Week One Reading Reflection - Rethinking High School

Ringing my Bell

As I read chapter one of "Rethinking High School" one thing that continually resonated with me was the idea of learning by doing. I think that hands on is the best practice, that doing is knowing (or at least closer to it). By allowing students to engage in real world tasks we help them to truly invest in their learning and experience their newly acquired knowledge through usage. Furthermore, when students are actively involved in "doing" larger scale projects they are more likely to be taking on multiple disciplines of study. For example, a census project could provide students opportunities to work collaboratively to collect information, to synthesize the results using mathematics, and to write about how their results relate to specific elements of their social science and language arts studies. Most importantly the students task would require them to go outside of the comfort and safety of a tablet arm chair desk in a polygonal room and interact with the communities and the world around them at large. Doing could mean that they are on a computer in the classroom or a resource room creating an artistic and visually pleasing form for presenting their findings. As long as students seek answers by thinking critically to solve problems and create unique and personal products we will know they are learning. In this way our assessments also become more valid, especially if the previous assessments were multiple guess. Learning by doing creates able and confident citizens who, even during their most fresh and naive step into the adult world, will have experience to lean on.

Mediocre Measures
Not that it's a horrible practice, but I found the part about the educators and creators of Best Practice High School reflecting on their own experience as parents a little short sided. The authors mention that the three of them took their experiences with their collective eight children and evaluated the feelings that they've experienced from their children. I think they came up with a good synopsis: "Some of our children were welcomed and reasonably well served by their schools, others had mixed or indifferent experiences, and some were ignored, misunderstood, or injured." The problem I have is that it is still merely a personal reflection. I think actually surveying students (anonymously) would render much more discrete understandings of how the students feel in their schools.
Second to?
Creating curricular paths to success was right down Best Practices High's alley. They both are concerned with constructing meaning rather than filling kids up with information and are more concerned with what students can actually do than how many of the correct bubbles they can find. 
What about you Mr. Sullivan?
I'm excited to work with my colleagues, especially from different disciplines, on creating tasks, assignments, and assessments that engage the students in two or more disciplines at a time. I think that with the help of technology we can tear down the walls that divide our disciplines and find ways to inculcate the skills we all posses into rich, rigorous, and stimulating activities for all of the teachers' students to experience and interact with, sans limitation. 

Newsletter Sample

This is a newsletter I made that was then converted into a jpeg format and placed on this blog.

OUSD Middle School Diversity Project

Ashley Parks, Cynthia Rey, and I created this short movie about the current diversity issues in the Oceanside Unified Middle Schools: King, Lincoln, and Jefferson. The film was shot by Ashley Parks and me, while a majority of the photos were shot by Cynthia Rey. Some of the photos were taken from the North County Times periodical.

Journal 10: Diabled Students and Technology

Disabled Bodies, Able Minds: Giving Voice, Movement, and Independence to the Physically Challenged

by: Diane Curtis

This article and the accompanying video discuss how technology is benefitting the disabled. On numerous levels of interaction and through numerous devices disabled students are making great strides in their access and abilites. Technology has become a powerful tool for disabled students to bridge gaps and overcome some of their disablements in all subjects, from music, to writing, to physical interactions. I was extremely impressed by the community contributions to the disabled student who had is musical instrument stolen. I was also very glad to see these students moving on to succeed in higher education. I have seen some of this technology used in the classroom but never to the extent that was displayed in the video.

Why do disabled kids have so much trouble transitioning out of high school to continue their education?
Often times students are wrapped up in studying for high school exit exams and other exams that are required by the NCLB legislation that they don't have time to study and prepare for the experiences that are to come in the next few years of their lives. It is a big transition for them and they are not adequately prepared.

Why are the developments so slow for integrating technology for disabled students?
Many of the teachers are not up to date with technology and tech specialists spend most of their time focusing on providing resources for the majority population. I think that technology should be need based. Most applications for students able bodied students can be run as web based applications while hardware and software for disabled students is often more costly but must be purchased. We need to cut corners where we can and provide resources for those who need them.

Journal 9: Holding Back

Are Schools Inhibiting 21st Century Learners?
by: Dave Nagel
This article discusses weather or not schools are inhibiting students by limiting their access to technologies. The complaints range from blaming the teachers to blaming the filters that are in place on the computers accessing the Internet. The article cites that young people are the leading users of technology, often in a much more sophisticated manner than adults, and they should have access to these important resources. Educators and parents feel that safety precautions are vital however they expect that the new and powerful technological resources that are available to educators are being used in the classroom. The article talks about the utility of gaming for understanding difficult concepts. Many were for gaming however very few were actually implementing it into their curriculum. Mobile learning technologies were also seen as a great way to engage students and make the learning more relevant and engaging. Most students have a cell phone and/or a mobile digital media player.

What are some steps that can be taken to add more opportunities for incorporating technology into the classroom?
Schools should develop a plan to increase the amount of technology used in the classroom. Together with administrators and technology staff, teachers should be looking for different ways to couple instruction with hands on and interactive technological materials. Teachers should also evaluate how their technology either worked or did not and then revise their plans.

How can teachers help all students to have the necessary devices to teach with technology?
Grants are the first thing that come to mind when considering how to make sure that students are provided the tools they need to succeed in as web 2.0 users. Also keeping lines of communication open between teachers, students, parents, and the community at large can help to foster involvement and encourage community contributions. People are more likely to help and participate if they are made to feel that they are a part of something.

Journal 8: Free Science Resources Online

Spotlight: Free Science Resources Online
by: Dave Nagel

This article is about where to find some free online resources for science. The article talks about three specific places to find curriculum, lesson plans, projects and other really cool and helpful resources. The three places are MIT, NASA, and the Smithsonian. The MIT site is cool. It has all kinds of demonstration videos which I found useful. I don't plan to teach science but I think this would be a really cool resource if I did have to teach science. The NASA site has cool instructional videos. The one I watched was kind of boring though. But there are some really technical tools that can be accessed through NASA's site. The Smithsonian had really cool articles and activities. I accidentally went to some of the humanities activities and found some that I really liked and would consider using in my own classroom.

How can these sites be used in the classroom?
There are numerous ways to use these sights in the classroom. The videos on the sites can be shown to the students even without a computer in the classroom. They could be saved and put on a DVD and then played in the classroom. Each site has numerous lesson plans on them which could be of immeasurable help to a new teacher. There are also links and activities for students on the sites that could be used in the classroom.

What age groups can use these sites?
All three sites are relevant to all ages K-forever. I found a lot of the stuff I was looking at to be very interesting and some of it to be far beyond my own knowledge level.

Journal 7: Collaborative Documents

The technology that I looked at is called Collaborative Documents, and it involves multiple people being able to contribute to a single project. Google Documents is a prime example of a collaborative document, but others include yourdraft, writewith, and whiteboard. All of these sites can be used as word processors and provide access for multiple users. In essence you no longer need to purchase expensive microsoft office software because it is all available through web-based applications. These applications not only make it free and easy to do your word processing but they make it free and easy to share and collaborate with others.

However during my searching I looked at a new application for facebook.com that allows student groups to work together in groups to accomplish collaborative assignments. The application has capabilities with scheduling, discussion boards, and task organization as well as a collaborative documents section. People using this application so far seem to be excited. The format is based on facebook's platform so it will be familiar to those who use it.