"And just like that it's over. We tend to our wounded and count our dead." - Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton Well, this is it. The FINAL blog of my graduate school career. I have spent the last two weeks in a very reflective mood. I was thinking about my last minute (a day before the first class) decision to jump on the Touro Train. I am very glad that I did.
Perhaps it is only in building all the pieces of my website that I really understood how far we've traveled. All the little pieces I've added to the LIL are snapshots of the hard work and learning that has taken place. When I started putting the website together, it seemed an impossible task with far too many empty spaces to fill. Now, as I work on polishing it, and on my final presentation screencast, I can't seem to find a way to squeeze everything in. There are far too many stories, experiences and lessons to fit into a website or into a brief video. My reaction to these final assignments is one that I want my students to have as they come to the close of a project. I want them to reflectively look back and understand how much they have accomplished and how very far they have traveled. This might be a pretty big undertaking for 7 year olds. I really appreciate how this process, beginning with research and then moving forward has caused me to be very thoughtful about what happens within my classroom. It isn't enough to come up with carefully prepared lessons, I must evaluate and analyze those lessons based on the outcome. I might be aiming to teach my students how useful and effective computer science can be, but I need to assess whether or not that is what they have gained in my classroom. An effective teacher is in a constant research loop - designing, testing and redesigning. But it is not the students we are testing, but rather our lessons. As I design my website, I am always finding places where I can increase clarity and/or make overall improvements. Like the craft of teacher, I am in a constant state of self-evaluation. Good teaching involves self-evaluation that is always running in the background of every lesson, and this model will hopefully lead our students to become more self-reflective themselves as they determined their own levels of learning and understanding.
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After spending 18 years teaching in the private school system, I found myself without a job. I was a teacher without a classroom. I spent the next year and a half substitute teaching in the Napa Valley Unified School District. I subbed at every high school, middle school and nearly every elementary school in our district. I worked nearly every single day, and learned a lot about the schools in Napa. All of which is a really long way to say that I discovered that Phillips Elementary isn't like any other school in the district. I was so happy to be added to their staff four years ago, and three years ago my principal tasked me with creating and building a powerful tech program for our students. As a result, we've spent a bit of time talking about technology and the ways we want to empower our students. Most recently, we discussed the impact of tech on our youngest of students, who are coming to the Technology Design Lab for the first time this school year. Our emphasis for this young students is to build both literacy and computer literacy. We learned just last Wednesday (Sept 27th) that we have been given a grant and now are a magnet school. Our emphasis will be on leadership and technology . We had so many discussions last year as we went through the grant process about the role of technology in connection with the idea of leadership. The conclusion that we came to was that students today must have strong digital skills if they are to be effective leaders in their community. They must not only know how to use technology, but must understand the social, emotional and academic impact of technology. As students lead in their community, they can utilize their digital skills to communicate, rally and share their projects, ideas, and plans. We have relied on the ISTE standards for students, and they have been our standards. As a result of this grant, we are working on creating a clear, and succinct statement of what a successful graduate of Phillips Magnet School will look like. We are writing our mission statement as we begin this new journey. However, this mission statement has already been lived out for the past few years, as we already have embraced the idea that we must include a powerful digital toolbox in order to educate leaders. As a Title 1 school, we have spent many years trying to provide equity for our students. Creating a strong technology program was one way that we felt we could level the playing field for our students. Over time, I recognized that having strong digital skills could take my students from catching up to their peers, to providing them with an edge. Beginning to introduce them to the world of script languages: Java Script, html/CSS, SQL and Swift, provides students with a more advanced understanding of computer science, but also begins to introduce them to a new field. Students become exposed to all the many job opportunities associated with those skills. This is significant in a community such as ours.
