Post 3: Digital Age Citizenship

     This week’s post is all about collaboration. The idea of the metacognitive challenge for the 21st century skills movement is for education to grow and consider technology and more progressive ways into the curriculum. The movement is skills that people need for work, citizenship, and self-actualization. The framework for the 21st century skills movement is different groups working together. The groups are working in a way to make sure that their ideas are building off of one another. They are collaborating to create a framework for the skills movement.

     

     Talking about collaboration leads into the next topic. PLCs and PLNs stand for Professional Learning Communities and Professional Learning Networks. The important features of a PLC are 

“people must work collaboratively rather than in isolation. They must engage in collective inquiry to address the issues most essential to student learning. They must resolve issues and answer questions by building shared knowledge about their current reality and the most promising practices occurring both within and outside of the school and district. They must continually monitor student learning and gather evidence of that learning in order to inform and improve their professional practice, respond to students who need additional support, and drive their continuous improvement process” (Bellanca & Brandt, 2010).

The main idea of PLCs are all about collaboration. I think this is important because I work must better collaboratively. I think that sharing ideas, combing them, and improving them makes for better ideas than ones that I can come up with by myself. It is hard for schools to advance to 21st ways of thinking. These are listed in the following table. I think some of the more difficult reasons for schools to become PLCs are that it is hard for some teachers to work collaboratively, which is very important to PLCs. Teachers that have been working for a long time might find difficulty in changing the ways they teach, another difficulty is differentiating for all students. 

     Switching gears, this week in class we are focusing on Digital Age Citizenship lessons. The focus for my lesson is the Digital Footprint and Reputation. The age group I am teaching this to is eleventh and twelfth graders. Within this lesson I will incorporate the ‘big idea’ question. For this lesson the ‘big idea’ question for my students is “What do you think a digital footprint is?Why do you think that we need to understand the digital foot print? What effects does the digital footprint have on a person’s reputation?” The reasons behind this are that these students are looking into and applying to colleges and jobs. They also need to think about their safety. I will help them explore these questions with a video demonstrating what kind of information that they are posting about themselves and how it is on the internet forever. Including ‘big idea’ questions in lessons is important. These help students discover more and dig into topics more. 

Reference:

Bellanca, J. & Brandt, R. (2010). 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn. Bloomington,       IN: Solution Tree Press

Post 2: Digital Age Leanring

I had never heard of The Five Mind Theory before, but I find it quite interesting. It is the belief that there are “five” different minds, The Disciplined Mind, The Synthesizing Mind, The Creating Mind, The Respectful Mind, and The Ethical Mind. This makes sense if we think about learning styles and preferences. Different minds learn in different ways. I think that this is important as educators because we need to reach as many minds in as many different ways as we can. Dr. Howard Gardner describes a time that he was in a Chinese classroom; “ I was invited to observe a college course in psychology and was dismayed to find that the class consisted entirely of students simply reciting the textbook content verbatim” (Bellanca & Brandt, 2010). Gardner then went back and forth with the teacher why he/she did not ask questions that made the students think creatively about the knowledge, eventually the teacher essentially said, “Because we have done it this way for year, it works.” If we simply asked students to memorize the material they would not really be learning it. Information needs to be taken in, digested, and comes back out in, possibly, some other form. Students need to related the material to themselves and let their minds understand it, rather than spit it back out verbatim. 

Along with considering The Five Mind Theory in teaching I think it is important to incorporate critical and creative thinking into teaching and learning. Creative thinking can be thought of as “building on one’s thoughts and ideas through imagining and inventing something new, with the optimum goal of generating new ideas out of one’s existing ideas” (Coffman, 2013), whereas critical thinking has more to do with problem solving. Critical thinking is “to sift through vast amounts of information...to determine its effectiveness and quality and then reformat that information into new and meaningful knowledge (Coffman, 2013). We need to incorporate both of these kinds of thinking into our lesson plans because students need to be creative to successfully think critically. If we force students to think both ways and practice these skills, they will start to build on each other. Designing lesson that involve both kinds of thinking prepares students to do this all the time and to understand material on a deeper level. These kinds of thinking can be prompted with the “big idea” question. The big idea question is usually a more broad question to start a discussion that students must think about. They must think creatively and build on each others ideas. 

Technology can easily help these kinds of thinking and strategies to encourage them. Technology allows us to use so many different resources, students to do their own research, and teach lessons in different ways. Therefore technology is helping to teach supporting The Five Mind Theory. Using Inquiry based learning and technology promotes the asking of questions that students must discover and think creatively and critically to come to an answer. In the Digital Age, I am expected to use technology as a means of conveying knowledge to students in creative ways and forcing them to think and create their own conclusions about the material. 

Post 1: Technology Integration

This is my very first blog post! Well, on this blog at least. The only other blog I have had is a photography blog in high school. That blog was too keep track of our reflections and our photos in case we lost the hard copies. I am always nervous starting blogs or journals because I have a hard time keeping up with them. I am going to try my best to continue this blog when this course is finished. As for Twitter....a social networking website I will be experimenting with in my class this year. I have never used Twitter before and have never wanted to make an account. I am excited to see how I, myself, will end up using this and liking it and to also see how I might use Twitter in my future classroom.

Involving technology in classrooms can be a difficult thing to accomplish. I think that technology can serve a great purpose to push students to learn more and to feel comfortable with the content. I think that since technology is such a daily part of our lives that we need to integrate it into our teaching. Our students are used to using technology such as; phones, iPads, computers. If we integrate these devices into the classroom we instantly interest the students and the students may be more comfortable with the material being studied if technology that they are familiar with is being used. According to this article by Edutopia, “Seamless integration is when students are not only using technology daily, but have access to a variety of tools that match the task at hand and provide them with the opportunity to build a deeper understanding of content. But how we define technology integration can also depend on the kinds of technology available, how much access one has to technology, and who is using the technology” (“What is Successful Technology Integration?”, 2007). This is important to consider when when thinking about students that learn differently. Whether that be their learning styles or their learning preferences, lessons and activities need to be differentiated. By using technology in the classroom, this gives students different options. Some might work very well for some students and some may not work at all for other students. With technology integration we would hopefully have many different devices and uses of technology so that differentiating could happen easily and be helpful to the students. 

I want to be a secondary math teacher. Most people think that math is hard in general and even harder when technology is involved. Math can be hard, but using technology does not make it harder. I can use technology in the form of notes, games, supportive activities, and more! There are so many videos online to help student understand a concept. There are also tons of math games online that are free and easy to access. These are just a couple of ways to integrate technology into my future classroom. As a future teacher in the digital age, it is expected that I integrate as much technology into my classroom as possible. I like the idea of blending technology with direct teaching. Some concepts in math are more easily understood if the idea is taught and then a few examples practiced. After this, I would use different forms of technology to have my students practice what they are learning. The Technology Integration Matrix can help me decide how to use technology in my classroom. The matrix helps to organize different levels of engagement with technology. By picking a “Characteristic of the Learning Environment” and a “level of Technology Integration into the Curriculum” the combination of the two helps teachers decide what kind of involvement of technology they might want to correspond to their lesson plan. You can find the matrix at: http://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/matrix.php

Reference:

What is Successful Technology Integration?. (2007). Edutopia. Retrieved from

http://www.edutopia.org/technology-integration-guide-description