reflexiones

I was so grateful to be able to listen to and talk to the three MAC alumni who were kind enough to come and share their experiences with us. It's great to hear about the different kinds of situations (great tech help like Andrea has; little interest in tech like in the school that Kevin student taught in) we might encounter.

Each of them were (as was the point, no doubt!) inspiring in their use of technology. I loved the idea of Facebook "office hours"; using cell phones to access internet in classrooms (or schools) with few computers. I'm also really curious about Moodle--if it's like C-Tools, I can certain see the benefit of it; I can't imagine my university career (I did my undergrad at UM, too) without it.  I loved Larry's idea, too, about using FB to connect with students and to get them excited about their subject *and* to teach them a bit about internet etiquette. And I will remember Kevin's suggestion to look into funds for things when their is something that I want for my class or for the school--that there might be things out there that aren't openly advertised and to look for them.

I also enjoyed our (brief) discussion about the readings and it has me particularly excited about the point-counterpoint looking into whether schools should conform to students or students to school. I have been fairly optimistic up to this point about the possibilities technology offers to students; this week's readings, however, have reminded me of what I'm convinced are very real downsides that have to be examined.

I asked Lauren about her evolution as a teacher and, goddess though she apparently is, was very reassuring and hopefully suggested that one doesn't really become the teacher they are going to be until (as everyone says) the third year; she says she made lots of mistakes along the way. As inspired as I have been by all these teachers we have met (in this class, and also in Shari's class), sometimes I feel overwhelmed. It's great to remember that now I'm taking it all in, and it's a process, and I will become the teacher I want to be.

Finally, it's been a really interesting, rewarding, challenging (and SHORT!) semester and I am genuinely looking forward to returning in the fall.

Not, however--truth be told--until enjoying a bit of Spanish sun!

Saludes desde España y que todos lo pasen bien el agosto!!!! Hasta septiembre!

Mindless chasing

After talking a lot in class about how technology can provide really great teaching tools, I think these were the first two articles that we've read that directly (and ominously!) articulated some of the fears that have been expressed by many throughout the class.

Who can't relate to the seeking behavior described in Emily Yoffe's article? At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, I have had days where I blow hours of my life on the internet, checking with glee my round of things I like to look at and finishing with a sort of empty feeling like, What have I really done here? What have I really accomplished? Why do I get so excited to check my email or see if so-and-so has updated their blog?

I remember the same feeling when I finished high school and traveled for a year around the U.S. and Europe--we'd have mail days where mail (as in, actual letters and packages and things) were forwarded to our group wherever we were and I remember relishing them and looking excitedly in my mail box to see if there was anything there. But I feel like that's different. Why? Maybe simply because checking my (real, physical) mailbox to see if I'd gotten mail wasn't something I could do repeatedly, constantly, or which could turn into other activities like googling for hours on end. And even if I did, I would at least get exercise walking to the post!

A couple other personal observations: if I am on the internet before bed, even if I'm exhausted, I get this weird little second wind and wind up staying up too late. I have heard that the internet (and TV, too--but we don't have TV) really stimulate the brain and so you shouldn't go online before bed. I have made it a rule not to bring my laptop into my bed! On the other hand, I *have* to read before I go to bed. It relaxes me! On the one hand it seems like, well, why should the two be so different--aren't I "reading" online, too? But we do really interact differently with books than with the internet. My attention span online is much less than it is with a book (god, even with a book sometimes I find my attention span is not what it used to be! Especially after spending a lot of time online!) But online sometimes I'll read like a few words of an article and start kind of itching to read something else! Much has been said and written about this, I know, so I mention it just to say that, yeah, my personal experience bears it out.

In terms of the Klapperstuck article, I appreciated the acknowledgment that the attributes of Generation M mentioned in the article are generalizations--they are not shared by all supposed members of that generation, and they *are* shared by people outside of that generation. I have already mentioned ways in which my patience and attention span have been reduced since actively using technology and I'm not a member of this generation.

Yet this is (again, generally) the first *whole generation* to be connected the way Generation M is, and that is worth examining. My daughter, who is four, says to me sometimes, "Mommy, I want to watch baby tigers on your computer." And I marvel that for her, seeing whatever she wants whenever she wants is just a given ("When I was her age! Blah blah blah ten feet of snow blah blah blah Dewey Decimal System blah blah blah"!) (Ah--the internet also makes being a parent easier, though!--when my daughter asks me "Mommy, why do leaves changes colors?" I can say, "Um, I'll tell you in a minute" *google: p-h-o-t-o-s-y-n-t-h-e-s-i-s*)

I read a book years ago called Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, and have read a bit from an emerging field of psychology that looks at the same problem, and I really think people need to be invested in things other than technology. I really believe there is something to be said for the connection that people form to their environment when they are NOT distracted from it and NOT multitasking and are just there, in nature. Don't we have a responsibility as educators and citizens to encourage students to develop this connection? To experience life "disconnected" from technology in order to connect to other things that technology (I suspect) prevents them from connecting with.

