Technology in the Classroom

        This past week in class we spent a majority of the time watching a video about the use of technology in South Korea. This video was of particular interest to me because a good friend of mine just moved to South Korea to teach through Teach for America. It's interesting that a country so far away with cultures so different from ours can be so similar in a mechanical way. South Korea is much more highly advanced when it comes to technology. On top of being one of the world leaders in technology creation and implementation, South Korea educates its citizens on the proper usage of such devices.
      I think that if we are going to implement any sort of tool in the classroom, that we first need to teach responsible behavior for said tool. If we do not set up rules and/or guidelines for usage of new tools in the classroom, then students will go awol with them. Technology usage in the classroom has opened, and will continue to open, many doors for learning within the classroom. It is not plausible for me to take all of my students to a country halfway across the world, but it is plausible for me to pull up a national geographic movie on my overhead projector or classroom TV and show my students what it is like in those distant lands.
     Technology is the gateway to global learning. It allows us to encourage open-minds and reach beyond our own backyards. I think that like any other tool in the classroom, technology usage needs to be moderated and supervised. It should have specific purposes and one should stick to those set uses.

Academic uses for a webcam

        I've always used my computer's webcam for personal tasks, but never really considered using it for academic reasons. People tend to associate webcams with online, video chatting, but someone doesn't need to be on the other side of the camera to make use of it. Based on the different backgrounds that were availible, and the option to include your own backgrounds, I would use the technology of a webcam to do a world-wide tourism project. Each student would be  given, or would select, a country and then they would have to find out everything there is to know about that country. They would need to 'photograph' themselves at various important locations (tourist spots, monuments, etc) in that country. The ability to change photo backgrounds for the webcam would make this project possible.
       
         Another way I would use this, if studying Operation Iraqui Freedom/The War on Terror, is to video chat with some friends that I have who are in the military. Doing a weekly video chat would keep the students up to date with what is going on over in the Middle East as well as give them a personal connection to the task.
    
        I would then have the students, depending on grade level, use the xtranormal program to create a 30 second commercial 'advertising' their country.

       These are just a few simple ideas, but I think that they would make the information come alive to the students as well as make it personal to them.

The "Disabled"

Walk a Mile in Her shoes

I was amazed by the courage that Aimee Mullins has. Her views on disabilities in general have given me such great insight into how I should view disabled children in my classroom.  Aimee states that kids are naturally curious about what is foreign to them. Like I said in my first blog about the students teaching themselves, students are curious about things that they are unsure about. At the age of a child, one does not fear failure. They are curious about a vast array of things and they are willing to do whatever it takes to find out the answers to their questions.

Aimee suggests the thought that the ‘disabled’ may really be the super-abled. I like her reasoning here. If every teacher were to stop placing labels on students, regardless of what the label is, I believe that they will uncover colossal potential amongst their students. For Aimee, it was her cry to people outside of the medical fields that she was used to working with that brought her answers and opportunities.

I think it is a flaw that every person has; we place limits. Instead of limiting things, we need to work with it, regardless of what our brain tells us.  We need to disguise the disability into something beautiful, because it is in that moment that people will stop degrading something because it is different, but rather will praise it because of the beauty that it can portray.

Aimee’s story is just one example of how things can change. He ‘flaw’ is completely medical. 50 years ago she probably would have been given a wheel chair and that would have been the end of it, but with today’s science and technology, nothing seems impossible. The science behind computers is complex to say the least, but within it is held the light of the future. Teachers need to embrace this new tool, work with it, challenge it, and in the end, we, the disabled included, will be able to accomplish great things.

Education is Killing Our Hopes of a Successful Future

Schools Kill Creativity

The beginning of this clip is led by a comment that we don’t know what the world will look like 5 years from now and yet we are supposed to prepare children for it. I never really thought about it in that way. We can search for trends across history, but with the way that technology is growing every day, who knows what education, or the world itself, will look like 10 years from now. I think that because of the fact of an unknown future, the education system needs to allow for more flexibility when it comes to content. A million things can change between yesterday and tomorrow, but it can take years to get curriculum and standards changed…just a thought.

Another interesting statement that came up was about the willingness to be wrong.  If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. Originality means taking a risk. If nobody has ever done it before, there is no way of knowing how it is going to work. You can have all sorts of theories or assumptions, but there is no way to be certain.

Kids have the awesome ability to not be afraid of being wrong. They are quick to jump to conclusions and if they are incorrect the first time, they will guess again. It’s as we grow up that we become intimidate by being wrong. Somewhere along the line of elementary school and middle school, students develop the fear of being wrong. I think that this fear goes more deeply into the fear of looking dumb. By this age students know what grades mean. They know if they are performing well on state testing and they know if their peers are not.

On top of causing kids to be threatened by an incorrect answer, we also steer kids away from doing the things they like because we draw the conclusion that they would never get a job doing that activity. We circle everything back around to the fact of whether or not someone can get a job doing a given activity. I do it myself. When I heard about fellow classmates in college who were majoring in Music Composition or Outdoor Recreation, I was always confused. I always wondered how someone could make a life for themselves with degrees in those fields.  

That is the problem. This is how the schools are killing creativity. We need to allow for variety. We are mining the earth for the specific children who possess minds that we believe will best serve us for our future. There’s a problem with this effort though. We do not know what the future holds and if we gradually eliminate the knowledge that we don’t feel is important, we could be greatly missing out on a vast amount of opportunities. We will not be around for this future that we are preparing the next generations for, so we need to make sure that they are capable of flourishing in it. We need to change.

Child-driven learning

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

I have to say that I watched this video in awe. I have always believed that a child learns so much more if that learning is facilitated by them. If a child is genuinely interested, or curious about something, they are going to do whatever they can to find out more about that topic.

In this clip, children in India are introduced to computers for the first time. They are not given any sort of instructional manual, it is completely hands-on learning. The Indian children learn how to use the computers by experimenting with it. I think that this is so amazing. I truly believe that we underestimate the learning potential of children and this research is proving that theory. State and national standards have deemed what they find important for learning in the classroom. These standards, and achievement tests, are just creating obstacles when it comes to learning. If we allow the children to explore the things that they are interested in, their curiosity is going to both scaffold and spiral.

I use the analogy of cleaning a messy house. If I start by cleaning the kitchen, I am ultimately going to come across things that do not belong in the kitchen, so I have to find out where they go. If I put the towels in the linen closet, and find that it too is cluttered, I will become distracted by cleaning that as well. I am still cleaning (learning), but my cleaning has taken a side street. Ultimately I will return to the kitchen and keep cleaning there, but that does not mean that my time spent the linen closet was wasted or unneeded.

The research that this video discusses should begin to serve as proof that children can learn anything as long as we allow them to and provide them with the tools to do so. The main tool needed here was a computer, but once the children had access to computers and the internet, they were able to learn things about DNA and bio-technology that even I cannot fully understand.