Digital Blog Post #L

Credit: TedxTalks on Youtube.com

I wanted to open this week's blog post up with this wonderful video about technology. This video is fun and has a few laughs to offer, but more importantly, it gives a great timeline for technology and how it has been used in schools.
This all leads into my thoughts about how we need to include students in technology and change in our classrooms. According to John Dewey, students enjoy the idea that people care what they think. It is such a common sense concept, yet one that a lot of us probably fail to recognize. Students want to be involved in things that are happening in their classrooms. They want to be considered when decisions are about to be made. They want to feel as if the place where they spend six hours a day working, is a place where they get a voice and are included.
I don't think that this is unreasonable to remind ourselves of once in a while. I think that is is very important to understand that as adults, we want to be informed of changes that are happening in our workplace. Better yet, we'd like to have a say in what those changes are and how they will affect us. Students are no different. When we include a student in the technology of the classroom and the changes that are being made, we are telling them that they have that voice they desire. We are telling them that they matter. We are including them in the way they will get their education instead of just pushing it at them.
Our book tells us that students who have decisions are more likely to care about their education. It tells us that students who get decisions feel as thought they are part of a group and feel included and then "produce better results" (Maloy).  Later in our textbook, we see that "Many teachers have told us they feel isolated and powerless as agents of change in educational systems" (Maloy). So, if many students feel powerless and many teachers feel powerless as far as decision making with things like curriculum, it's definitely time for a change!!

The next big idea I wanted to discuss is called "Flipped Classrooms". I first heard about this idea in another education class, but we referred to it as "backwards teaching". In any case, I particularly loved this idea and enjoyed reading more about it in chapter 12 of the textbook.

 I can't imagine teaching any other way to be honest. I think that "flipping" the classroom really allows the teacher to have much more time to spend working with students who need extra explanation on new concepts, but also allows students who do not need the extra help to work with others or to work on other things that they do need more time with. This entire concept is a time saver and again, a common sense notion. I love the idea that a student would be able to watch a video or read a new idea at home (or anywhere really) where they are comfortable and on their own schedule, then be able to jot down notes to discuss in the next class. I feel as if several of my college classes have been done in this fashion and those were the ones that I got the maximum learning from. I was able to stretch out the at home portions for a day or two and really think about what I wanted to ask when I was sitting in the classroom. This would obviously not work with very young students (or very immature ones who won't watch a video at home at all), but I feel that it is a great idea for the age group that I am interested in teaching; middle and high school students.
I also enjoy what the textbook tells us about flipped classrooms: "No longer passive recipients of curriculum, students become active researchers, analyzers, and presenters of ideas and information" (Maloy).

The final thought that I have for this blog post goes back to a classroom that I observed as part of my required hours in my Intro to Education class. The topic in the chapter is "Strategies for single- and multi- computer classrooms".  In the classroom that I observed, every student had a laptop computer. There were desktops still in the room from before the laptops were assigned by the Google company, but they were obviously rarely (if ever) used these days in favor of the laptops. The students were given such activities as hunting down answers to the teacher's questions (which they all loved because the students turned it into a game of researching speed and skill), verifying information that they were reading in an article (finding credible sources or looking for bias), and typing up answers to prompts that were available from their teacher on their Edmodo accounts. I admit that I was fascinated with watching a large class of sixth graders actually do their work online rather than sneak in a Facebook update when the teacher wasn't looking. It was not until later that day that I began thinking about how activities must have been done when those students only had the five desktops in the classroom....
Even the way activities are done are constantly changing. It is so important for a teacher to be prepared to alter the way he or she teaches. If we get stuck in a comfortable pattern, we are in danger of being as obsolete as those desktops. We must change and think and use creativity in every class, every day. It really isn't just the idea of how we will rotate students in a room when we only have five computers, but it is a matter of how we will rotate our own thinking and routines in order to stay productive and current for the sake of our jobs and the sake of our students.

In closing, I have enjoyed writing these weekly posts and I look forward to using some of the technologies and ideas I have learned in this textbook when I am a teacher. I am, by far, less nervous than I was when I began this class. I have even made the effort over the last few weeks to learn how to use all of the features on my Smartphone. I am moving into the 21st century now - look out!


Resources:
Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2010). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.