Lseeon 12 Reflections

Right now my head is spinning with ideas and I feel a little overwhelmed with all my new knowledge. I think one thing that I want to focus on this year is collaboration. I want to provide students with more opportunities to collaborate with peers and adults. I would like to provide parents with ways for them to collaborate with teachers, parents and students. I think I will use a blog to help me with this. I will need to change my past thinking a little. In the past I have used the messageboard on my website for super point questions and gave students points if they had the correct answer. If I use a blog I will be giving them points on their comments to other students. Now having students comment on whether they agree with previous posts and why. I think that will work. I also plan on having students working together this year on creating podcasts and movies to review units for the state test. I will be doing this as part of the Mac grant. I think this will give my students another method of collaboration. I an anxious to start the year and see how all my ideas play out.

School 2.0

I found the School 2.0 website and map very exciting. I feel that collaboration is key to making this work and that is something that I feel as a middle school we are struggling with now. Parents don't have the time to come in to the school but they could be an integral part of the on-line educational experience. Of course I wonder how this is financially possible. I know that many students have computers at home, but our resources at school are not sufficient. I loved on the map how they talked about shifting textbook dollars for digital media. I wonder if this can be easily done. I serve on the budget committee and it always seems to me that we are very limited as to how we can spend certain funds like textbooks. Is the federal government going to be able to financially support school that are following the 2.0 vision?

Dr. Zhao's Podcast

I found Dr. Zhao's podcast very interesting. I agreed with many points that he made. Our students live in a digital world and we need to address that in their education. We also need to teach them how to interact on a global level. I agree with Dr. Zhao that students in Europe are much more adept in these two areas. I spent a year travelling and volunteering in schools in Europe in 1994 and even then I was very impressed with their educational system. Students seemed to be dedicated and driven to succeed. By the time they reach high school they know their career path. Many students spoke multiple languages. I think that the US needs to stop thinking that we have a superior system and start looking at other ways of education. I loved Dr. Zhao's comment that we send more band to Europe than we do educators. I feel we have so much to learn from other countries if we would just take the opportunity to do so.

I also agree with Dr. Zhao that we need to re-think the educational benefits of gaming. I find it very interesting that he created a game to teach Mandarin. I truly believe that we need to stop resisting this technological society and embrace it and make our educational system work with it and use it to benefit all students

Student Collaboration Ideas

In Kevin Honeycutt's podcast he talked about the need for kids to collaborate. I loved his idea about having three teams work on a project, each being responsible for a different piece or stage of development. I think it would be amazing if we could do this with the three academic teams at Merton Williams. Our teams are always very strong and some students have struggled in the past when they have transitioned to the high school, maybe a project like this would help build cohesiveness in the entire grade level. I have seen first hand the many benefits of students colloborating on projects during our "What Up Doc" project and the Science Olympics. I feel that I have such a better understanding of what they know and have learned by listening ( or reading on a blog) their converstaions with their peers.

Thoughts on Delicious

I started using delicious to save my bookmarked sites a couple of months ago. I have slowly been adding sites as I visit them. I thought that this was a convenient way to keep favorites but didn't realize how wonderful it was until my desktop at home had some issues and needed to be repaired. I could easily get all my bookmarks on my laptop through my delicious site. I think this would be a great way to share interesting sites with students. I think I am going to put a link to my delicious account on my website so then when I add content related sites to my Delicious account my students can easily access them without me having to add them one by one onto my website.

Thoughts on Wikis

I used a Wiki with my students as part of the "What's Up Doc" project this year. The wiki was created by our school librarian. I thought that the Wiki was a great tool for collaboration. Students worked in groups and used the wiki to gather and share information. Now that I know more about creating Wikis, I'm wondering if a wiki would be a better tool for students and parents than my website.

Video Resources

I like to use video clips in my class. They are a great way to present information in a different way. This year I used both You Tube and Teacher Tube. I have found that You Tube has the most videos but you definitely need to preview them first. Teacher tube has a lot of relevant videos but are usually a little "drier" than You tube for the middle school population. I was not familiar with Next Vista but did find some good videos on the site that I can use in my class. I like the fact that they are all under 5 minutes and approved for content. I was unable to find anything on Clip Blast that related to the topics that I was searching for. I was looking for videos on photosynthesis and the human body. Have other people had success with this site?

Reflections on Blogging

I have really enjoyed learning more about Blogging. I think it would be a great way to spark discussion among students on-line. Ideas I have to use blogs would be for students to share thoughts on "hot topics" in science and share websites that they find would be helpful. I have used the message board on my website in the past for extra credit but I could also use a blog for that too.

Interesting Blog

I found Bob Sprankle's article "The Shred or Not to Shred" very interesting. I am always troubled with the amount of paper that is thrown out at the end of the year. Even tough this year we recycled much more in our building we still use a tremendous amount of paper. This article brings up some interesting points about how blogs bring permanence to students' work.