Blog+Entries


 * Blog Entries For TCH 501 Class:**


 * __ BLOG QUESTION #1 __** What do you think are the most important characteristics of an effective teacher in the 21st century teaching and learning context? And why do you think so? (discuss at least five characteristics)

Hey, I also agree that a good and effective teacher should be a good role model. Teachers are more than just dispensers of information. Heck, a computer can be placed in the front of a group of kids and dispense information. But just like a Cub Scout Den leader, sports coach, or minister, a good and effective teacher has to be able to inspire kids to be good citizens. I guess that is why teachers are held to a higher standard in their behavior outside of the school day, and by being uber careful about what is posted on YouTube and Twitter. I do my best to make my class fun, relevant, and important to my students. Hopefully, they make the connection that what I teach is a reflection of myself, and they try to emulate that in some way. So, great insight, and I’ll be looking for your next posting.

The most important characteristics of an effective teacher are not always the same for everyone. Each teacher exposes their own opinions and perceptions with this answer. For me, I think that the most important ones are enthusiasm, flexibility, intellect, organization, and talent. Enthusiasm is definitely needed when teaching a classroom full of students. If the teacher seems bored or dull, then the lesson will seem to be so, too. Flexibility is a must, because not all groups of students perform identically. If a class works much quicker than the others, an effective teacher has to be able to come up with an enriching lesson to fill in the extra time. Intellect should be one of the most obvious characteristics that a teacher should possess. Students ask what sometimes seems to be a million questions. Sometimes, the questions are not even about my particular class, but about something from another class. A good and effective teacher needs to be able to answer as many questions at possible. This allows the teacher to maintain an aura of being a “know-it-all”. Fortunately, this is my seventeenth year of teaching and I have never told a child that I don’t know the answer to a question. Sometimes, if there are a few minutes left at the end of class, I do what I call “Q and A” where the students can ask any question about anything that they want the answer to. Next is organization. Now, I teach Art and Digital Photography, so you might not think that I am a very organized person. But you would be wrong. Even the custodians at my school marvel that my room is cleaner and more orderly at the end of the day than practically any other room in the building. Organization is critical because whether it is student projects or supplies needed to create the projects, you have to know where everything is. Finally is talent. For an Art teacher, talent is one of the characteristics that define the position. An Art teacher with no talent is like a Math teacher who can’t add numbers in his head. The teacher’s talent inspires the students to do the best they can, so their project can hopefully be as good as the example. These five characteristics as they relate to me combine to make me the best teacher I can be.

You are right in your analysis. The difficult thing that we Art teachers do that no one else can comprehend is to teach a difficult and deep humanities class that very few humans are capable of teaching. You can learn quantum mechanics and teach it. You can learn English skills and teach it. You can memorize geographic locations and teach them. But Art, like Music, is a part of being human that lets us really enjoy our humanity. The trick is in teaching it in such a way as to let the greater majority of students to be successful in it. I use Bob Ross as a role model. If an unartistic person looks at one of Bob’s paintings, they immediately think they can’t do that. But he breaks the project down into small technical drills, and in the end, it looks great. I actually do 4 Bob Ross-esque paintings with my 5th graders. The paintings look great, and from that moment on, they love my class because they know that even “unartistic” students can make great art. I try to stress to them that it isn’t the end product that is the most important part of the lesson, but the thinking process that gets them there. Please point yourself out to me, so I know who you are. I am usually the only Art teacher in a group.


 * __ BLOG QUESTION #2 __** In the digital age and in the perspective of historical continuum, student diversity should include differences through time, from generation to generation. Today’s school kids have almost the same accessibility as adults to Internet information. It is the first time in human history that the young is able to teach the old in consistent manner. Please share a story/stories what you learned from you students or your children, and share you initiatives to learn from your students intentionally both as a knowledge source and a way to better understand your learner.

This is a very difficult assignment, because I am having difficulty thinking of a time when any child taught me anything about computers or technology. Ever since the first Macintosh computer was introduced in my high school during my senior year in 1984, I have been on the leading edge of computer technology. I have been the one to teach others how to use them. Now that being said, I must clarify that I am strictly a Mac guy. I find pcs inferior to use and repulsive to touch. So I suppose a story of a student teaching me anything about technology would be at my first teaching job in West Frederick Middle School in Frederick, Maryland. One of my very bright students and I got into a discussion about the few similarities between Macs and pcs, and the vast differences. This student showed me how to navigate a pc’s functions. For example, on a Mac, when you want to get out of a program, you have to go to FILE and click on QUIT [whatever program you are in], or hit Command and “Q”. On a pc, you just click the little X box in the top corner. I prefer not to be taught things by children, because it is my responsibility to teach the concepts to them. If there is something I don’t know, I will research it and try to learn it by myself. Whenever possible, though, I will avoid pcs entirely and use a Mac as my technology hub. That was not always an option in the past, but these days, I can use my iPad for just about everything. I don’t think it is relevant to the conversation, but much of what my students try to teach me on their computers are games. I prefer to not use my computer as a gaming device. By this time in my career, students who have my class, from 5th grade all the way through their senior year know that I am a technophile. Even the IT guy in my district comes to me with Mac questions from time to time. That isn’t to say that I know everything, especially when it comes to using pcs. It just means that no children have taught me anything about them.

