Progress on Final Project

My team and I have been working vigorously for about 2 weeks now assembling the pieces of our final project.  We have met in and out of the classroom through the past week to ensure a clean cut final project.  Our idea is to come to the present time as a class (like EDM310) about the current technology use and how they were probably just as confused about things as the student beginning EDM310.  We will try to provide some insight about the class we are attending, and how to succeed.  I am excited about the finished product.

IT'S GONNA BE SWEETER THAN ICE CREAM...

Blog Post #12

Creating a Path of Your Own

THIS ASSIGNMENT REQUIRES A WI-FI CAPABLE MOBILE DEVICE! 

1. Create a Path account from any mobile device. This must be done from an Android or Apple mobile device; both have applications and capability to run the program.
2. Include links to your blog,twitter, and email.
3. Use your populated accounts from your social media networks to follow and contribute to professional and recreational paths.
4. Remember to keep it professional!
5. Be sure to include Path to your PLN.


This assignment is to ensure that students are incorporating their ideas into the mobile media culture of today.

Blog Post #11

Farther.... Nay, Much Farther Than Any Eye Can See

For over 10 years now Mrs. Kathy Cassidy has been using networking media as a tool in her First Grade classroom.  At that time the only facet she was utilizing was her class blog.  This manifestation grew as the time progressed as she even had to replace her original blog with a blog usable today!  This blog allows Mrs. Cassidy to share the work of her students with the parents, her peers, and even the rest of the world.  For instance, a post from three weeks ago includes a Skype conversation her class had with another class fro B.C. about the custom of Halloween (that sounds like fun).  She also posts videos, projects, readings, and almost anything they do in the classroom to the blog and  a Youtube channel .  In the video, Little Kids.. Big Potential, Kathy uses the classroom to describe those activities they would complete throughout Grade one.  She embraces technology in the classroom by not making students "power down" when they arrive int he classroom, as she states in her interview with Dr. John Strange.  Embraced by her students, their parents, and the administration she has developed a myriad of technological learning experiences for her students.    Giving these little kids the potential to go farther and do more than other children in the traditional classroom.

                                                                                                     Picture courtesy of Cassidy's blog

Comments for Teachers in October

     Educational Abolitionist

For the month of October I was assigned Mr. Joe Bower's blog entitled for the love of learning.  There you will find an abundance of quips yet highly academic for-thoughts on the education plateau of the 21st century.  This is where I found the letter from Bill Ayers to President Obama after he won the election urging him to put education on his "reflective agenda".  A hearty feel of Americanism seeps from the lines of text Bower writes himself.  On the first lines you see under his picture he states:

I am Joe Bower and I teach in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. I wish to challenge 'traditional' 

schooling while exploring more progressive forms of education. I intend on using 

this blog to uproot some of the most deeply rooted myths that continue to distract people from 

a love for learning. 

And I am going to have fun doing it!

             Comment 2.1

This was the first post I was assigned from Bower's blog.  He titled the post What won't we do for High Scores?.  At the front of the post he placed the cartoon you see above pointing out the crude and unusual lengths teachers and schools are going to for higher grades on standardized tests.  The point is that teachers are placed between this "rock and a hard place".  They must choose to educate their classroom in their own personal way in fear of job loss because of failure on a state test.  Bower lays down 3 simple facts:

"Put enough pressure on teachers to get high scores...

Convince parents that high test scores are the ultimate achievement...

Push children to grade grub their way to high scores..."

Where will I place my focus as I shape young minds?  As we scream to abolish standardized tests and pray that our educational system reverts to it's former glory, Bower challenges these educators to realize the path we are going down when making decisions.  As an aspiring educator I feel as though, however cliche it may seem, I will be that iconoclastic educator that defies the administration.  The teacher that cares nothing about the rules or regulations, but i keep my job.... How outlandish it may seem; I hope I am some form of that.  
In my comments on Mr. Bower's post I reflected on what was stated above but in a slightly more reserved, academic demeanor.  I talked about the reality of educational financialization along with the decay of public educational policy.  I also included an interesting piece from the Huffington Post that spoke about the torture of standardized testing and the asphyxiating affect it is having on the student's ability to learn.   

             Comment 2.2

After the election.  I wasn't surprised to be reading a blog post about the world's most tuned in event in history.  According to Network World Obama's post-tweet was the most viewed tweet in history.  So, again I was not surprised to be reading some type of reflection or biased remark on how the election turned out.  I was again surprised to read the second post I was assigned from Bower.  A funny caption was included that sums up the feelings of many American educators, which was tagged at the center of his post.  As if it were the heartbeat of this body of text. 

