The Big Picture of Technology in SchoolsBefore I started the graphic I made a list, as the book said. My original thought for the design was to make bullets of each resource and practice, but I realized this would take up way to much space. I think a website would be a better place for that type of design.
As I was making this graphic, the first thing I focused on was the color scheme I wanted. I tried to mimic the colors of the book cover. The arrows in my graphic also come from the book cover. In hindsight, I should have done a rough outline sketch on paper. I found myself rearranging a few times. (I did find a shortcut, and maybe everyone already knew, but you can select more than one element at once and move them as a chunk.) I heard my junior high technology teacher echoing in my head too, “Stuff before Fluff.” I always had a hard time with that and I find I still do. I like things to be pretty as I am working and it makes things take much longer than they should. I need to work on getting my main ideas down first then designing how something will look. I split my resources into Three major categories, Hardware, Software, and People. Then I split Software into a few subcategories: Tools and LMS’s. This section has a lot going on. There are so many great resources. Hardware focuses on the physical aspects that are needed, computers and WiFi and Networks. Software focuses on the plethora of tools and great materials that are available. People are what I find to be the most important resource. We talk and share what we know and what we have learned through our unique experiences with technology. Collaboration seems to be an overlying theme of this course, we need to talk to others in order to make our learning meaningful and impactful in our schools. For the Teaching Approaches section, I thought about the different teachers that I have had in the past and what they did to emphasize technology and use it the best way they knew how. When I was working on the specific practices section, I tried to think about the most valuable projects I have done in the past. Valuable in terms of what I enjoyed and what was challenging but the benefit was worth it. The Technology in Schools section is my major take away from the book. Have a vision, make a plan, find the resources to implement the plan and then provide support for those the plan impacts.
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What did you learn from Chapter 5 and Chapter 6? One of the major themes of Chapter 5 was to have a plan for how the school wants to use technology and then a plan for getting the technology that best fits the needs of the school. These two parts of planning are often reversed, we get the technology first and then ask “how are we going to use this?” I have done this before with tech tools for my lessons, I find a really cool tool and want to use it even though it is not always the best way to teach something. Rarely is the tool completely useless for the lesson and students like a break from everyday routine, some good does come out of trying the new tool. I need to keep in mind the goals of the lesson when I choose the technology tools for my lessons just like schools need to keep in mind the goals of technology when purchasing it for school. I also think that the time it takes to learn how to use technologies should be considered. If it takes a long time to learn how to use something, teachers are not going to use it to its full potential. Teachers need training on how to use different tools too, YouTube is great for tutorials but not everyone will go out and look or know what to look for.
The last part of Chapter 5 on pages 67 and 68 stood out to me. I loved reading how the author went the extra mile for the school and the students. He took the time to listen to teachers' needs and investigated things the students were interested in, like Minecraft. I laughed out loud when he said he called tech support to fix a printer that was unplugged. In Chapter 6 the part that really stuck out to me was on page 75. PD has many forms, and not all of them take hours of commitment. It can be as simple as scrolling through twitter or talking to a colleague. I also felt that the author emphasized collaboration in this chapter. I enjoyed reading the story from Whitney and Robyn and how much collaboration benefited their school and students. I am excited to collaborate with other teachers and professionals as I begin teaching. I feel that collaboration has been a major part of adjusting to teaching during the current pandemic. Teachers are pooling their resources to help get the best education to the students and it is incredible to watch and be a part of. I liked this model because it is very straight forward. There are different roles that technology can play in the classroom and depending on the topic and standard that is being taught, different levels may be chosen. SOMETIMES it is okay to simply use technology as a substitute, but MOST of the time we should try and “teach above the dotted line.” I liked the graphic above because it provides some guides from Bloom’s Taxonomy for each level and that helps me to place a specific activity for my classroom.
I think that using this framework to evaluate how I use tech tools in my classroom will help me to ensure that I am using technology in a meaningful way and not just using technology for the sake of using technology. There are many resources and examples of ways people have used this model to enhance their teaching. I liked the example in the video provided that took the same assignment through the four levels. Concrete examples like that make the implementation of this tool easier. How does technology improve teaching and learning in your school? Technology allows for more student-centered instruction. The ease of collecting data with technology helps teachers and students to know exactly where students are at with learning different materials. In the classroom I am in right now we use Moby Max to track where students are grade-level wise and to help fill the gaps in learning that they have. We also have a couple of interactive whiteboards that we can use to project our materials and communicate information to our students. Each student has a computer that they can use during the day, this is a great resource for students as it allows them access to information. Technology allows us to show our students tutorials and show them where to access information if they are not understanding. We can use videos and other materials to enhance our lessons and provide students more real-world applications to what they are learning. What are some areas in which this could be improved? I think that often our interactive whiteboard is used as nothing more than that, a whiteboard. I would also like to find different activities for the students to use their laptops more not just for the sake of using their laptops but I think there are some great activities out there like Desmos and PearDeck that would help us get some more immediate feedback from our individual students. How do you go about making decisions about what technology to use in your classroom or school? I try to outline the goals of my lesson and then see if a specific tool would fit well to enhance the lesson. If the technology does not enhance the lesson I do not use it. I like to learn about a variety of different tech tools and what their pros and cons are so that I can make those decisions a little bit easier. My goal is to fit the tech tool to the lesson not the lesson to the tech tool.
When deciding what to include on my visual, I flipped through the book and read the things I had circles and highlighted and I read the titles of the chapters and jotted down my thoughts when I read these. Originally, I tried to incorporate everything I had jotted down, but then I read “Less is More” and decided to rework my design to really focus in on the major takeaways from the book.