On that note, I'm off in a few days to spend ten days in the mountains on the sea in Valencia with my family where I will have not internet connection! But oh the joy of checking my email and going back online when we return!!!

webdings and things

We had a great discussion with Jeff today that began with the Xu Bing (who, incidentally, does a lot of amazing things playing with language and meaning in his art) text (there I go again with "text"--although it's pretty appropriate here, I think) and ended up tying in the readings about gaming. Some of the highlights of that discussion for me were:

-What Mindy said about "developing a tolerance for ambiguity." Yes! That really resonated with me as a world language student *and* future teacher of world languages. But I think it's a sentiment that could apply across disciplines. Couldn't it connect a bit with what Dan Meyer says about "being less helpful"? Get kids used to the feeling of not having all the "formulas," of not playing "guess what's in the teacher's head" (as I recently read) and let them feel free to discover the answers, guided not just by the tools we are teaching them but by their own thinking and intuition...

Which connects with:

-What J said (or was he echoing B?--ah, yes, it was her idea about "safe" something-or-others (it's late, I'm tired and my brain functioning is diminishing!--but it was a gaming term I think)...but the idea that intrigued me was the idea that games are these safe spaces for kids to fail and how (as Gee was asking) can we make SCHOOLS safe spaces for kids to fail?

The session with K was daunting and I ended up getting a little overwhelmed at the end but I did do it, and it was fun, and I look forward to working more with podcasts and getting more familiar with them.

I'm already thinking about the This I Believe assignment and starting to think about, well, what DO I believe? In some ways it seems like we just started the program, what convictions could I possibly have at this point? In other ways, however, we've been eating sleeping drinking breathing this program for the past five weeks and I know that I am developing ideas, beliefs, intuitions and curiosities about a great number of things! Reflecting on those things and being able to articulate them will be a really great exercise, I think.

gaming

This week's texts (I'm using "texts" in the cultural studies/eduspeak/Charlie and Deanna sense of the word) were pretty eye-opening to me because I hadn't really bothered thinking about gaming much before to challenge my own stereotypes about gamers as kind of losery, social inept teenage boys--even though I have known plenty of gamers who didn't fit this stereotype (well, and, erm, a few who did)!

I think both the James Paul Gee reading and the talk by Jane McGonigal made me realize some perhaps important distinctions. Namely, once again (I'm being reminded of this a lot in this class) that Technology is not just this big monolithic thing. One of the point-counterpoint topics is about (I'm paraphrasing), should schools conform to today's kids and their use of technology and the kinds of media they are consuming, or should kids conform to schools expectations of what is important to learn, etc. What this week's material kind of signaled for me is that games might well be deserving of serious consideration because they don't at all seem to fit the criticisms normally leveled at Kids Today and Their Technology! By which I mean, they don't seem to make kids impatient, shallow, socially inept, pale blobs. Rather, as I've been convinced, gaming seems to instill patience, strategy, and what did McGonigal call it? Urgent optimism? And a need to form complex relationships built around a common goal. I mean, that's amazing, right?

But the questions that I'm left with are, How much does that apply or can be applied to Real Life? Certainly Jane McGonigal thought there was evidence that it could be (the work she did with the games built around a world crisis or social justice issue kind of thing), and Gee made a strong case for why real life should be more like games. How much transferability of skill/knowledge is there between gaming and real life? If you are able to form all these meaningful, world-changing relationships in a game, could you do the same in real life? The stereotype about gamers would say no. But what does the research say? I'm looking forward to talking about all this in class...

librarians are the world's coolest people

I'm not just trying to suck up, either!

I have a dear friend who is a library in British Columbia, Canada and she is one of the coolest, smartest and best people I know; she is the first person that shattered the stereotype for me of librarians as little old ladies who constantly whisper "hush". Librarians are keepers of knowledge, guardians of knowledge, guides to knowledge, lovers of new ideas and new technologies, etc.!

[as an aside, here is what I remember of my elementary school librarian, who was an old--at least to me--buy sturdy German lady with a really thick accent who taught us the Dewey Decimal System (John Dewey!). She was talking to my class one day about how hard it is to define some words, How, for instance, she asked in her strong German accent, would you define the word 'try'? Only because of her accent, I thought she said "tie," which I thought was quite easy to define!]

Anyway, I feel very grateful to have been given the opportunity to work in our group with J, who was amazing, ebullient, and an incredible font of knowledge. Her commitment to teachers and teaching was evident, and should I end up in a school with a librarian as committed as her (or the other librarians that we met), I would consider myself lucky.