The post spoke of the mandates that Obama's policies lack, but the core of educational conservatives (even Fox News) supported Obama as the lesser of two evils.  My favorite quote from the post was "Mitt Romney could have been trusted to carry on and intensify Obama's current education policies, but only Obama can be trusted to be courageous enough to rethink his first term of cancerous education policies."  Cancerous.  Bower's last words spoke of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his extraordinary will to change what was broken.

I read the comments left by other viewers and all were on another level of political knowledge than I was currently at.  Set back by some of these thought my comments on the post were substantive and bifurcated.  While I believe myself to be a Republican it is hard to argue with the facts at hand.  The country, no matter the President, must turn it's focus to a set of core principles.  I spoke of the quandary I have been in since reading all of the blogs, tweets, articles, videos, etc. about the commercialization of a six billion dollar industry, also known as education.  Titans of finance who seek to privatize deals with schools to provide a higher education to the acolytes.   

A letter to the President. From Bill Ayers.

This was written by Bill Ayers is an American elementary education theorist and a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This open letter first appeared here.

by Bill Ayers

Dear President Obama: Congratulations!

I’m sure this is a moment you want to savor, a time to take a deep breath, get some rest, hydrate, regain your balance, and take a long walk in the sunshine. It might be as well a good time to reflect, rethink, recharge, and perhaps reignite. I sincerely hope that it is, and I urge you to put education on your reflective agenda.

The landscape of “educational reform” is currently littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on all sides. Sadly, your administration has contributed significantly to the mounting catastrophe. You’re not alone: The toxic materials have been assembled as a bipartisan endeavor over many years, and the efforts of the last several administrations are now organized into a coherent push mobilized and led by a merry band of billionaires including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton, and Eli Broad.

Whether inept or clueless or malevolent—who’s to say?—these titans have worked relentlessly to take up all the available space, preaching, persuading, promoting, and, when all else fails, spreading around massive amounts of cash to promote their particular brand of school change as common sense. You and Secretary Arne Duncan—endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of reactionary politicians and pundits—now bear a major responsibility for that agenda.

The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united “school reform” agenda are these: turning over public assets and spaces to private management; dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score. While there’s absolutely no substantive proof that this approach improves schooling for children, it chugs along unfazed—fact-free, faith-based reform at its core, resting firmly on rank ideology rather than any evidence whatsoever.

The three pillars of this agenda are nested in a seductive but wholly inaccurate metaphor: Education is a commodity like any other—a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screwdriver—that is bought and sold in the marketplace. Within this controlling metaphor the schoolhouse is assumed to be a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads.

It’s rather easy to begin to think that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and “privatizing” a space that was once public, is a natural event. Teaching toward a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes” (winners and losers) becomes a rational proxy for learning; “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior turns out to be a stand-in for child development or justice; and a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on lawmakers, foundations, corporations, or high officials (they call it “accountability")—is logical and level-headed.

I urge you to resist these policies and reject the dominant metaphor as wrong in the sense of inaccurate as well as wrong in the sense of immoral. 

Education is a fundamental human right, not a product. In a free society education is based on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being; it’s constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. Further, while schooling in every totalitarian society on earth foregrounds obedience and conformity, education in a democracy emphasizes initiative, courage, imagination, and entrepreneurship in order to encourage students to develop minds of their own. 

When the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it. People are turned against one another as every difference becomes a potential deficit. Getting ahead is the primary goal in such places, and mutual assistance, which can be so natural in other human affairs, is severely restricted or banned. It’s no wonder that cheating scandals are rampant in our country and fraudulent claims are commonplace.

Race to the Top is but one example of incentivizing bad behavior and backward ideas about education as the Secretary of Education begins to look and act like a program officer for some charity rather than the leading educator for all children: It’s one state against another, this school against that one, and my second grade in fierce competition with the second grade across the hall.

You have opposed privatizing social security, pointing out the terrible risks the market would impose on seniors if the voucher plan were ever adopted. And yet you’ve supported—in effect—putting the most endangered young people at risk through a similar scheme. We need to expand, deepen, and fortify the public space, especially for the most vulnerable, not turn it over to private managers. The current gold rush of for-profit colleges gobbling up student loans is but one cautionary tale.

You’ve said that you defend working people and their right to organize and yet you have publicly and noisily maligned teachers and their unions on several occasions. You need to consider that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions. We can’t have the best learning conditions if teachers are forced away from the table, or if the teaching corps is reduced to a team of short-termers and school tourists.

