Thoughts on Organize Your Online Life lessons 7/23

I am glad that Jeff and Rory had us research these three programs for this assignment. I learned to use two new tools that I hadn't heard of (Evernote and Blendspace) and learned an extremely useful new feature of Google Drive. Without this assignment I would have never known that Evernote and Blendspace even exist. Since I began playing around with Evernote a few days ago, I have come to realize how useful it can be. I rarely write things down in a planner but typing to-do lists or notes that sync directly to my phone are extremely helpful. Evernote is an awesome organizational tool and I can see myself using it an awful lot in the future.

Blendspace is a useful tool for planning lessons for new teachers. I like the fact that I can look at more experienced teachers' lessons and adapt them to fit both my teaching style and my students learning styles and capabilities. The seamless integration of youtube videos, pictures, and other media make it a hassle free way to create a powerpoint-esque lesson. Eliminating the downloading, cutting, copying, and pasting means a lot of time is saved. There are definitely limits to Blendspace but I can definitely see the value that it has for beginning teachers that are looking for sample lessons and lesson models.

A Google Drive feature that I was completely unfamiliar with was Google Form. There are so many features of Form that are useful for teachers. The fact that you can conduct surveys to test basic understanding is just scratching the surface. Jeremy demonstrated to Sam and I how to create a formative assessment that had some substance to it, which I didn't know could be done using Drive.

To conclude this post I wanted to throw a couple of questions out there that we either talked about in our small groups or that popped into my head. The first is does anyone else think that Microsoft Office is very close to becoming obsolete? The second is did anyone else find it difficult to try to get inside the mind of a middle or high school student to try to figure out what could be useful for them? I pose the second question mostly because I am mainly focused on myself and getting through these next couple weeks. It might be easier come fall. I would appreciate any thoughts!

Sporcle: Mentally Stimulating Diversions

In college, one of my favorite distractions was sporcle.com. Sporcle is a website full of trivia games that categorically range from sports and entertainment to language and physics. While Sporcle is not an expressly educational game, it certainly has certain features and games that provide an educational stimulus if used in the right way. For example, if history teachers want to provide their students with a quiz to gauge their learning, they can simply click on the tab for history games and either choose a random quiz or pick from any number of subcategories that include politics, war, and art. Science teachers also have many sub-categories to pick from. Under the chemistry tab there is a quiz that asks players to name the Star Wars terms that are formed by the chemical symbols of elements.

Sporcle can be a fun way to get students to think critically and gives teachers the option of creating quizzes and monitoring stats of the players. This feature is free, allows you to create up to eleven quizzes per month, and, as I mentioned before, allows you to monitor the stats of your quiz. This could potentially provide teachers with an entertaining way to monitor the learning of their students.

Although Sporcle is not designed to assess higher order thinking, it is a good way to gauge the students' understanding of the basic concepts of a lesson or unit in a timed setting, similar to what they would see on a test. Although the quizzes are not explicitly multiple choice, many of them have the same type of feel in terms of having to guess an answer from a group of choices.

Even if you don't think that Sporcle could be a good educational tool, it is definitely a fun website for wasting a few minutes of time (even though we don't have right now!). Check it out and let me know what you guys think!

Reflections on today's trip to TCEC

Let me preface this post by saying that I had a terrible attitude going into this trip to TCEC. After the last trip I didn't feel like I got much value out of it and I left the school very conflicted. Going into today I expected more of the same. I know that this is a horrible attitude to have going into something like this but the fact that I could have had a whole day of production as an alternative made me feel that way. The first few hours affirmed my attitude which made it worse. We talked at our table about how we didn't feel like the unit planning was very useful without the before and after context that would be required in a real school setting.

My negative attitude lasted until Precious joined our table. Not only was she a good resource to use in terms of helping us design lessons and build our teaching practices, but she was also eager and willing to share her knowledge of the city of Detroit. She provided us with a perspective that we didn't receive the first time we went to Tri-County. It wasn't filled with political opinions and BS. Her knowledge was centered around her actual experience and knowledge of the city and it felt like a breath of fresh air. I gained more knowledge from her in 30 minutes than I did the rest of the time I have been at TCEC.

