My Ideal Classroom, Revisited

Technology is not a huge part of my placement classroom.  However I feel like my experience so far in the field has helped me to form a more concrete vision of the kind of classroom that I would love to have, at least in terms of the available technology.  This was the topic of our first Educ 504 class, and I feel more able to discuss it now.

My ideal classroom would not be extraordinarily fancy by any means, there are just a few gadgets I think could really benefit my students.  Fun gadget number one that I would want in my ideal classroom is a document camera. (Side note: I am super pumped because my placement classroom is about to get one!)  A document camera can be useful in a science classroom for a variety of reasons, the first of which is demonstrations.  It would be SO much easy to demonstrate smaller phenomenon for my class if I knew that they would be able to see it!  This could also be useful for diagrams, because I like to do some of my notes on the board instead of in power point it would be nice to use the document camera to show students diagrams and not put them through my not so artistic rendition.

Another helpful piece of technology that my students could benefit from would be a laptop cart. I don't think my students will need to have computers everyday, but access to a laptop cart would make activities such as making graphs for a lab report, or doing online lab simulations so much easier.  This technology would only be ideal however IF it worked at a reasonable speed.  I hate how some school laptops are so slow that they are hardly worth using.

Finally I would like to have the basics in my classroom, a white board (preferably more than one) and a projector.  While I'm sure that there are things that I am forgetting, I think that I could really extend my students learning just by using those simple tools.

Response to an Edublogger

Now I must admit, I did not think that shyness was a character trait of mine.  But I found the task of replying to an Edublogger to be surprisingly nerve wracking.  I think in a lot of ways I just felt like to much of a newbie, maybe even a bit like an impostor.  Who am I to comment on their experience rich posts?  The experience that I have to draw from feels laughable outside of our program.

However I bit the bullet and did it anyway, and while I found the commenting part slightly painful, digging through the posts of other teachers.  I think that was the most valuable part for me, scrolling through and skimming (because frankly I did not have time to deeply read all the bloggers sites that I visited) countless blogs, just to get an idea of what was out there.

I ended up commenting on two blogs, that while well written and helpful, were not stand out posts by any means, just posts that I think that I will be able to come back to in the future.  The first post that I commented on was about how to get ready for a first day of school.  The advise ranged from the mental preparedness of just simply being positive to the procedural aspects like setting up classroom norms on the first day of school.  I liked this post because it was practical little things that I would be able to do to have a better first day of school, it was nothing overwhelming or complicated.

The second blog post that I commented on was a simple post from a teacher in California about an activity that he did during the week prior to the standardized tests.  It seemed to be a requirement at his school to give his students time to review and prepare for these tests.  The jigsaw activity that he did seemed like a great way for him to judge student understanding and allow students to be teaching other students.

While there were plenty of interesting posts about big ideas and important talking points, I chose to comment on these posts because they were things that I could put in place in my own classroom.  I don't have tons of time now, but reading ideas that other teachers have through blogs is a practice that I would really like to continue in the future!

Podcasting Presentation Peaks Interest

For any of you out there that attended the podcasting presentation in class the other week(eek time flies), you know what I mean when I say that it was SOO informative!  Hello audio tools I never knew how to use, its nice to finally learn about your existence!  But really I was actually incredibly grateful to the presenters for giving an engaging but very educational presentation.

All of the coolness of their presentations aside however, I have to wonder what this tool could really do to improve student learning in a Biology class.  I can see how creativity and functionality could flow from these in the humanities and I think that the sample podcasts that the presenters gave were  awesome (I think that the podcasts convinced me to actually do those fictional assignments) but us Biology kids could only come up with half hearted uses in our discipline.

One idea that I did think was really cool would be to use podcasting as a note taking device during a lab, especially a lab that requires a lot of hands on maneuvering, however I wonder if this would take away from the valuable lesson of teaching students how to keep proper scientific records.  Also a lab is not typically the most desirable location for doing a podcast, as multiple groups will be up around and talking as well.

With all of that said I would like to invite the ideas of the audience, what do you think a science teacher could do to bring this cool piece of technology into the classroom in a meaningful way?

In the meantime I am content with the knowledge of how to use cool tools like garageband for myself, even if I can't bring it into the classroom yet.

