Organizing My Life... electronically!

I'll openly admit that I have trouble organizing my life. For that reason I like to have lots of structure around me to make sure that I'm organized. Evernote was possibly the coolest program I've found yet to help me with organization. From my professional to my personal life, this program will be awesome for organization. Since I can share notebooks with people, this will be awesome for sharing recipes with friends or even for creating my weekly grocery list. From a teaching standpoint, this will be great for collecting and storing notes, storing material for lesson plans, and being able to store lesson plans within a cloud. Let me mention that this is the best part of this program! Everything is stored in a cloud, so all I have to do is log on, plus there's even an app I can load onto my phone. To me Evernote is so versatile that it'll make my life that much easier when it comes to organization.

For our presentations I was assigned to Google Drive, which is also a great program. I can see this program being extremely useful for group work or assignments during my classroom lessons. Again, I love that everything I do is saved to a cloud so I can access it at any time from anywhere. I'd like to incorporate this into my classroom with group projects so I can easily monitor what the groups are doing and it also creates a shared space for the groups to work. I was really impressed with Google Drive, but from an organization standpoint, Evernote seems way more useful for everyday life.

Blendspace was also fantastic, and I'm hoping to use this tool for enhancing my lessons with more material. I may choose to run lessons from this website, but so far I'm planning to use this site for supplemental material. Anything extra that I think will be relevant, but not necessary for a lesson will be uploaded here for my students to explore should they be interested in further information regarding a lesson. All three of these tools will be used in my classroom, and I'm completely sold on Evernote.

Just Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Seriously... 20(ish) years later and I still don't know...

Borrowed from thegeektastics.com

The game I chose to take a further look at was Carmen Sandiego series. There are many variations of the game that include "Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego," and "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego." I remember spending hours with these games as a kid, specifically "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego ?" and "Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?" While this game has the obvious history connections in regards to tech and teaching, as an English teacher, it has some other fantastic qualities. Granted my memory is a little rusty, but I remember learning tons of vocabulary from these games. I was able to learn adjectives to describe the suspects that aren't typically learned in school. For example I learned what flaxen-haired was while playing the games. Secondly there were some awesome connections to culture and works of literature that this game promoted. In the 1997 version of "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?" I was introduced to Shakespeare and helping him find his stolen manuscripts in the Globe Theatre. Looking back at this experience through my English teacher lens I see an awesome opportunity to start building factual knowledge without the student actually knowing that they're learning something. Later in my career I was able to draw on this knowledge to have a mental picture of what I thought the Globe Theatre should look like along with some lines of "Romeo and Juliette" already memorized.

After watching the Gee video about video games and learning plus reading his article, I think we owe it to our students to expose them to games like this. In my personal experience I didn't even realize that I was learning. I was building base knowledge about things like Shakespeare before I even knew how to read it! It was really interesting to work backwards and apply Gee's learning principles back to this game. The game really focuses on well-ordered problems because you are a detective with clues to try and catch the bad guys. This game does a great job leading the student to higher order thinking where they are making a hypothesis based on the clues they are provided. This game also does a great job with risk-taking. The student is allowed to make mistakes, and it's ok if the bad guy gets away. The student is allowed to pick the game back up from the beginning of the mission and there's plenty of room for trial and error until the student is able to capture Carmen and her cronies. It's fun looking back at this game through a teaching lens now that I see this game as more of a tool than a toy.


Want to play the games? They're available online! Click Here!

Tech and Teaching... Some Concerns About the Future

So after class on Wednesday I had a few thoughts about tech and my profession. After taking the GRE on a computer and after having an opportunity to experiment with the Smarter Balance lessons, I left the class worried about how I'm going to help my students succeed on tests that are computer based. Now, I'm not that old, but the majority of standardized tests that I've taken were on paper. The strategies that I know how to use on a standardized test are for a paper based test. What really stood out to me on the ELA potion of the Smarter Balance test was the fact that my normal strategies for test taking went out the window.

In preparation for standardized testing I had teachers give specific tactics on how to make a test more manageable. Simple things like crossing out answers that I knew were bogus was always a favorite tactic that my teachers helped me with. I've also been taught/trained myself to look for words I don't know and circle them, make notes in the margins, or even underline phrases that I think are important. With these computer based tests, we can no longer do that. I was appalled that the difficult words in the paragraph were defined for the reader! Part of learning comprehension involves using clues to figure out what words mean. I was really disappointed that the words were served up on a silver platter for the student. Also, because I will be an English teacher, this really concerns me. Many of the Reading Apprenticeship tactics that I will try to teach my students may not work in this situation, so I ask myself "How can I modify my lessons for this new test?"

Another issue I'm concerned about is the comprehension level of my students while they read. During my EDUC 695 class we read the Mangen et al. study titled Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. Essentially this study found that reading comprehension is dramatically lower when the text is read from a screen. Again, as an English teacher, these computerized tests really worry me. Comprehension is a major skill of reading, so I want to make sure that this is a skill I can help my students practice with the least amount of interference as possible. So here I am now, a very confused intern. I feel that this will be one of the biggest challenges in my career, learning to compensate for the new technology that may not be the best tool for my students to use while teaching my students the essential skills that they need to become an effective learner.

All Aboard the Dewey Train!

Not this guy. Malcom in the Middle anyone? (borrowed from USAtoday.com)

This Guy (borrowed from http://dewey.pragmatism.org/)

So I'm hoping I can focus this blog around the "Habits of Mind" that I plan to apply to my theory of teaching, but I have to add a little humor. Hence the pictures above. While I'm still just a novice at this teaching thing, I've already found some nice theories that I want as my foundation for teaching and John Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed" just became another block in that foundation. While reading I kept thinking, "This Dewey guy is definitely onto something!"

The line that drew me in hook, line and sinker was, "Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." After reading this sentence, I immediately pointed at my screen and yelled, "YES! THIS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!" (Well not really, that might disturb my neighbors, but I hope you get the idea.) To me, this phrase emphasized the importance of skills, not factual knowledge. We're teaching our students skills that work for the community as a whole, not the individual. I thought this tied in well to teaching students skills and dispositions, something close to what Ritchhart spoke about in his Intellectual Character piece. Since Dewey does place a heavy emphasis on learning skills rather than facts, he immediately won me over. I'm hoping my classmates may want to start a fan club with me. We could get jackets.

While reading the piece I couldn't believe it's taken almost 100 years for this theory to take hold, and I feel that it still isn't widely practiced in schools yet. This is something that I will want to look into further as I continue my teaching adventure.