What particularly struck me about our lesson: how a good librarian can really help you have a vision and keep focused on the learning. How important it is to teach kids about good resources, that there is more to the world that google. J helped us find some of those resources. (Incidentally, this is one of the point-counterpoint topics that interests me most--the one about finding good resources in the digital age, although truth be told I found all of the topics super interesting and would be perfectly happy with any of them). I was also intrigued by the possibilities that google docs provide as a way of democratizing learning and making group work more transparent to the teacher--and, importantly, facilitating collaboration between students. J. had some other suggestions for us as to how to further promote sharing of ideas and findings like a multi-class Skyping session. C. suggested Skyping with students in Japan, J and others in the group pointed out some of the logistical difficulties with this but I thought it was a good idea and at least a promising suggestion of some of the possibilities technology holds for connecting people.

[Another aside: when I was in 7th grade, our class had pen pals in Japan. I adored receiving letters from Yoshi, which were always in translucent rice paper envelopes and contained stickers that were wacky photographs of her. Over the years, we eventually began emailing each other, but nothing beat the thrill of those little letters from her in her careful little handwriting!]

My final takeaway from the class, which I mentioned in our debriefing, was how many really rich possibilities there are for working cross-curricularly, and the incredible benefit that offers to students by making their learning more relevant and connections between ideas more apparent, but also to teachers as a way of collaborating and thinking about the big picture of what we think education should be for our students. The implications there are, I think, amazing. And it kind of connects with my earlier thoughts about my own content area, and how much more broadly I think of what my job is than just to teach grammar and vocabulary.

The great strength of the MAC program, as I have experienced it so far, is exactly this kind of communication across classes and subjects. I am amazed at how connected everything is; I am (*we* are, I think) constantly connecting some we read or talked about to something else in another class. So my own learning is making me think about teaching...

la asignatura marginada!

I enjoyed the reading about backwards planning and found that the idea of it really resonates with me. We have read/talked so much (in what classes? It's all blurring together now...) about the pitfalls of planning a really awesome lesson plan without thinking about where it fits in the context of the larger educational goals. Wait, Bob Bain mentioned something about that on our first day (about how he had a mentor that helped him think through his great idea and really put it in context); we also read the thing about the teacher who did something with Shakespeare (um, sorry, it's late! Brainpower is diminishing!) but then never mentioned it again, etc.

Reading through the NYT teaching section was amazing; it is incredible how many resources there are out there. I was disappointed (if not unsurprised) that there was very little that addresses my content area. I was told before joining the program by a former student that world languages students are sometimes treated (or their subjects are treated, I should say) as kind of like the bastard children of all the subjects. I think part of that has to do with the difficulty of defining what it is a world languages teacher does, and what, if anything, is the agreed upon goal of teaching a foreign language?

This question really intrigued me as an undergraduate studying two foreign languages, because on the one hand studying languages is a humanities field: you are reading literature, watching films, writing papers, etc. But there is also a cultural/historical/political component: you can take history classes, anthro classes, etc. And the particular focus can depend, too, on the language you study. In my case, for example, my Spanish major was in general much more sort of liberal arts focused, whereas with the Chinese major I took more polisci and history classes--I suppose because there more people interested in Chinese who wanted to pursue politics or business or something like that. Studying a foreign language can also be a study of linguistics and, in particular, second language acquisition. And there is the fact that for every student who just really wants to read Don Quixote, there is a pre-med student who wants to put on their med school app that they are fluent in Spanish.

So all this makes me think about my content area, and how important it is that I understand my goals as a teacher--this fits in with both of the readings for this week. I have an idea that I want all my students to learn to speak Spanish (or begin to learn), obviously, but also that I want them to understand something about history, other cultures and social issues.

But I think it will be important for me to read more from world language teachers to hear how they imagine their job and their goals as educators. For this I am grateful that we are being introduced to new resources; indeed, I hope to find answers to these questions that I pose from blogs and from twitter...and who knows where else.

#notawasteoftimeatall!

Antonia was a great saleswoman for Twitter (better than Kim K!). I think after listening to her sing its praises, however, what most worries me is that it's just so much to keep up with. I don't mean the tweets themselves (I liked her advise to just let them go and don't worry about reading everything), but I mean learning all of the possible ways to use Twitter. I suppose I'm not very confident in my ability to master Twitter (etc.) but I'm trying not to freak out and just take things one step at a time.

I'm looking very forward to our project dealing with the tsunami in Japan, and feeling very grateful that we will have the opportunity to work with all these librarians. I'm already trying to think of ways that this topic could be used in a world language classroom; it doesn't seem like the most obvious framework for dealing with this topic but I'm willing to admit to a (hopefully temporary) lack of imagination.

