C4T#1 Comments 3 and 4

My teacher that was assigned to me was Joe Dale. His blog this week was about an education conference that he had gone to and how he was able to use technology to teach Language.  There were several different links on this blog, the one that I found most interesting was an AudioBoo that Mr. Dale and a Mr. David Muir did on some of the things covered in the conference.  Mr. Muir talked about how he is getting his students to use a computer for giving a speech, and how the computer will help with pronunciations of the different words and help them practice their speech.  In this same clip they seemed a bit down on Macintosh and seemed more in favor of PC's, I questioned this and told them the personal preference of certain people in EDM 310.

My second blog that I commented on for Mr. Dale was a conference he gave about how to use Posterous as a platform for teachers to blog.  His blog post went through every step, from how to set up your blog, to edit and make posts from your phone, to how to involve students with the content and share their assignments.  He went onto show teachers the different audio and visual clips that could be posted by simply sending an e-mail.  I told him that I was very grateful for his in depth lesson on how to use the forum and invited him to follow my blog and the one for the class. 

Blog Post # 9

Mr. McClung is recapping his first year in teaching in an elementary school in Noel, Missouri.  I was surprised to hear some of his comments that he found to be ground breaking, such as listen to your students.  I thought about this and then realized how easy it is to talk "at" someone and not to them.  This I think, is more of a problem than I had at first realized.  When you can truly communicate your lessons to the students, they can grasp the information and both the student and teacher get more out of the situation.  

I also found it funny how he felt it necessary to complete a lesson as if he were still being judged by an instructor or an administrator.  He's right that teachers must bring the lessons down to the level of the students.  It doesn't matter how well the principle thinks that a teacher is doing, if the students aren't comprehending the lesson then we as educators aren't accomplishing anything.

I think that many of the points that Mr. McClung went over in this blog are very important.  But, I felt that these were things that all teachers should already know, but perhaps I'm not quite close enough to the teaching part of my career to make such a judgement call.

C4K#2Summary #4, #5, & #6

The first student assigned to me this time is a little girl in year 8 at the Pt England school named Racheal. In her blog post she just gave general background information about herself.  This didn't give me a lot to comment on, so I just told her a little bit about myself.  Telling her that I have three kids close to her own age. I also told her that I like sports also, especially basketball. She said that she enjoys writing, so I tried to encourage her to keep working hard in school and on her writing and hopefully someday I would be able to but her book.

The second student that was assigned to me was a little girl at Pt England School in Ms. Janine Tito's Room 22, named Rose. Her blog post was a bit hard to comment on, as it consisted of three pictures with no captions. So, I started by introducing myself and telling her that I have three kids her age. I then went on to ask about the two of the three pictures. The first picture was a religious Drawing of either Jesus or God, and not knowing this child's parent's religious views I declined to comment on this picture. The second photo was what looked to be a christmas photo of a baby, so I asked her who was the baby and asked if it was one of her younger sisters( she has five sisters). The last photo was that of a church that had one corner leveled and in ruins. I had learned from my first kid that there had recently been an earthquake in that area and asked her if this was damaged during that earthquake.

My third student made a video slideshow that showed his school, friends, and activities that they participated in this year while at school.  I said how I liked the video and asked how they liked school, and told them to keep on blogging because of the excellent job that they were doing.

Blog Post # 8

In the videos "This is How We Dream" by Richard E. Miller he makes the points that there is an ever expanding base of knowledge at the fingertips of students, and the public in general.  He points out how these new tools can be used to do more collaborative projects with people from around the world.

If these tools are available then we as educators need to be able to use the different forms of multi-media that are out there to help prepare our students to succeed in the ever-changing world of  technology.  I personally think that I would be able to implement the use of multi-media into a Paper/Project, and that I would be able to use it effectively(whether that true or not I'm not sure).

I hope that if it becomes necessary for me teach kindergarten- third graders how to use multi-media in researching and writing a paper that I would be able to help them do the job.  I think that the way all of these technologies are changing that there is a possibility that some day the system will catch up with it and then these tools will be available to the students.  Then as teachers these tools will be available to us to help our students expand their horizons.  I think that the biggest problem with using multi-media would be getting the school systems to change and use the technology.  Once this happens the way we view school and teaching will be forever changed.