You have declared your support for a deep and rich curriculum for all students regardless of circumstance or background, and yet your policies rely on a relentless regimen of standardized testing, and test scores as the sole measure of progress.

You should certainly pause and reconsider. What’s done is done, but you can demonstrate wisdom and true leadership if you pull back now and correct these dreadful mistakes.

In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).

Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere—a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

Sincerely, 

William Ayers

Comments for Kids in October

As I had done for the month of October, I have compiled the works and comments left during the Comments for Kids assignment in EDM310.  Here I have paraphrased the articles left by children, but also the comments I had left for them.

Comment 2.1

Clare and the USHRS Blog

Clare is part of a collaborative classroom made up of students from all over the world.  The student body is comprised solely of students who may never even come into contact with each other, but are required to collaborate on all assigned work through the use of multimedia devices.  I really enjoyed her interest piece, From the Mouth of Babes, which explored the thought of what exactly "Liberty" means to individuals.  Clare and her co-writer described with vivid literary devices how they approached the individuals they asked about liberty.  The most important group she said she had asked was a second grade group from her hometown.  She said they gave the most honest answers full of child-like ambiguity, with no regard for political finesse.  

In my comments I applauded her on a well written piece and that it was a nice change of pace from reading a younger field of works.  Also, I posed a question to her asking if she would mind if I asked my field experience class the same questions she approached her audience with.  She kindly obliged, but the instructor was not too keen on a collaboration from my end and thought it best to stick with her own gathered materials.

Comment 2.2

In the second post I was assigned during October, a young lady named Chloe had written and recorded a wonderful story.  Chloe is in year four at North Petherton Primary School in the UK.  She read her story about two siblings who went on an adventure while being chased by an old man.  On their adventure Chloe uses vivid detail to describe the surroundings of our main characters.  Throughout the story Chloe also uses key literary devices like personification and allusions to give the reader a very good grasp of the nature of the story.  In the end the main characters find themselves safe in the arms of their older sister, and the nasty old man finds himself behind bars.  If you would like to her Chloe tell her story Click Here!

 I was very surprised at the imagery Chloe was able to use in her story at such a young age.  My comment on her post reflected such amazement.  I commended her on the beauty that I could see through her descriptive words such as: Poppy and Harry's aesthetic features, the purple flowers in the woods, and the gruesome characteristics of the farmer who chased them.  It was an exceptional use of vocabulary, and I would have been proud of any student who used language to that degree.  I ended my comment with praise for her concluding the story with the incarceration of the bad farmer. 

Comment 2.3

Josh was the third student I was assigned for the month of October.  His class was assigned to create a blog post pertaining to the reading they were currently doing in class, The Outsiders.  Josh chose to create a character analysis on Ponyboy.  It was spot on!  He mentioned the relationship Ponyboy had with the main character, and why exactly they had become friends.  Also, he mentioned the past conflicts Ponyboy had with other characters in the book that shaped him as a dynamic character.  Many quotes supported Josh's analysis of the character, which he included on his blog.  It was one of the better blogs I had read since starting this project in August.

I actually let Josh know that I had enjoyed his blog more than most of my other assigned students.  I commented that his exemplary use of critical analysis skills were key in the analysis of The Outsiders and the character of Ponyboy.  Lastly, his use of quotes were exactly what was needed to show a reader how dynamic the character truly is.

Comment 2.4

Eyes on Ireland

During the month of October both Dr. Vitulli and Sontoli were far away in a country many would call Ireland.  Here they were participating in a convention on using visual arts in the classroom.  They created a special blog to account for the day to day activities they would be doing while at the convention.  Included in this blog was an introduction to each Dr., and a small rundown of how their first couple of days would hopefully progress.  I also used the comments left previously to conclude that they would be giving their presentation from the University of Alabama the day that I posted. 

I congratulated them on making it across the pond and told them how excited and proud I was to be part of the University they were representing.  In their post I also saw that they were able to see some of Kevin Abousch's visual art.  He is a famous artist from Ireland who takes many photographs for celebrities, and his most famous work can be seen in the airport they had arrived at in Ireland.  I have seen his work many times before, as many of you have and didn't realize it.  

Comment 2.5

My final student assigned this month was Aspen, and she is attending Mr. Boylen's class in Iowa.  Aspen wrote a story about a trip she went on with her family when she was a younger girl.  The story tells us that her mother planned to surprise her cousin who lives in Colorado.  To do this she needed Aspen to keep it a secret.  So, her mother woke her up very early in the morning and they family got on the train and headed toward CO.  When they arrived the cousin's boyfriend picked them up and took them to where her cousin worked.  Another part of the plan was to send Aspen to the register with something and check-out; Aspen executed this perfectly.  After the cousin realized her family was visiting they became tourists and visited everything there was to see around their cousin's house.  At the end of the visit the family was very emotional, and Aspen said that she couldn't wait to see her cousin again during the holidays.

