Vick Davis posted a Truth or Dare…and I took her up on it.
- Do you spend any time talking about proper methods of e-mail? So what are proper methods of email? For me it depends to whom I am writing the message - as in all written documents, audience is key. The only thing I would like to banish is the use of the subject field as the message body…that's just annoying!
- Do you have a facebook or myspace profile? Yes, Myspace…I had some students that encouraged me to create an account back before that school district blocked it. Muchas gracias to my AP Biology class for teaching me about social networking.
- I someone wrote about you, is your name hyperlinkable? I have a blog (http://www.aswiftlytiltingplanet.com) and a wiki (http://edtecher.pbwiki.com)
- Do you know the names of all of your students? I am a central office administrator now…I don't really have students - but back in the classroom, it was my policy to speak to every student every day.
- If your students have computers in the classroom, do your students make ongoing eye contact? Not when my AP Biology students were Myspacing instead of using the computers for class.
- Are you unafraid of what would happen if youtube, myspace, and facebook were allowed in your classroom? Afraid/unafraid is perhaps a bit strong of a word. There are some very nice possibilities to opening these technologies to student access at school.
- Do your students collaboratively create documents? Back in the classroom, my AP Bio and Honors Physics classes ONLY created collaborative documents, projects, experiments. They had to be part of a scientific research team within a constructivist classroom.
- Do you expect your students to complete their reading assignments? Only in AP Biology...
- Do you assign papers and grade them after reading EVERY WORD? Can anyone truly say that they read every word? Some papers I certainly did (AP Biology Finals and Physics Concept Completion Papers), but not everything, everytime.
- Have you ever given assignment and allowed students to create content on the public world wide web? Some of my AP Biology students loved the Wikipedia assignment.
- Do you allow students to post content WITHOUT premoderation? Yes.
- If you allow students to post online, do you subscribe to 100% of their content in your RSS reader? I never did that when I was in the classroom. If I were there now I would.
- Do you comment on your student blogs? N/A
- Is more than 50% of your content relevant "to life?" (Ask your students) Since I "control" the technology for a school district now, I'd like to think that yes, students do find my "content" relevant to life. But maybe they would call the filter ugly names and wish for open Wi-Fi access (one day it's coming…).
- Do all of your students open their textbook for your class on a weekly basis? My physics students didn't even know there was a textbook. The AP Bio students were sick of reading the Campbell (6th Ed.).
- Do you give reading assignments that include web content? I certainly did…that was the primary source of information for my physics students. It was important for the AP Bio students too.
- Have your students been taught methodologies for assessing the validity of web documents? YES!
- Do you give students projects where they must manage themselves, multitask, and deliver a comprehensive output that is relevant to your topic? You could pretty much say my physics classes were entirely run that way.
- Have you changed anything significant about ALL of the courses you are teaching THIS YEAR? This year I am teaching professional development classes to the teachers in our district about the power and availability of Web 2.0 tools.
- Do you care? Yes. I care about a great deal many things…I care that the Federal and state governments are trying to fix a broken education system with the wrong tool. I care that large numbers of high school students never graduate because they drop out or die from alcoholism and drug abuse. I care that our education system became so rooted in the past methods of educating children that it did not continue to evolve like the rest of our society. I care that so many parents let their children watch too much TV, stay up too late on a school night, not eat breakfast (because there is no food to eat), and go to school wearing the same clothes for three days in a row without taking a bathe or combing their hair. I care that we are destroying a generation of kids since we are so caught up in standardized tests because people in Washington D.C. think it’s a good idea . I care because we need to close the poverty gap, throw away the textbooks, and let our students create educational content in online social networking environments. I care. I care about kids…I care about education…I care about technology.
Does it matter if I passed or failed this dare? No, for me - it does not matter. What matters is that we as educators have failed, so far. I think Vicki's post from Monday is a good place to start.
5 comments:
I'm with you except for the part about how we've failed as educators. Give up the guilt wallowing, hair shirt wearing, whip your own back with a cat-o'-nine tails because we can never do enough for the children, they are our future kumbaya, already.
There's only this: Do the best you can and keep moving. End of story.
Sorry Audrey, this one caught me on a grumpy day, but my point was that our failure to evolve alongside society has caused the NCLB backlash of standardized testing. If educators had provided some innovative leadership for our country over the past 50 years, we may not be in the boat we are in now (who's to say for sure unless the time machine has been invented). If we had developed portfolio and authentic assessments in a much wider scale and showed our society how and why it works, then maybe our parents wouldn't go "I hate the standardized tests, but how else do you measure student achievement?". Education failed to changed because we believed in the tests too.
I have to amend your matra: Do the best you can, keep moving, and bring everyone you can with you.
I like that... Do the best you can, keep moving and bring everyone you can with you. Sounds right to me.
I don't think that the reason we have NCLB is because we didn't evolve along with society. I think it's because we floated some disreputable policies that dismantled skill based education which produced generations of students who were poorly prepared. And, we wanted every child to go to college (as if that's the sole measurement of success). We collaborated with the Academy to make college the only target (empowering universities and making them a load of money), and dismantled vocational education (saving the department of education a load of money).
Suddenly, no child could be left behind, but every avenue other than college was left behind. Making a load of money for McGraw Hill et al (McGraw Hill with it's 70 years of ties to the Bush family btw).
I'm all for technology, but not if it replaces fieldtrips with virtual fieldtrips and labs with virtual labs. I'm all for portfolio assessment for the classroom, but it's a bear for state and federal assessment. And I want no part of that. I don't like NCLB, but I agree with one thing: we need some way of monitoring what schools are doing and insuring a comparable level of quality from district to district and state to state. NAEP is one way, less invasive... that allows for an assessment of the school itself. I don't have the answer, but I do think it's time we realize that after 50 years of trouble distinguishing the baby from the bathwater... we may not know it yet.
"we wanted every child to go to college" - have you heard Phil Schechty speak in the past couple of years? He has a great presentation on how our education system was built to teach a few students a lot, but now we use it to teach a lot of students, some. Why?, because we want to send everyone to college.
You may be right about the Universities looking for money...I am watching universities jump into online graduate programs left and right without much concern for academic rigor.
I really appreciate your comments. Keeps me thinking :)
This is a great post, and I'm glad I dug down into the comments. So often the best part of a post are down into the comments. Yes, we can never do enough for kids, however, teachers are responsible for the classroom, hold those w/ authority over the system responsible for the system. The system may be broken but there are a lot of teachers out there using McGyver strategies to do a lot with a little.
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