In the two videos "The Chipper Series" and "EDM 310 for Dummies" the videos were presented in a humorous way.  The main thing that I would like to do in any video that I produce is keep it funny and entertaining.  In the videos that I would make I would like to also make the videos more geared toward children and their interests.  Maybe an art project with paper mache, something to gather their interest and something that I could use to connect with the kids.  This would get the kids interested and allow me to entertain the children while they are learning something, anything.

In the video "Learn to Change, Change to Learn" presented by the Pearson Foundation, the arguments that were presented in the video were persuasive because they were given by educators.  There is a real need for society to change the way kids are being taught in schools today.  There was one teacher (around the four minute mark) that stated kids need to know how to find information and be able to authenticate it.  I could not agree with him more, today I can find out anything I want to know from my phone, so why are we trying to get our children to learn these facts when they can look them up in the same amount of time.

 
In the two videos , "The Secret Powers of Time" by Philip Zambardo and "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us "

by David Pink the ideas given to us in them were really surprising and interesting to say the least.

In "The Secret Powers of Time"  we learned about the different ways that people look at the world today, and how that effects the way we veiw our world. I thought that this was fascinating, to see how we view our own measure of time and how it effects the outcome of our own daily lives.  In the future I will try to be a more future oriented thinker.

In the video "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" there have been studies shown that money is not the biggest motivating factor for most people in the world.  It shows that to truly motivate people they need autonomy, mastery, and purpose.  Autonomy simply states that  people generally want to be self directed. Mastery is the need to work on a skill for the sole purpose of improving that skill.  Purpose is the idea that people want to be working on something that will matter.  I think that all of these points are true, but my boss has not, nor will he ever see this video.  So, I will have to wait until I'm out of svhool to see if any of these motivations are true.

SMARTboard Lesson

Blog Post # 7

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

In this video of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, Dr. Pausch first let's us know that he has cancer and has less than six months left to live, but he takes this opportunity to give a valuable lesson on life and how to live. I enjoyed it, and his insight on the lessons that are taught by just being involved in certain exercises, he referred to these as "head-fake" lessons. An example he uses is learning sportsmanship and teamwork from the simple act of playing football as a child. Sometimes these lessons are the most valuable knowledge that anyone can gain in life.

Dr. Pausch spent the first part of his lecture discussing his childhood, and the dreams that he had always hoped to realize. He delivered the discussion with enough humor and charisma that the listeners were entertained and were kept interested and involved. Dr. Pausch talked of "brickwalls" or barriers, obstacles that are put in our way to keep "others" from reaching your dreams. He learned his "head fake", strong work ethic from his football coach, who also taught him that people that don't correct you when you make a mistake have given up on you.

The next portion of Dr. Pausch's speech, hemoves on to telling that the greater gift in his life was not realizing his own dream, but rather helping others realize their own dreams. His students were the ones that he helped realize their dreams. His background in Virtual Reality and his the contacts that he made in the private sector helped many of his students get a leg up on the competition for those positions. But, I find the most important thing he mentioned in reference to his students was not only to set the bar to low, don't set the bar at all. He found that his students went well beyond all of his expectations.

I feel that Dr. Randy Pausch was a great contributor to his students life and his loss is a loss for all those that had the privelage to have him as a teacher. He spent the last segment of his speech trying to show the "head-fakes" in this lecture. The one that hit home for me was the fact that the lecture was not for us, it was for his two young children.

Project #11 "Reading to kids"

C4T#2 comment post summary

In this first post my teacher started off by saying that her new classroom was designed to not need air-conditioning, but would rely on fresh air ventilation. In theory this is a good thing, but when the ambient temperature is close to 100 degrees with 90% humidity that makes the ventilation seem more like a "sauna". She went on to say that she was thankful for the opportunities she does have to teach children who are eager to learn, starting a new term, and learning new ways to incorporate technology into her classroom.
I commented by saying that I sympathized with her situation, noting that it regularly reaches those same temperatures here. I was also proud of her bright attitude, she seemed to only be looking on the bright side of the situation.

The second teacher I was assigned to was Henrietta Miller, a year 5 teacher in Sydney, Australia.  She blogged  about a show that is airing in Australia that follows students through their years in school.  She had some interesting points that were made during the show that she shared concerning student success rates, the one that I found most interesting was a child's persistence. I commented about the troubles I have with my own son and his persistence, and asked if she had any tips on how to encourage him in his academic endeavors.