Do You See What I See?

As a visual learner this weeks blog assignment hits pretty close to home. I can say from my own experience that good visuals can really make or break a lesson for someone like me who needs to see the ideas presented as opposed to just being lectured. Even as I think about it right now, I can remember sitting and taking an exam today and on a few occassions closing my eyes and trying to visualize what had been written on the whiteboard when the lesson was being taught. For me this worked really well. I did even petter on the section of the exam where we were required to identify images on slides. We visual learners thrive on pictures, even if the pictures are just words presented as graphics, like in the kids show Word World. Presenting pictures gives us something to grab hold of and retain that comes through for better than the sounds that often end up all run together as they issue from a lecturers mouth.

Podcasts

I've downloaded and listened to a number of podcasts - everyone from my favorite talk radio hosts to motivational speakers uses them - yet I never even thought about the possibility of using them to enhance the classroom experience. This opens up a whole new level of instruction! Now I can be in a student's ears at all hours of the night haunting with all of my favorite facts and dates and events. Ican just see it now:  I'm sitting in my class waiting on the bell to ring and in walk Joseph and Andre having a conversation about which battlefield landmark was the most important to the battlefield at Antietam Creek but they don't really know that's what they're discussing. They are just reveling in the body count at the Sunken Road because they heard it on my podcast over the weekend. They only listened to it because they knew that I'd give an all extra credit quiz over it on Monday, but they listened and that's all that matters. I smile.

Podcasts could make an excellent tool if used properly. They offer a student a way to gather information on their on time and in a medium they feel comfortable with (not to mention making the teacher look kind of awesome for even using them). It also gives the parents another opportunity to engage with their students and know what they're being taught. If you haven't noticed by now, I'm a HUGE fan of parental involvment and I think it's great when something is presented that can put the parent right in the middle of the learning experience. Some of the other Web 2.0 tools that we've looked at, like wikis, are great also, but they don't offer the students and parents the authenticity of hearing you speak. They can also be altered, where a podcast is done once it's recorded. I look forward to trying this out with my son who is homeschooled. This gives me a way to put lessons together for him and still go to work and school, and can relieve some of the burden on his mom at the same time. Exciting stuff indeed.

Lean On Me

So far in this class we've learned ways of using tech to communicate and share information with students in a way that gives them a lot more opportunity to absorb what they need to learn. But today I was excited to see that not only could we reach out to students but to eachother as well. Using wikis and some of the other tools we looked at will allow us to engage other teachers, finding assistance or offering it when needed. I have to admit that I typically avoid wikipedia due to its lack of reliability and oversight. The idea of having a venue to post information and have an expert correct it or even be the expert (dare I imagine it) is intriguing and exciting. I look forward to playing around with some of these tools and learning ways to implement them in what I believe to be a unique teaching philosophy.

Because I don't believe the students that I will teach will be my own, but their parents' instead, I won't assign them homework that intrudes upon their time with their parents. Instead I want to be able to communicate openly and freely with parents, letting them know the day's or week's lesson plans and encouraging them to set aside time - at their own discretion - for reviewing or digging deeper into what was taught. Teamed with a blog, these tools will give me a way to interact with parents and their students without having to budget extra time for face-to-face and phone conferences unless they are actually needed. This also gives interested parents a way to see into their students' classroom and know exactly what is being taught.

My philosophy is one that I believe will greatly affect the way students and their parents engage in the academic experience. I'm glad to know that there are tools out there that can be easily impleneted to help make my classroom vision a reality.

Now You Play Nice. . .

As a dad, I've said those words to my Littles a thousand times. Not one time, though, do I remember one of them stopping to ask me what I meant by that. Instructions are and directions and rule govern so much of what we do every day of our lives, yet I can't help but laugh when I think of how few of those instructions, rules and directions we actually know. When I was taking the copyright quiz I found that a good bit of what I THOUGHT I knew I was totally wrong about. This is why I appreciate a lesson like this one. Although I won't claim to have learned everything there is to know, I at least know where I can access the information that will set me in the right direction. As a teacher, this will be what students will require of me - whether they know toask or not.

For the students that I will engage in the future, the web will be a classroom unto itself. Indeed, most of their world will be virtual. For this reason, it will be vitally important for me and other teachers to be able to help them and their parents navigate it safely while following the rules. Because of my own philosophy about teaching, I see myself focusing on the parents far more than on their students when stressing the importance of web safety and etiquette. Being able to furnish parents with websites like http://www.netsmartz.org/ will give them the tools they need to guide their students safely toward success in my classroom. They will also be able to hold me accountable for making sure that their students are protected within the bounds of any activity, such as blogging, that I might give them to participate in outside of class. Overall, I learned through this assignment that I have quite a bit to learn, but the tools are out there for me to succeed.