Tech in my placement

I found that the tech in my placement assignment was a really good way for me to begin to get to know not only my own classroom better, but also the school that I will be spending the next year learning in.

I am not placed in a wealthy school district for my student teaching, so I was unsure of what kinds of technologies I would encounter.  I must say that the discoveries that I made about my school were surprising on both ends of the technology spectrum, there were somethings that I was surprised and impressed to hear that we had available at my school, while other things I was disappointed to hear weren't available.

One fun peace of technology that the students at my school have access to is video and video editing equipment, while this does not take place in my classroom I think it is great that our announcements are put together by a group of students.   Using that kind of equipment and getting that kind of experience is something unique that I think could be really valuable to students in the future, I wish we had that in my high school!  Another awesome thing that is available in some classrooms in my school are Google Chrome Books and Smartboards! Woo! While almost all of the teachers in my school do not have access to these technologies, I think that it's pretty awesome that some students get to experience using them!

Some of the other technologies that I learned about were pretty standard, there are computer labs that teachers can reserve for a class period if they want to do online research, and my mentor teacher has taken advantage of this more than once already this year.

What I could NOT believe was that my mentor teacher had to pay for her own projector!! Doing power points in class is a pretty standard way of getting dense scientific information across to students before we move on to the hands on learning.

So while there are so cool flashy technologies at my school it is easy to see that there is still a serious funding issues at play here that are creating a large gap.

A new view on grades and student achievement

This past week Pete Pasque came to speak to use about a couple new tools to use in student assessment, e-portfolio's and badges.  These two processes really opened my perspective on how we should.could be thinking about student progress and achievement.

In our current school system a student could go through all four years of say English classes only being able to write at exactly the same level.  Improvement from year to year is never really checked because teachers don't have access to past assignments and students rarely look back at their old work.  With the E-portfolio system there would be a central digital location for all of these kinds of assignments to be held for the entire high school career.  This E-Portfolio system that they have in place at Skyline High School is great, students have access to previous years work and progress can clearly be shown throughout.  Not to mention that it is really cool that they are able to turn in so many assignments electronically, yay saving trees!  This is one great way to emphasis to students that it is important to be able to have proof that they are able to do something beyond just the grade, for future college applications they can not only show that they got an A in their English 10 class, but that they also were able to write and awesome compare and contrast essay.

The next topic that Pete talked about, badging, was a little bit less intuitive to me.  I, like most people I would imagine, am most comfortable doing things the way that I have seen them done before.  Don't get me wrong, I am not stuck in my ways, but sometimes I need a little convincing.  Badging is one of those topics for me, I like the idea of being able to see student achievements and skills simply by checking out the badges that they have received.  In some ways it seems like a more accurate account of what a student knows than a grade in a class because quite frankly you have no idea what a teacher covered in a Biology class, it could be totally different from school to school.  Badging provides the answer to the topics that were mastered.  However in my mind grades mean something, this student really grasped the concept therefore they earned an A and this student has an OK understanding therefore they earned a C.  That is how my brain is structured, therefore giving both of those students the same badge is a little hard for me to get my head around.  It would mean a whole different understanding of education

While I don't think either of these electronic tools will be put to use in my classroom anytime soon, I think they are well worth another look, and hearing Pete talk made me really think about what it means to organize your digital life.  I would love to learn more about all of those topics so that I can do a better job preparing my student's for the future, because I know that I am currently not informed enough to give them the support that they need.

See you this fall!

In today’s Teaching with Technology class we wrapped up the summer session discussing how technology will be making its way into our standardized tests in the near future.  I had not heard of the impending Smarter Balanced Assessment that would be accompanying the common core standards in as soon as March 2015.  As this would be during my first year of teaching (hopefully!) this is of great interest and concern to me.

One aspect of this test that concerns me that whether the test is good, bad, or neutral it will be difficult as a first-year teacher to prepare students for a radically different test while we are still navigating the waters of our standard teaching practices.  It will only be a comfort that everyone else will also be new to this particular testing style.

