What an Education

As a year-long teaching intern I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to work in a school four days a week for the entire school year.  While my graduate classes have given me the theory, combining that with a lot of practice in an authentic situation cannot be matched.  In just a few short months I have learned so much about being a teacher in today's environment.  I have not only learned how to teach math or science or writing, but I have been able to see the extreme challenges which today's teachers are up against.
     The most difficult of these is the focus on standards and getting the students to pass the SOL's.   SOL's in theory are not a bad thing, but I wonder if the designers of NCLB ever imagined a world where teachers feel compelled to teach to the tests so that their students get a high score.  The students and teachers must work at such an aggressive pace to cram in all of the material that the students need to master.   I know that everyone, teachers and administrators, are trying to do what is right.  But, I feel so bad for the students at times when we've had to move on to new topics to stay with the pacing guide when they had not fully mastered the current material.  We only hope that through our review sessions we can help them to master the concepts going forward.  Unfortunately, I do not have a better suggestion for a way to measure that our children are learning the necessary skills to be successful in the future.   As a teacher, I know that what I can do is to do my best teaching in a way that reaches all of the students so that they can, in turn, do their best.

Wikipedia and the Age of Information Overload

My son recently had to do some research on the original Buddah, Siddhartha Gautama.  He spent quite a lot of time searching all over the internet because his class was specifically warned by the teacher about the hazards of using information from Wikipedia.   The crazy thing was that the Wikipedia page about Buddah was seemingly so much more robust than other references to Gautama.   Was that because it was full of misinformation?  Actually, it had many references embedded within it and was a good starting point for my son's project.  If anything it was too complete and after looking at it with him for a short while, my head began to hurt from the sheer volume of information contained within it.

I understand that Wikis can be updated by just about anyone which makes the information suspect.  No longer is there tight control over information (either the quantity or the quality) but does that mean that the information lacks integrity?  In the case of Buddah, much of the same information on Wikipedia was found in other articles.  By not using Wikipedia, my son had to do a lot of digging.  Did he learn anything from the experience?  Only (according to him) that his teacher is purposely trying to make their lives more difficult by disallowing Wikipedic information.  Maybe students' time would be better spent on teaching them how to evaluate prospective internet resources instead of simply disallowing the use of Wikipedia.  Who knows, it may be the most valid and correct of all the information out there.  But alas, since he was unable to use Wikipedia he spent time searching everywhere else and ended up using a different resource.  But whose to say that one is correct either.

I found this video of two late elementary/middle school age students discussing similar issues regarding the use of Wikipedia with their teacher and thought it was interesting. 

Ok, so I was going to have you watch a video, but I can't get it to work right.  So after two hours of screwing around with this crap here is what I look like:  

Do You Take a Chance?

     As a student in an elementary education teaching program, I can see many advantages of having students use blogs as detailed in Diane Penrod’s Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy.  Not only can a blog offer an authentic writing experience, but it can also help students take responsibility for the information they are posting and become more involved as others respond to their blogs.  Blogs also offer a multi-media approach to presenting information which is something that children are highly attuned to, unlike many adults.  And, blogs offer writing opportunities to children with different intelligences, modalities and special needs who may not be able to truly express what they think and know within a more traditional writing context. 

     But as a parent of young teenagers, the openness of the internet is a concern for me.  There are predators out there looking for children and no matter how many times a parent or teacher warns children about the dangers of revealing too much personal information, teens think they are invincible.   A study by Georgetown University’s  Children’s Digital Media Center showed that children post a great deal of personal information on the internet.  To mitigate the risk, the blogs either need to be locked down so they are only accessible by parents, classmates, and teachers or screened before they are posted to ensure no personal information is revealed.  However, neither of these security measures prevents a student from creating a blog outside of the classroom and posting whatever they want.   Ultimately, we must rely on the student being responsible enough to blog in a safe manner.  Are the benefits worth the risk?

Just Giving This a Go

So this is the first time I am blogging.  I feel so 21st century!  If only my kids could see me now!  Their totally technology-lame mother doing something techy.  (Is that even a word?)  Of course they would be totally embarrassed and pretend not to know me, but they are teens so I am used to it.