#5 - This Blasted Slide Show

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Hi everyone.  Let me start by saying that this was one of the more frustrating things that we've been asked to do so far.  Granted, after talking with the professor I realized that most of my issues were self-imposed and apparently I'm not as far along as I thought I was.  Still, this one had me pulling out my hair and channeling the spirit of an angry, anti-technology, TV Grandpa as I shouted at my computer monitor "why won't you work?!"

Now that I've got that little bit of venting out of the way I can admit that it was kind of important that I got this figured out, because this is a pretty useful technique to know.  This is one step forward to making sure that no student, or teacher for that matter is ever out of reach.  Any kid who was out sick, or on vacation, or just a little out of it one day, can go online and get the day's notes online straight from the horse's mouth.  And, this even goes beyond just helping out kids.  I attended a Board of Ed meeting last week, and (while I pray I never have to see another one as long as I live) I met one father who was concerned about how much trouble his kid was having in math and how he was unable to lend his child a hand.  Imagine how much something like this could've helped that man, to be able go to the teacher's website and find a tutorial that would walk him through the formulas in question and help him to help his son.  Heck even a teacher can be helped with this.  Have your students post a presentation complete with their own voice and then you're not devoting days of class time to the live version, and the kids don't have to feel nervous about performing in front of their friends, at least not all the time.

The more I think about this type of program, the more useful it seems, even if it's not quite as user friendly as advertised.  As teachers it seems we're all going to be pretty dependent on Powerpoint, whether we like it or not.  It's a tool that gets our point across to the kids, their parents, might even be useful when you have to explain to the higher-ups what the heck you're doing with your class time.  So, with this program being so important, I guess any tool that makes it more useful is, at its core a good thing.

That being said, I still can't believe how long I was stuck listening to myself.  Does my voice really sound like that?

#4 - My Future Back to School Night

Strangely enough I was just arguing the other day with a friend that Power Point has never been of any use to me.  Yes, this project was done in GoogleDocs, but it's the same thing.  Now I think I owe him a drink or something.

This was really the first time in this class that I've been able to see in a tangible way just how much the new technologies apply to the new classroom.  This was a scenario that was easy to get my head around, and gave this kind of application a practical use.  I can imagine needing a way to reach the parents and even students that, for whatever reason, couldn't come to me for my lesson, and this is an easy and accessible way to do that.

Of course, it wasn't the easiest thing to imagine myself in the shoes of an actual teacher just yet.  I thought about all of the restrictions and time constraints and budget limitations that real teachers have to deal with, and then I just ignored them completely.  Now you're more likely to find my classroom on an old ABC sitcom than in New Jersey, but at least it was kind of fun to put together.  Let me know what you think.

#3 Part 2 - Using Tech as a Teacher

Nobody knows for sure where they’re going to wind up as a teacher, although some of us seem to have a better idea than others, namely me.  I have no idea whether I’ll be in a high school working with Huckleberry Finn or reading Mr. Popper’s Penguins out loud to third graders.  Both great books, although one is a bit more respected.  But I can assume based on my own educational background that I will probably be teaching English or Writing in one form or another.  That is why I’ve chosen for this exercise to work within Standards 8.1, more specifically Strand C – Communication and Collaboration.

One thing that all teachers past, present, and future can agree on is that no one subject is for everyone.  If you’re teaching math, you’re going to wind up with a couple numbers kids and a couple kids who think everything your saying is gibberish and the same the other way around.  Even a high-level music teacher is probably going to have at least one kid who is absolutely tone-deaf, but still needs to fulfill an arts requirement.  Trust me, there were enough kids in our chorus who shouldn’t have been.  But they still had to learn to read their sheet music and keep up with the rest of the group.  In this scenario, the answer was easy, if you didn’t know what you were doing, you asked the kid next to you who did.

An English class isn’t all that different.  Some kids are just going to get it quicker than others.  You can’t leave any kids behind, but you also can’t slow down so much that the children who are excelling are getting ignored.  This is why almost all of my English teachers favored more of an open-communication classroom as opposed to the lecture type.  They realized that we weren’t just learning from them, but from each other as well.  Today, in a more technologically advanced age, this idea is arguably even more important.  After all if we’re making blogs and web pages to allow us to help the students at all hours, we should be showing them how to use these same resources to help each other more easily.

School forces everybody to learn at a certain rate so that they have the information come test-time, but the teacher is not the only place for them to get their information.  They learn from other kids, from other sources, and it is very important for students to know from an early age that they are part of a supportive group.  Working together is an important life-skill that never goes away, and starting early will not only reinforce that later in a student’s educational and professional life, but also when they’re younger and inclined to feel more alone.  It might even make the social minefield of high school a little easier to navigate.  (I apologize for using such a tired metaphor)

#3 Part 1 - Embracing Tech as a Teacher

It’s easy to forget how quickly things change sometimes.  Right now I’m writing a blog, everyone is.  This wasn’t something that I would have needed to experience when I started undergrad.  Yes, there were blogs back then, but they weren’t everywhere.  Way back in the far-away days of 2002 there was just Live Journal and it was terrible.  It wasn’t that long ago that my family would come to my brother or myself for help getting whatever wasn’t working to “just do what it’s supposed to do for the love of god.” But, now that I’m a dinosaur like them, I’ve been sacked and it’s up to my younger cousins to know everything about everything that’s coming out, and I am now obsolete.