Another concern that I have about the Smarter Balanced Assessment is the online format.  So far in our teacher education we have been learning about frameworks such as Reading Apprenticeship where we teach students to ‘talk to the text’.  These techniques which have been proven to improve reading comprehension would not be as feasible or as effective for readings done on a screen, where there is no ability to highlight or annotate the text.  We would be asking students to do things that they are not ready for.  What would the solution to this be? Structure our activities to match one assessment?  Is that really doing the best thing for the students?

While I do not have the answers to these questions, and while I am by no means excited about its implementation, I do understand that this is the direction the world is taking.  Getting students used to doing more things on a computer will only make them more computer literate, a necessity in many modern jobs.  Another plus of online testing is that they can be made to adjust based on student responses, in this way testing could be more accurate by asking more questions in a students ZPD.

Also as this is the last blog post for the summer class I will probably not be posting again until the fall.  Not that I don't love blogging, but more that I think my computer and I are going to take a slight time out (Which I wish could start tonight, but there are papers looming in my very near future)!  See you soon!

Edubloggers

When we were asked to write a blog post that reflected on  someone else’s educational blog, or ‘edublog’ I will admit I was less than enthused.  Not that I didn't see the value of this assignment, I did, but because my stress was high and my available time was low.  That all being said, I found a really cool blog for Biology teachers!  Before I found the one I liked I spent awhile searching through personal blogs by Bio teachers, some of them were alright but on the whole I didn't see them as terribly useful to me. 

The blog that I ended up enjoying the most was kabt.org.  KABT (Kansas Association of Biology Teachers) is an especially helpful blog because it is meant to be collaborative not just reflective as many of the personal blogs that I found were.  Many posts on this site were in reference to changes in curriculum, successes and failures of experiments, and ideas for potential field trips.

One of my favorite posts was clearly in response to the apprehension around the new AP Biology curricula.  In this new curriculum there are many more laboratories that students are expected to get through and have a thorough understanding of in order to do well on the AP test.  Teachers had been concerned about having enough time to do these labs and get through the content that is expected of them.  This post showed this teachers experience with her students after the first semester with the new curriculum.  She indicates that the labs are helping her students to understand content without excessive lecture time, and they are gaining both valuable lab skills and valuable thinking skills.

For me kabt.org is the kind of edublog I see myself visiting and utilizing in the future because its emphasis is more on collaboration then on self-reflection.  I think that a blog like this could be used to inspire new ideas for my classroom as well as get advice from veterans about what does and does not work.

Class 4

                On Monday we discussed a lot of really interesting and engaging topics.  I really enjoyed the speaker that we had about different internet resources that are out there.  Like a lot of soon to be teachers I feel like the idea of just letting a kid go with a research project can be really daunting.  When you give them time to work on it in the library you want them to be able to find reliable information and not just copy down what they read off of someone’s blog or off of Wikipedia.  There were quite a few websites that were pointed out that even have their own lesson plans for how to teach your students the ins and outs of internet research.  I thought that was especially helpful because I am by no means an expert and I would hate to teach my students something that was wrong!

                We also did a lot of discussion about how to plan a BYOD lesson in your content area.  I found this part of class both very interesting and very challenging.  I am a science major, biology to be exact and chemistry minor.  However it was difficult for our group to decide on the best route to take because Earth Science, Biology, and Chemistry don’t have all that similar of content.  I thought that the conversations that stemmed from this though were really inspiring and I think that if this lesson were to happen in a real classroom students could really benefit from having the perspective of the multiple disciplines.

                I found the video game talk in class incredibly interesting as well.  Not being a video game person myself it was hard for me to see how it could play in important role in the classroom (despite how my fiancé wants me to think about video games).  However after hearing everyone talk with enthusiasm about their experiences with video games both as kids and now I realized that there is something to consider here.  It could be valuable to allow students in a math class to play math games online at certain times, like when they have finished a test or finished their homework early.  Getting students excited about these games could cause them to learn more content without even realizing it.

                Now I’m off to waste some time before bed playing some educational games!  I gotta do my research for future students right? It’s only responsible.

Video Games In The Classroom

If I were to make a list of skills that I lack video gaming would be close to the top.  After learning Nintendo 64 at a young age from my brother and experiencing defeat repeatedly I never found the motivation to move on to another gaming system.  Controllers got tricky with more than one joystick and way more buttons then seemed needed, I was at a major loss.  Because of this lack of video game literacy I had never really considered using video games in my classroom.

