Not Another Email, I'm Stuffed!!

Every week when we read a new book, I think, this is the best book so far (except for Mind on Society, for obvious reasons)!! I absolutely LOVED The Information Diet by Clay A. Johnson. While I was reading it, I kept stopping to read aloud parts to my husband that I found fascinating or unbelievable. I did that quite a bit, much to his annoyance.

Prior to reading the book, I didn't think that I overindulged in technology. After the book, I now think otherwise. I am the exact type of person Johnson referred to when discussing the anxious feeling one gets when a text or email comes in. I have this need to answer them immediately. I even get annoyed when I text someone, and they don't immediately reply. I think that they must always have their phone with them like I do and are choosing not to answer me. I check my email at work constantly, and my phone is always with me. During the summer, I did take steps to reduce the amount of time I was trolling Facebook, and now I rarely go on it anymore. It seriously is not a big loss for me. However, I do enjoy reading Yahoo! News and BuzzFeed. Come on, who doesn't want to know which secret Starbucks drink you should order based on your favorite Disney princess (BTW, mine's the raspberry latte). I have also recently noticed, but didn't make the connection until reading The Information Diet, that the ads on Yahoo! News are geared directly towards me personally; I just thought they were a coincidence. Bottom line, to me, this means that I need to go on a serious information diet.

In my middle school, especially when I am doing locker duty, I overhear the conversations students have with one another. Sometimes what they are saying is totally untrue, and the person listening will just nod along in agreement or even reply with a much more absurd comment. I don't feel that I have the right to jump into their conversation and set the record straight. But, what I can do is what I do best-teach. I can teach my students how to use the Internet responsibly. How to check sites to make certain they are unbiased and reliable. They need to know that everything they find on the Internet is not true. If they do find something they are uncertain about, they can use the Internet to help clarify and give them understanding. Being a good digital citizen is not something they will develop on their own over time. Just like organization and studying, it's a skill students need to be taught with guidance and allowed to practice. Once they master this skill, not only will they become better, more informed digital citizens, but they will be over-all better citizens in society.

We've Got Spirit, Yes We Do...

After I read the journal article, The Creative Spirit, and learned that imagination, creation-oriented, and inter-disciplinary action are the characteristics which good instructional designers embody in their lesson designs, I began to think about what a disservice I have done my students by just being a “lesson planner.” Creative lesson designers “truly design to extend understanding, [and] to create something new and innovative.” What student wouldn’t rather learn using that type of lesson?!

Lessons designed to allow students to use their imagination, create, and explore learning on their own rather than being fed the outcome in which we want them to achieve are so much more powerful. The inter-disciplinary part of the creative spirt allows students to collaborate with others who can add their viewpoints and knowledge to enhance the overall learning. When the means to the product can be discovered rather than directly taught, students can make stronger background connections, which allows them to have a person interest in the intended learning goal.

The video we created last class is the perfect example of the creative spirit. As a group, we used our imaginations to create a recruitment video for the Doodles program. We were given guidelines to follow, but we could incorporate our creative ideas into the actual content of the video. Each member of the group had their own expertise and knowledge to lend, which only enhanced the outcome. We had to incorporate the six design principles into the script by summarizing them to discuss the key points. By doing so, I was able to review, connect, and see how they build on one another. The final video came out awesome; exactly how my group had hoped.

I have found that all the activities we have completed in class come full circle with what we are learning, even when I think that there is no way the activity is relevant (Helping Don in Africa?!). I look forward to class each week so see what new activity we will be completing and just how it fits in to the design principles.

The Right Tool for the Job

When I finished reading the journal article Affordance Allowances, I was so confused! I searched more examples and explanations on the Internet. I even found another journal article called, Educational Affordances of a Ubiquitous Learning Environment in a Natural Science Course. I thought if I read it, I could glean some clarifying information. Needless to say, I did not! I watched The Day the Universe Changed thinking that by the end it should clear everything up. Wrong! I ended up writing my affordance allowance with not really understanding what result I was trying to achieve. I especially looked forward to class to help me get a better understanding.

During class, I found that writing the affordance analyses for the Osmo and Ozbot really helped me understand that even though a technology might look cool and engaging, it doesn’t make it the right technology to use to reach a learning goal. The Matching Learning Goals and Tools – Considering Affordances activity also really helped me to understand that there are so many right and wrong affordances to meet learning goals as well as multiple ones that may help for different reasons. It’s all a matter of choosing the right tool for the job.

