Chapter 8 Alternative Post

David Warlick is a blogger, author, and above all a teacher.  In his “about this blog” section, Warlick vividly paints the way for his thought process on education and technology today:

“Many of the barriers that prevent us from modernizing our education systems come from the baggage of outdated notions about teaching, learning, curriculum, our children, and their future.  Asking questions seems to be one way of probing and provoking new perceptions about what we do, why we do it, and how we might adapt within an almost constantly changing environment.”

I completely agree with Warlick, and believe that teachers put up barriers with the old way.  He points to the solution of many problems, and that’s simply asking questions.  Asking questions is just as important to teachers as it is for our students.

In Warlick’s blog post titled “WhereDo We Go to Measure Success,” he points out the importance of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineer, and Mathematics).  Yet in a graph he created, based on data from Bachelor'sdegrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, he fails to mention the overall increase in degrees received over the years, despite the huge shift in percentage.  “Mathematics and statistics” had one huge drop, in 1970 it was 24k degrees and in 1975 it was 15k degrees to now being 16k degrees… the question isn't what are we doing wrong now but what were we doing right or wrong back then when the data showed the largest decrease.  Overall, the data seems shocking.  Warlick questions, “Is STEM education doing what it’s suppose to do?” in relation to the graph; however, I am asking, will STEM education change these statistics when the children of this generation grow up and graduate college?

To continue with Warlick’s thought process in his blog post “I Never Needed to Know That,” he stumbled upon a blog post of 10 Things Students Won’t Need to Know WhenThey Graduate.  One thing that this list makes clear, and that Warlick points out, is that there is no way to know or predict what knowledge will be most important to our students for the future.  Some of Warlick’s comments really got me thinking, “How they learn has become much more important,” and “Perhaps the most important thing we can help our children learn, is how to teach themselves.”  I believe these are wise words, and one solution would be to teach children how to synthesize their questions properly with the use of the internet.

Largely, Warlick’s blog is to promote critical thinking among teachers and himself.  It is a personal blog and is based on his personal opinions and views on today’s education.  From what I have read in his posts, Warlick is an innovative teacher that truly wants what is best for the kids and ultimately our society.

Sources:

Bachelor's Degrees Conferred by Degree-granting Institutions, by Field of Study: Selected Years, 1970-71 through 2009-10. Rep. no. 286. Institute of Education Sciences: National Center for Education Statistics, n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2012.

Dillon, Bob. "10 Things Students Won’t Need To Know When They Graduate." Weblog post. 10 Things Students Won’t Need To Know When They Graduate. Edudemic, 27 Aug. 2012. Web. 14 Oct. 2012.

Warlick, David. "2¢ Worth." Weblog post. 2¢ Worth. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2012. <http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/>.

Chapter 7: Problem Solving and Inquiry Learning with Software and Web Tools

Focus Question: How can teachers evaluate the different types of educational software available today?

To be a good game it must consist of rules, goals and objectives, outcomes and feedback, conflict/ competition/ challenge/ opposition, interaction, and representation or story.

To be a good game for a classroom one might ask: Does it have teacher support resources?  Is the content current, thorough, and age-appropriate?  Does assessment include pretest, posttest, recordkeeping by students and groups?  Does the program promote creativity, higher order thinking, collaboration, problem solving, discovery, or memorization?

Going to sites like the educationalsoftware preview guide lists a searchable directory of more than 1,000 software titles for use in prek-12 classrooms.

Tech Tool 7.2 A Math Learning Game—Zoombinis Logical Journey

I loved this game as a little kid.  I am now sitting here wishing that my parents had not thrown away all my games from when I was a kid because I “grew up,” and windows 98 is now “obsolete.”  This game was awesome at creating patterns and using higher order thinking.  It took a lot of trial and error to figure out what the pattern should be.  This game would be great for k-5^th graders because it comes in different difficulty levels.  I would use this game as a “fun-Friday” educational game because it would take at least 30-60 minutes for the kids to get past a couple levels.  As you can see in this YouTube video below 3 adults/ teenagers had to really think to get past a few level in 30 minutes.

Even though this tech tool is talking about Zoombinis, which is awesome, it links to the learning company, which is a site that contains much more.  It continues with game like The Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego.  All of these are fun and thought provoking games.  I would not use any of these games as a core in the classroom however; it would strictly be an additive because it does take up so much time.

Chapter Summary & Connection

Adding games, video games, interactive games, and manipulative tools is very important to kids and should be important to teachers too.  I think one major thing that teachers are going to have to battle with is the time that some of these games consume versus the lack in quality of some of the shorter games may be.  I remember going to reading labs when I was in elementary school, and I am certain that the use has grown much more in the past 15 years.  When I go and visit the local library, even they have reading games on the computers for the kids.  There is obviously a connection between these games and children learning…  I believe you learn best when you are having fun.