To me video games are leisure activities to be taken on outside of school hours.  I am by no means saying that there is no educational value, because there is, even non-educational games teacher children about problem solving and thinking ahead, however I'm not sure I've been convinced of there place in the classroom.

I looked into the educational computer game Caduseus.  While I could see its value in getting kids more involved in the scientific process, it seemed to be to lengthy of a game to allow time for it in the classroom.  In this game you are told about a scenario where a contagion has spread across this fictional world and our main character was asked to analyze phlegm samples of the sick to try and find the contagion.  After examining many samples our main character cuts her finger on a slide and has the bright idea to look in the blood samples for the contagion. This is where the game begins, you are looking at a slide and have to match all the microorganisms that you see, the assumption being that the non-matching organisms could be our contagion.

While the game could get students interested in science and the research process I think it would be a game I would suggest for them at home.  Maybe I would research a variety of educational games and make a list for them to play at home instead of watching TV or something.  However I think that the game is a little to slow for me to want to spend my time on it during the class period.

Because I needed more distractions in my life

It has been said, and probably will continue to be said, that I am a huge science nerd.  It's OK I've come to embrace this nerdiness as fact and moved on.  However I had not really thought of my love of science specifically high school science (I am so NOT a fan of reading scientific research articles, which is why alas I decided no on being a scientist), but this nerdiness has not before been the center of my procrastination. Like many college students I procrastinated on facebook, netflix, and most recently pinterest(because yes for every fitness page I pin I should also pin a delicious desert).  But yesterday in class I was shown a whole new(but admittedly more productive) distraction, Gooru!
I will admit that I have spent more than a little amount of time since Monday on Gooru looking up cool science videos and thinking about how they could help my students see difficult scientific concepts differently.  For those of you who didn't have someone in your class present on Gooru, here is the basic rundown.  Gooru is a collection of educational materials that can be searched by content or specific topic, once you have searched your topic you can also narrow down whether you want to see videos, articles, quiz questions etc. about that topic.  Now if that wasn't cool enough you can also take, say,  a handful of videos and save them onto a class page.  You can give your students this page and have them watch those videos for homework if there is not enough time for them in class.  Super cool.
On a less enthusiastic note I think that through our group discussions that took place during/after our presentations I got more disillusioned about the real use of websites like Diigo and Dropbox for us as educators.  Here is why, Google.  It is hard to support websites that do things that frankly Google can do better, and even if Google's product isn't really better but rather equivalent, it is so much easier for us to have our students use Google for a multitude of things then have them learn a multitude of websites.
Should this concern us as consumers, let alone educators, that Google has so much of our information and habits at it's fingertips? Seriously think about it, for me if Google all of a sudden ceased to exist I would lose my emails, my calendar, many photos, documents, probably even more that I am not aware is a Google product. To some extent of course it should concern us, but really what is our other solution.  Hide away? Avoid the internet?  For me, I have just accepted Google's domination over SO much of my life.

Organize Your Online Life

For the Organizing Your Online Life Project I researched the website Diigo.com.  I had never even heard of this website and to be honest I was bummed I hadn't gotten Pinterest, I love Pinterest, and while as it turns out Diigo(I keep saying dingo in my head, I really have to stop that) is pretty nifty I don't think I could LOVE it quite like I love Pinterest.
With my Pinterest obsession aside, I had a little trouble with my research on Diigo because I wasn't currently wanting to research or save any articles.  But after some trial and error and playing around on the site I discovered some cool things, like the sticky notes you can use to annotate websites or the capture tool that will save a screenshot of the article you are interested in just in case it gets taken down before you get to look at it again.
What I found SUPER awesome for teacher purposes is the groups that you can form on Diigo.  I thought this would be really helpful for teacher to make groups with other teachers so that they could share interesting articles on education that they think others should see, or if they found a good website for lesson plan ideas.
A teacher could also use Diigo if they assigned students group projects, the students could have their own groups and share their research and annotations with each other.  Along with this there is a community on Diigo that you can use to search for articles on any subject you want.  I thought this might be useful because these are articles that people already thought were important enough to save, they might have some really good information for research.
While Diigo may not be my new favorite website, I am glad that I had to research a website that I don't already use, because I did learn a lot about how I can use this tool to organize my online searches.