One of my 4th grade students was able to spend the afternoon at Pixar studios, as result of our work in computer science. I had to wait outside the gates while she attended this amazing day, but on the ride home, she shared what she had learned with me, and her words demonstrate the powerful impact that technology can have on my students. "They have basketball courts, and a pool, and an exercise room for their workers. I think that is really cool." Here is where I expected her to talk about the fun of having those available to you, but my students seem to always surprise me. Instead she said, "It's like they care about you. They think it is important to be healthy, and so they have places for people to exercise. I want to work for a company like that. A company that knows I'll work better if I feel better. It's like you matter." She was 10 at the time. I try to keep this conversation close to me as we develop and craft our final, official tech mission statement. As with all other things in education, humans are at the heart of all our words, objectives and plans. Technology is just one more way to allow our students to express themselves, so that they can build a powerful, new world for themselves and their families. This is our mission statement: HOPE. GottfriedIt is a little difficult for me to consider Lisa Gottfried's blog without factoring in all the things I know about her. She and I both are part of the original Digital Innovator's program with Napa Learns. We've spent many hours together trying to determine the best ways to inspire teachers to embrace innovation and bring technology into the classroom. This is what I know about her without even reading her entries; she is brilliant. This is not an exaggeration or rhetoric. She is one of the most intelligent, thoughtful people I have ever met, so it is no surprise that her blog is exemplary. Her presentation on all aspects of her project is thoughtful and clear. I could turn to any section and understand not only her thought process, but also the implications, examples and impact of the project as a whole. I really enjoyed when she included entries from her students as a deep look inside how everything can play out with actual students. I loved this thought that she penned, " How do we harness the power of blogging to get students jobs, create authentic writing tasks, and strengthen our learning community? " The idea that contained within the heart of her project was the idea of empowering students not just for now, but also for the future. Her target audience, teachers, were addressed at every turn. Her clarity of focus on demonstrating the ways that student blogging can enhance their learning and empower them for their own futures was clear within each page of her blog. She kept her main audience in front of her and it showed even in her choices for the student work she showcased. She was making a strong, and persuasive argument for the implementation of blogging in the classroom. DearbornAnn Dearborn's research project was also a close look at blogging in the classroom. Her project involved the use of blogs to encourage and improve student responses with their own and one another's reading. Her audience, like Gottfried, was teachers, and encouraged consideration for the use of this technique in more classrooms. Again her writing was tuned into her main audience - educators. Her reasons and research for the use of blogs within the classroom was clear, and she showed her thought process as she developed her thinking towards this technological integration within a reading classroom. I loved this question that she asked, " How could I make home reading more engaging for my students?" because it is one that many teachers ask themselves. The push to increase engagement and excitement with reading is the pot at the end of the rainbow that all teachers seek. SaslowAlexander Saslow's Build-a -Unit Toolbox is a project with science teachers at it's heart. His clear enlargements, and strong voice, compel you to understand that this toolbox will not only benefit science teachers, like himself, but all educators who desire to have a logical, streamlined and efficient method of planning lessons to support students. Saslow's title implies that he is reaching out to science teachers, but a more accurate description would be that he is speaking to all teachers and administrators who want their students to benefit from thoughtful connection between the never-ending world of standards and the everyday classroom. He makes this clear when he says, "This is the reason for this project - to make the standards accessible for ALL teachers." In all cases, it is not just the stated audience that comes across but rather that every aspect of their project is geared toward a specific goal - to enhance learning for students and to bring clarity and efficiency to the classroom. Toward this end, all three of these projects focus on speaking to teachers, but the result of their efforts is to benefit students. Dervin's Sense-Making is not for the faint of heart. It is a concept that requires careful reading, rereading, and thought. I found that the best way to understand what I was reading was to create pictures and diagrams. This helped me understand what was being communicated to me. I also read the article in small chunks and then reread it another time using my own drawings as references. Interestingly, the drawings that I created nearly matched some of the diagrams that were included in the reading. This gave me a sense that I was understanding what I was reading. This confidence led me to continue forward, and make more notes and drawings. It was the encouragement that I needed to reassure me that my understanding was on the right path.
Dervin was trying to communicate the important idea that it is essential to understand HOW individuals make sense of the world around them. Specifically for my classroom experience, it would be helpful for my to understand how students make sense of HTML or CSS. If I have a clear understanding of THEIR understanding, I can connect to them in ways that help THEM make sense. Relying on MY understanding doesn't necessarily assist my students. I need to consider things from their perspective and must understand how THEY make sense of computer programming so that I can better help them bridge the gap of their understanding. Sharing the material that Dervin has written with others would be no small task. Understanding my "students" for this task would be essential. I would of course break into chunks as that is the way that I and my colleagues approached it. But it would be important to understand how my students best learn new and complex material. Do they learn best through video examples? Role play? Reading? If I were to truly explain and assist them across the gap I would need to understand how they make sense of complicated information. What would be the most effective way for them to bridge that gap of understanding. Sense-Making
Perhaps the reason that sense making is such a complex and dense topic is simply because it is taking a close look at human behavior and humans themselves are complex. Sense making is a beautiful portrait of the complexities involved in education. Students are infinitely unique, and thus the way the understand and interpret the world around them is infinitely unique. Sense making is an approach to understanding these complexi |
AuthorJen has been teaching school for awhile now. She's learned some stuff, but she's got tons more to learn. Archives
October 2017
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