Our table talked about the fact that Belle Isle has recently been leased from the city by the state of Michigan. Precious openly admitted that she was skeptical at first about the fact that people are being charged to access Belle Isle, she was also willing to admit the fact that she has seen the positive impact that the lease has had on the area. We also talked about her job with Michigan Round Table and the role they play in educating folks on social justice issues in the city. She was open minded about our views and was willing to listen as well as speak. It was great to pick her brain about the city and what we can do to help fix some of the issues that exist there.

There was one particular question that Stephen and I were asked by one of the students that was the most powerful part of the day. One of the tri-county students asked us if we had always known that we wanted to be teachers. It was clear to both of us that she was concerned about her future because she told us that she had no idea what she wanted to do going into her final year of high school. We explained to her that neither of us had any idea what we wanted to do until after college. She listened intently and I hope that our stories helped her understand that she doesn't need to know right now. The feeling of knowing that what I said might have truly helped someone made the entire day worth it. This is why I put up with trips that I don't want to go on. If I was able to help that one person today with less than five minutes of conversation, then the entire day was more than worth it.

Reflections on Computerized Testing

After class yesterday I took some time to think about what I had experienced while I was attempting to take the computerized test. I chose to take the 12th grade english test and when I fired up the test to begin, I felt like I was trying to read a map. The screen was very busy in the sense that there was way too much going on. There are multiple windows that need to be scrolled through and, on the first question, there were different articles that needed to be read in a thin window which I felt prevented the ability to look back and forth between windows in order to match the text with a possible answer. Another issue I found was the fact that you weren't able to skip questions without having to write down some sort of filler in the answer box. I guess my main point is that I was disturbed by the imperfections in a high stakes testing system that makes a difference in the future of students.

I recognize that there are benefits to computerized standardized testing. For starters, they are cheaper to administer than paper-based tests. I remember the examples Rory showed in class were something like $25 per student, which, in my own experience with computerized testing, is on the cheap side. Another is the prevention of teacher biases. To a computer, each student is simply a number or statistic and therefore can't be discriminated against. Lastly, they are the easiest to grade, which I understand to a certain degree but as an aspiring history teacher, I would prefer to grade my assessments by hand in order to get a better understanding of how my students are thinking.

As a history teacher, I don't believe that computerized testing is the best way to assess my students' learning. Multiple choice questions are an ineffective method of gauging how deeply a student is able to think about historical events and put them into context. History is about asking why things happened, not "what" or "who". In my own experience, there is no effective method of computerized short answer writing that doesn't require a teacher or trained grader. Why not cut out the middle man (or machine)? As a teacher, I need to understand how deeply my students are thinking about the lessons I am teaching them and I don't believe that computerized testing is the appropriate method of assessment.

What do other people think? Is this a cross-content area belief or am I off base here? I think that computerized testing is more affective in some content areas than others but at the end of the day it is generally most teachers in the MAC program would prefer paper-based testing. Anyone believe computerized testing is superior? I would love to hear a different perspective!

Thoughts on Dewey

One of Dewey's most important ideas is the idea of community. He explicitly states that learning is a process of enculturation which is an important idea in terms of incorporating technology into the classroom. Because the classroom is a community, it would only make sense to make technology a tool that is available to all members of that community. While Stager argues that BYOD perpetuates inequality within the classroom, I think it can also be argued that technology is a community building experience. An example of this is Google Docs which as we saw in EDUC 649 today (7/14), are an important tool in community learning.
Another important aspect of Dewey's Pedagogic Creed is the idea that the educational process has two sides, psychological and sociological. He argues that the psychological is the basis and that the child's own instincts furnish the material and provide a starting point for education. I believe the same can be said for the use of technology in the classroom. Each individual has a different way of utilizing technology to solve problems which are unique. My instincts could tell me to use a piece of technology in a completely different way than my peers but the goal is to use that technology as a means to an end. Dewey states that he believes that the center of a child's education is their social activities. Today, technology is at the forefront of social activities. With a plethora of social media available to students, I would conclude, based on Dewey's argument, that it is the responsibility of the school to teach kids how to use these platforms in such a way that would encourage both social and educational growth.