This is my first Podcast

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JingaLing

Here it is!!!!

http://www.screencast.com/t/wXmYBKKApWHf

URL to YouTube Video...Welcome to English!!!!!!

Photosharing in the Classroom

My family has used Google Earth before with our friends from South Africa. We stayed up until 1:00 AM taking visual tours of each other's home towns and even our former houses! It was so cool to see where we each came from and that our worlds are not so very different. Google Earth would be really fun to use in class even if it's just to show students the settings of some of the stories they read in class. It opens up the world.

Ways I think I might be able to use photosharing in class will probably seem a little boring. What immediately jumps to mind is finding photos that pertain to the subject being studied to use for writing prompts. There are images of anything imaginable on the web, and to be able to look at them and use them for the beginnings of writings would be great. I could use visual images from the web to discuss mood, personification, point of view, persuasive writing, and so many other topics that are pertinent to literature and language. I could also use it to show students real-life photos that relate to the stories we read in class. They then might be able to picture the story's action a little better. At the moment I'm thinking of To Kill a Mockingbird. If I could show them photos of a little towns in the south that are like Maycomb, they might better understand what the town looks like, and then the plot and the interactions of the characters might make more sense.

Other photo sharing might include students collaborating on group projects, presentations and class projects. They might also view pictures of other students' work from around the world. I'm thinking of having access to projects that some of the students I knew in Korea are doing. It would be a great way to show my American students what is being asked of international students.

It's much easier to think of ways to share photos than reasons to allow students access to a social networking site. Having read the articles about photosharing however, does make me realize that there is a potential risk to having students out there surfing for photos. Still, gathering photos from the current technology is far more powerful than the overhead transparencies I am using now. I am excited by the possibilities of photo sharing in class.

Steve Hargadon Points to Ponder

The first point Hargadon makes about how the freedom of failure makes experimentation more innovative is thought provoking. As a classroom teacher in the public schools, I do not feel like I have the freedom to experiment and fail very often. I'm sure students don't either. Given the emphasis placed on test scores and state standards and no child left behind, there does not seem to be much room that allows for experimentation and failure. So when Hargadon makes the assertion that part of the building of a social networking site is the possibility that it will fail in its original intent is interesting. Learning how to change and grow and meet the needs of the people then becomes the true measure of success.

But I suppose there is an aspect of failing in school. Annie O’Connor and I work together all the time, and we are constantly rethinking, discussing, conversing about how we can improve and change our curriculum to better meet the needs of the current students. It’s empowering. Social networking sites, if used for collaboration among teachers, would be great. I would love to network with my friends in Korea and connect to see how to make a site work for us and then possibly extend it into student interaction—like pen pals but through the internet.

I'm also interested in his sixth point about moderating and guiding the network. If I were to use a social network as a classroom teacher, I would be concerned about users being polite to each other and respecting the boundaries set up for the site. I think in a public school setting there would need to be much more teaching of guidelines and boundaries before students would be able to use it. The way they use their own social network sites would be very different from how to use one for a class, and so the rules would have to be slightly different.

I know there are teachers and districts out there that are already on this bandwagon and using it to great benefit, but a serious limitation I have is that many of my students do not have access to a computer. We are also limited by potential legal ramifications with students. Before we could use social networking sites in class, we would need approval form district admin, parents…the list would be long. And then we would be in the scenario of Will Richardson where we are listening to all the ways we CAN’T use a social network in school. Do I sound pessimistic? I don’t mean to. I would love to collaborate with overseas teachers. I think I need to begin with colleagues and then go from there.

AsianAvenue

I'm writing about the Asian sites because we lived in South Korea for two years and were awed by their use of technology. We found that Koreans were CONSTANTLY connected to cell phones, computers and technology of any kind. We were surprised at the prevalence of cell phones, which they call hand phones, and how often they are used. They took pictures of each other, their food in restaurants, their papers, their hair, each other, and US! We had not seen so much technology in such constant use in the states, so we were a little unprepared for its pervasiveness there. So, I am interested in the Asian social networking sites.

1. What was the target audience for this social networking site?
According to Wikipedia (which I did not edit in this instance) the original intent of one of the first Asian social networking sites, AsianAvenue, was to capture an ethnic audience that shared common political ideas.

2. How long was the site in existence?
The site has been in existence since 1997 and has been very popular, claiming to have attracted more users than Black Planet, which is a "community sister site."

3. Why was it popular? What was its demise?
It seems that most of its popularity arose from its strong political activities and the successes it experienced getting some advertisers to change the way they portrayed Asian women, particularly in relation to white women. Conflicting design intent was stated by a writer who interviewed Yao Ming for the site in which he described the site as being used mostly for dating. So the original intent of the site seems to be a little unclear. Due to the fact that "sometime in 2003" the site began to offer previously free services to "premium users" only, the site lost followers. Subsequently, the site relaunched in 2005 and added more social networking features, which I'm guessing they made available to all members. Since then many musicians have used the site for launching their music, and Barrack Obama created a profile on the site during the presidential campaign.

