Digital Blog #C : Chapter 3

Academic Content (What to Teach)
First, I chose to explore my thoughts more fully on the section pertaining to academic content in chapter three of the text. The reason I chose this (brief) section is because, for me, one of the biggest concerns I have as a future teacher is whether or not the content I chose to use in my classes will be good enough to make a lasting difference in a person's education. This one concept is, in my opinion, one of the largest chunks of responsibility teachers have. Although the school system and national curriculum decides a great deal of what a student will learn, it is up to an individual teacher to select the muscles that go on that skeleton... Will the paintings of John Waterhouse be of critical value to a student or should he be ignored in favor of a more modern artist? Will students admire the courage and vision of Alexander the Great, or would it be best to only highlight his campaign? I can think of no responsibility greater than making the final decision on what to teach and what to leave out of a lesson. After all, I will ultimately decide what information my students have access to (more or less) throughout the year, and there is so much I want to share.
Encyclopedias seem to be a thing of the past and teachers today have the wealth of knowledge of the internet. I imagine that this makes the job of selecting content even more tricky. Instead of twenty six volumes of information, I will have endless things to choose from when I begin designing my lessons. This is both a blessing and a curse. I have already learned (as of last week's blog post) that one can download entire lesson plans at no cost, complete with study guides and quizzes, for students on a wide variety of topics. It would be very easy for a teacher to fall into this comfortable and tempting "ready made" style of choosing content based on what is already done for you online.

Photo Credit to: Nicole Weeks and to www.Canva.com

Understanding by Design
The next concept that I want to discuss is the approach to lesson planning called "Understanding by Design", also in chapter three of the textbook. This concept can be defined by thinking about its three components which are shown on the diagram below:

Photo Credit to: Nicole Weeks and www.bubbl.us

Understanding by Design (UBD or backward design) promotes long term knowledge absorption, relating that knowledge to projects or papers, and allows the teacher to plan out how a lesson will be taught.
I think that this model is very straightforward and simple in design. A teacher will decide what they want students to gain from the lesson and how they want the students to be able to recall the information. Based on these things, a teacher can determine whether he/she should use more visual, tactile, or auditory tools in the lesson. The UBD is a sort of backwards map for teachers. As someone who always seems to work from back to front, I particularly like the way this is set up. It just makes sense, for me, to first think of what a student should learn from a lesson plan before designing one!

Verizon Thinkfinity, PBS Teachers, Gliffy
The third section of chapter three that I chose to explore more fully was actually the Tech Tool 3.1. The very first statement on the page is, "One of the central challenges of teaching is finding new and creative ways to engage students with academic content...." (Maloy, et. all). One of my very favorite books is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I remember very clearly a section of the book where the youngest daughter is struggling in school. She dislikes her cruel teacher and mentions to her mother that the teacher believes teaching girls is useless. I imagine the character's late 1800's styled classroom with blackboards and cold hard furniture, not to mention being smacked on the hand by a ruler should the students appear to not be working hard enough. Today, the teacher's focus seems to be mainly on how to keep the students engaged rather than how to punish them for not fitting into a preset mold. I think that this is a very taxing thing for teachers, but also a very exciting fact. The teachers of today are encouraged to think outside of the box and use their creativity in order to spark creativity in their pupils. Tech Tool 3.1 outlines the use of Verizon Thinkfinity which is a site that (up until recently) offered pre-designed lesson plans and subject specific site links to partners. PBS Teachers also offers lesson plans, educational videos, and blogs for educators to use in their classrooms. Several of my college professors use this site in their classes and I have always found them to be informative, engaging, and academically sound. The last suggestion Tech Tool 3.1 has is a "Web-based diagramming tool" (Malloy, et.all) called Gliffy. Gliffy is used to help teachers plan out the physical layout of their classrooms and more. I am excited to use these sites in my future classrooms and I believe that they will enhance my students' learning as well as my own.

It seems that there is no limit to what we can use technology for in our twenty first century classrooms. We have the ability to focus fully on one lesson plan that requires personal touches because there are sites that have more generic lesson plans already created and available to us in order to allow us to save time and focus on the things we need to. There are useful guidelines that help us think critically about what we want our students to gain from us as educators. And there are hundreds of thousands of sites teaming with information and help. The more I read in our textbook, the more I find myself surfing from website to website in search of tools I can use in the not-to-distant future. I have already begun to make accounts and save bookmarks for several sites I know that I will enjoy using and look forward to finding more!