Your husband is dead on right. When we were all younger and the technology was new, we had to learn EVERYTHING. Nowadays (and not wanting to sound like an oldster), it seems like technology is designed in such a way as to be extremely user friendly and “idiot proof”. My first encounter with computers in 1984 was to actually write computer code. I remember the teacher telling us that we needed to be able to write code and be able to know what is what on a motherboard. The fact that technology today is extremely user friendly and idiot proof is good in that the masses in general, and children in specific, are not intimidated by it. The downside is that just like your husband noted, when something isn’t going swimmingly, children immediately raise their hands and ask for someone to fix it. For us, computer programs in their earlier iterations required us to read up on them, experiment with them, and learn to be mini-experts on them. A parallel is modern cars vs old cars. When I was a boy, and I assume the same goes with your husband, I drove junk. But if the car had problems, I could pull to the side of the road and more often than not fix it with a screwdriver, pair of pliers, and roll of duct tape. Today’s cars are computerized and fuel injected and have to be worked on by an authorized technician. So as we progress technologically, we are becoming reliant upon the technology instead of the technology being reliant upon us. The only thing my students are “better” at concerning computers (and all related iDevices) is gaming. I teach them what a computer is made of, how it works, and what things like RAM, ROM, bits, and bytes are. One day a week, I share with them what I call an Awesome App Alert. I find a different themed app each week and teach them about it, and how they can use it in their everyday life as a utility, moneymaking device, or just for cool entertainment. Now you, your husband, and everyone else our age get to start off sentences to kids with, “When I was YOUR age…” and tell them how seemingly archaic technology was. Somehow I doubt they will envy us.

Excellent points. Your example about kids just typing the question into Google and getting an answer that they don’t understand is spot on. It brought to mind an example I gave to some of my 8th graders. One day while answering random questions at the end of the period, one student thought that he would stump me. He asked if I know the meaning of life. I told him that I did (I do, actually). He asked me to tell it to him. I told him that if I did, it would not make sense to him because enlightenment comes not from being given the answer, but from years of meditation and reflection. That is how kids are these days with their “research”. They just go to Google or Wikipedia and copy and paste. They are not being taught to THINK, just to ACQUIRE. That is why in my class, I use the Socratic method of teaching, and present many of my lessons in a way that causes the students to be creative in the way they go about them. There is no easy way out, but at the end of their time in my class, they always say how much they learned with me. Based on what you write, I assume your students feel that way after their time with you, too.

[|Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?]   [|‘Digital Literacy’ Will Never Replace the Traditional Kind]
 * __ BLOG QUESTION #3 __** There are two articles on the limitations of digital learning. Please make comments on each of them, and clearly state if you agree or disagree with what the authors are advocating. Make connections to your own digital learning experience and to your observation on the effectiveness of your student learning with digital tools, such as E-Book. How do you think of the “Traditional Kind”? Are they obsolete? Will they be replaced with “Digital Literacy”?
 * Read the two articles **

OK, I guess I am progressive in my views on education, because I saw both of these articles as being ridiculous. The first one seems silly because its arguments are so superficial as to be laughable. People retain less information from eBooks because they can’t use visual cues of where information is on a page? Really? I think that how much someone retains is based on their interest level. I thought that eBooks might be strange to read when I got my first generation iPad a couple years ago. But when I saw how futuristic it all seemed, I got very motivated to read on it. Now, I almost disdain picking up a paper book. I have over 200 books, magazines, and newspapers on my new iPad3. There is NO difference in the look of a page on my iPad and the look of a page in a paper book. So the whole “visual cues” argument goes out the window. Keeping track of previous pages is simple enough with the use of bookmarks. You can highlight words with virtual highlighters, then ERASE THE MARKS, and you can even get instant definitions to words you might not be familiar with just by touching the word. If the print is too small, you can increase its size, change the color of the print or the paper, and even have the book read its contents to you. As for needing to see how far you are in a book in order to have a feel for how much is left, just look at the bottom of the page. There is a progress bar that shows how much you have read and how much is left, as well as a percentage. I didn’t like this article. I also didn’t like the second article, because it also seems like it was set up as a Luddite’s dream to quash new technology. Getting a bunch of 7th graders to evaluate the validity of an article isn’t exactly a resounding unimpeachable argument. I’m sure that if the same article was given to them in a seemingly professionally produced magazine or book, they would have come to the same conclusion about the octopus. Of course everyone should think critically, but blaming it all on digital books and online learning is not fair. Saying that kids just Google information instead of learning it might be the equivalent of teachers a hundred years ago complaining that kids aren’t learning the meanings of words because they can always consult those new fangled printed dictionaries that are everywhere. In my opinion, technology is here to stay. Digital books, online learning sites, and video classrooms are not going to go away. Rather than whining about the way things used to be back in the day, people need to adapt, compensate for what they see as weaknesses in the system, and improve themselves as a species. To study for the midterm in this course, I started by reading printouts of the self quizzes. Too cumbersome and everything seemed to blur together. But then I scanned the pages, converted them into an eBook and put them on my iPad. I read them easily, studied gladly, and did pretty well on the midterm test. So as with many aspects of life, I think that individual psychology plays a big part in how it is perceived and accepted (or rejected).

