So it is officially almost the end of the semester and I am as tired as ever. Having recently realized that I have blogged nowhere near enough, I am making a last chance attempt at recovering my grade. I have worked so hard in this class (iMovie, in particular) and would hate to receive a less than stellar grade just because of my blogging habit (or lack thereof).
Tracie and I spent an entire day over the break trying to sift through everything that we experienced at the NYSCATE conference. After almost 8 hours of work, we have only partially completed 2 out of 7 pages. We tried to upload a Windows Movie Maker file of the interviews that we conducted while at the conference, but after a very long time of attempted uploading, we gave up. The file was not very large (only about 4 minutes), so why would this happen? Is it possibly a flaw with wmm? I used iMovie to do our falls movie, so I am a complete novice when it comes to wmm. Any suggestions? As of now, we are just going to use iMovie to try to overcome this obstacle.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Monday, November 06, 2006
Encounter with Technology --Social Studies 9th Grade
I was a Social Studies teacher today and the 9th grade classes (there were two doing this today) were working in the library Mac lab. I was stoked to hear that a subject commonly thought of as removed from technology (much like English), was utilizing the power of the web for learning. My hopes and dreams at the possibility of this beautiful junction were quickly shattered. A detailed account of my crash follows:
There were about 25 kids in each class. They were working in groups of 4 or 5 and each had a specific task they were to complete before collaborating to complete the project (a brochure for a country in Africa...hopefully more detailed and nuanced than a common tourist would want). Each student claimed they had already done their part...and proceeded to surf around on the Internet. There was no academic focus visible! I literally spent all of my time in these two periods walking around the computer lab making sure they were doing something at least partially academically related. There was no collaboration evident, though I reminded them that this was a group assignment. Out of each group, there was one studious, dedicated person who was assembling the information that they and their group had gathered on their specific country. In addition to forcing them to steer clear of sites that they were clearly not getting information from (web games, searching iTunes for a song they wanted, or viewing the latest upload to YouTube) I had my hands more than full trying to keep them from playing bumper chairs!
I am seriously hoping that this level of disobedience and lack of excitement about working in the computer lab using technology to learn, was simply due to the fact that I was a sub and therefore, didn't need to be respected. With the way that we have been talking about technology in classroom, I was really expecting that the kids would be chomping at the bit to research and learn on the web. But all they wanted to do was waste time and differ responsibility.
I guess that it does all come back to if they actually WANT to learn whatever the subject is...and apparently, they had little to no interest in learning about the countries in Africa. This teacher's idea was pretty cool and allowed the students a fair amount of creative freedom, but the kids were still not incredibly responsive. How can we as teachers instill in the students a sense of responsibility over their own learning, especially when we are allowing them to take more control?
Can any of you share your experiences with this sort of project and/or situation? Do you think they were being crazy difficult simply because their "real" teacher wasn't there?
P.S. Luckily, I had three other classes that went very well and I was also able to listen to a very interesting political debate during two of those three, or I would be thoroughly bummed.
There were about 25 kids in each class. They were working in groups of 4 or 5 and each had a specific task they were to complete before collaborating to complete the project (a brochure for a country in Africa...hopefully more detailed and nuanced than a common tourist would want). Each student claimed they had already done their part...and proceeded to surf around on the Internet. There was no academic focus visible! I literally spent all of my time in these two periods walking around the computer lab making sure they were doing something at least partially academically related. There was no collaboration evident, though I reminded them that this was a group assignment. Out of each group, there was one studious, dedicated person who was assembling the information that they and their group had gathered on their specific country. In addition to forcing them to steer clear of sites that they were clearly not getting information from (web games, searching iTunes for a song they wanted, or viewing the latest upload to YouTube) I had my hands more than full trying to keep them from playing bumper chairs!
I am seriously hoping that this level of disobedience and lack of excitement about working in the computer lab using technology to learn, was simply due to the fact that I was a sub and therefore, didn't need to be respected. With the way that we have been talking about technology in classroom, I was really expecting that the kids would be chomping at the bit to research and learn on the web. But all they wanted to do was waste time and differ responsibility.
I guess that it does all come back to if they actually WANT to learn whatever the subject is...and apparently, they had little to no interest in learning about the countries in Africa. This teacher's idea was pretty cool and allowed the students a fair amount of creative freedom, but the kids were still not incredibly responsive. How can we as teachers instill in the students a sense of responsibility over their own learning, especially when we are allowing them to take more control?
Can any of you share your experiences with this sort of project and/or situation? Do you think they were being crazy difficult simply because their "real" teacher wasn't there?
P.S. Luckily, I had three other classes that went very well and I was also able to listen to a very interesting political debate during two of those three, or I would be thoroughly bummed.
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