CEP810 Personal Learning Reflection

   Wow, eight weeks did go by fast.  It probably did not help that I was playing catch up for the last four.  After the first eight weeks of this degree I am proud to report that I could not be happier about my choice to pursue it.  From the very beginning I have been challenged to think about what it means to teach with technology in ways I had never imagined.  I have learned about tons of technologies that I had never used and have started asking questions about how to best integrate them with my classes.
   My favorite aspect of this class has been learning the technologies in a hands on way.  I had never blogged, kept bookmarks on delicious, or shared what I was doing in any way.  The whole time that I was doing these labs I kept going over a list of questions in my head.  How could I use this with my class?  How can I structure a lesson with this technology where the technology is not the focus but is instead an aid to learning? (I have some concerns about how to deal with the logistics of running a lesson in a technology based setting and having the mathematics be the focus as opposed to spending my whole time just helping students get the technology to work).  The addition of the NETS standards at the end of the class answered a large part of the overarching question I had had all along, how do I evaluate weather the technology is doing anything useful for students?  
   The SIG project was the highlight of the course for me.  Working with others and having to find solutions to problems with technology allowed me to explore issues as they arose was a powerful experience.  For example the discovery of the chat feature in Google Docs allowed the three of us to communicate effectively while we simultaneously edited our proposal document and then again when we were actually crafting the content of our wiki.  Another problem arose when we needed to combine all of our bookmarks with delicious.  We had to find a way to aggregate them and then pick out the ones that we wanted to share with the world.  We settled on the idea of creating a new account with Delicious and then linking to all of our bookmarks.  We found quickly that when we were crafting the wiki page that it was difficult to communicate in real time on the wiki page itself, so we returned to doing our work on the Google Docs site where we could communicate in real time and then copying and pasting to the wiki once we felt we had created a presentation that combined all of our individual work effectively.  Good grief, start checking of NETS standards for this project!
   After I had written the paragraph in my Personal Technology Plan paper about expending my PLN with people I have real world contact with I spoke with our libary media specialist.  We talked about technology integration and what our district was implementing.  When she told me that next years eighth grade students will have gone through some experience that will have introduced them to many of the technologies that I had just been working with in this class I was awe struck.  She asked a very straight forward question immediately afterwards.  "What will happen when a teacher in this building tells them that they have to do it some other way when they know a smarter way to accomplish the task already?"  We look like idiots is the simplest answer.  I have continued to strengthen my resolve that we as teachers need to be more than just aware of what students know, we need to make sure that we are a part of it if we want to stay relevant to them.
   I have done much more than meet the goals that I set forth in my initial Growth Plan.  I experienced things that I had never anticipated experiencing in this class.  I revised my understanding of what it means to teach effectively in the 21st century.  I have set new goals with the understanding that many of them will need to be revised as I learn more about how to use the technologies I have encountered throughout this course and those that I expect to encounter in the future.  Oddly, the one idea that is set in stone is that everything changes and I have the choice to be thoughtful about it or sit back and watch as I am made obsolete.

Learning Styles are Myths

I know I am posting this later than was prescribed by the class but I am so fired up right now about the topic of learning styles that I can barley contain myself.  Firstly to all of you who paid $8.95 to have your learning style emailed to you, ... I am sorry.  You have my condolences because their is a wealth of information to suggest that learning styles are bogus psychology.  No really google it!  Bing it I don't care it doesn't hold water.  I mean no disrespect to the people who contributed to the formation of this course and the material presented its just that it is not as cut and dry as learning style theorists would have you believe. 
When you answered the profile questions how many times did you have a memory of a certain moment in your own learning that influenced your choice???  I did for almost every one.  Does that mean that a single moment in my life is really a good indicator of who I am?  No!  Whether or not a particular moment in my life painted me as a saint or a sinner doesn't describe who I am in total.  It certainly should not be the case that my responses to a few questions, for which I had a particular memory about an incident in my life, dictate how I prefer to learn.  Check out the video below of Professor Daniel T. Willingham Cognitive Psychologist from the University of Virgina.

All of us who are taking this class have learned things in a multitude of ways and been successful.  That's why we have degrees.  A much more important pursuit to find ways to help our students become good learners. 
It is my belief that If we stop asking students to perform only rote tasks and instead focus on providing kids with authentic tasks that require analysis and synthesis of ideas that they will bring their overall "learning preferences" to bear on the task.  Furthermore we can focus on what teaching and learning is all about, in light of the fact that "facts" are free on the internet, helping students to make intelligent decisions with the facts that they gather.
I didn't  pay for my learning style inventory and I take issue with the fact that MSU has made this a requirement for a course, despite the fact that there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that it simply isn't true.  I urge anyone who has a role in the editing of this course to take this into consideration as it is revised and improved.