Technology in Real Life

Technology has come to play a huge role in our lives, both social and professionally.  I can’t tell you how many times during a conversation, usually an argument, that a friend will pull out their phone to look up a fact on Google.  Having a world of information has become the norm in our social interactions.  Long gone are the arguments over who scored what homerun in which inning, the answers are just a click away.  In the same thread, technology has become increasingly important in our professional life, Microsoft proficiency is almost universally required, and some jobs and schools will require even more out of you then that(because really I have no idea how to edit a video on my computer).

 What struck me as really interesting in our class on Monday was our conversation about how inequitable technology can be in the classroom.  Someone brought up that they wanted to assign a research paper in one of their past classrooms but because there was not universal access to the internet in all of the students homes lesson time would have to be taken away to allow the students to research in class.  How unfair is that? That not only are the students missing out on class time but the students that do have internet at home have much more time to do the research and probably more experience with the task! 

Another inequibility (yeah I’m sure that’s a word) would be the availability of technology across schools and school districts.  I am left to wonder that if too students with the same academic abilities would be able to compete at the same level in the job market if one student came from a school district that immersed them in new technologies and gave them experience with a variety of media while the other student didn’t have access to these resources.  How do we as teachers take the importance of technology in the real world into account when we plan our lessons that we give our students the best possible opportunities.

Change in an Unchanging System

For class tomorrow we were instructed to read two articles, one about John Dewey's influences in the field of Educational Technology and the other was written by John Dewey in 1897 and titled My Pedagogic Creed.  The Ed Tech article focused on how Dewey advocated for a classroom where students learned by doing because "experience is central to learning". He also advocated that the classroom needed to be a community and not a rigid teacher-student scenario.  The Pedagogic Creed article took these ideas even further stating that education needs to be focused on making students effective social beings because they live in a world of social connections.

These ideas in the articles sounded great so I had no wonder why they aren't put to use in our schools today?  I realize that some teachers do present the information to you in new and interesting ways but being lectured to while there was a power point behind the teacher and you had a worksheet to do by the end of class was a pretty typical teaching style while I was in high school.  If we know from Dewey's teachings that students learn better in community centered classrooms where they learn interactively why are the experiences that I described from my high school considered the norm?  I never had a teacher care about my ability to socialize, but why not, isn't that just as important for me to know to be a functioning adult as reading Shakespeare is?

These readings reminded me of the CPRs that they do at Scarlet Middle School to build community, while I often wish that my school had that I also wonder if this is something that will be allowed to grow to all schools.  Because if I learned anything from these readings it is that our school systems are slow to change even in the face of evidence that could make them better.

Teaching with Technology Day 1

Today we started the class I most feared, Teaching with Technology.  I know that logically I should not be nervous about this class, I am a product of the technological age, I have a laptop, a smart phone, and a tablet, and I use them all regularly.  This class shouldn’t be a problem, but I still felt apprehensive.  I think this apprehension comes from the fact that I have no idea how these things work in a practical sense, I know how to play Candy Crush and I can open a word document but beyond that I’m lost. How can I use these pieces of technology in a classroom? Is their use really necessary to effective instruction?

I was relieved to see that I was not the only one in this situation, far from it.  Many of, including the instructors approached the idea of using technology in the classroom with some optimistic skepticism.  We expressed a sense of optimism that technology could add something truly valuable to the classroom, but we were skeptical that all new technologies really were valuable.  For me technology for technologies sake in the classroom is a waste of valuable instructional time but if it helps students to connect and engage in ways that weren’t previously possible I think that it in invaluable.  I am excited that in this class we will be able to explore this distinction. 

After one full class period I feel more comfortable with this class, I won’t be behind for being unknowledgeable of the various uses that technology can have in the classroom, I will be in good company.  Together hopefully we will be able to discuss what works, what doesn’t work, and why? I hope to gain a greater appreciation for technology(including appreciation for blogging, because really what do I have to say that someone else can’t say better??). But really stick with me I’m hoping to find a blogging identity for myself that will help me to explore my own ideas as an educator.   

My Ideal Classroom