The fifth design principle, The Means Principle, helped me realize that there are so many educational affordances that are available, but it’s not a good idea to start with the affordance in mind. In a previous post, I mentioned that my math team had done lesson planning by creating the assessment first then working backwards to plan the lessons. It now makes perfect sense as to why this type of planning doesn’t work. When teaching directly to the test, it is so restrictive to what students can learn and discover on their own. The same applies to choosing the technology before the learning goal. Taking into consideration what we want our students to learn as well as connecting the content and learning activities to the affordance will lead to choosing the most appropriate technology to meet the planned learning goals.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Technology

I actually really enjoyed reading The Victorian Internet. Because I was part of the generation that was young enough to see the impact the introduction of the Internet had on society as it was made available to us, just plain folks. The Internet changed everything: the way we communicated; making it easier to locate information, how we did our jobs, and learned in school. I could completely connect with how people felt when the telegraph was introduced. The changes in society when the Internet was made available to everyone was so similar to when the telegraph was. Both opened many doors for the good while also allowing opportunities for consequences. Being able to connect with a loved one across the world was life changing, as was being deceived or misinformed. The idea that I really took away from both the book and the class discussion was that new technology really impacts society. It can change the way we receive and interpret information. It changes human nature in order to use the information received. Basically, changes in technology changed how people interact with the world.

The changes I have seen in society since the introduction on the Internet were subtle at first when everyone was learning how to use it and understand it’s potential. As time has gone on since the early 1990’s the changes have become greater and the impact irrefutable. I see my own children and my students in complete panic if they can’t locate their smartphones. It’s almost impossible for them not to be connected to their friends using text messaging or social media. I often wonder when did we become a society that requires us to know what everyone is doing at every moment?

I also see the good in technology. We can earn college degrees, pay bills, bank, book vacations, and buy virtually anything without ever leaving our homes (but is that really a good thing or just convenient?). To me, most importantly, it changes the way I think of educating my students. I can use technology to enhance my lessons, enrich students, as well as help struggling students.

Since technology has a cascading impact, it is only a matter of time before the next best thing is available to us as a society. The question is, will it enhance it or be a disadvantage?

But Play IS Learning!

After reading Vygotsky’s Mind in Society and discussing his ideas in class, I wondered if how we teach our students would have evolved to where we are today if it wasn’t for his insights. I assume eventually that learning and development would be studied and analyzed to determine how children best learn. But, Vygotsky was really ahead of his time. Who would have thought that play IS learning? When we think of children playing, we think of them occupying their time with games and toys. When in reality, they are developing essential symbols, tools, and rules that will be used throughout their lives. When these tools, symbols, and rules are learned during play, they help children develop those critical, high-order thinking skills which they will apply to other situations, such as work.

When discussing the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), I thought about my students who depend on support when learning a new concept. ZPD is what a child can do with help until they can do it on their own. There is such a great feeling when I have worked with a student and that lightbulb goes off in their head and they just “get it.” You can actually see it in their eyes.  Not only does it give them a sense of accomplishment, it gives me one too. When comparing Piaget’s idea of children developing naturally at certain age ranges, Vygotsky’s “play is learning” and Zone of Proximal Development is more realistic to how I experience children learning in my classroom. I couldn’t imagine saying to a student, “You’re 12-years-old, you should know how to do this.” Vygotsky’s process lets children develop at the time that is right for them at that moment, getting the help that they need when necessary.

The fourth Design Principle, The Learning Principle, is about designing engaging lesson which allow students to participate in “playful” activities at the edge of their knowledge and understanding using symbolic tools to develop and internalize meaningful thought. Students can engage in meaningful, playful activities to allow them to interact with the concepts being taught. We did just that during class when we wrote our poems. We took what we learned about Vygotsky then created different types of poems (eg: haiku, concrete). The poems where the symbolic tools we constructed to represent Vygotsky’s ideas in a fun, playful way. We did the same thing when creating our mind maps of the ZPD. These lessons really resonated with me after class, I mean, I internalized meaningful thought from participating in these lessons (: I really enjoy this class because it gives me the opportunity to think about how children learn rather than what I want them to learn. I look forward to introducing more of these types of activities in my math classes. Maybe, just maybe, my students will look forward to math for once!