Every objection I see about social media and the internet “in education” is not about it’s educational use. It is about it’s social misuse. This does not equate a banning of social media in education to me at all; it decries, (profoundly,) how much we must educate students on the right use of it! This got past educators due to an “ostrich in the sand” mentality, a fear of it competing with the “sage on the stage”, (lecturing teacher in the front for the whole class,) and a plain ole missing of the proverbial boat on how useful it should be. Let us exercise a little 20/20 hindsight…
Picture a world entering social media and the WWW where educators said “Wow! This is really powerful; we should teach ourselves how to harness it and guide our children through it.” First, they learned how to secure data and kept this concept updated frequently and taught digital citizenship to all users. Second, they explored the possibilities with students finding out what could be done to research more fluently; publish more impact-fully; keep content discussions ongoing outside the classroom; help learning become more enjoyable; assess actual learning more regularly; go paperless; increase information for parents; enable data-driven decisions; reach more home-bound students; create OER’s to share with the world; share culturally with other classes; adopt causes advocating to a global audience; collaborate with other teachers; help students collaborate more; develop lesson plans with sources all included; increase student ownership of their learning; etc…
BUT: someone might bully, (this happens in school and needs our attention anyway); a stranger might come along, (all the more reason to expand our stranger-danger education); and our students are creating a digital footprint that could stick with them through college and careers, (so we shouldn’t be involved in what that looks like???)
Sigh…
Best hour you’ll spend this week!
Top 10 Teacher Skills in Tech
Great article to pass on…
Favorite Tools
Okay. This week I am getting a little personal here. I had the dubious opportunity to find out what it is like to live without the use of one of my fingers. My left little finger, or “pinky,” is now my left littler finger. So, as I go through very ordinary tasks, everything is just a little, (pun intended,) harder to accomplish. Life without my favorite tech tools would be just like living without the use of my littler finger; I could do it all, but it just wouldn’t be as fun or as easy!
Take Microsoft Windows, for instance. It is so inherently part of all my computing that I almost forgot to list it! It even is working right now to provide my capital letters b/c it is too painful to hit the shift key with my littler friend. It has so many features, that I continue to learn new ones within the Office suite of tools as I explore.
As for keeping up with folks in my many faceted educational life, I couldn’t do it half so well without a good basic reader; I use Feedly. In my reader I load the url’s of people in my classes, professors, and professionals in the field of ed. tech that I follow. Speaking of following, I have a Twitter account that constantly loads tweets from other ed. techies giving me url’s to great, cutting edge articles in this ever-changing field. I keep up with my young students on a secure LMS, called Edmodo, where we all communicate dialectically in our own online classroom sharing research, videos, flashcards, and Socratic conversation on our learning materials. I also have 3 emails; one for personal and younger education use, one for Liberty, and one on Google for other professionals in education and for all things Google. Since all of this could make me appear to drop off the face of the earth, I keep FaceBook for personal sharing that I would, otherwise, never have the time for.
Speaking of time, I am so glad that this ultra, Samsung laptop of mine came with a calendar. I fill it in my need-to-remembers and the day before each of them I am reminded of things I have going on, whew! I also have set of favorite time-savers for lesson planning. YouTube, Sophia, and Khan Academy are just 3 examples of OER’s, or open education resources, (some of them whole lessons!) free to use for my students or my own personal learning; check them out! I can also create lesson plans online and share my time and talent with others as OER’s through Gooru or Fluency 21. But, the most important part of using time well is my time with the Lord. Currently, since so much of my daily life is online, I am able to get right to this every morning because a set of devotions comes right to my email through Bible Gateway. I am going through the Word chronologically in one daily plan plus once a week a topical message from John Piper is sent to me as well. Both of these come with links to the full text in my favorite translation of the Bible. I know that there is no way to be able to do all I do without my Source, my Love, and my Lord; so Bible Gateway is my most favorite tool of all because it nurtures my whole day.
Fluency 21 Lesson
This lesson is my first time using Fluency21 as a lesson plan generator. What an awesome site! I like that it made me much more intentional in my planning to plan flexibly for students anywhere within the digital divide; to more actively engage 21st century learning skills; and to remember to include a debriefing session from the project. It is also my first OER contribution to the global learning community at large. OER, or open educational resources, are making an enormous impact in education by being available freely to all who can access the internet. Look out world; here I come!
I wrote this for my Classical Conversations Challenge A class which meets once per week and then is followed up the rest of the week in their homeschooling program. It is the same class that I created an Edmodo classroom for, where the students find videos and links there from me and from each other as they research, collaborate, and dialogue in between Tuesday sessions as a physical class. This curriculum is very integrated by design, so my plans for this class will include objectives from various “subjects.”
It is my intention to also utilize it as an example during an instructional video that demonstrates how to use Fluency21 for an Azusa Pacific University graduate class, which they can use if they find it helpful. So, whether this lesson is utilized by other students and teachers via OER, or by my Challenge A class, or instructs other teachers in this class or other graduate students at APU; I am pleased to use the WWW to multiply my talents for His glory.