Chapter 6: Teaching with Educational Websites and Other Online Resources

Focus Question: What are WebQuests and virtual field trips?

WebQuests are online inquiries by students—designed and guided by teachers.  Students visit sited pre-identified by a teacher and assess what presentations to share with their classmates.

Designing a successful WebQuest consist of stage setting (introduction), task (activities), process (instructions), evaluation (assessment or rubrics), and conclusion.  When being designed it must be considered the capabilities of the students, primary goals to teach, ability levels working cohesively, and is technology integrated seamlessly into the assignment?

Virtual fieldtrip take students to places all over the world without ever leaving their school’s classroom or computer lab.  Museums, science centers, historical sites, and other educational organizations have developed online field trips an example found at the cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc.

TechTool 6.2 Social Bookmarking

Goodreads is an online bookmarking tool for organizing your favorite books, books you want to read, and books you did not like.  After rating so many books, the website starts to generate suggestions that you can add to your reading list or select “not interested” to make it go away.  I am in love with this website!  I’m always making and losing book lists, and now I can have it all in one place.  I give this site an A+!  It has a strong authority, is accurate, objective, current, covers several genres, and is easy to navigate.

By barbourians on Flickr

Delicious is a resourceful website for bookmarking other websites.  Add a pin to the bookmark bar on the web browser and it is instantly useful for all your bookmarking needs.  It organizes the bookmarks by “tags” that can then be searched.  This is handy but it’s also frustrating.  The tags have to be easily memorized to know what you’re looking for.  I would love to be able to organize my links by folders or boards so that I could browse a certain subject, like on pinterest but pinterest also fails in that I wish they had tags that searched only your boards.

Summary & Reflection

This chapter was just an overwhelming amount of information, and has lots of useful links.  It really opens up the classroom to the internet with WebQuests, virtual field trips, interactive maps, videoconferencing, and websites created by universities.  It also points out that filing things away with paper is a flawed system.  Things get lost, misplaced, and outdated so quickly.  With using online bookmarking, I can organize all the websites I find to incorporate into lesson plans.

WebQuests and online virtual field trips are resourceful tools for any subject. I love the fact that teachers are taking the curriculum and creating fun internet scavenger hunts to relevant materials for today.  I’m looking forward to exploring WebQuests and how I can develop something that is interactive, exploratory, and engaging. 

Chapter 5: Researching and Evaluating Internet Information

Focus Question: What are search engines and how do they work?

Search engines retrieve information from the internet.  They can be explored using keywords, which are words or phrases used by search engines to locate matching Web pages.  As shocking as it may seem, because of Google’s popularity, it has been estimated that less than half of the web is searchable in Google.

An important part to conducting research is taking notes.  Notestar offers internet-based electronic note-taking… another option is Office OneNote 2010.

Google has revolutionized how people search today, compared to the old “crawler” systems that advertisers found ways to trick the algorithms that ranked sites by keyword indicators.  Today we have search engines that allow us to view in free-text search (shows results that include 1+ keywords in phrases), Keyword/ exact math search (retrieves only resources that contain exactly the word or phrase used), Boolean search (customize search using “or, and, not” to include or exclude keywords).

Tech Tool: Photo and Audio Resources on the Web

Flickr is an online photo-sharing tool that can be beneficial to teachers and students.  The authority of the website is easy to find and even a nice help option.  This is not an information-based website, but an image based website.  Even though there is an option to find only CC photos, they cannot prevent people from uploading photos that are not their own intellectual property.  There is no objectivity to be found on this site either.  The website is up-to-date with a copyright of 2012 and a daily traffic of users. Based on the uses of AAOCC I give this website a low A because it is hard to monitor plagiarism.  Esthetically I am not pleased with the website.  It is jumbled, confusing, and has little direction of how to use it.  It was great for looking photos up but there seems to be a large learning curve for newcomers who want to contribute images.

Photo by ** Lucky Cavey ** on Flickr

Librivox offers free audio recordings of published books that are in the public domain.  The authority and about section can be found under more info.  The accuracy and objectivity is subjective to the content of what the public domain books and other materials contain.  Dates are hard to find (if at all) and coverage is minimum. Based off of AAOCC I give this site a B with lack in currency and coverage.

Summary & Reflection

The internet has gone through many improvements in the past decades.  Search engines have gone from “crawler” systems to searches that produce results that are more accurate.  I have experienced this growth in search engines.  It would be expected that “regular” search engines would not produce proper results for children.  This causes a lot of work on a teacher’s end. Fortunately, there are many kid search engines like www.askkids.com, kids.yahoo.com, and more.  I particularly remember using yahoo kids when I was in middle school and remember having resourceful information for my age group.  Schools have found other ways to prevent kids from stumbling upon inappropriate information by using filtering software and partitions.  This can sometimes cause problems though when resourceful websites are blocked.