4. Is/was there another competitor in the same market that was more popular?
Other competitors in their market include MiGente, Cyworld and Black Planet, but I'm not sure whether any of these sites was or are more popular than AsianAvenue. It seems the reason for its falling off was due to cutting some networking services to some of its members.

5. Would you ever consider creating an account and using it? Explain your reason using a personal experience as an example.
Because I am not Asian and this site is for geared toward an Asian community, I would not consider creating profile on it. I'm also not running for a political office, nor am I in a rock band. But more seriously, I have never used a social networking site, even though I have many friends on Facebook. (I may join after this class!) My children are also not quite old enough to have a personal space on any of these sites, but I realize the day is coming and it would be great if I were a baby step ahead of them…maybe?

Wikis in the Classroom

After spending quite a bit of time this week making mistakes on my wiki, trying to fix them, sending frantic messages on the discussion board about how to find my original text--why isn't there an undo button at the top of the wiki page?--I have decided that I just want to go to Hawaii!! Ahhh, but seriously, I can see using a wiki for purposes of putting the day's lessons on it, writing the day's homework assignment, posting charts and graphs and explanations that can be accessed easily by students and parents alike. Other purposes might include creating a class writing where every student is required to contribute a few sentences to a paper or poem or help edit a sample paper. It would be a great place to show exemplars so that students would know what they are to be creating with a piece of writing. Perhaps each class period could have its own wiki which is accessible to only that class and students could turn in assignments in the wiki. I read a wiki, that I can no longer find, that was about literature circles. I have used literature circles in the past and have loved them, but have found the sheer numbers of students I now have make them really difficult to orchestrate. If each group had their own wiki and could post their writings as they read, that might be a way to use it. I'm just writing as I think, so these are random ideas not clearly defined.

The biggest block for me and a classroom wiki is how to manage student use. I watched Richard Buckland's video where he explained how he used it in his class, and he spoke about the "wiki nature" often. He taught college level students. I cannot yet wrap my head around how to use it for high school students. Sometimes it seems a blog would be more useful because it cannot be changed except by the administrator, and if I would put a block on a wiki site so that only I could change the text, then what would be the point of a wiki at all? I even asked some of my students how they thought a wiki might be used in class, but they were a little unclear and said, “Wikipedia? It’s great!” But when I explained what a wiki was, that Wikipedia was not the only one out there, they looked a little puzzled and weren’t sure either. However, I have some really bright students who will probably have some ideas for me next week.

At the moment, with the wiki I created for this class about writing a character analysis, I don't think I would have any expectations for students to contribute. When we read and annotate short stories in class, could I have students annotate the story on the wiki and then print the annotations for the entire class? Would that increase the quality of their work, or would most students just allow the over-achievers to create all the notes?

Clearly I have far more questions than answers, but I spend quite a bit of time pondering how I might use this tool in the future.

Sheryl's Wiki Link

http://sheryledu255.wikispaces.com/

A New Pedagogy

Will Richardson’s blog from Sept 2, titled Opening Days, was quite thought provoking. In it he states that while schools are talking more about technology, it is mostly talk about how to add technology to classrooms instead of conversation about changing education. There is so much more to be done with computers than just word processing, creating power points and doing minimal research, but most school districts are not using technology for much more than these things. It is helpful as a teacher to be able to access the web to find lessons on subjects we’re teaching, but how do we make it a common medium, as common as a textbook, paper and pencil? What would it take to really move our educational system into the 21^st century? Many of these questions seem to be answered in his previous blogs about school districts being monetarily rewarded for maintaining the status quo, and top level administrators who are woefully out of touch with the actual happenings of a classroom, as evidenced in his blog Lawsuits? What Lawsuits?

Let’s face it, money, or the lack thereof, drives the realities of education. We are feeling the squeeze right now, and school districts are no different. How can we improve technology in the classrooms, or even develop a new philosophy of educational technology when we can’t even pay the teachers who are currently standing in the classrooms? How can we supply schools with computer labs, let alone students with laptops, when we can’t even get enough books for students?

I appreciate Richardson’s push to get educators to think about a new pedagogy and his desires for us to ask ourselves the tough questions about education. Are we helping students create? Are we willing to create with them? What are we afraid of? But when I stand in my own classroom and read student writing I wonder if I really need students to be more technologically savvy, or do I really need them to work at becoming more literate? What is the best way to achieve this? Are these ideas mutually exclusive? Writing can only be improved by writing more, whether it’s done with a pencil and paper or keyboard and monitor. Reading can only be improved by reading, so in these instances more technology does not necessarily help. What would be powerful would be letting students converse with their peers across the world about the importance of education, and allow them to dialogue about the realities of their worlds and how they are going to bridge these gaps when they are adults and leading these causes…in just a few years.

