Course Reflection

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I did some mathematics today. I figured that it would take me about eight minutes to correct one final exam. I have 103 students. If I were able to sit down without a break, I would spend thirteen hours and forty five minutes correcting papers. If I were to give myself a ten minute break every hour, I would be correcting tests for sixteen hours! On the last day of school some of the students would collect their tests and look at their mark. In the second week in June, most students are unconcerned about their paragraph structures or that “alot” is not one word.
These sixteen hours of paper correction will have minimal benefit for the students. The exercise does demonstrate the old way of thinking. The teacher gives the knowledge, the student receives some of that knowledge, and then the student tries to guess what the teacher will put on the exam. This is an ineffective teaching and learning process which needs to be changed.
The formative work that leads up to the summative assessment has the greatest value, but the same problems arise; most teachers do not want to read through, and correct sixteen hours of rough drafts. Some of this burden should be moved away from the teacher and back onto the student. Personal responsibility has been stressed to the student since kindergarten, but often peer pressure can have a greater effect. A thirteen year old middle school student might not care if they misspell a common word or create incomplete sentence for their teacher, but with the power of peer review via a blog, more emphasis is likely to be put on avoiding the simple mistakes that can easily be rectified by proofreading.
When I first began teaching, I thought that peer review might be an infringement on student privacy. In fact, there was a Supreme Court case on the very issue in 2002 where the Court unanimously agreed that peer review is not a violation of existing privacy laws (http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/00-1073P.ZO ). The implication was that students could work together to help each other learn, which in turn helped to chip away at the teacher centered method of education. My current philosophy is that I want to be somewhat removed from the direct teaching role and instead be a constructive criticizer and motivator.
This course has helped me to move away from being the center focal point of the classroom. With the use of blogs, wiki pages, and podcasts, the students can correct many of their mistakes before the end of the unit. Their motivation will come from the positive pressure of an audience and their own interest in the subject - which may have been stifled in a traditional classroom setting.
In the next two years, I will move away from paper and pencil and instead will create a classroom where students will submit virtually all of their work electronically. All students will be required to have a blog, which will serve as a living portfolio of past work. Google Documents will be used often for the sake of marking formative writing. All of these technological tools are available for immediate use. What I will need to work on is protocol for peer interaction; students are often too quick to point out the deficiencies of others. If an unsafe classroom environment develops all will be lost.
This course has taught me that the catalysis behind technological change is not educational software companies. Technological innovation is a democratic, grassroots movement where the marketplace of public opinion decides the direction of change. Youtube came before teachertube. Personal blogs predated educational blogs and radio podcasts were around before educational podcasts. I would think that within the next two years, ideas that have grown out of social networking sites will be applied to school children. What I excel at doing is seeing non-educational applications and adapting them in a productive way.

Here is a bit of "ED" talk comparing and contrasting the availability of technology to students and teachers in Kuwait's public and private schools.

http://mansiononthemoon.net/mp3/Walden%20Podcast.mp3

21st Century Skills Skills Skills Skills Skills and Skills

On our short walk to school, my wife and I were wishing we had a four day week. I mentioned that there were school districts in America where schools do have a four day work week for the purposes of saving money. Those are low cost Fridays – nobody has to fire up the boiler, prepare school lunches, or transport students to school. The downside is that the school day is an hour later and there isn’t any guarantee that this would be a more productive hour.

At the Partnership for the 21st Century, there is an interesting article about the outdated nature of schools and how learning environments do not necessarily have to be segregated by age, but instead can be ranked by ability. The idea of flex time is mentioned where students have a longer time line for assignments and projects.

After I read this article and recalling my morning conversation, I thought of having a “Work at home Wednesday”. This would be a time when the student would spend a minimum of four hours at home working on their computer. They could collaborate with classmates, follow guided lessons from their teacher, or otherwise be involved in independent study. The key to a program such as this would be accountability. Certainly technology could be created that would readily log all the academic activities performed by the stay at home student.

I would see a program such as this as beneficial for several reasons:

1) The students are given a “break” in the middle of the week.
2) Wednesday evenings are traditionally ceded to local religious organizations; therefore the sacred cow of education, evening sports competitions, would not be infringed upon.
3) The perennial problem of “snow days” would be solved. If the weather makes it unsafe for the students to go to school, the school can go to the students. There wouldn’t be the usual debate as to when days should be made up.
4) Schools will save money in regards to services they usually offer.

For this article alone, I found this a forward looking, worthwhile website.

What I found less valuable on the website was the throwing around of power words. “Skills” is mentioned incessantly in word and in the information video. I equate “skills” with “any verb you can think of”. There are breathing skills, eating skills, walking skills, skills in sleeping properly and spitting off a bridge skills. In today's political climate, to question the value of “skills” it to run the risk of being labeled a troglodyte. I feel that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Once they explain what specific skills they are interested in, I will have a stronger opinion about their political agenda.

The Partnership for 20th Century Skills

Selling Ones Soul to Google

There seems to be an excessive amount of free services available. I would like to find services that having staying power so that I can use them year after year. With the very nature of digital technology, a natural selection takes place where some sites and technologies are run out of common use. When I look to instigate a technology plan for my students, I want something that is free, easy, and long living.

If I were to look into the future for the next five years, I would say it is a safe assumption that Google will remain an industry leader. For this reason, I will be having my students sign up for a g-mail account. With this g-mail account they may share documents on Google Documents. They will have an e-mail account that will be easy for me to remember [first name_last name_AIS2009 @ gmail.com] and they will have an easy to set up Blog through blogspot. Because it is so closely related to Google, a g-mail account is all that is needed to sign up. With Google, students may also subscribe to RSS feeds and share calendars. While I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, I predict that Google is a good basket to place them in.

Lost in Cyberspace

Sorry for being a late-comer. I had posted some work on my school site. Periodically, like today, I will be linking non-blogger media files to my class website.

This particular link will take you to a PowerPoint presentation that I gave at the 2008 NESA Conference in Bangkok. It concerns the use of grade level websites:

http://aisgrade8.net/cblog/index.php?/archives/933-Grade-Level-Webpages.html

As you look through the slides, think of ways in which students can incorporate the grade level websites into their daily lives. Please post your comments back on this site.