Debra
Getting parents/students on board with an online community
Starting my online classroom.
I had two primary concerns that needed to be overcome to encourage permission and participation in my online 7th grade classroom.
EDUC630
Welcome to my place on WordPress! This is my last class in Liberty’s M.ed program for Teaching and Learning; Educational Technology and Online Learning, so feel free to take a look around. My posts are archived by class, date, or subject for your convenience. I am a home educator and tutor from the Hartland area in MI; that’s about halfway between Lansing and Detroit if you aren’t from around here. I hope to become an online instructor or consultant in educational technology this year after my graduation in May. Working online will help me finish home schooling the last 2 of our 7 children while segueing into a more professional role for my educational skills. My favorite tools are found right here on the web like: Skydrive, WordPress, Twitter, Feedly, Google tools, Khan Academy, LinkedIn, and Edmodo.
Enjoy!
Debra
Progressive education
Taken from Hillsdale’s current issue of Imprimis:
Here is a passage from the Teacher’s Guide for Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition, published in 1991 by the College Board—the influential organization that, among other things, administers the SAT exam. It is written by an English professor from Agnes Scott College in Georgia.
. . . AP teachers are implementing the best of the new pedagogies that have influenced leading institutions of higher learning. Perhaps most importantly, as Arthur Applebee explains, “objectivity” and “factuality” have lost their preeminence. Instruction has become “less a matter of transmittal of an objective and culturally sanctioned body of knowledge,” and more a matter of helping individuals learn to construct their own realities. This moves English courses away from the concept of subject matter to be memorized and toward “a body of knowledge, skills, and strategies that must be constructed by the learner out of experiences and interactions within the social context of the classroom.” Emphasis is on the processes of language and thought, “processes that are shaped by a given cultural community and which also help students become part of the cultural community.” Contemporary educators no doubt hope students will shape values and ethical systems as they engage in these interactions, acquiring principles that will help them live in a mad, mad world (emphases added).
Could the difference be more stark between the older and newer ways of education? Between leading students toward an understanding of the right way to live in a comprehensible world, and telling them they must shape their own values and make their own reality in a world gone mad? And by the way, think of the definition of “reality”; then think of making one’s own reality. Do you see that it destroys the meaning of the word to use it that way?
Classical Education
Modern Education vs. the Trivium by Debra White
The primary problem with modern education today is not that it is modern, it is not a fault in itself to be contemporary; the problem is that it leaves us ill equipped. What? Even though we have all the tools of modernity for science and calculation, the internet, and unending opportunity to self-publish; these things are only as useful as the ability to use our first computer, (the one which God created,) the mind. This ability would include analytical discernment no longer common to our age, which comes from understanding the basic premises of logic. The tools of logic, or thinking, include the ability to define terms, structure an argument, and find the flaws, or fallacies, in the arguments of others to communicate persuasively. Unless we have these abilities, using the wonderful, modern tools listed above is like allowing toddlers to play with precision surgical equipment. Or, worse, it is sending our students into a war of propaganda without any weapons at all, who, in futility, toss words around without any clear sense of their target.
The trivium is a pedagogy that targets the ability to use our God-given mind to do the very things mentioned above: define terms, structure an argument, and find the flaws, or fallacies, in the arguments of others and then communicate persuasively. It begins with grammar, not just of language, but the foundational information of any subject. And, so, the foundational stage of learning includes a lot of memorization and recitation until the basic terms and machinations of each subject are solidly learned. The second stage of learning in the trivium is dialectic; this is an argumentative stage of questioning and manipulating our learned information to discover its limitations, parameters, and usefulness. This stage includes forming and answering questions; critically analyzing sentence structure, historical ethics, scientific conclusions, and showing the logic of mathematics through written and verbal skills. These skills culminate into their ultimate development in the final stage of the trivium, the rhetorical stage. Here, we leave off argument for argument’s sake and synthesis of information takes place showing appreciation for truth and the self-expression of a trained mind unfolds.
Modern education does not train the mind in this way, (although some of our brightest and best begin to pick out the process as they go.) Modern education reduces learning into segregated topics, or “subjects,” each to be learned as though separate from one another. Science, language, history, art, and geography are not synthesized through logic and ethics leaving them vulnerable to revision with few people adept at untangling fact from fiction to even question it! Logical and ethical thinking skills, such as those trained in the trivium first use subjects to exercise thinking on, and then integrate them as needed for each specialization to apply in discernment, real life problems, and employment. Both forms of education do teach subject matter, but modern education uses each as an end in itself, while the trivium uses all of them together for the mastery of any one of them, the solving of problems, and the pursuit of truth.
Sayers, D. (1947) The Lost Tools of Learning, Oxford University retrieved as First Electronic Version through Fig-books.com ISBN 978-1-61061-235-7
QR codes
I reported on this handy idea earlier in my education, but not in this website. I like to get students engaged asap when they walk into class and this tool is great for that. Load the first task of the day into a QR code; have students always primed to scan it on the way in and watch an introductory video; or complete a survey; or form into assigned groups; or start a warm up….
dlwhitemich 