Tech Tracks

rummaging in the 21st century\’s Technology forest

Swimming with Fisch

April 7th, 2007 by · No Comments · Education, Musings, Teaching, Technology

Karl Fisch, you’ve started something!

Thanks to the thinking in 2020, I just *had* to play devil’s advocate with my students the last couple of days before this long weekend. I posted an imaginary quote on the overhead:

School is a place of safety, learning and excitement. The only thing needed to make schools better is to find a way to improve TAKS scores.

Then I asked the kids to write two anonymous pieces, one as a response to this quote, and the other as a vision of what they would like their learning environment to be like by the time they finish high school. I primed the pump (slanted their thinking?) by asking them to think about how they learn things best. Not necessarily in school, but the things they want to learn, like how to add music to their my*pace page, how to do a jump on the skateboard, how to use cheats in their favorite game…things like that.

I’m just now sifting through their responses. Some are so-so, but some are really catching my attention. They are making me wonder if we can start to make the kind of changes that brought about the responses you have shared in the PowerPoint you showed before your Palm Beach presentation.

We’ll keep swimming, and I’ll try to share some of the students’ insights in another post.

Wonderings

September 4th, 2006 by · No Comments · Education, Musings, Tarkington, Technology

There is a huge debate raging over the use of technology (read Internet) in the classroom: is it a tool or a toy? Can there be any educational value in something that refuses to conform to the State Standards? Should our children be learning in ways that are not traditional?

I’ve come into the debate much the way a hedgehog copes with a busy road…curled up in a little ball, trying to roll my way across without getting squashed. As a teacher of middle school students, trying to help them learn to control the computer rather than let the machine control them, I’ve found the road to be both wide and treacherous.

My students see technology as an integral part of their lives, and can’t understand that the older generation just “doesn’t get it.” To them that mindset is a foreign as watching a VHS of a black and white movie! I want to drag myself into their arena, to see the world the way they see it, but somehow I’m losing myself in the hows and whys of justifying the classroom use.

Tech can be enormously satisfying…and enormously frustrating. I spent Friday on the road to, attending and returning from a workshop offered by the publisher of my newly adopted text for Technology Applications. As it turned out, I spent far more time on the road than I did learning about the text. (Is that the correct term for a predominatly online program?) After the presenters did their “meet and greet” and showed us their (well-planned) presentation on the benefits of the system, we all tried to log in and create our classes. True to Murphy’s law, the publisher’s server disappeared into the ether just as we carefully entered our mile-long registration codes.

I could feel the presenters’ pain, having experienced the same quirks of tech myself, but just how much confidence was I supposed to have in the new system if we couldn’t even get registered?

Which leads me back to the debate and to my own tendency to imitate a hedgehog. Why should I try to use a system with my students that can’t fulfill our needs? There is a hard copy of the student workbook…will that be just as satisfying to a bunch of 7th and 8th grade kids? Probably not. So now my task is to get over my initial reaction to the text, and figure out how I’m going to afford headphones for each of the workstations!

Time to Practice What I Preach

July 10th, 2006 by · No Comments · Education, TappedIn, Technology

I’ve been a Technology teacher (read: computer literacy) for the last 9 years. I’ve tried hard to keep up with all the latest in tech advances in my own computer life, but it just dawned on me that I have not been doing the same thing for my students.

Pretty ridiculous, isn’t it? How can I keep preaching to others that they need to “come into the 21st century” when I’m feeding my kids the same stuff I covered in 1997?

It’s summer, time to be thinking of the coming school year, and I want to completely revamp the curriculum. I’ve got a new textbook (Prentice Hall, Technology Applications) and lot of ideas from my favorite onine professional development site TappedIn, so I’m good to go.

Or not. Seems the website is being revamped, and won’t be available until August 1, so no help there. But that doesn’t mean I can’t work on planning the course for the first semester, so onward in a fog.

Critical Thinking?

July 4th, 2006 by · No Comments · Education, Musings

Is this a valid theory: Because we no longer have kids helping around the family farm/ranch/business, the’ve lost a large part of “natural” education.

I’m wondering if that’s why teaching critical thinking has become so necessary in today’s classroom.

Weaving my own web

July 4th, 2006 by · No Comments · Musings, Technology

Clay Shirky caught me with this passage:

As we have learned from the Web, when data is decoupled from physical presence, it is fluid enough to be grouped differently by different readers, and on different days. The Web’s main virtue, in handling data, is to transmute organization from an a priori, content-based judgment to one that can be ad hoc, context-based, socially embedded, and constantly altered. The Web frees us from needing to argue about whether The Book of 5 Rings “is” a business book or a primer on war — it is plainly both, and not only are we freed from making that judgment firmly or in advance, we are freed from needing to make it explicit at all.

What’s in a Name?

July 4th, 2006 by · 1 Comment · Musings

It’s interesting to contemplate just the letters, which grouped together in a particular way identify me. Thanks to Spell with Flickr I’ve been able to look at my name as a series of pictures. I’m surprised at how I’ve reacted, insisting (to myself) that this form of “H” doesn’t look anything like me…that form of “B” is perfect, etc.

What’s in a name? Just how am I identifying myself? I wonder…

Wonderings

May 29th, 2006 by · No Comments · Education, Musings, Technology

There is a huge debate raging over the use of technology (read Internet) in the classroom: is it a tool or a toy? Can there be any educational value in something that refuses to conform to the State Standards? Should our children be learning in ways that are not traditional?

I’ve come into the debate much the way a hedgehog copes with a busy road…curled up in a little ball, trying to roll my way across without getting squashed. As a teacher of middle school students, trying to help them learn to control the computer rather than let the machine control them, I’ve found the road to be both wide and treacherous.

A New Beginning

May 14th, 2006 by · No Comments · Musings

It seems as if I’m spending all my time reading (see the links), and none of my time writing. It’s not a lack of reflection, just a lack of time spent typing.

Now that the school year is drawing to a close, I’m thinking back on what I have accomplished (and failed to accomplish) in the classroom.