I commented hesitantly on her post.  I wrote about some of the same places I had visited when I went to Colorado.  Although, she had several grammatical issues, as well as spelling mistakes; I really enjoyed reading her story about visiting her cousin.  She had a real connection with her cousin, and this was abundantly apparent throughout the text.  Lastly, her extended vocabulary and use of tough literary devices aided breaking up the monotony of reading a longer post.  She did a superb job.

Short Movie Project #11

Special Blog Assignment

A world where grades will be left behind...

During USA Today's 30th Anniversary they have interviewed some of the world's greatest visionaries.  In one particular interview a man named Sebastian Thrun, most well known for his work at Google, has taken the center stage.  He is asked a battery of questions regarding the path of education in the next 30 years, and his response is surprising.  Thrun explains his work at Udacity, the education company he founded in January after teaching a free online artificial-intelligence course that drew more than 160,000 students.  He goes on to say that he has no crystal ball that can tell him the future of education, but he can say that it is ready for an overhaul.  The abilities that the internet gives an educator, as well as a student, has almost no boundaries.  An era of financially feasible (possibly free) higher level education and progression of web-based classroom is speeding this way, and Thrun and colleagues are at the helm. 

"In this version of education, learning will be free and available to anyone who wants it while operating like a whimsical playground: No one is late for class, failure is not an option, and a lesson looks something like Angry Birds, the physics-based puzzle game that has been downloaded more than 1 billion times."

I do believe that the field of education, from a professional standpoint, is on the forefront of radical change.  After reading that Thrun taught to over 160,000 students in one classroom sitting I pondered on my value to a profession that has that capability.  Since I am a education major and will not be finishing my degree for 2 more years, I have no experience or formal education that would merit anyone paying any attention to me.  So, I sit in a conundrum.  Of course I do realize the importance of engaging in social interaction is a reason brick-and-mortar schools are still around.  How long until I am no longer needed as a teacher after I have finally become one after 20 years of education?  I was asked to reflect upon the article, but instead find myself reflecting on a career choice.    

Smartboard Project 14

Blog Post #10

          Adventures in Pencil Integration

I believe the cartoon is a spin-off of the PC and Mac commercials made very popular by Apple.  The cartoon depicts the use of a Papermate No. 2 pencil as outdated and a broken scheme.  While on the other hand, the technologically savvy hipster individuals write with multimedia instead of pencils.  The hipster being a person who only buys expensive counter-cultural products, such as a Ticonderoga.  Now that the use of pencils is becoming obsolete, the pencil will become an object used when speaking of history instead of a tool for education.

                        John Spencer's Relocatable Retaliation in Retrospect

A life without using a pencil, a pen, or paper.  This is what Spencer is depicting in his novella-like blog with witty rhetoric and humorous puns.  I chose to reflect on his very first blog from January 2010 titled will we fall behind ?  He introduces the fear that trying new things in school must be put behind us.  Mr. Spencer uses the fact that slate and chalk, paper and pencil, and other devices are put by the wayside to allow more advanced forms of exchange of ideas to take place.  For example, Tom (the protagonist of his post) is in conversation with a colleague about the use of paper and pencil usage in the curriculum.  The fear is that these students have been using slate and chalk for years, and with the introduction of paper and pencil the transition would be too much for the teacher and children to handle.  So, delaying the advancement of tools in the classroom has become an issue.  When will the transition be made to prepare the students for what they will experience on a professional level?  That is the message John Spencer is relaying to educators and the point in which he practices in his classroom everyday.

                                                     Don't teach your kids this stuff.                                                                                                    Please?

Empowerment.  Why does the profession of teaching even exist?  Probably a thousand answers to that question, but reflecting on this post by Dr. Scott McLeod I would say that empowering a child to succeed in a world where knowledge is power.  McLeod uses a poetic structure to explain that if teachers do not allow students to learn about the latest technology then they will NOT be prepared for the world after they graduate. To understand exactly where McLeod is coming from there is a small biography available to readers.  I pose a similar stance on the use of technology in and out of the classroom.  Allowing students to use every type of technology I can get my hands on and teaching them how to properly utilize it is one of the most important professional goals I have set for my classroom.  I honestly believe that if students are not empowered by the things they learn in my classroom, then I have failed.