Political Thinking In Your Head

So I came across this article a few weeks ago that my wife sent to me.  Now, just to give you a quick idea of who I am, I do not like how politics are handled these days, I have not and never will solely sell myself to one "party", and I think the games that are played in the political ring are childish and unforgiving.

With that said, this article struck a nerve with me.  Not because of politics, but because of how different sides of the political ring think.  In the research conducted, people are hard wired to think the way they do based on genetics and obviously some learned behaviors. In a nutshell, Republican will stand their grounds and not bend, they want to see things stay the same.  Democrats are a little more wishy washy, but want to see change and progress made by taking chances.  Two opposite sides of the coins.  It summarizes the article by stating that if Democrats want to see change happen, then they must stay convicted to one item and not jump around to a bunch of different ones.  That would be the only way that the two "thinking" groups could ever find a common ground.

I was amazed that this same song and dance truly happens in education.  There are those that want to keep it the same because it is what they know and it is safe.  There are others who are progressive and want to see it change at the rate of society.  I would really like to know who will win this all out war of ideals.  What did make the most sense though is that if we do want to see change in education, we can't change it all over night.  We need to stick to one thing, back it up with data, and sell it to the people who are digging their heels in the ground.

There are a lot of affordances for wikis in the classroom.  I have used them and found that they are a great treasure to deposit a bunch of math concepts on.  Students really have had a lot of individual fun on them as well.  My first experience with them was in the summer of 2009.  I had my students simply use them to work on tests together without talking.  Each group had their own page and would collaborate by putting down the answers and members would either change the answer or simply do the other problems. I tend to use summer school to experiment with these types of technologies without any formal training.
My next experience with using a wiki was to redo my home page for school.  It gave me more freedom and it was easier to use.  CHECK OUT MY OLD SCHOOL WIKI.  Again, the whole idea of the wiki was still in its infancy in my mind and I really had not figured out how to use it well.  Without enough time to see the benefits in education, I really was only playing around with it so that I can learn it and hoping some sort of lightning bolt of knowledge would hit me.  I was also learning so many other tools at the time that I had no idea which were good or bad.  They just all seemed new and fun and I wanted to introduce the students to all of them because I knew other teachers would not.  This turned out to be a very bad thing when trying to promote change in a classroom.
The last time I used a wiki in class, I had the students working on it.  They were each in charge of posting our notes on it each week.  For each lesson, they were to link a video, a picture summarizing the topic of discussion, a game site(if found), and a link to definitions of the math words learned.  It proved to be too much management for me and a lot of extra work for the students.  The idea was for them to be creating a hypermedia presentation for reference.  Students would then build on it from each class and each semester.  I did not feel I had enough time to teach a wiki and teach the curriculum.  I now know that I do.
If this class has taught me one thing, it is that scaffolding is a very powerful principle in school.  I can, and probably will, go back to the wiki idea.  However, this time, lessons will be scaffolded in a way that it will not only teach the students the layout of a wiki, but allow them to creatively add on to it as well.  I do not have to manage it as I thought I did.  I would rather let it be more of an organic thing.  As time goes on and more people add to it, more will want to add to it and make it better.  It could ultimately end up being a great piece of work.
Stay tuned for Wiki 2.0 in my classroom, it might take a while, but it could prove to be one of the best references in Loudoun.  Especially, if I reach beyond the school walls and have other schools participate.

Blog? Yes please.

Over the past few years, I have been amazed at how far online publications have become a part of my life.  I currently subscribe to over 15 different educator blogs and learn ideas about   not only what others in my profession are thinking, but what they have to offer to the educational community.  At this time, I am simply offering my lens of how cool I think these things are.  I have read everything from why we should not give homework across every curriculum to seeing some of the coolest approaches to my subject matter.  From other teachers giving 30 day initiatives to becoming friends and communicating with them on Twitter.  In fact, from blog to twitter, I met a few of these people when I went to a conference in summer of 2010 at the ISTE conference.  All of us had a common goal.  A goal to transform education or at least do our part to bring a different approach to how we presented information inside our classrooms.  I have also joined people in webinars along the way.  All because I found their blogs interesting and inspiring and had to take that relationship a little further.

At the beginning of 2010-2011 school year, I naively wanted to introduce blogs into my classroom simply because I could see some of the affordances of them.  I had one of my classes put up all of their presentations online and begin keeping their digital lives archived.  I furthered lessons by keeping my assignments online and commenting on what they were doing.  On the student blogs, they added links that connected them to websites that they would frequently use in my class.  They used them to reflect on their assignments using questions that I had posted.  I also had them begin keeping a diary of vocabulary.  Unfortunately, this proved to be too much work for me and I had to drop it.  Managing their use of the blogs along with building my entire curriculum around teaching the uses of these things proved to be a lot of work that I was not willing to attach to their grades.  I have tried blogs a couple of times because I have seen the power of them.  My most successful story of students learning blogs is that one of my students has managed to keep tuning into his..............and that to me, makes it all worth the effort.  Here is an example of the blog I keep coming back to you.  You will notice my students will be down on the left side, most or all which have not been touched since they were part of my classes.

The thing that will always keep my mind shuffled is that my students were able to intelligently understand the use of blogs.  They searched the internet and found others that they were interested in.  They hated keeping their own up to date because it was subject related, but were also able to see value in the ones that they had read.  The optimist in me simply wants to think that blogging was so new to these students that they had a hard time seeing their own benefit of using them.  I want to think I planted a seed that will lead them to a path of connecting to other people's knowledge and thoughts.  With the population that I teach and the adult troubles that they face, it is important to see that they are not alone.