Sunday, June 7, 2015

Blog Reflection 4

What would be the impact on students if a project ended by just ceasing work without any of the suggestions in this chapter?

When I read this question I jotted down a couple of points:  no summation, no esprit de corps, and no flattened classroom.  If the project just stopped there would be no conclusion.  In the real world, the scienctists from around the world that are collaborating in these exact way; and they will publish their work.  So if a project just stops, it is not authentic learning.  What a morale breaker it would be to just clean up your stuff and get a grade later!  If everything is cleaned up and turned off at the end of a project, the classroom was never really flattened.  It went right back into the traditional box of a classroom.  It basically defeats the purpose of flattening your classroom.

Blog Reflection 3

To give students a choice is a differentiated instruction strategy which is meant to improve learning for several reasons.  Research indicates that giving students choices is effective by causing the student to feel they own their education.  When the student feels ownership, their engagement increases.  A goal of giving students choices is to build their critical thinking skills.  In the flattened classroom there is a great deal more room to provide different modalities for learning to suit learning styles.  The technologies make learning different and diverse.  So a choice for a student is not whether or not they want to learn how to use technologies but which technologies to use and how to use them. 

Chapter 6 Guided Question

I am going to admit to breaking a cardinal rule of a flattened classroom and social media.  I am invisible.  I am there; but I do not contribute much.  As a teacher-leader, I will need to ensure that I am visible in my flattened classroom.  Being visible means having a well-developed digital footprint.  The three "R"s from our text book, Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds, are receive, read, and respond.  I would say that I am good at receiving.  I do check my favorite sites i.e. Facebook, use Blackboard for school or read the news online.  I would rate reading everything at fair to midland.  I will admit that the responding is a serious weakness in my digital footprint.  I cannot treat work/school online activities so cavalierly.  As a teacher-leader, I need to make the conscious effort to be visible by vigorously monitoring and responding constructively to students in my flattened classroom as well as with coworkers. 

Blog reflection 1 for class

As I have gotten caught up with class stuff, I have finally used my RSS Reader.  For class there was an initial 10 that we were to automatically add.  I noticed that I in fact had half of them already chosen.  Too Good!  I have tried to choose diversely with liberal and conservative leaning news feeds included.  I can say that once it is fine tuned I will like it.  I have no fear of editing my list over time.  I think that my feeds are too political.  I don't think that I have learned a lot.  I did recognize the term teacherpreneurship.  I also felt that I had decent background knowledge on topics that were in my feed i.e. etextbooks and sex ed.  As far as the etextbooks, I know that this is a spreading trend.  I will keep up with it because it will be coming to my classroom at some point in time.  I didn't comment because it appears that what I have in my feed are more articles by news outlets.  Using a RSS Reader is not my normal routine.  I use my bookmark function for the sites that I want to check frequently.

Watch what happens!?

This is the first post of this blog.  This is meant as a way to track what I am doing correctly.