Making it Personal and Change for Students in the Future

I agree with the article, "Education: The Case for Making it Personal" in the education journal Educational Leadership. Standardization has destroyed the personal connection between teachers and students in schools. It has also hindered real learning and replaced it with meaningless memorization. However, i don't think the article helps us too much. I feel at least here at the school of education at New Paltz that too much standardization is bad. I'm sure many educators would agree. The people who need convincing are parents and politicians and other non-education people. Without their support we will only have more articles like these that show a few diamond in the rough examples rather than making any real progress. If we want real change in schools we need to get out of our scholarly field bubble and reach real people about what we want to change in schools. Until then, this is only a dream.

The second article, "A Habitat for 21st Century Learning," kind of goes against the idea of personalization. I had a hard time relating to it for two reasons. First it centers around public schools in Illinois. If we want to personalize education each state with its own group of different cultures and systems, reading about Illinois and their problems does not help me as a New York teacher as much. They talk about making completely new buildings with every aspect to teaching in mind in the architecture and construction. They may have big open fields in Illinois to build on, but we have very little space here in New York. Although I enjoy the idea of making schools more community oriented I cannot relate to this idea very well either. My home town on Long Island is devoid of most culture and community. What do we do with a place that lacks community? See what I mean by we need to be more personalized in education. This article comes off as slightly ethnocentric to the situation the author is in. I would have liked the article to acknowledge that every school district faces a different set of problems when changing for the future.

My own classroom

In my fantasy, my classroom would mainly be decorated by books. I would want it to look almost like a library. The books would look big and old and give the students a sense of awe and wonder about our deep and rich literary history.

Practically and from a tech standpoint, I would want to be able to have a laptop that could plug into a projection system and internet that it could also plug into. The internet is a great quick reference guide for teachers and students. When a student asks a question I don't know, we can find out together on the internet where I will have the opportunity to model how to find reliable sources and information on the internet.

SAS and Vital NY

Channel 13's database of lesson plants on Vital NY is a great resource for beginner teachers. Not only does it have lesson plans that can be directly lifted from the site, but most of the lesson plans can be reformatted to fit any lesson. As long as a teacher takes the lesson activity or idea he or she can change it to fit any topic. The many video resources will also be helpful for the ever growing visual learner students.

SAS Curriculum Pathways, as seen from their demo, have many tools at the disposal of teachers and students. The programs look to be engaging and even entertaining for the students. For English, the writing reviser will be extremely helpful for student writing. Although I fear it might kill the style and voice of some students who are already competent writers. It also may make students lazy in correcting mistakes in their writing on their own and have them depend on a program to correct grammatical errors.

Intel tools

Both Intel tools seem like great teaching tools. The visual ranking tool as modeled in class is a great discussion starter. Everyone values things differently and it is the teacher's job to make sure students can adequately voice their reasons why they rank things a certain way. This is very important in writing.

The seeing reason tool is excellent for cause and effect relationships. This can be useful for organizing complex plots in novels and stories. I tried making a character web with it but it didn't come out exactly the way I wanted it since the tool is more concerned with how things are greater and lesser rather than equally connected.

Oh, and free things are always good things in my book. Good job Intel!

Frontline: Digital Nation

In PBS's Frontline show "Digital Nation," I found South Korea's game/internet addiction problem most interesting. It is amazing that they actually diagnose this as a real addiction like an addiction to alcohol. From my own experience and seeing others, I believe it is a real actual addiction that some people may not be able to conquer on their own. This is something that we as teachers will have to cope with in the classroom. Do we try taking the addictive technology away, or do we give in and accept that the human race will be attached to the internet.

You can watch the whole show on PBS.org

1st class

This class is going to be very helpful to me it seems so far. I was expecting to come into a class re-learning boring things I already know how to do on a computer, but we will learn about things I've been curious in and never tried, like podcasts, and other things I've never even knew existed.

I also believe we have a good group of classmates from different backgrounds and situations to create vibrant discussion with different insightful view points.

Our instructor Professor Murphy-Genter seems to have the best of both worlds, good teaching experience and extensive technology experience.

Hopefully the workload won't be a burden!


-Jimmy