Instructional Design Models

Advanced Organizers and the ARCS learning theories differ in their origins. Advanced Organizers are cognitive and focus on how the brain makes sense of new information. The central precept of this system is that the brain is logical and orderly and new information must fit into that system. The focus is how the brain processes and stores new information while connecting it to the old. Most of us have used advanced organizers. They include activities such as skimming a text before reading, anecdotal accounts to pique student interest before beginning a topic, and using graphic organizers, which are visual representations of ways for students to organize new information. KWL charts, cause and effect charts, T charts, concept maps, and webbing are just a few examples of graphic organizers, all of which are given to students before the new topic is introduced. Advanced organizers are pre-learning tools that bridge new information with previous knowledge to help the learner place new concepts into long term memory.
Contrasting with the cognitive approach of advanced organizers is the ARCS design—Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction—which is a motivational theory whose focus is making students want to learn. The idea is to make new concepts enticing and vital at the onset, and then allow students to feel successful upon acquisition of the new material. The difference between the two learning theories is that one is affective—feeling centered—and the other is knowledge driven. Accessing student motivation in order to introduce new concepts is different from constructing schemas on which to “hang” new ideas to help new concepts fit into a “slot” in the brain.
Advanced organizers and ARCS are similar in that both learning systems seek ways to make sense of new information. Both systems try to pique student interest at the outset with similar techniques. Both seek ways to make the learner feel successful, ARCS by allowing learning to take place in small segments, and Advanced Organizers by cuing students to important concepts at the beginning of the lesson. Both theories want to make connections to learning that already exists in the brain.

Beginning Phase of ARCS Lesson
To Kill a Mockingbird Introduction

General characteristics of audience—15 year old regular education sophomore students. Prior knowledge with themes of the story involve prejudice felt for being teenagers, racism, single parent households, hypocrisy, growing up, injustice, familiarity with literary elements
Demographics: most students come from middle to lower middle class households, many single parent households; many deal with the ideas in the novel such as racism, injustice, socioeconomic difficulties
Motivations: most students will fight reading this novel because they will not see that it has any relevance for them, but once they read it they love it. I also tell them there’s bad language, a drug addicted old woman, a hermaphrodite snowman…what more could they want? When they really fight the reading I tell them how sad it is at the end when they get blow up by a bomb…some kids actually read just for that and are disgusted to find out that does not happen--but they read it.
Societal factors: General lack of importance placed on education and reading.

ARCS: Attention: agree/disagree statements
Have students decide whether or not they agree or disagree with specific statements geared toward the themes of the novel.
Example: 1) In America, everyone has the same chance to succeed as everyone
else.
2) A hero is someone who succeeds at whatever he or she sets out to do.
Response is either in philosophical chairs or journal entries.
Relevance: Some of the relevance is the fact that it is a required reading for sophomore English students. But when we discuss the themes involved in the book, many students see that many ideas are still issues today.
Confidence: We read sections of the novel at a time answering study guides as we go.
Satisfaction: Many students feel great satisfaction having completed a book, liking the book and understanding the important ideas in it as demonstrated through various activities along the way and testing.

Teaching Philosophy

As a new teacher, my educational philosophy was vague. I believed that teachers were visionaries and facilitators and students were eager learners who would actively pursue knowledge based on desire, and if not that, then my enthusiasm and dazzling personality. I was wrong, and since returning from South Korea two years ago, my philosophy has changed. I now believe that students need to learn how to be resourceful, learn how to find answers that cannot be found in textbooks, learn to become independent thinkers, and finally, learn how to work. So, my educational philosophy is a work in progress.

Resourcefulness is a trait that seems to be lacking in today’s American student. Too often students rely on the teacher to point out the answer on a specific page, or if the information is not in bold print, then students stop looking for it. They cannot seem to think of alternative ways to find information. The ability to seek answers and gain knowledge are qualities students will always need to have and will remain a necessary component of a well-educated person despite our access to technology or lack thereof.

Thinking independently is another quality students must develop if they are ever to compete in a global market. Many of today’s students will be working in fields that may not currently exist. If they do not learn to think for themselves in a creative way, where will our next innovators come from? If we want the future generations to be able to find alternative fuel sources, be problem solvers and budget balancers (did I say that?), then they must learn to think of questions and answers that are not currently in textbooks or created and answered by a teacher.

Finally, students must develop a work ethic. The most striking difference between the American student and students I saw overseas is the ability to work until the job is done. Korean students are relentless workers. They are also interested in how to improve and constantly seek to increase the quality of their work. My students here resent having to work hard and most see little value in working to improve; they are working to just get it done. This is a deadly attitude. I think that the apathy toward learning is actually the greatest risk to students today. The ability to work hard, even when the task is not entertaining, has application and value that extends far beyond the classroom. Somehow a willingness to work needs to be revived within students.

Resourceful, independent thinking and hard working students do exist in my classes. My challenge is to shape more of them into that mold.

First blog posting

Greetings! This is my first blog post.