Itunes for Education

I love using itunes in my classroom. I am impressed with the amount of educational content available for purchase through the itunes store. I no longer buy physical dvds for my classroom from sites like history.com, National geographic or PBS. I can purchase these same programs from the itunes store for a lot less money and they often times come in hd. It is easy to find programs in the itunes store. You can view a list of networks that have programs in the store and go directly to the network page to see what is available.

I have used itunes for music for a few years now. I really like incorporating music in my classroom. It is interesting to link music with themes and cultures in social studies. Not only do I use my own purchased music but I like using the radio stations that are available. There is a good selection.

Accessible Websites

In my three years of teaching I have not really dealt with disable students. I had a deaf student in my class in 7th grade and in 9th grade and I had a student who had limited use of his hands but he had an assistant to help him out. For the deaf student subtitles was an easy fix for media.

I have, however, had a multitude of students with learning disabilities. As I have come to use computers and the internet more and more in my classroom I have found that design considerations for my classroom website and choices I make concerning educational websites should be made with these students in mind.

I think as a general rule, reading or gathering information from the web is different from more traditional text based sources. Many students are used to multitasking while on the internet and so sitting down to look at one source at a time for 20 minutes may be a different computer experience for them. For this reason it is important to design learning activities on the computer with student's prior knowledge and habits in mind.

Navigation and brevity are key. Students may give up easily if they get lost in a website. As a teacher it is important to offer the link as a clickable hypertext so that students don't have to type the link themselves. It is also important to offer instructions for navigation that are short and simple. With reading on the web it is important to keep it brief. If it is a long passage then break it up into chunks so that students don't get lost. Questions to go along with the reading can help quite a bit in guiding students.

The internet is a blessing to education. As teachers we should sell this outlook to our students and not make things too complicated and overwhelming.

Costs of Distance Education

I am a big supporter of online distance education. That is not to say that distance education is without flaws. I support distance education because to me it seems like a vehicle to meet students individual needs and offer students a way to learn on an individual basis. I see this as a good thing because different students learn in different ways and many students fail in our current educational system because their needs are not met by a classroom teacher who has to teach in a uniform manner to a classroom of 40 students.

Distance education can be a costly venture, from the investment in current technology to the training provided for online instructors and pay to online technicians. Maybe this needed money can be allocated from traditional educational funds used to by things such as textbooks. Textbooks are becoming, or maybe already have become outdated. Our current generation is used to having information at the touch of their fingertips with the internet, and with so many credible sources and primary sources available electronically, do we still need the traditional, expensive textbook. This is just one example. I am sure there are other outdated, archaic educational practices and resources that are absorbing money that can be used to support distance education.

What is best for the student

I read an article this week called "Distance Learning Pros and Cons" by Dr. Randall S. Hansen. The article listed, in my opinion, some very accurate pros, such as accessibility, availability, and convenience. However, if the author's intent was to equally weigh the pros with the cons, I don't think he succeeded. I specifically took note to two cons he listed, both about the lack of social interaction. He specifically states that there is no social interaction and that the college atmosphere is omitted.

Young people spend a lot of time with technology, including computers, video-gaming systems, phones, and ipods. A lot of their social interaction takes place on these devices as well. The x-box gaming system has a community of millions of people who play games and communicate over the internet. World of Warcraft, a subscription based computer game has over 11 million subscribers who play the game online with other people from around the world. I see students consistently communicating through text messaging and updating Facebook pages.

It seems that methods for social interaction have changed with technology. Maybe educators should go with the flow.

Are parent-teacher conferences outdated?

I was a good student growing up and the only reason I didn't outright refuse to go to parent-teacher conferences with my mother was that I knew I would get some serious props from my elders on that night! It was also a chance for my mom to see my classrooms, meet my teachers, and embarrass me in front of my peers.

At Mountain Ridge Junior High we don't do parent-teacher conferences, we do "student-led conferences". Like the change of name is really going to change the frame of mind of parents coming to this thing, right? Anyway, once each semester students put together a portfolio to show their parents when they come to this special night. Students gather a grade printout from each of their 8 teachers, an assignment from each of their teachers, and fill out some paper work which deals with their goals and gratitude to their parents. They use class time to do this the week of the conferences, and their parents set up a time to attend the conference between 3:00 and 9:00pm. When students and parents come students are to take their parents to a designated classroom and show them their portfolio. They can then visit all the teachers they want.

Here are my thoughts. Now, with the available technology, parents can and should be checking their students grades online with programs like powerschool, which our school uses. Parents can be in tune with what their students are doing through using teacher websites. Parents can communicate with teachers easily and conveniently through email. And what will ultimately become of the student portfolio...it will go in the trash, of course.

Why do we persist in such an archaic practice? In a way, by holding these conferences, aren't we communicating to parents that it is okay that they only have contact with their child's education only once a semester? Instead of these conferences, why don't we have a night where parents can come to the school to meet the teacher if we need an organized parent-teacher activity. On this night teachers can teach parents about the technology that is available to them to check on their students learning.

Out with the old and in with the new!

Customization, not standardization

Public education is very standardized. I know, state the obvious. At my junior high we have state standardized tests and national standardized tests in math, science, and English. In addition to these standardized tests our administration has asked the faculty to create common assessments, so basically standard tests within departments. The administration defends this action by arguing that common assessments within curriculum departments creates "viable, guaranteed curriculum". I can see the value in common assessments. When multiple teachers teach the same subject at the same grade level it creates a type of equality between classes. Students shouldn't fret over which teacher they have because they all have the same policies, the same agenda, and the same tests. If a student needs to change a schedule and switch into another teacher's classroom there won't be much of a change. Basically, these benefits help administration with school policy and organization, counselors with scheduling, and maybe teachers with collaboration, but is this best for students.

I teach history and this current vision of education is not the same as its origins. From what I have studied about early education in the American colonies, schools were a mix of children of all ages, which means students were all at different academic levels. Early teachers did not deliver monolithic lessons and lectures but facilitated individual student learning.

I see technology as being a device that can return classrooms to a place where students can learn at their own pace. I believe the technology is here, but now the problem is the relationship with technology to standardization. Educators can fit technology into the current form of standardized education, or technology can disrupt the current trend and make public education more studentcentric.

Education for Everybody

I read this week about MIT's open course ware. Basically, professors at MIT have made their educational materials available to everyone through their open course ware website for free. This is awesome! I went to the open course ware website, http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm, and clicked on the high-school link. A professor from MIT had posted a series of videos specifically to help students with the basics of calculus. What a great resource for high-school students. There was also a link on the high-school page for teachers. Available on this page were resources tailored to help high-school teachers in their classrooms.

If one of our goals as a nation is to be a leader in education shouldn't we follow the example of professors at MIT and make educational resources available to everyone at no cost? Is it therefore ethical to make money off of education?