I included the definition of innovative because I want whoever looks at this graphic to be using the same definition as Couros intended. I find a lot of arguments and confusion stem from people having different definitions for the same words. The words on the gears are the characteristics and ideas that I thought the book was focused around. I wanted to incorporate the gears that we saw throughout the book; I like the parallel that gears make things around them move much like the different characteristics of the mindset and the major ideas of the book work together. As far as the visual appearance of my graphic, I tried to stick to a color scheme of three to five colors. My goal was for the graphic to convey the message without looking cluttered and confusing. What did you learn from the book this week? In tutor training, we looked at some research on reading speeds. A student who is a good reader that starts out with a words per minute (wpm) of 300 who practices reading faster can achieve wpm of 1000 or more. A struggling reader who has a wpm of 150 who practices the same amount achieved a wpm of 300. The same message was stated in the book this week, we need to focus on strengths! A good leader can identify others strengths and encourage them to grow in those areas and as a whole the organization or school grows. Another part of the book that stood out to me was that less is more. Teaching is overwhelming and if teachers are bombarded with resources they are unlikely to use any to their full potential. A few resources at a time are enough. Choices are good but too many choices are overwhelming, when I was thinking about college and what I wanted to do I remember almost wishing someone would just tell me what to do. I knew that was not an option but I felt like I had way too many options and did not know the direction I wanted to go. I had to narrow my options and make a choice. Something that I think will stick with me for a long time was a quote from page 168, “Today, isolation is a choice educators make.” Last week we looked at the characteristics of the innovative leader. I discussed networking and this quote reminds me of the importance of making connections with others in my field and continuing to learn. What did you learn from the videos this week? The first video highlighted that with Youtube and live-streaming students can be two feet away from masters. Teachers do not have to know everything because knowledge is easily accessed with the right google search. The third video touched on this as well when she talked about releasing power to the learners. I like the idea of a students teaching students model. One thing that has been rather hard for me in student teaching is facing that I can’t help everyone, there is just not enough time. I can help some students though, and some students can help other students, and by working together everyone can get some help.
When telling the story of Captain William Swenson the speaker in the second video asked, “are they just better people?” He came to the conclusion that no, while they are good people, they are a product of their environment not better people. It reminded me of the Zimbardo prison simulation I studied while in Intro to Sociology, people do things and act a certain way depending on their environment. This is a major reason why we need to surround ourselves with people who challenge us to be better people. I think about this as I look for a job for next year, I need to try and find a job in a school that will help me to grow and be a better teacher. What are 3 key takeaways from the book thus far? I think my number one takeaway from this book and from my student teaching experience is the importance of relationships. Relationships are the most important thing in education. I was asked today for my view on standards and their role in the classroom. My response was that standards are important and necessary for planning instruction, but they are not the main focus of teaching. Relationships are the basis of the culture in our classrooms and in our schools. They take a lot of effort to cultivate and it is not always easy.
Another major takeaway I have from the book thus far is that compliance does not equal innovation or success. In my student teaching placement, we have been doing a lot of group work recently. Group work can look and feel like chaos, I have to remind myself that silence is not conducive to learning. I also wonder if sometimes compliance is a reaction students have when they are intimidated and not comfortable in the classroom. The final takeaway that I will comment on has to do with student choice. The book does a nice job of emphasizing how student choice can empower students. I love the idea of a genius hour to give students options on what they learn. I also think that giving students a choice is as simple as giving the option of a test or a project. What did you learn from the reading and the videos? Both Sir Ken Robinson and George Couros talked about how we should focus on strengths. I think it was in tutor training that we talked about how a slow reader can work and work and work and only get a little faster, but a fast reader can work the same amount and experience and incredible increase in words per minute. Kids should have the opportunity to explore what the care about. When kids are passionate about something they are more likely to be problem finders that Ewan McIntosh says the world needs. I liked the definition of intelligence as not simply knowing but doing something with what you know I liked the quote on page 17 of the book, “The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” It is a little bit daunting but it is so true. It is like when you work out, eventually what you start with will be too easy and no longer challenging enough to provide any change in strength or ability so you have to change your workout. On page 47 in the book, Couros discusses that it is not that teachers do not want to change it is that they do not know how to change. My current classroom teacher talks a lot about how he would love to try some new things but it feels like he is just sitting spinning his wheels. There are so many things demanding his attention that trying new things get pushed to the back burner. I liked the questions that were provided on pages 39 and 40 and I think that they are a good place to start implementing an innovator’s mindset by taking what we already know how to do and using that knowledge to make something new and better. How does it change your thinking moving forward? I am always focusing on what I need to do better on and I guess I should be focusing on what I do well. I want to start focusing on are my strengths and working on building those up so they can help me in my weak areas.
I also want to ask more questions to my students and my colleagues. Like the quote on page 58 says, “What we model is what we get.” -Jimmy Casas. If my goal is to get encourage curiosity in my students, I should model curiosity to them. I remember in high school we had to read and annotate a passage and there was a word that no one knew. The next day in class the teacher asked if anyone knew what the word meant… crickets. She was so frustrated with us for not being curious enough to look up the word. It was not like we had to go find a dictionary, we all had smartphones. Every time I see a word I do not know this scene goes through my mind. Sir Ken Robinson said, “Education is meant to take us into the future we can’t grasp.” He talks about how schools “Kill” creativity, we teach kids not to be curious. How are the kids we are teaching now going to handle the world if they are not curious? I hope to learn how to evaluate tech tools to see which one will best fit the goals of the lesson and the needs of my students. I am excited to learn more about leadership and collaboration throughout the course so I can be a better teacher and coworker.
I am not sure this fits into this class but I also want to learn how to questions more effectively. So often I feel like I am handing the students way to much help. I feel like there is a fine line between productive struggle that leads to deep understanding and frustration that leads to giving up - I need help telling the difference.
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SPRING 2020 Archives
April 2020
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