Ready or not, here they come!

Is this the message that us as educators want to send to the workforce? Absolutely not! The skills needed for the 21st century workforce is enormously different then the ones that were required a century ago. Unfortunately, many schools and educators are not prepared to teach students such skills.

Partnership for the 21st century has developed a frame work to incorporate the key elements of learning for the 21st century into the classroom. It covers all areas such as content, context, and assessment.

As I was reading through the framework that Partnership of the 21st century provided, I once again was ashamed of my ignorance toward the importance of technology. Also, antagonized by how my teacher preparation program neglected to mention such important subject. I graduated December, 2008. So, I should have been exposed to all the studies and teaching methods that is directed toward implementing technology into the curriculum, yet I wasn’t. Surprisingly, considering the fact that Partnership for the 21 century is pleading for help to spread the word, it seems like many other teachers are not being exposed to such matter. So, I’m here stretching the importance http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/

I do want to mention that this framework suggests standardize testing for accountability. Yes, that word again, ACCOUNTABILITY. Of course it also suggests variety of other assessment that the teacher conducts, but once the accountability is in the picture, standardize testing is the one that really counts. Considering the fact that standardize testing can be bias and many times do not assess student’s true knowledge (Kohn, 2000), why make schools accountable?


Kohn, A., (2000) The Case Against Standardized Testing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann

Everyday I get 86400 seconds deposited for use. Once the moment has past, it never comes back. How I use this time is my choice. Am I wasting it?

Today I heard a powerful message about time management. How do I use my time? The conclusion was that I don’t use it very wisely. How about in school? After reaching this thought, I felt a sudden guilt. There are days that I tell myself “I’m going to have laid back day.” Whose time am I really wasting? Not just mine but also my students. They look at me with curious eyes and I am telling them that I am too tired for any in-depth learning.
Sorry kids.

It’s a 3 day weekend and I miss my kids already.

How do you use a blog for students who can't read or write yet?

I teach twenty pre-kindergarten children. I am very proud of their writing skills; they are able to sound out initial sounds and sometimes ending sounds and write the letters that they hear. However, students are not yet able to participate in blogging. I would like to figure out a way to use blogging for my students as well, but my creativity is not allowing me any options.

Although my work with students directly is limited, this blog will become a powerful tool for communication between me and the parents and parents to parents. I usually only have time to communicate with my parents during drop-off and car pool, which only can last for about 1 minute. In the brief talk I had, many parents are interested about what students learn and how they can help in preparing their children for kindergarten. I do send out a weekly letter but there is not much I can communicate through a one page standardized letter. Also, it only serves as an announcement from me and not at all promotes feedback from the parents.

Since students at this age are dependable, parent involvement is essential. First, I will enable my parents to write entries on my blog. I will learn more about the students’ home life so I can incorporate that it the school life. This will enhance my lessons. I will update pre-k news as well as important kindergarten information, this will resolve the issue Will Richardson states of school web pages not being updated regularly (2009, Richardson, p.25). The blog will also contain links for educational websites and educational games. This will give students a learning tool at home and provide information that parents are seeking. Also, the parents will be able to communicate amongst each other for exchange of information and for a source of supporters through out the journey of raising a child. My blog will be written in both Korean and English for my non-English speaking parents.

I am still debating on posting students’ work. I was trying to find out a way to only allow certain post to selected group of people, but have not yet found that feature.

I am open to any suggestions and ideas to make this blog more effective.



Reference:

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press

Are we using technology to help students? or us teachers?

So far my experience with technology used in the classrooms are power points, research homework, microsoft written essays, on-line educational games, and on-line testings. This only replaced poster boards, libraries, hand written essays, and paper and pen testing. Are we using the gift of technology effectively? Well, applying technology to its minimal use does not certainly harm anything, right?

Picture this, a Hispanic child transfered to your 2nd grade classroom . This child speaks very limited English and you notice that this child does not understand your instructions. Therefore, she has a hard time in English, Math, Science, and Social Studies. What would you do?

This is what I saw when I was interning. A teacher puts this individaul to a computer to play a game that helps her identify sight words. Then she sits for math. Then the teacher prints out a Spanish written worksheet from the internet for science and social study. The other time the student has the ESOL teacher pulls her out of her class. Due to individualizing this students study, he/she experience minimal interaction from the teacher and from her classmates.

With help from technology this teacher found a way to teach this child without ever really teaching.

By the way, I thought this cooperating teacher was a great teacher. I am not writing this post to critisize this particular teacher. The reason why I'm posting this is to hear from different teacher how could this situation have been different.
How would technology help individualizing without isolating?