Creative Commons and Copyright

I feel like it is strange that we have just now discussed copyright at this point in the course.  It is obvious to me that it is an issue that needs to be considered in the context of any web2.0 technology.  In fact I was concerned about it when I made my PLN visualization as I was looking for images that were in line with my ideas about my personal learning network and the pictures I selected.  To be honest after reading all the information I feel both more concerned and more confused about how to decide what I can include in the products for this class and for my own classes.  The four factors that decide fair use that were cited repeatedly in the readings/podcasts are so vague that it seems as though one can construct an argument for almost any "fair" use of copyrighted material that is not overtly stealing.  Even as I write this I am aware that what it means to overtly steal content is my own construct and may not be agreed upon. 
The Creative Commons copyright is a wonderful idea in theory.  However, when I tried to use the link to the creative commons search provided in the lab I was dismayed to find the declaimer in a link on the site stating that
"search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations. CC has no control over the results that are returned. Do not assume that the results displayed in this search portal are under a CC license. You should always verify that the work is actually under a CC license by following the link. Since there is no registration to use a CC license, CC has no way to determine what has and hasn't been placed under the terms of a CC license. If you are in doubt you should contact the copyright holder directly, or try to contact the site where you found the content."
So the resource that is meant to ensure that I don't infringe on a copyright can't ensure that I don't infringe on a copyright?????  What good does this do us then?  Where do I find the statement that tells me exactly what the "CC" is?  Is it always obviously displayed?

Ahhh math humor, maybe this will lighten the mood.  Requires understanding of Complex Analysis though. :(

"Graffiti math"
by Quinn Dombrowski
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/

Released under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

My image.  Experimental Probability Lab in Algebra 2 Honors, during my internship year.

MAET

https://picasaweb.google.com/slawatsch/MAET?feat=directlink

I use images and video all the time in my class I am worried at this point that I am not using them appropriately.  It was nearly impossible to find images that resemble the things I use on a regular basis.  Advanced math seems to make this difficult.  This lab has made me significantly more concerned about using any images.  I hardly have time to plan effective lessons and I certainly don't have time to spend digging through licenses on the web for two hours before I use an image.  When I show an image or a video in a class it is always for educational purposes, I have no idea if this passes the test for copyright infringement but i do know that students have learned a lot from my choices.  I think I would have enough of an argument that I have transformed the content into an educational experience that I am alright but I also want to respect intellectual property in the same way i would want others to respect my own.

RSS Page Reflection

This is a lot of work.  I am hardly able to keep up with email from three accounts and this is like adding yet another.  As I mentioned in the workflow entry I have a difficult time building new habits and this is no exception.  Right now this is especially true as I readjust to having a baby in the house again as well as being a student again.  The time that I have invested in it has been surprisingly useful.

It took me a little while to get the hang of the Google Reader interface which surprised me because I generally pick up things like this quickly.  Other than that my experience has been pretty solid.  I haven't spent a lot of time searching for new feeds to add to subscriptions, instead I've focused on the feeds I picked for the RSS lab.  In general there are a lot of items that I skip over after reading only the title.  I was quickly enticed into a series of articles about interactive white boards (IWB).  I found it particularly interesting because I have an IWB and don't think that it has been any great benefit to my teaching, the articles cite many of the same reasons I am disillusioned by them.  It would have been good to have read articles such as the ones I shared prior to our decision to install them in every math classroom in the school. 

As a consumer I research many of the things that I buy ad nauseam and it was interesting to consider the fact that as a teacher adopting technology I simply just grab anything new that I can get my hands on with little to know time spent researching it.  It should be equally important to a teacher to research the potential of and possibly the limitations of anything we bring into our classrooms.  I have known for a while that I needed to be more thoughtful when it comes to using technology in my classroom which is one of the reasons I applied to the MAET program.  Its not as though reading the articles from the feed was amazingly insightful, what I gained more of was an appreciation that there are people with first hand experience that have thought about the same questions I have and put their thinking out there for the rest of us to consider and use. 

There doesn't seem to seem to be as much information in my feeds pertaining to actually teaching my content with technology as the prescribed feeds were general in their scope.  That tells me I probably need to find some other feeds that are more in line with my goals,content area and grade level.  That task proved difficult when I started looking for feeds to complete the lab assignment.  Having added the feeds I did and tracking them over a couple of weeks has helped me to know more about what I am actually looking for when I continue to add subscriptions.

Lily is here!

We are happy to finally be celebrating the arrival of our second daughter.  Lillian Mae arrived on February 25 at 2:49am.  Thankfully, she spared her older sister from having to share a birthday with her, though only by three days and one minute.  Oh sleep, we used to know each other so well!  We'll meet again someday... maybe 18 years from now.