Monday, September 29, 2008

Anthropological Assessment

The assessment of my school's technology and resources available to staff and students gave me a clearer perspective of one of the facets of Colony High School culture.  The first few days of school were a real awakening for me when I observed a plethora of new widgets and gadgets being inconspicuously poked at by students with headphones dangling, usually from one ear.  While doing the assessment, my mentor teacher's brand new Dell broke.  I learned first hand that it took over a week for it to come back, and even then it still had several program glitches. 
Overall, I learned a few policies and gained a larger network of people to seek when I have technological needs.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Article Assessment 1

Adam Zopel adamzapple88@hotmail.com 9/22/2008
Listen To the Natives by Marc Prensky

Overview
This article outlines the importance of teachers to consolidate and concentrate the important legacy knowledge, and make room for 21st century learning possibilities. In the digital age, technology allows students of all ages to essentially learn how to teach themselves.  They can do this effectively if given the opportunity to explore their options.  By advocating to include more technology within the current learning process, the exchange of information can be maximized.
By broadening the education system to become more adaptive with  instruction, collaborate with students, and adopt systems the current future already uses, mastering skills can take on a whole new form.

Reference Points
1.  Digital native, or immigrant.  Tools like computers, cell phones, ipods, and camera phones are like extensions of the brain to the digital native.
2.  Teacher qualities that focus on empathy and guidance rather than limiting the process to subject matter knowledge.
3.  Adopting systems to the teaching process like:  blogging, wiki, googling, and programming.
4.  Alternatives to hearding:  One-to-one personalized instruction, adaptive instruction, and allowing students to work in virtual groups.
5.  Collaborating with students.  Having equal student representation when decisions are being made about the education processes.  
6.  Being flexible with student use of technology and offer after school times to access technology for learning purposes. 
7.  Engaging and compelling students by speaking their language.  Find ways to educate through "gameplay". 

Reflection
I gained a great deal from Marc's point of view.  I agree, we should incorporate more technology within the classroom.  Whether it be wearing heart rate monitors and ipods in PE class to corresponding with a virtual pen pal in Egypt, there are many ways to embrace the technological advances our society has created.  I'm also a huge advocate of personalized instruction.  By adapting the methods we choose to pass information on, we just might reach more students and actually make a difference in their lives.  We can do this by collaborating with them on a personal and professional level.  As the article stated empathy and guidance as being qualities from which an administrator should look for in a "good" teacher.
This article helped me to realize the digital age is not the future, it is the present, and becoming a motivated immigrant means learning as much as I can from the natives.



Saturday, September 6, 2008

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Futuring

A. How would you “grade” or assess Fox Becomes a Better Person, and School Train?
I think the class that created
School Train went well beyond my expectations. Under the guidelines of making connections using metaphors, they definitely deserve an exemplary grade. Specifically in using:

*Creative video enhancement

*Manipulation of speed and movement

*Sound sequencing


When assessing
Fox Becomes a Better Person, I would need to set up some guidelines to grade the students by. For example:
*Student understands the moral of the story
*The amount of effort put into developing project

*Self critique of overall performance compared to my assessment
Overall, I believe she deserves an
A for her efforts. Well done Hannah!!

B. What impacts could the developments portrayed in epic2015 have on your classroom, particularly with respect to things like podcasting?

In my
2015 class room podcasting might become an issue while the students are running long distances since they are allowed to use them at this time. For example:
*Test answers sent in upcoming classes could be relayed

*Information could be completely false since the media as we know it no longer exists

*The focus of task at hand will become diminished by technology interference


Epic2005
puts up a few red flags in my mind as students begin to only receive news designed for their interests. I think it is a huge challenge to sift out the garbage, and a time consuming effort to find the credible facts. If I give an assignment that students will use the internet to gather information, I will definitely require them to list sources. Maybe even have them find information that contradicts the information they believe to be true so they understand how much disinformation there is.
Since Podcasting is already a big part of the classroom, I will try to embrace this concept of information exchange. However, I will do this with great caution, and always reminding my students to check several sources before taking anything for truth/fact.
C. How might you use Sabrina’s piece as a model for something you would do with your own students?
I like how Sabrina was descriptive in explaining her goals in teaching. She knows herself and where she comes from, so this helped her to see the
big picture. This is how I would help my students create a similar goal setting outline.
*First, what are you all about and why do you value the things you do?

*What long term and short term goals do I have?

*What steps do I need to take to reach success in each goal?
If the students first figure out who they are, they're more likely to clearly define a few goals. Then, they can go about the process of researching how to accomplishing each step in achieving each goal.

Using a video is perfect because it makes it more real. They can always look back to see how their goals have changed or evolved into new goals they never might have imagined.