students are such. We need to properly integrate technology into the classroom before we can properly integrate it into homework.

I feel that this article gave some wonderful suggestions on how to use technology to enhance learning, however some areas were clearly forgotten. We must remember that students need to be educated on how to use technology in their education. Time and effort needs to be spent in teaching students how to properly use, navigate, and explore the numerous technological based education tools.

Web 2.0: can it enhance the classroom?

I have spent a lot of time over the past week exploring all of the wonderful web based technology that is available to teachers. I have found that every single one of these can be a wonderful asset to any classroom, and any teachers instruction.

The first site I explored was www.gliffy.com. I am fortunate enough to teach in a school that uses the Inspiration program. This is a great program, however if students need to work on a chart at home they cannot access this software. Instead I could give my students an assignment that they could create with gliffy, then they could save it and I could view it right from the internet. This also would allow students to view charts that I have made from home.

The second site I explored was www.wikispaces.com. I think that this is a brilliant idea. This site allows teachers to bring information to the students in their own language, the language of the internet. This also allows students to check work that they may have missed when they were absent as well as post discussion questions or topics.

In general, I think that teachers need to start using sites like these. This would allow us to bring education to the students in a way that they can understand it. This allows teachers to be fast paced so that their audience doesn't become bored or underwhelmed. This is the correct direction for education to be moving, towards the future.

What's in the News?

Christy Rheam

What's in the News?

Due 2/13/2008

Article: "Kids Can't Focus These Days. Then Again, Neither Can I." by Thomas Washington

washingtonpost.com. Sunday, February 3, 2008: pg B02

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-yn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020102825.html

Summary: This article looks into the issue of students reading. It quotes facts like "less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier", and states that the percentage of 17 year old non readers has doubled in a 20 year period, from a recent study from the National Endowment for the Arts called "To Read or Not to Read". The author, Thomas Washington, explains, however that students are still doing their business as usual. Washington points out that it is not just the students who are having trouble focusing. We are all accustomed to a technology based world in which information is quick and even librarians (Washington is a librarian) cannot stick with a long novel that does not capture them right away. Because of our technology based world, students have become better and better at picking out the important information and discarding the unimportant. He ends the article with the following questions, "What do we need to know? Why do we need to know it? And, given that by the end of our lives we will have absorbed and converted to knowledge only a sliver of the information available, should we bother knowing it?"

Response: What an interesting perspective, from a librarian, none the less. Washington's article opens a new perspective on why reading scores are low. Students are so accustomed to reading for tests and not for depth. The have become masters at picking out the important information without actually reading entire assignments. The technology based world that our students live in has trained them to multitask, allowing them to text, IM, write papers and read articles all at the same time. According to Washington, this has not caused them to be any less successful in school.

My View: Honestly, I am very much in agreement with this article. The students that I teach are not the strongest readers, however they are still succeeding in my classes. They are quite good at picking out important information from assigned readings. They openly admit to me that they have not read the information completely, however the required summaries that they have to write are generally really good. I feel that this article very much relates to Marc Prensky's idea of Digital Natives (see post from January 22). These students think and learn differently and have adapted the old fashioned assignments to their fast paced world by extracting the important information from assigned readings.

Questions: Do students need to be strong, fluent readers in order to function in the high paced, technology based world? How to we teach students to be fluent readers while still preparing them for the high paced, technology based world? Is it wrong for students to ask 'why do we need to know this'?

Thoughts on the first two chapters of Multimedia Projects in Education

I found the DDDE model outlined in the first two chapters of the book to be extremely influential. As I was reading through these chapters I thought about all of the multimedia experiences I have had in my education and I wished that my teachers and professors had used the DDDE model. The DDDE model really requires the educator to think thoroughly about the assignment that they are giving. I also think that it requires the educator to experience the multimedia themselves before presenting it to students. This allows for a less flawed lesson and an easier understanding on the part of the student. I also really appreciate how the evaluate section requires the educator to reflect on the activity as well as revise it for the future. I cannot count how many times I hear educators say, I forgot to fix that from last year. How can we as educators learn if we do not reflect and revise our previous work? I feel this is an extremely important aspect of teaching and the DDDE model requires it.

Lerning Styles and Multimedia Tools

The type of multimedia that I would have the most difficulty learning with would be audio clips. Since I am so strongly a visual learner (9 on the visual side) I have difficulty learning with just written materials or materials that are explained only verbally. I know that pod casting is becoming popular as an education tool, however if those pod casts are only audio I would really be at a loss. Video pod casting would be really useful to me on the other hand. If I can see pictures, demonstrations, and diagrams that go along with the material I am hearing I really understand much better.

The multimedia tool that I would like to learn more about is how to use technology as a tool for knowledge construction. At the school where I teach I have access to the program Inspiration, however I have never used it. I am a visual learner, and so are most of my students, so this could be a wonderful tool; however I have not been properly introduced to the program and do not know how to use it. I hope to sit down in the near future to 'play' with the program to figure out how it works. I am making a goal that in this upcoming trimester I will use the program at least twice in each of my 4 classes. This will take some time and effort, however I feel that it is important that I become acclimated with the program and that I use this useful tool in my classroom.

Reflection on Marc Prensky's Digital Navites, Digital Immigrants Part I and Part II

Finally, someone is actually acknowledging why students are so different now. I work in a school that has teachers of all different ages and experience levels. The more experienced teachers, ones who have been there for 15-35 years always seem to complain about everything that the students do or do not do. Interestingly enough I hear less of this type of complaints from the younger teachers. We younger teachers are digital natives. Because of this we are relating to our students better than teachers who have been there for a long time.

My school is extremely fortunate in that we have SMART boards in every classroom. It is absolutely unbelievable how many teachers don't use them. There are many of us that do use them, however it seems that learning to use them has been a big issue for many of the older teachers. They seem to be stuck in their old way of teaching. I know that many of them are trying to use the SMART boards, however it seems so difficult for them to simply navigate around the SMART notebook (the software that comes with the SMART boards). All along I have known that I have an advantage because I have grown up with computers, however I never realized how great that advantage really is.

I felt particularly passionate about one line from Marc Prensky's Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. He states, "Digital Immigrants don't believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because they (the Immigrants) can't" (pg 3). This particularly stood out to me because I had an experience where I fought for a child who liked to listen to music while he worked. I was in one of my first meetings as a teacher with a parent, the learning specialists, and all of the students' teachers. The purpose of this meeting was to help the parent better know what her child could do to stay on top of his work and be a better student. At some point in the meeting the head of the learning specialists said that the student should never listen to music while he worked on homework or read. She claimed that there was research that proved that this was in no way beneficial to students. I quietly, but quickly spoke up and explained that I personally need to listen to music while I work or I cannot stay focused. I told them that the music almost acted as a distraction for me. Not a huge distraction that actually took my focus away from my work, but a little something that helped prevent me from becoming distracted from bigger more distracting things in the room. I don't know if the parent listened to me, but I felt it was important to bring it up.

Now that I have read Marc Prensky's two papers on digital natives, I understand why that worked for me and not for others. I am a digital native. I am used to multi-tasking. In high school I would write papers while chatting online, and surfing the internet. My brain is programmed to work like that. I need a slight distraction from my work to keep my brain busy. This allows me to be more efficient in my work than if I were working in a silent room with no other distractions.