I agree with your assertion that everyone learns differently. That seems to be missing from a lot of these surveys and studies. Groups either do well or poorly, like something or dislike it. I’d like to see the breakdown of degrees of like and dislike, proficiency and deficiency. I’m sure it would give a very different impression. And I also agree with you in saying that traditional literacy will not likely be replaced any time soon. After all, Nikola Tesla invented radio well over a century ago and people are still listening to the medium. Doubtful that books will go extinct.

Oh, yes. I agree with you in the ease of getting your book with the electronic format. That is its real selling point, to be sure. I was showing my son some of the features of his eBooks. He was thrilled at the fact that if he comes across a word he doesn’t understand, all he has to do is touch the word and its definition appears. Try doing that with a paper book.

[|The Flipped Classroom: Turning the Traditional Classroom on its Head] [|Flipped Classroom Defined]
 * __ BLOG QUESTION #4 __**** To Flip or Not to Flip? ** To answer this question, you need to learn about what a flipped classroom is and how the model is practiced in the real world today. Present your opinions or experiences, if any, on why you agree or do not agree to use this model in general and in you classroom in particular. What your worries or concerns are if this model is promoted in all K-12 classroom settings.
 * Direction: ** Please read the following links first, and then Google relevant online reading with key words such as “flipped classroom model”, “reverted learning”, “converted learning” etc. to get ready for this blog question.

Great point about the students with extra curricular activities. I have that problem at regular school where I teach now. Students will leave class at 2:00 informing me on the way out that they have a baseball game, softball game, golf game, etc. And there are also the kids in the play, kids who have a part time job, and kids as you so astutely point out have parents who don’t hold them accountable. And what about students with accommodations and IEPs? On an intellectual level, maybe this kind of method is fun to imagine, but I think it would be difficult at best to make happen.

I can’t even believe that this method of teaching is given serious consideration. My jaw dropped when I read the articles. In the first place, does anyone think that all students have or have access to computers in order to utilize the flipped classroom videos? What do we do about the families who for one reason or another don’t have computers or Internet access? I teach in a pretty affluent district, and many of my students fall into the “no computers/Internet access” category. Next, who in their right mind would even entertain the fantasy that students would do the work on their own, and simply be guided by a teacher? It is difficult enough to get students to do what they are supposed to while they are in my classroom with me constantly trying to put on a dog and pony show to keep them interested and motivated. I am supposed to believe that on their own they will do this? Heck, nearly every kid whose parent gets mad at the district at one time or another and pulls them out for home schooling ends up re-enrolling them again because the kids won’t do the work. In my opinion, the teacher should be the sage on the stage. Teachers impart knowledge and information. Teachers model behavior. This idea of having students teach themselves is bogus at best, thought up by theoreticians and people who probably teach in super wealthy and affluent areas. Crikey! This type of model definitely would not work in my class, since I teach Art, and that entails a good number of projects. It is not reasonable to expect the students to have all of the paint, paper, clay, plaster, colored pencils, and so forth that I keep in my class. Even the tie-ins with the other curricula would not be able to be understood outside of the context of my class. As we work on different stages of a project, discussions take place, examples are talked about, and sometimes even spontaneous and serendipitous tangents are followed. It’s like learning how to play a sport online, then meeting with a coach for a limited discussion. I give this an enthusiastic thumbs down.

I have similar concerns with this method of “teaching”. Your observation of job security is a good one. In the future, what if it is decided that students can participate in some Khan Academy-style setup, and only go to school for guidance or simple question answering (or not at all)? Will children have the motivation, drive, and desire to do the studying on their own? It is difficult enough to get them to do the work when they are in a group of motivated kids with a motivating teacher. Would they put down their video games or even get out of bed to learn basically on their own? And since my class is a majority of the time a project based one, Art might be eliminated from the curriculum due to the inability of students to all produce works of art in their homes because of lack of supplies on hand. So as an intellectual puzzle, this might be good to discuss. But in reality, I think it is unworkable.