METS/S. Finally! Something that works! At last! A clear, concise, concrete, credible, easy to understand, straight forward guide to what is expected. How could anyone go wrong! Whew! I wondered if someone would ever tell us what they are thinking.
The METS/S is great. It leaves no question in my mind what I should be doing with each student. It was comforting to see exactly what is expected. After all, if I am a teacher, you should be able to tell me what you expect me to teach and how I get there is up to me right? As long as I meet your expectations we all win.
“Joes Non-Notebook” was very good. It really emphasizes the perspective of a technologically savvy student whose mental comprehension far exceeds a text book. Unfortunately a text is limited in its ability to convey knowledge by the boundaries of its pages. Whereas a computer connected to the internet is boundless and left to explore on their own, a student could find additional information that helps everyone learn a lot more.
Sexting is very scary. I have 4 children. Two are teenagers. They both have cell phones and while they know they are subject to my wife and I viewing their phone at any time, there is no guarantee that they won’t make this mistake. I wish that someone would come up with software that could prevent this on a phone. It seems that there should be something that would allow for the filtering of a message or picture before it is sent and if it didn’t meet the “settings” for the phone it wouldn’t send. Wishful thinking I know!
The city that I work for has a very descriptive straight forward technology use policy. It is easy to understand and you know what will happen if you violate it. There isn’t any room for misunderstanding. Most importantly it doesn’t take hours to read it.
http://www.ci.farmington-hills.mi.us/Intranet/HRReferenceDesk/PDF/StandardPracticeGuide.pdfI think teaching the Millennium Generation is proposition rich opportunity. Carefully guided, thoughtfully engaged, provided with some authority to make decisions on how they accomplish the goal, they could present to be the most intelligent generation yet! The thought processes that they engage in at a young age is similar to that of the computer that they spend hours on researching, blogging, face booking, twittering, etc.
The Millennium Generation represents a change in teaching on a grand scale. The only limit to their potential is from the teacher who teaches them. Either it’s a “Joes Non-Notebook” scenario or it’s the Grand Canyon web page with video tutorials and associated links.
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Hey - great post. As I was watching the video about Joe's Non-Netbook, I remembered the number of times I had asked teachers for my daughter's book publishers' interactive web addresses and the teacher did not have a clue. The tools must get better, but in some cases we are not using alternative cyber resources that are already available. We are still stuck in hard seats, square desks and frozen book pages books (non-digital). We have to open it up with a cradle (Pre-K)to grave technological learning approach. Hope it makes sense- Peace
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M.A.H. Foye: We have online textbooks at our school and those resources are amazing. We have online videos and interactive quiz practice. It is great.
ReplyDeleteLarry: Joe's Non-Notebook reminded me of my children. We recently were going to watch a movie and it was a VHS tape. My 8 and 10 year old girls couldn't figure out how to work the VCR. They have no problem with the DVD player, or the computer, but VHS was a foreign technology.
It will be interesting to see what happens to education in my career. I have been seeing a lot of information coming at me that says the future of education needs to change dramatically in order to meet the needs of todays learners. I guess look at us. I am sitting on my couch at 1:27 AM doing a blog post. We are collaborating on a project and we don't even have to be from the same country. The future of education is very exciting!
Excellent blog post! I like the point you brought up about attempting to find a better filtration system for students when it comes to texting inappropriate material. My daughters are still very young, but if we don't find a better system now, it will be an even bigger problem in the future when they are teenagers. The part of the post that really caught my attention was the refrerral of the internet in the classroom as being "boundless". I agree with you that it is up to the teachers to make sure that we do not limit our students when there is so much information out there that is accessible to them.
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