The Learning Starts....for Me!

I have taken my summer to learn a little more about education and what is out there in education in the world. I want to get better at teaching. I want to see what else I can do to help me teach the students. What ideas are out there that I have not heard of or that can refine what I have been doing? So spent time with Ted. Ted.com is a website about ideas. Great ideas. The cutting edge ideas... about everything. Ted is a collection of presentations from Ted Conferences over the years. This has become my personal professional development.

I spent time with Sugata Mitra teaching me about how kids can teach themselves. I found that I need to stop pushing the information to the students and I need to present and let them learn or give them time to teach themselves. As we use technology in our school I have heard teachers say that we need to know how to use the computer completely before we teach the students. We can't let them go on their own because we don't k now what they are doing. We are not going to know everything so we need to let the students go (with some guidance) and have them show us what they are doing. We can have them teach the class if they find something new. We want the students to stretch themselves and yet we prevent them from stretching by holding them back from teaching themselves. I need to let go.


Another I learned from was Ken Robinson. I had heard about him on a few other blogs so I listened to his ideas about creativity. I will be looking at my class to see where I can increase creativity in my class. I learned that I need to let kids come up with ideas. I want them to feel comfortable to come up with crazy ideas. In another presentation about Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age, Randy Nelson talks about improvisation and how improve is going with any idea. Go with every idea. When an idea is stopped, it goes dead. I want kids to have the opportunity to present their ideas without having to have these ideas getting squashed. Building creativity will mean I need to hold back on toning the kids down. I will try providing a place on our wiki that the students can type in their ideas so we can all remember what it was. Using a back channel will also give the students a place to ask questions and write ideas.

Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005. It is one of the greatest speeches about how to "connect the dots" in our lives. It is not just because I am an Apple guy, but it is a great speech. Steve shares a few stories from his life that might have gone a couple ways, but he made the best of what he had and moved forward. The dots were put n the page and now he can connect them to see where he was and what helped him get to where he is.

A few other presentations I enjoyed were...
David Logan on Tribal Leadership
Tim Brown on Creativity and Play
Elif Shafak on the Politics of Fiction

Walking a Tightrope Without a Net..book!

I have been doing a lot of reading this summer about using our students netbooks better. I have found a few programs that I want to use. As I was reading Dave Warlick's blog he mentioned using Xmind as a brainstorming program. I was using Freemind but Xmind is so much easier to use. So I will be installing it on the student computers when we start school.

I was searching around on the net and ran into a blog by Brad Flickenger. He talks a lot about using netbooks in the classroom. He has some great ideas about using them in the curriculum, classroom management, and basic netbook stuff in the classroom. It gave me some ideas about having the students sign a netbook contract. We will put together a few rules and consequences for the netbooks. He also mentions that he has the students do a monthly maintenance checklist to keep them clean and orderly. I will be putting one of those together also to keep them running as well as giving the students a sense of ownership for their computer.

One thing Brad talked about was using flash drives in the classrooms. If the students have their own computers, why use a flash drive? I can see a few reasons why we should use flash drives. Taking documents home for use on their computers and going from one computer in the school to the computer lab to complete a reports or to show a presentation. I have not been sold on the Google Docs yet for Elementary School students. I want to use it, but I have parents that do not want (or do not have a computer) email addresses for their children. I want a way for the students to get a Google Docs account, but I am still trying to figure out how to get all the students an account. I was hoping that Google would let me put a class of students into a group so I can manage them. I am hoping that we will get to the point of having parents set up the account for the students. We will see this coming year.

I really like his idea about sending the students a question each morning before school for them to answer in the morning. We have the students do Morning Work (a language question, geography question, analogy question and a math question) and work as partners to complete the questions. Adding a message on our Wiki would be a great addition to the morning work. It could be a starter for Social Studies, a topic in math, language, or even a situation in class. So many ideas. I can't wait.

Care to Discuss it?

One of the great things I like about using a wiki is the discussion page. Having the students complete an assignment on the discussion page is a wonderful way to get the students writing and enjoying the method of writing. When completing a topic in social studies and science, having the students do a short summary about what they learned helps the students review information in the lesson. They have to recall and put into words the information they learned. It also gives them a place to review the information before a test. The discussion also gives the students the opportunity to read other student's information to help recall other information in the lesson. Students also reply to other students' writings to ask questions, give support, and comment on something they liked. It gives the students an opportunity to learn how to use writing to communicate with others. We have moved into an age where we are communicating by text a lot: texting, Facebook, email, blogs, and messaging. Students need to learn etiquette online when writing. The discussion page in one way to learn how to communicate with others online.