In Mr. McClung's post What I Learned This Year, he tells how to read the crowd, be flexible, communicate, be reasonable, don't be afraid of technology, listen to your students, and never stop learning. These are the multiple categories that he had written about in a reflection of his first year of teaching. When I read this post, I was not sure what I was going to expect. This post made me stop and think about everything that I knew what a teacher should be.
"How to Read the Crowd" pertained to how teachers teach in a classroom. He tells about that when he had been interning, the lessons were not particularly student centered. In "Be Flexible," he tells how you have to sometimes adjust lessons because there is no such thing as a "perfect" lesson. His section called "Be Reasonable" told that teachers have to expect that not all students are going to live up to the teachers' expectations. "Don't be Afraid of Technology" advises that people should not be afraid to deal with technology but to use it as a tool. Mr. McClung advises teachers to listen to their students. By doing this, the students will understand that the teacher truly care about teaching them. Also, Mr. McClung tells that teachers should never stop learning. Teachers have to constantly learn to keep up with different technologies, ways of teaching, etc.
My fourth comment for kids went to Serena, who is a year six student at Pt England School in Auckland, New Zealand. In her blog post Miss Slade Class, she tells about her day in class. In class they were asked to write about the Christchurch earthquake. At first, I did not know what she was talking about but I looked it up later. The earthquake was registered at a magnitude of 6.3 and it happened in the Canterbury region of New Zealand’s South Island. This earthquake had caused hundreds of casualties and a decent amount of damage to the area. Now that I know what this earthquake was, I understood why they had been writing about it in their class back then.
For my fifth comment, I commented on Tevita’s Blog. Tevita is a year eight student at Pt England School in Auckland, New Zealand. In his blog post My Graphs, he tells about his experience with learning how to create graphs. They were learning about statistics in school and using graphs to show their findings. In his blog, he included a picture of a graph that was created to show classmates favorite colors. When I was reading this, I was surprised. I did not start learning statistics till I had come to college. My middle and high school did not offer a statistics class. Statistics is a very good thing to learn. If someone is conducting a study, they will need statistics to organize their information so that it makes sense.
My latest comment was on Savannah’s Blog. Savannah is a student in Mrs. Phares’ fourth period class at Edgewood Middle School. In her blog post Bullies, she expresses her concern for bullying in her school. This can be a problem in some schools. Some students that are bullied rarely put up a fight, and some just snap after a long time of being picked on. When I looked at the comments for her post, she had mentioned that it’s not as much as a problem anymore. As someone who had been picked on in middle school, this is a good thing that it is becoming less of a problem.
Richard Miller: This is How We Dream Parts 1 and 2 This video shows that people advancing to a point where books are rarely needed to be printed. In regards to the book, As if Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education, Richard E. Miller says, “It has now gone the fate of virtually all academic books. It’s out of print, and you can get it on amazon for 59 cents.” It is amazing to how much information you can find online. Most research can now be done without having to set foot in a library.
To be honest, I’m not sure if I am fully prepared to write with multimedia. I believe with enough time, I will be ready. There is also the fact that multimedia changes, and as soon as you learn one another is created. Teachers will always be learning how to write with multimedia. There is no one person who is not learning new things every day. I hope that as time goes by, I will become more capable of writing with different types of multimedia so as to convey my findings to others.
I believe that my students will be able to do this if given the chance. They would be more than capable of learning the various ways to write with multimedia. They can create videos to tell about history, or work on other projects such as audio clips. As a future teacher, I believe that they will be able to learn more if they are able to write with multimedia. Writing with multimedia allows the students to take time to learn about the different topics that are being covered through sound and visual aids.
I believe that the messages that are being expressed in these videos are that just because something seems hard, you should not give up. In the Chipper Series, Chipper gave up on college because Dr. Strange’s class was “not working”. In the end, she got a degree, got fired from different jobs, and then decided to go back to school for her masters. This shows that she might have made a bad decision by dropping out. In EDM310 for Dummies, this video shows that as long as you know the main programs that are being used, it can be fun and enjoyable class experience. The characters had given up at the beginning because they felt confused about what they needed to do, but they had not really tried to learn.
Some projects that I would like to do myself are something along the lines of testimonials. I think it would be a good idea to create a video that compared the experiences of the students in EDM310. I would like to show people that that have had bad experiences versus people that are greatly benefiting from the course.
I feel that most of these arguments are accurate. Most learning is done outside the classroom through communication. The means of communication outside school is what most kids participate in. School is becoming more of just a place that partially helps with the building of classroom communities. It is better to prepare students for college and life by helping them have a greater academic experience.
In “The Secret Powers of Time”, Philip Zambardo tells that there are six main time zones. There are two main views of the past, present, and future. It mainly talks about being future oriented. He later tells of the Pace of Life, which is an idea by Robert Levine. This tells of the sense of time duration in ordinary life occurrences. Cities and countries are now able to be told by the pace of life. Boys are more likely to drop out of high school than girls. This is apparently because in a study it was found that by the time boys are 21, they have spent 10,000 hours playing video games alone. This is shocking to me. I have friends that play video games, but I could not see how anyone can play that many hours of games. This also talks about family values and how they have changed. About twenty years ago, there was a study which had results of 60% of families had sit down dinners. They redid the study and the results were that 20% of families had sit down dinners. Zambardo brings a good point that there cannot be family values if they do not have sit down dinners. It is better for people to realize their time perspective and others perspectives as well.