Of course others are in the same boat.  Obviously we can’t give up, it’s not like technology is going to go away and really we wouldn’t be too happy if it did.  We just have to keep up, no matter how arduous a task that might be for some of us. 

We’ve been told in class and in the videos provided and probably on 60 Minutes about the growing disconnect between teachers and their students and it’s easy to understand with the speed at which tech grows.  But, thankfully, educators aren’t throwing in the towel.  The NJCCCS states very clearly that it acknowledges the important role that technology plays and will continue to play in the growth of young people, and I do agree that that is a role that current and future educators should nurture, not run from.  The natural next step for us should be to embrace that technology and integrate it into the way we do things.

We can’t teach kids how best to learn, how best to study maybe, but not how best to learn.  Instead we have to find out how students are already learning and approach them through that new media.  As we’ve seen, some are already doing this quite well, utilizing web sites, pod casts, open forums and more to help their kids get what they need.  We’ll have to do all that and more because technology’s not going to stop growing.  But, it will be worth it eventually, once my little cousins finally teach me how everything works.

#2 - Assessing a Web Page

To start this entry off, I have to thank those of you that commented on my last post.  It’s certainly not easy to feel like you’re always playing from behind, but it is helpful to know that I’m not alone here.  It makes this all seem a little less daunting.

Now onto the next task, finding out what makes any of these school websites worth looking at.  The article by Dr. Jamie McKenzie gave me a decent idea of what I should be looking for, but at first I had trouble identifying some of the things he was talking about.  I quickly realized that the problem wasn’t with his guide, I was just looking at some bad sites.  Some of the school sites just looked lazy and hastily put together.  I couldn’t find anything more than a couple bragging announcements or notices about snow days (and there weren’t even enough of those).  But, after blindly clicking on links in DE, I think, I switched over to GH and clicked on Paramus, the most familiar name I saw.

As it turned out, this was a pretty decent stroke of lazy luck.  The Paramus site was impressive and very easy to navigate, very important for me.  Whatever I was looking for I found and found quickly.  I messed around on the site a little longer before clicking on the “teacher’s notes” link, which lead me to the teachers’ personal pages.  I liked seeing how every teacher was involved with this project.  They posted their assignments online, offered a place where students could ask for help, really made a hub to give the students more of what they need. 

Some, however, pushed this idea even further.  Mr. David Allocco set up a page that gave his students practice tests and links to independent material that pertained to his lessons, and photography teacher Dennis Dalelio posted instructional videos, sample photos from some of the better-known artists in the medium.  All of these professors showed their students how to achieve and gave them their credit when they did.  Every teacher in the system was able to use the school site to post assignments and announcements, but the efforts of these professors went above and beyond and showed me a bit more about the potential of these sites as way to reach their students, and make sure that they always have a way to find what they need.

#1 - An Introduction

If I’m going to be honest here, and I’d like to think that I am, I don’t really know what I’m doing, or at least not as much as I would like.

I haven’t had much luck with technology in my life, computers really.  I got my first Mac months before switching to a school with brand new IBM’s, got a new PC before going to college where I needed a laptop, and finally saved up enough for a really good laptop only to watch the thing die on me after a year.  I often think that things could have been different between the computers and myself if I had become familiar with them at a young age like my friends did, but the truth is that unless it came with a game controller it wouldn’t have meant much to a younger version of me.  Plus movies in the ‘90s made it really hard to trust these things.

I wasn’t all that much more savvy after college either.  I was a writer and a lit major, so when I was working on something, it was probably just a word document.  Otherwise I would be on AIM or ITunes, nothing too taxing.  I even bothered with Facebook for a little bit before realizing how much I couldn’t stand it.

I just didn’t see this newly computerized world as anything other than more convenient, good, but nothing that inspired me the way it has others.  For some reason computers still seem foreign to me even though I’m never more than 10 feet away from one or any longer than 10 minutes without one.  And yet, here I am, here we are, staring down the barrel of blogs and podcasts, and I’m intimidated by all of them.  I don’t know what I’m doing, or where I can take what I’m learning.  But, while I’m not overly enthusiastic about the tasks set before us, a little scared really, I am intrigued.  I want to step up to this new world, alien though it may be.  Yeah, I’m still stumbling through this landscape blind and a little timid, but I am moving forward and that’s something, I think.