What's In A Domain Name?

Before going through the MAPping Information activity, I thought I was equipped to do decent enough web searches. I knew a enough to get by if I needed reliable resources for research projects or speeches. I knew better than to look to wikipedia.com as a completely reliable source, or go to only cite an ultra-conservative website like drudgereport.com to make an arguement for conservatism being more sensible than liberalism. Because I had already spent some time with the campus library staff working on projects for previous classes, I was pretty well aware of the differences between .com and .org and .gov - although I have to admit I didn't know there were so many different extensions and combinations of them. But I guess that's about it.

In going through the exercise, I realized that I still had a bit of learning to do when it comes to fully vetting a website. I never could have imagined that so much information could be gained from deciphering the URL - or Uniform Resource Locator (http://www.novemberlearning.com/, 2012) (that isn't my attempt to sound intelligent so much as it is me referring to knowledge gained roughly 5 minutes ago - yes, I'm that far behind). Then to go deeper and start to examine things like the links within the website was an idea that had never really occured to me. Most times I've just ignored them, preferring to just stay with the text that I was reading. I found, however, to do that could lead to a good bit af confusion. The link I chose for the activity was the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (http://www.zapatopi.net/, 2011). I chose it because I figured that it would be good for a laugh, and indeed it was. But it was also eye-opening. As I read through it, I started to realize how someone, to whom it might be plausible that an octopus could live in a tree, this website could sound just credible enough to make them true believers. Even with it's use of links to wikipedia to authenticate the locations or general terms used, a somewhat gullible person could really be drawn in.

I think, as a teacher, it will be helpful to know how students approach the art of gathering information. This is something that will be a huge factor in them reaching their learning goals just as it is for me. With simple knowledge like the proper way to vet a website, students will be able to avoid the many misinformation pitfalls that await them on the web.

It's Me!. . . (Again. . .)

I'm Jonathan (the whole thing!!) Vaughn. I'm a transplant to Sulphur Springs, TX from Chicago, IL by way of Newport News, VA. I spent 8 years in the Air Force - 6 active duty and 2 reserve - where I was a flightline avionics tech. I had the pleasure of maintaining F-15 C/D, and F/A-22 fighter aircraft at Langley AFB, VA. Of the two, my overall favorite was the F/A-22 while I much preferred working on the F-15. My reserve service was spent working on the A-10 at Barksdale AFB, LA. While on active duty I earned an A.S. in avionic systems technology which, upon enrolling at A&M Commerce, I quickly abandoned and changed to history with teacher cert. I am also carrying a minor in writing. I made the change because, frankly, I wanted to do something that mattered. Playing with jets is fun stuff, no doubt, but what long range significance is there? I didn't (and don't) see any. When I consider history, however, I see a subject that I am passionate about learning. I opted for the teacher cert because - as my 12 yo son will tell you - I am also quite passionate about sharing what I learn and the implications of it. My wife suggested the writing minor because she thinks I'm good at it (and a bit long winded too, which doesn't hurt). So that's how I arrived here. My long range goal is to teach history in an environment where individual thought can be fostered and encouraged. I want students to really absorb what history is, decide what they think and feel about it, and realize how it has produced their personal 'today' and guides them toward their individual and collective 'tomorrows'. I want to learn everything I possibly can that will make me a great facilitator of that kind of learning, including how to implement the technological tools that will help me connect to students. Although I'm not really tech savvy, I'm taking the examples that I've observed thus far in my classes and starting to build an idea of how I'd use technology in my own classroom.

I envision a classroom setting in which students are encouraged and enabled to interact with history. This may be through computer based programs, or something of the sort, designed to allow them to choose a particularly interesting aspect of the lesson that I would have lectured on. I want them to be able to feel like they've in some way taught themselves the lesson and made it come alive. I'd also like for students to have access to personal interactive timelines where they'd be able to input the historical information that I give them along with their own family history so they can have something to relate all of those facts and dates to. Most of all, I want students to really think about the history they've learned and reflect on how it affects them. I want them to have opinions about it and judge it. Something like a blog would be an excellent tool for that. I don't ever plan to assign homework (I'm morally opposed to it), so I'd like to use tools like blogging to point students and their parents to web-based and other resources that would aid them to in navigating my courses succesfully. In this way, students would not be enabled and encouraged to make the learning their own, they'd also be forced to.

My biggest goal while in this class is simple; I want to learn! Because tech is a bit foreign to me, I want to take advantage of the opportunity to learn as many of its applications as possible. I want to learn to effectively use the tools available to create in the future the classroom that I've described. While working toward this goal it would also be nice to build some relationships with people of like mind and goals. I look forward to gleaning wisdom from those of my classmates who have already been in the classroom environment and can help me achieve the vision that I have. This should be a fun and interesting semester.