Somewhat relatedly, I watched the TED talk with Dan Meyer that Antonia (or Kristen?) linked to on Twitter and I found it really compelling. To a large extent, I think what he has to say resonates across subject lines. I kept thinking about, for instance, prescriptive grammar rules like math formulas. We can teach children foreign languages by just giving them the "formulas" and giving them texts to plug in those formulas. Or we can make them think about those rules and what they mean and why they mean that and really work to figure out how to apply them. I'm excited to develop ideas over the next year of how technology can be part of that process of me learning to engage my students in genuine learning.

questioning my own assumptions

The articles that we read for this week have made me feel, frankly, a bit silly for being so stubborn about twitter and why it's stupid and the downfall of our society. Such pointless hand-wringing and pearl-clutching! I'm on FB and even though there are a lot of things about FB that drive me bonkers (um, a LOT of things), I'm always defending it to my mom, who is not on FB and is utterly perplexed by it. My mind is opening to the possible benefits of other forms of technology (in particular Twitter, the focus of this week's readings) to us as future educators.

One thing I found really resonant was when I think it was Kristen (or both Kristen and Jeff?) suggested that rather than handicap today's children and make them unable to speak in full-sentences or look other human's in the eye, that new technology like cell phones and FB and Twitter can actually enhance their ability to communicate by adding another approach to their arsenal of ways to communicate. And, really, why should the two be mutually-exclusive? It reminds me of a book that I read by Robert Lane Greene called "You Are What You Speak" in which he defends the perennial accusation that too much slang/too many "dialects" (a loaded word in linguistics) is infiltrating our language and that Kids Today aren't going to be able to speak proper English! In fact, he asserts, they can, they always have been able to, and they are perfectly capable of code-switching depending on the circumstances. Why can't the same be true of technology?

(Here is a link to an article that talks about Greene's book; granted it is only very peripherally related to the topic of this class and even of this blog post, but it is interesting!)

The Ferguson article in particular made me excited to think about Twitter as a tool for connecting with other teachers. I thought of it specifically in the context of being one possible answer to the problem of teachers not sharing with each other (being disincentivized to do so) in environments where merit pay reigns and job security is weak. Communities of educators built over Twitter could be one way of keeping teachers out of isolation, in collaborative environments without the direct worry of "helping the competition."

The "Tweacher" article helped me begin to think about creative ways to approach Twitter in the classroom. Some of the ideas the author shared really struck me because they seemed the exact opposite of what many of us fear when we think about technology in education. That is, rather than isolating students, they could be ways of connecting students and building on ideas (I'm thinking of the use of hashtags like #hamlet to create references for students to later refer to, creating an archive of discussions on Twitter so students can see how they have built and evolved ideas over the course of a semester, and the "Hearts, Keys and Puppetry" project started by Neil Gaiman (*heart*) that allows students to connect with complete strangers to create a living story)...

My final thought it slightly unrelated, but it involves the warnings in the third article to "Tweet safely"...this reminds me that technology has the potential to introduce another layer of responsibility to the teacher...teaching their students how to protect themselves and their privacy, and possibly how to conduct themselves in the online world. What are the implications of that?

first impressions

Our first session has planted lots of little seeds in my mind that I'm excited about developing over the course of the year to come...

What is technology? Watching the clip from the 1940s ('47?) hygiene film, we talked about (that is Jeff pointed out that) film was an early educational technology; Kristen and Jeff mentioned a colleague who studies regular cell phones (that is, not smart phones) as a classroom technology... "Technology is the making, usage and knowledge of tools, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or serve some purpose. The word technology comes from Greek τεχνολογία (technología); from τέχνη (téchnē), meaning "art, skill, craft", and -λογία (-logía), meaning "study of-".^[1] The term can either be applied generally or to specific areas: examples include construction technology, medical technology, and information technology." (Ha--guess where that quote came from! Go ungulates!) How can what we define as technology change the way we feel about its role in the classroom?


Talking about our memories of technology made me a) feel really old and b) begin to think critically about my own experience with technology and what I have found useful. For instance, I had one particular teacher who used power points in basically the way that Kristen demonstrated that our students probably will--that is, with lots of random bullet points and without any clear logic or order. I had another teacher who used power points in a way that was actually really compelling and thoughtful. Which makes me realize that perhaps we can't argue that any given technology is necessarily just GOOD or BAD but rather we should think about how any given technology can be used in a productive way or in a way that is not productive and even disruptive or detrimental. I love that we are going to be questioning the use of technology rather than learning about technology IN teaching without that critical context. 


I really liked the slides that demonstrated how you have to know your audience (was that the point of those slides? I don't honestly remember the exact context!)--for a student to get a joke--or more generally to make meaning of something, you have to know what the students know or it is meaningless to them. This reminds me of a problem I have read about with some kinds of standardized testing and how they privilege certain students by making references and analogies that are more easily understood by certain classes of students.


But now I'm just rambling...in short, I'm really excited about this class!

hola

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