Resources:
Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Weeks, Nicole (2015, September 20). Academic Content Tree. Created with Canva. www.Canva.com

Weeks, Nicole (2015, September 20). Understanding By Design Bubbles. Created with Bubbl. www.bubbl.us

Digital Blog #B: Chapter 2

Groupwork and Collaboration in the Classroom is the focus of my first chapter 2 concept. I really believe that it is crucial for educators to embrace technology for group projects in the classroom. Groupwork can be daunting, even frightening for some students. The benefits to using a computer, smartphone, or any other technology in a group project are priceless. Most students will feel a sense of relief when allowed to use technology in a group because they will work at a pace more comfortable to them, be able to instantly share their work with other members of their group, and have the gift of using their own talents to the best of their ability. Also, students can do activities while the teacher is free to move from group to group and supervise work. The students will learn independence, cooperation, leadership skills, and more. While using technology, they will be able to research projects from a multitude of different sources and be engaged while they are doing so. Please view my Youtube video below for more reasons on why technology used in group projects is exciting!

Video Credit to Youtube.com 

created by Nicole Weeks

Expressing Creativity Using Technology is the focus of my second chapter 2 concept. As the book states, "Information technologies provide teachers and students with powerful ways to express their creativity using electronically generated words, pictures, symbols, and numbers" (Maloy, et. all). Students can use technology in so many ways to express themselves and create unique assignments. When students are allowed to use their talents, their creativity, they feel connected to the assignment and they feel a sense of pride while working on it. They will gain enrichment as well as a sense of accomplishment from their work, and this is (in my opinion) the best way to allow a child to truly learn. Technology allows a student to use multiple sense as well as multiple intelligences to create in the classroom.

 Image by Wordle


Last, but not least, I was interested in the Three Learning Theories: Behaviorism, Cognitive Science, and Constructivism. The book states  that teachers typically follow one of these three learning theories when using technology in the classroom. I am excited to explore these more as I develop the kind of teacher I wish to be for my students.

To use Behaviorism, a teacher would believe that lesson plans would be carefully thought out ahead of time. Students would focus on memory and recall to prove they have in fact learned something. The teacher or the technology would be the main source of the education received.
(Behaviorism does not draw me personally. I feel that, although planning is crucial to learning, students benefit from more than pushing buttons and following drawn out guidelines all the time.)

With Cognitive Science, the teacher would consider the student's individual learning style when instructing the classes. The student and the technology share the responsibility of education, rather than the responsibility falling solely on the teacher or the computer as in Behaviorism.
(I believe that Cognitive Science is geared towards the teaching philosophy I feel most comfortable with. The teacher would take each individual student into account when drawing up activities and lesson plans, and then show students unique and creative ways to use technology to accomplish learning goals.)

Constructivism seems to be more free spirited, meaning that students are believed to be the guiding force of their own education; They would use technology in more creative ways, ways that would heighten the learning of the individual rather than whatever was selected by the teacher.
(Constructivism, although interesting, feels as though it would be the most student-guided learning style, and I feel as if it is a teacher's job to draw a path for students rather than let them flounder around in a vast space looking for the right things to learn.)

Image credited to: Toondoo


Resources:  
 Maloy, Robert, Verock-O'Loughlin, Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA. Pearson Education, Inc.

Digital Blog Post #A - Chapter 1

Technology. This single word can literally cause our bodies to have physical reactions. For some, the word causes excitement and feelings of anticipation as they consider an anxiously awaited text message or remember a personal success while playing an online game. For others, the word brings about a sinking feeling or a kind of dread as they relive past embarrassments or concern themselves with the possibility of future ones.
In this modern age, children are practically born with a cell phone in their hands. As you can imagine, the opinions we have about this phenomenon vary greatly.
There is, however, no denying the fact that technology will not slow down and wait for its critics to accept it. It will not pause while we try to catch our breath. Technology, like everything else that is a part of the human race, changes, grows and evolves.
Teachers in the 21st century are in a unique position to evolve with technology, or to fall to the wayside.
The simple truth is that chalkboards have gone the way of the dinosaurs...

