Information Technology Class comes to a close

It is hard to believe that 15 weeks of class are done. Its even harder to believe that we have already completed more than 15 weeks of the school year. THere will only be about 3 weeks until the end of the semester when we get back from Christmas break. This year is just flying by.
As I begin my final reflections on our class, I believe it is also important to thing about where each of us started and where we hoped to travel during the course. I am the team geek already. Computers and technology are a part of most of the things I am involved with each day. But there are always new challenges and new student needs out there to be met. I took this class not so much to improve my skills as a way of seeing what else was out there and how others were applying it. I wanted some new tricks to put into my toolbag.
With that goal in mind, the class was both a success and a little bit of a let down. The material for class was great and I did pick up some new tools and web-based applications that I can use to support my school and my students. But my second hope was that the class would give me the opportunity to interact with other techies and classroom teachers to see what they were doing and how they were meeting student needs. This course has been offered as a summer option at my school, but I passed on it because I was hoping to interact with teachers from other schools. My classmates were great and it was fun talking to them, but most were not in the classroom yet or were not strong in technology. I did learn from my peers, but did not pick up as many peer insights as I had hoped. So in some ways, my hunt for peer insights continues.There is a lot of good technology out there, we just have to find it and discover effective ways to use it to meet our students needs.

Google Earth: Just too much fun!

I have been using Google Earth in the classroom for a little over three years now. FOr someone who loves geography, this is an application that is pure trouble. As I begin planning my lesson, I find myself off exploring things that have nothing to do with the lesson I am planning to teach. Often I see something that leads to another interesting point. Before I realize it, hours have slipped by and I am still playing. Its as much fun to check out places you have been as it is to look at places you have never seen. I have literally spent hours arguing with other teachers about when the last time the school was scanned based on lines in the parking lot and which cars were or were not in the lot at the time.
Bringing the lesson to life in the classroom with students is just as distracting. I have learned that it is best to always plan a Google Earth play day before using the tool for the first time in a lesson. Once students see the maps projected onto the whiteboard, the fun begins. I always start in space and fly into our school. As I rotate the perspective so that the view is into our class window.... I can always count on at least half of the class turning to see if the camera is hanging in the air outside. They know its not, but they can not help looking. Soon after that come the inevitable requests to see their houses. So students take turns coming up to put in their addresses and watch the view fly to their houses to.
Eventually we get to the planned lesson. And their are so many that Google Earth can support. In my classes we have checked out rollercoasters and amusement parks for our science lessons on motion or gone to see places described in books we were reading. This is one application that is only limited by the imagination of the user. But be careful. Its so much fun that everyone might forget that they are learning.

Educational Philosohy of the Month

As I have worked on my own educational philosophy over the past week, I have spent a bit of time reviewing different web sites and blogs to get a feel for what other teachers say and think about education. The themes and models seem endless and they seem to change so quickly. During my 21 years as a software engineer, I thought I was used to being in an environment where everyone was looking at the latest piece of technology. Those of us who had been in the development field often referred to the new tools and toys as silver bullets. Everyone was looking for the perfect tool to slay the evil programming problem. But unlike the movies, the old engineers realized that there were no silver bullets. It was all about hard work, discipline, and a bit of flexibility in the way we think and approach a problem. There was never going to be a programming language or software tool that would solve everybodies problems. But there were ways to use the existing tools and some of the new ones more effectively to solve problems. It is what made a good engineer valuable and the rest of the players just programmers or hacks.
During the last 8 years of my engineering career, I began teaching college classes at night. As adjunct faculty, I was somewhat isolated from the politics of the college. Teaching philosophies and the latest teaching fads were not something that night school teachers had to deal with more than once a semester at semi-annual training sessions. One just had to keep the student critiques in the right range and you could teach as you thought best. But after I retired from my technology career and began to take classes for my teaching license, I began to be exposed to many different educational silver bullets. Each education class and professor I had followed a different "method" for the best way to reach students. After first, I assumed this was just a good way to expose us to different concepts. But then I began to teach.
I teach at a middle school and over the 6 years that I have been at this school, we have had 5 different school or district philosophies. Each has had something to offer, but before we could really make the new one work we were off exploring a new way to slay poor standardized test scores. The programs we used just fell be the wayside. Whats a teacher to do but follow along. Unfortunately, some just quite trying and pay lip service to whatever current approach is being forced on them. I oftern wonder whether there would be nearly as many approaches if a disertation was not required for most Doctorate degrees. If we eliminated the need to come up with a new silver bullet to get a degree, would highly educated teachers spend more time learning to use the tools we have already discovered. That's not to say new ideas are all bad, but sometimes its nice to have an expert at something we know trying to help a student who is having trouble learning.
I am not sure if it is politically correct to reference someone else's Blog while writting your own, but I did find one that seemed to be searching for the same goal as my own. David Truss asked the question in his own educational philosophy (http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/statement-of-educational-philosophy/), "I wonder how much of what I have written is ‘universal’ and how much of it is a product of being stuck in the current bureaucratic-age based paradigm?" I think its important to ask why we believe as we do. Is it what we were told to believe, a rut we are stuck in, or something we are passionate about. We all need to remember the first line of David's philosophy, "The goal of education is to enrich the lives of students..." because if it is not all about the students, then its time to leave the classroom.