Week+9+Reflective+Journal

I like the video for this week. I especially like the fact that the presenters acknowledged the fact that with all the new advances in technology, teachers feel like it will be impossible to keep up. It is so overwhelming. Of all the programs that he mentioned as well as the ones David Warlick mentioned at the conference, I feel like the only ones I can say anything about is the wiki and Picassa. I was hoping to be able to experiment with some more. I know that many of these programs are self taught. If the kids can figure them out so can we but the main problem for me seems to be the time factor. When can you do it all? It all feels so alien sometimes.

I could not figure out what the gaps were all about in the needs assessment. I'm a big picture kind of person. It was very confusing because I did not know what it was I was supposed to be looking for. I was asked to take a look at what some of the other girls were doing. I finally just said, "I don't have a clue as to what this is all about. Why have we spent so much time on this, What about the other stuff we are supposed to do? So finally Kathy said, "We need to see where we as teachers are lacking, as well as what the students have not been exposed to. Then we will have to write that into the plan for professional development and try to use what we learn in the classroom." Bingo, that all I needed to hear. I just never connected the idea of gaps to that. I'm ok with it all now. But it made me realize that we probably do that to our students. We use words in our expectations and they have now clue where we are going with it all. It is certainly how I have felt.

I learned something about the moodle that I did not know after watching the video. I did not know that you can not view other people's posts until you have posted your own. That is really good because it can prevent students from seeing other posts until they have done theirs. We have a problem in the classroom with students copying other people's work if they can get away with it. I was wondering what would happen once they figured out if they saw someone else's they could then respond without doing a whole lot. That is brilliant. I have seen in the past that they will copy word for word from another person's work. It seems we need to work on doing your work honestly.

I think that good pedagogy coupled with proper content and the proper use of technology can profoundly enhance education. We need to engage teachers first with the desire to better the outcome of the students learning. We got our Ipod touch yesterday. I was very skeptical with this idea. First I thought they would be too small and the students would drop them. I had never seen one before. When the kids saw me with it, they were so interested in telling me all about it. I can see how it may really be useful for pod casts prior to a lesson. I also think that laptops would be better useful for typing in large amounts of information. OUr school improvement plan requires us to teach 21st century skills. I can see some ideas for bringing other teachers on board with this idea. The biggest barrier is lack of common planning time. I have always believed that you make believers out of people one at a time. That is what we must do get one teacher on board at a time. And we must insist that administration backs our belief that this will enhance student learning.