In “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us”, Dan Pink tells about different types of motivation through incentives. He tells that people found out that as long as the task only incorporated mechanical skill, the bonuses worked as was to be expected. This was not the same when it came to cognitive skill. Apparently, once you get above rudimentary skills, the performance declines. They replicated this in India and found that the higher the incentives, the performance decreases significantly. In the video it says, “One day of autonomy produces things that never emerge.” This was told as an example that is opposite of incentives.
In my opinion, what is described in the videos is very important in the great scheme of things. Education is changing rapidly and it is being left behind. As it was said in “The Secret Powers of Time,” kids are seeing school as something boring and not wanting to be there. The education is becoming lost to the digital advances. People’s drive for success is incredible. Some people are over achievers and want to work hard to become the best that they can. In the middle of that, they sometimes slack off and have poor performance. Dan Pink tells about how in a study it has been shown that when someone is asked to perform a task above rudimentary skills, the performance just plummets. This has an effect, because it can cause work in a company to be slowed down, and cause problems.
The results of this presentation are as follows: 1. What state was not in the original 13 colonies? Oregon (All answers were correct.) 2. Which was the first of the 13 colonies? Virginia (All were answered correctly.) 3. Which of the following states is located in the western part of the country? California (Everyone answered correctly.) 4. Between what two states is the capital of the United States located? Maryland and Virginia (This surprised me. No one answered this correctly even though we told the answer in the presentation.) 5. The capital of New York is New York. False (Everyone got it right.) 6. The capital of Virginia is Richmond. True (All answered correctly.) 7. Virginia was founded in 1629. False (This was shocking to me. One person answered this incorrect and it had been covered in the presentation.) 8. Where is Montana located? West (One person answered incorrect and everyone else was correct.) 9. Where is New Jersey located? East (Everyone answered this correctly.) 10. Where is Nebraska located? Central (All participants answered this correctly.) 11. As a bonus we asked: What is the capital of Alabama? Montgomery (Everyone answered this correctly. If someone had answered incorrectly, I would have been shocked.)
Overall, I really enjoyed working with the Smart Board and giving a presentation using it. The results were good, but it shows that we need to find other ways so that the students retain the information better. From the information that I have provided, it is mainly the location of the states and dates that people did not remember as well. I will take this information, and find a way so that students remember the information given to them better. I would gladly use the Smart Board for another presentation.
This is currently my PLN, Personal Learning Network, on Symbaloo. It is not finished yet, and I will be adding more things to it as I continue on in the semester. I plan to add more research sites that will help me with my papers that I will want to write. I will also try to find more blogs that contain information about the education world and the technology used to teach. I can't wait to see what else I will come across while I am furthering my education and my PLN.
Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He was in charge of the virtual reality program. His last lecture was given September 18th, 2007, and the very next year on July 25th, 2008 he died of pancreatic cancer. In the last lecture, he talks about how to achieve your childhood dreams and how he achieved his. He also tells that there are always “brick walls” that will be there to get in your way, and you need to find a way to get around them. “Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.”
Throughout the lecture he provides stories from his childhood, which has inspired him and his teaching. When he played football as a kid, he learned that you have to learn the fundamentals and work hard at getting them right before you start with the more complicated problems. “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” This is a good quote to follow. In my opinion, if you always get what you want, you do not learn anything from your failures and how to correct it in the future.
Randy Pausch motivated his students to work hard to go above and beyond in class, and encouraged them to achieve their dreams. In his class “Building Virtual Worlds,” Pausch encourages his students to do better by telling them that they did well, but he knows that they could do better. According to Pausch, this was the right words to say because the students came up with better and more interesting projects as the semesters went on. This allowed for his students to set the bar on what they thought was good enough. One thing that Pausch says in the lecture is that people learn from their students. He has learned a lot from his students, and he takes all of the lessons from them and puts it to work in his teaching and life. The Last Lecture has many good messages in it about how to teach, how to live, and how to have fun doing it.
The first time that I saw this lecture was my senior year of high school. My English teacher showed the lecture at the end of the semester, and we read the book every day of the semester. I was moved by the lecture and his story that he had told. To be able to speak about his life and what he has accomplished during that time shows that anybody can achieve their dreams, and that you should live your life to the fullest. “If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you.”
For my second teacher, I was assigned to Brian Crosby's blog called Learning is Messy. In the first post that I read titled Transparency, he mentions a quote from the show "The West Wing." This quote is based on a real life occurrence. I enjoyed reading the quote in his post. It shows that people make mistakes, even professionals. One thing about mistakes is that you can always take that mistake and use it as an example of what not to do the next time. Kids believe that they make a lot of mistakes, but they are only just beginning. They are expected to make mistakes when they are starting. This quote made me think about learning math versus real world application of math. Math seems hard while you are learning, but it becomes more complicated in the real world when it is applied to the different sciences. The next article I read by Brian Crosby was How did you begin your technology journey?. This post told of his first experiences in his technological journey. According to his post, the first computer that he worked with in education was 25 years ago, when his school had gotten four Apple II-E computers. I don't know much about the history of computers, but I do know that I had never heard of this computer until it was mentioned in Mr. Crosby's post. In comparison to how much experience Mr. Crosby has, I feel inexperienced in the world of computers. My goals now will to educate myself more on computers and the different software that is available.