                                              Photo Credit to Matthew Weathers on Youtube

According to the textbook Transforming Learning with New Technologies, teachers of today have the ability to create what is called a digital identity. While our current familiar identity is comprised of elements such as our age, physical appearance, and gender, a digital identity is made up of our technologically related skills and abilities (or lack thereof), and may not even include the above aforementioned things.
A teacher's classroom can include powerful learning tools such as a PowerPoint presentation,  YouTube, Evernote, and Dropbox. This ever-growing sea of options allows teachers to select technology that best suits their skill level as well as benefits the students.
A teacher can select any one, or even dozens of technological aids for their lessons. Students are visually stimulated by the streaming videos shown in classrooms, seemingly unaware of the fact that they are learning. Teachers have to ability to create personalized websites that can include anything from the current week's spelling list to the amazing opportunity of a real-time conference with a parent on a busy schedule. A teacher's digital identity is just as personal as his or her non-digital identity. It can be improved upon. It can be shared. It can be one of interaction and creativity.

Long gone are the days of waiting for parents to drive us to the library so that we can toil through card catalogs to find books on assigned essay subjects. Today's digital child is practicing vocabulary and spelling on SpellingCity.com. They are checking homework due dates as well as chatting with teachers and classmates on Edmodo.com. They are immersed in a world of notebooks without paper pages, phones without cords or peak-hour charges, and tablets that are neither stone or wooden. A digital child may not ever drop a dime into a payphone in their lifetime, but they are skilled with hand-eye coordination like no generation we have seen before them and a whimsical view on math or science brought on by games like we have not seen since we were in kindergarten. Our digital children are the ones programming contacts and ringtones into our new phones for us. They are downloading programs that some of us cannot pronounce. As the children continue to thrive from birth in this wireless world,  we must make an effort to keep one step ahead of them just so that we can stay on par. At times, the idea of this is frustrating. I don't think that there is a parent in the known world who cheerfully brings their new ipad to their middle school child's room to ask for help setting it up. This act is, instead, done with shame. We are ashamed that our children have a wealth of knowledge that we do not have. Some of us chose not to take that walk of shame... It seems, for some of us, a better idea to fight and argue and verbally slander the machine aloud, well into the wee hours of the night, before putting ourselves in the role of the child and allowing our child into the role of the caretaker. But along with the digital child is a valuable lesson for the ranting, profane ipad owning adult; we have taught our children that the only stupid question is the one left unasked, and now it is our turn to take our own medicine.

And while the infernal machine that we spent "way too much money on" has us acting no better than a chimpanzee figuring out how to work a combination lock, there comes a point when we must admit that we are outmatched, outwitted, and outgunned. The benefits of technology in the classroom far outweigh the shame from our own shortcomings. Our children are capable of designing glorious architectural masterpieces without ever wasting a scrap of paper or a speck of led. Lectures can be recorded and then absorbed and reabsorbed by an eager young mind at a time of convenience and in a place of their choosing. Cultural understanding, quotes from philosophers long since dead, lists of foreign government policies, charts of the very stars that we all live under are just a few key strokes away. The benefits of technology used for education is unlike anything we have ever seen. It is grand. Its possibilities are endless. It is the unknown. I believe that this is truly where our anxiety springs from. Our children are learning in ways that we were not allowed to. Perhaps, if we are honest, we are a little bit jealous of that fact as well.

Photo Credit to Scott McLeod on Flickr

In the end, I want to say that becoming a 21st century teacher may seem like a lot to digest for those of us who were not born as digital children, those of us who remember clapping erasers at the end of the school day, those of us whose identity was printed on a drivers license and not in cyberspace. If we can use these tools to sharpen the minds of our youth while keeping our own minds free from atrophy, then technology begins to be our friend. And it may never be as close of a friend to us as it is to our children. We simply have not known this friend for as long, or have a grip on all the wonderful things that this friend is capable of doing for our lives. We do, however have the opportunity to explore this friendship and to be the teachers who remember both the "good old days" and the "great new age". That is a remarkable opportunity set before us.