Roberson Instructional Technology Weblog

teacher-factor.jpg
Our principal gave the our staff an article “The Teacher Factor” (NY Times, 2000) in our mailboxes without any explanation. We are all assuming she gave it to us since we are starting into our round of MAPs testing. I”m mean isn’t one of the main reasons we test is to find out how well our teachers are teaching??

I’ve felt that our school has over done the testing. We’ve got DRA, CoGAT, CSAP, MAPs, etc. and we are still looking at others. The kids are tested so much, the classroom teachers are teaching in a rush.

Anyway, back to the article. So what does make a good teacher? They say they are still researching that. I found the article to be true to what most teachers say after they have moved around to many different schools. Some even say they can tell who the student had the previous year, but what the student has retained. Enjoy the article. I’d like to know what you think.

After completing my practitioner profile this week for my Trends class, I reflected on online educators. I learned quite a bit about online learning and educating that I did not know in the past. The eductator I interviewed does not create any of her lessons, nor is she an expert in the area she teaches. She is currently teaching an education phycology class, but has little expertise in the area. Her curriculum is created by the university and she tracks the work completed by her online students. There is very little she can alter. I can understand this from the university’s standpoint because they want each class to be identical no matter who the teacher is. The big question I have is how often the material is updated. I’m sure psycology doesn’t change as quickly as technology, but there has to be developments that can be taught each new semester. She said she has taught the same material for the last couple years. I don’t think that would work in the technology world!

Many of the educators I talked to who taught online courses were able to mold the lessons to fit their style and current trends. Even with being a student in a current instructional technology trends class, I feel trends are everywhere, in every disipline. If a class were to be in a classroom and the same lessons had to be taught by all instructors, the class would still get differerent types of input and feel for the material. I feel an online class should be the same. An instructor should be able to mold the class as they see fit.

I’m not sure why this came as a surprise to me during my interview, but I’m thinking it came from my assumption that everyone gets to mold their classroom as needed to make the material work.

Our school was notified last week that we won a grant provide by LSI Logic here in Fort Collins!  The grant was written for document cameras that will be used in our fourth grade classrooms.  When the district announced participating in the grant process, the grant was to be complete and submitted by the first day of school.  We found out the week before school started.  We got the grant written and off to LSI, but there was limited research time.   We requested five document cameras, microscope adapters and light boxes.  These are all wonderful tools, but I’m a little nervous about the use of equipment.  Most of our classrooms are still using overheads for instruction and they feel the document cameras will replace the overheads.  I’m hoping that is true and the teachers will utilized the new technology in their classrooms.  The downside is our school is a natural light school (many windows), so the projection image may not be as clear as they anticipate.  If it’s not very clear in presentation, I’m not sure they will continue to use the document cameras.  Technology is a wonderful thing given the correct environment.  I will be interested to see the outcome.  Given more time to evaluate the technology, I feel we could have tested out some equipment to find the best match.   I realize now that we should be looking to the future and trying things out in order to be better prepared for quick decisions! 

The week has been crazy with paper editing through email, learning about RSS and blog updates, kids, sports and Lego Robotics! I have to say I think I’m in over my head this time. One day at a time, right?

I read a great article by Will Richardson (2005) called “RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators” and it got my juices flowing to learn more about RSS. I hadn’t realized it was such a powerful tool. Having my fifth grade students subscribe to feeds when doing research could be a time saver in class. Up front it would take some training, but they would enjoy it. It took me quite a bit of time to weed through using RSS and linking it to my blog, but I finally succeeded! In Richardson’s article I read about using a Furl account to have links automatically updated by those who subscribe. I would like to learn more about these accounts and how they can be used in my classroom.

I’m constantly amazed with the web technology I could be using in my classroom. I’m slowly emerging from my bubble!

In my Current Trends and Issues class I read an article titled

When Gadgets Get in the Way

by Lisa Guernsey. The article was published in the New York Times on August 19, 2004.

The article seemed to be focused on the use of electronic devices in an upper school level setting, but when I got into the article, I could relate many of the scenerios to my elementary classroom setting. I have a few 5th grade students who are bold enough to bring their cell phone to technology class, but I have not yet found one of them texting (that I know of). The part of the article that made me chuckle was when she compared texting to note writing. I had never thought of texting in that way, but I can see the relationship. Kids today will have the fun of quick notes being sent, but will miss out on the hard copies that they can keep! I think I still have a shoebox with some of my school notes. I’ve seen news channels talk about bullying that occurs using texting on cell phones, but bullying also happened with note writing. It is something we will always have to deal with.

When Lisa talks about is the use of the networking software NetOp, I could relate. I use NetOp in my labs and the kids like it. I can lock their computers so they will pay attention for instruction and if the lab gets too noisy, I lock the computers again. I can view what they are doing on their computer from my teacher computer and I can send them messages, but I have never had to. With the kids being young, they get the idea pretty quickly when I freeze things!

I enjoyed this article. If you have a chance, you should check it out.