31 is fun, if you don’t mind listening to me rant.
In this episode I rant about a “news” story I found in Google News, then make a connection to one of the things that David Warlick talks about: It is not enough to teach our kids how to read and write. We need to teach them to read and figure out if it is RIGHT.Hopefully I’ll get to do that in my Art Club.
The local news had a story on backpacks being too heavy for students nowadays. When I went to their website to reference the story I couldn’t find it, but I DID find that they had in fact covered it several times before: 8/17/04, 8/23/02, I can go on, but I won’t.
In a society where we stress more and more learning we seem to be putting more than just emotional weight on our students’ shoulders, and apparently we’ve known about it for years. Think about how much an iBook weighs compared to all the books that it could replace. (And when you figure that e-books are cheaper and updated more often, those laptops can be very cost effective.) If there ever was a just reasoning for using digital media over printed texts, this is it!
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana
“We cannot get to the future without making a break with the past” – Phil Shapiro
“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” – William Gibson
It’s a bit of a dichotomy here. To get to the future we have to build upon the past, but the past can be very controlling.
Take a look at photo processing. Any good photo editing program will have tools labeled “burn” and “dodge.” Burn makes things darker while dodge makes things lighter. Why do they use these terms? It’s because when you’re developing photos in a darkroom “burning” is when you give an area on the photo paper extra light (which makes it darker) and “dodging” is where you use something – anything – to block the light from certain areas (thus keeping the area lighter). The processes done by the software have nothing in common with the darkroom techniques other than the results, but the names stuck.
When we teach students how to use “new” technology we often have two routes we can take.
We can start with the old school stuff so they can appreciate how things used to be done, although they will often resent being taught old and outdated methods. (Trigonometry without a calculator, anyone?)
We can immerse them immediately into the realm of the new way of doing things. This will have a better chance of grabbing their attention, but many things will be confusing because the students won’t know what came before.
As a floating Art teacher who walks into different classrooms everyday I’ve seen a lot of teachers pick #1 because it meant they had to spend less time with the new things they were unfamiliar with, while at the same time I’ve seen other teachers pick #2 because they themselves didn’t know much about that subject matter’s history.
This is where I offer some witty remark about how to fix this problem, but I can’t really think of one. I suppose the best way out would be 1.5 – halfway between 1 and 2, if you can forgive the math pun. Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula that can find that for you. You have to feel it out, I guess, just like any performer has to feel out their audience and know when to deliver the right punch-line.
19th podcast – one more and it’ll no longer be a teenager.
Show Notes:Congratulations to Steve Dembo of teach42.com fame, he recently got hired as a kindergarten teacher for a charter school. Steve, does that mean you’ll change your podcast description to “musings of a kindergarten teacher?”
iKnowThat.com – I’ve only just barely scratched the surface of this site, and I already like it. They have plenty of “games,” but they all have an educational nature too them. Registration is free and VERY fast, activities are organized by subject, and a “Teacher Guide” is included to let you know the grade appropriate objectives for each activity.
Art Club – We’ve hit some snags, but we’re working on it.
I recently revisited Ender’s Game, a very decent sci-fi story, if somewhat unbelievable when it comes to child psychology.
I’d already read the book once, but that was back before I was a teacher. Back then, it just struck me as an enthralling story with plenty of plot twists. (I was once told that the art of writing a good story involves creating a character you like and then visiting hardships upon that character. Ender’s Game does just that.)
But now I’ve been teaching for a few years and I have a lot more tech experience under my belt. When I went back to read the story one of the first things that struck me was that everyone had a computer.
Everyone.
Sure, the students called them “desks,” but really they were tricked out wireless laptops. Even before Ender left Earth to learn in the high tech battle school it was obvious that the 1:1 student to computer ratio wasn’t just present, it was expected. There were no books, save for the electronic files the students could access. The internet was still in it’s infancy when the book was written, but Orson Scott Card had gotten a fleeting taste of it and imagined a world where students could find ways to communicate with the world over the ‘nets. The “anonymity” of the internet was present as well, and in fact played a key role in the story along with self-paced life long learning.
So why am I talking with this? No reason, I suppose. I just thought it was cool that even in 1977 (the book’s earliest copyright date) there were pioneers who were thinking about what computers could do for education.
A Basement of Broken Dreams – An album by John Holowach, hosted on archive.org. I used his song called My Piano Sings (Part 3).
If you don’t push the students you’ll always have good results, but if you push the students then they will LEARN.
When sending email about the art schedule, some messages aren’t finding their way to my gmail account. Chalk it up to computer glitch or user error, but art sign-ups were up 100 percent so I still think my system works.
Podcast Alley: Education Podcasts – Lots of good podcasts here, many of them much better than my own. I recommend casting your vote for Connect Learning (ranked 13th place), or the one for which I cast my vote: Teach42 (ranked 4th place). Either of these is worth a spot at number 1.
31 is fun, if you don’t mind listening to me rant.
a very decent sci-fi story, if somewhat unbelievable when it comes to child psychology.