My Blog of Potential

This is not an original idea – for years we’ve been told that teaching is more effective if the learner can see the value of what is being taught. With that in mind, however, I am beginning to look for ways to help my teachers make connections between what they must teach in the classroom to meet the state standards and what is currently going on in the world.  Since I am not in the teaching rotation, and I have time to research, perhaps that is a good way I can support my teachers – I can look at their upcoming units and prepare some web-links that will connect what they are teaching to how it is being applied today.  Some subjects are easier to connect than others – for example:  our language arts does a unit on the Holocaust, and sometimes I think students look at that as an example of a horrible thing that happened in the past, without realizing that similar atrocities are still occurring today.  I did some research online and in a short amount of time I was able to find news articles and reports on current-day conflicts where the terms ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ and ‘Genocide’ are being used.  I’m not sure what the next step should be, though – I’m sure the students’ reactions will be “That’s awful, someone should do something about that” – but I really want to have some resources and suggestions available for them in case they want to take that next step.  Where to go from here? 

I am beginning to reflect on our constant struggle to get students and teachers to use our subscription library databases (things like Gale and Newsbank), and it is a struggle.  Kids and teachers don’t want to have to remember to first access the library webpage, then login, then select the library database, then login again – they’d much rather just go to Google and start searching.  This struggle has been going on for at least 5 years that I can remember in my district, and I’m beginning to wonder:  If students and teachers are this resistant to using subscription databases, and if they’d much rather use the free search engines that are widely available, could the money spent on those databases be better spent elsewhere?  Perhaps instead of fighting this battle, we should save our money, and spend our efforts on teaching the teachers and students how to search using the tools that will be available to them once they leave our school district.  Maybe we should be teaching them to use the advanced search features of Google – limit their searches, specify using Google Scholar or some of the special Google tools.  We should be concentrating our efforts on teaching them how to evaluate what they find, not on how and where to look for it. Teach how to figure out who is behind the website (or web directory) and what their agenda may be. Maybe it’s time to give up the losing battle and pick one we can win, or at least break even on.

The K12Online Conference kicks off in just a little while with a keynote, and I am very excited to be able to view it. We have an inservice today, and our teachers will be spending the day collating and examining the disaggregated test data on all their students. Since our teachers do not have to take a yearly exam (yet, sigh – let’s not give anyone ideas!), I do not have data to analyze, but I still have to be on campus and available in case someone can’t figure out how to manipulate the excel spreadsheets that contain the data. So…I am going to use that opportunity to hook up a projector and ‘just happen’ to have the keynote playing in the lab near where the teachers are working. Hopefully I can get some ‘drive-by’ traffic to stop and listen when they’re taking breaks and looking for some relief to the mind-numbingly dull drudgery of analyzing disaggregated TAKS data.

A Vision of K-12 Students Today

This was a very well done video – I want all my teachers to watch it!!

This post will be updated from time to time as I collect my thoughts.  I am listening to the Inside K-12Online podcast and picking up the excitement as they are thinking about and planning the conference.  I always feel kind of caught flat-footed when I see any conference call for papers, because I don’t feel like i’m doing anything innovative – so what could I contribute?  But I’m starting to get a glimmer of an idea.  Many times in my district the early adopters of technology are getting frustrated because of all the safety concerns and bandwidth concerns thrown up by district administration – perhaps I could pull together and document various ways we are addressing those concerns so that someone a year or two behind me could take that back to their sys admins instead of having to do all the legwork from scratch.  I”ll start chewing on that idea.