Gruhn

It was neat to see how fired up the teacher was when she used the Wiki’s for the first time. According to her experience, I can see why. Her students seemed to be really in to it. As I navigated through many of the Wiki’s, it appeared to me that all teachers were doing is taking lessons that we already do and put them in a format on the web.  How simplistic is that?(even though, I cannot say anything about the web being simplistic, but the idea of it all) Our students are on the web, why not take our lessons to the web. I wonder though would this work with students who struggle with reading or is this primarily for advanced students. What about students who do not have a computer at home. I do like the ideas and am enjoying this new stuff but am still somewhat skeptical if this is the answer.

As I was reading through my new favorite blogs, a central theme was repetitive and it reminded me of graduate school. The theme was “What is wrong with education?” I often wonder has education ever been any good? I know everybody thinks that they were educated properly while the kids today are not receiving a quality education.  It is amazing to me how bad our education system is according to – well- everybody. Of course everybody had a solution and their solution would absolutely work. There were comments on merit pay, to home school to the value of instructional minutes. All of these topics certainly are worth debating but have we forgotten that real education/learning comes down to when the student wants to learn. Then the approach probably does not matter. Just my two cents.

I was very interested by what was called amatuer learning. Sometimes we do expect our students to be professional learners. As we do this, do we drive them to hate our subjects. How many of our students actually like our subject matter. Can we control this. Not sure if we can but how do we make it where our kids believe our subject matter is relevent and interesting without compromising our educational standards.(Test scores, etc) Is this mission impossible? I know it is not much fun teaching a bunch of students who do not like the subject matter at all.

http://students2oh.org

The blogging and responding format certainly lends itself to being more interesting and creative than other formats. It is shorter which in itself probably leads to more readers thus more responses. This leads to more thinking.  The causual format could lead to bad habits in regards to sentence structure , spelling, captilization, and other areas. It seems this format does cause people to question more or if they agree find reasons why they support the stated position. This is critical thinking. I am impressed by the format. To get people to think and respond with their own voice is encouraging and I am sure would stimulate some nice class discussions. I think that blog writing could definitely facilitate learning at a much more rapid place then some traditional formats.

I would have to combine the most challenging and the most important into one category. Why is it that in life that the things that are the hardest are often the most  important? For me, using technology to my advantage would be the most challenging and the most important. Throughout my years as a teacher, I have learned about many advances in technology, but would seldom continue to use them. I would and still do just resort back to what is comfortable. Teaching is hard enough and then to add the element of being uncomfortable doesn’t seem too appealing. The easiest thing(which I did not find really any of them to be easy) would be that I believe that I am a competent/effective learner. I do believe I can learn anything as long as I think that it is relavant and that it is possible to implement in the classroom