Although this was one of the shortest chapters in this book, I believe that it is one of the most relevant for education reform. The most thought-provoking statement that I read was “professional development provided the teachers at Union City [New Jersey] was a process, not an event…” I feel like most of my professional development has been just that, an event, because I never used any of the materials I got, and there was no follow-up to see if individuals who attended the PD trainings made improvements in their teaching. I attended a training on Access, but I don’t use it; I use Excel instead.

Yet, there have been events that I have attended which have been meaningful and changed my teaching approach and helped me grow into a better teacher. One is the Math Leadership Support Network sponsored by PIMSER and the University of Kentucky. The purpose of this program is to provide materials and leadership training for teachers and administrators to take back to their district and distribute the information and improve schools from within. Since I began attending the meetings in August (they occur about once a month), I have a huge binder full of activities, informational reading, and have acquired eight books, including Vandewalle. The 5-8 activities work well with my high school kids. Their focus for learning is to teach students conceptually. Because they model the activities with us, I finally have a good understanding of how to design and teach good conceptual lessons. I will be adding them to my wiki from last semester sometime during this week (I am officially on spring break). They will be under the heading of Activities That Work. The address for my wiki is:

http://pamcallahan.wikispaces.com

A second PD that was successful and was more a process than an event is one that I have already blogged about (the successful high schools at work). I recently received a mailing from them of a technical math test with some really good questions. If anyone would like a pdf copy of this test, just reply to this post, and I will get them to you via email, and I will post it to the wiki, too.

So I was trying to locate public groups that teachers might join and discuss classroom issues. Well, while searching for groups on MySpace, did a search on math. I did not select all categories, I was just on whatever group it had defaulted to, and to my surprise (gasp), I found 15 groups, most of which were hate groups! But on a serious note, when I searched for teaches in all categories, I did find this one, which has over 1700 members.

http://groups.myspace.com/theteachersroom

The current discussion is on class size, which I know many of us struggle with. Large class sizes are harder to teach. The kids just distract each other, making it harder for them to learn and for us to teach.

So if anyone has a MySpace account, you may want to check this group out.

I sent the following response to a classmate who was undecided about how much to be involved in SNS’s.

I was one of those people who said I would never get a social networking site. But once I set up my pages (MySpace and Facebook), I told my students about them and asked them to add me as a friend. I have gained a small group of students between both sites. My students have wonderful poetry, blog writings, comments, and pictures to offer in return. Yes, some of them are silly, too, but that’s okay. They come to my MySpace and Facebook accounts and look at my pictures and send me comments. The way I see it, my kids have a lot to offer, just as I have a lot to offer them. They have given me great advice about how to spruce up my pages, and it pleases them to be a part of my world. I don’t feel like I am giving up my privacy; I see it as sharing more of myself with them. If I do get to the point where it becomes too overwhelming, I can always disappear into cyberspace. I know that inviting students may not work for everyone, but teachers know their students and can gauge whether it is a good idea.

As far as renewing old acquaintances go, it is up to you. Remember that people do change, so people who were not very interesting ten years ago can be very interesting to get to know now. I say take the chance, and if you don’t like them, just delete them out of your cyberworld.

On Friday, I am going to a math leadership meeting in Lexington, and I am going to collect teachers there who have SNS sites and add them to my list. In order to build relationships, you have to put yourself out there, for better or worse, and see what happens. As the Kentucky lottery slogan goes, “you can’t win if you don’t play.” So I encourage everyone to get out there and try.

I have yet to broaden out and find more adults for my Myspace and Facebook accounts, but my student population is growing. I find that I get to know my kids even better by reading their postings and viewing their pictures. I have almost thirty friends between the two accounts. Some of my former students have found me and are writing about their college experiences.

Having once been a person who said she would never take part in such forms of communication, I am definitely a convert as I can now see both the educational and social value of using SNS accounts.

The last post to my Myspace blog is a thread where students can discuss their memories of two of our students who died in a fishing/boating accident this weekend. I knew both the boys from my ESS group, and they were both wonderful students and will be dearly missed. I have such a heavy heart about the whole incident, such a tragic accident, and it will be a very emotional day tomorrow.

I had the pleasure of going to Atlanta from Wednesday to Friday of this week for a conference sponsored by the Southern Regional Education Board and the National Career Pathways Network (formerly National Tech Prep) on Making Successful High Schools work. We spent one and a half days coming up with projects based on a very detailed and thoughtful guidelines for lesson planning activity and collaboration. I was a part of the Agriculture Construction team with a fellow teacher and several teachers from Louisville, KY and McCreary Central. Our project was to design an environmentally friendly house. We called it the “Green” house project. The Louisville school had already gotten some of the funding for their project from State Farm, so I am going to check and see if we can do the same for Powell County. They are supposed to take our lessons and post them to their web site, and when they do, I will post a link here on the blog. The basis behind this program is to use Carl Perkins money and grant money to integrate more mathematics into the vocational classroom. By coming up with comprehensive unit plans, teachers work as teams to focus on the mathematics that needs to be taught in order to ensure kids learn the math and the vocation at the same time. The hope is to raise the math skills of students so they are more marketable to employers, and employers were surveyed to see what was lacking in new employees, and it is the math skills. The school in Louisville is also getting help from local businesses, including one of the local banks who has bought property for the building site. The finished product will be sold to a first time home buyer at a discounted rate.

We did make it out of Atlanta before the tornado hit, we were held on the runway when the severe storm warning was issued earlier in the evening, and then they flew us out at such a high rate of speed to get us out quickly.  We weren’t allowed to use our cell phones, and no refreshments were served.  We were supposed to fly out at 8:03 p.m., left at 9:23, and the tornado hit at 9:45. We had been in that area being tourists around 6 that evening. We just missed our connecting flight from Charlotte to Lexington, and ended up spending the night in Charlotte with no luggage. The airport was kind enough to give us an overnight supply bag with toothbrush and toiletries, but we did have to pay for the hotel, and it took two hours for the shuttle to get everyone there because it was 30 minutes round trip and they could only take 10 at a time. After getting three hours of sleep, we got up and ventured to the airport for our 7:40 flight, which was delayed by fog until after 9:00 a.m. We finally made it home to Bluegrass Airport at 10:15, but our luggage was not at the baggage claim. We finally located it at the baggage office with the tags of our original flight, not the new flight.  So even though we were all very tired, it was the best trip I have ever taken and we all really bonded over the experience.

If any of you travel to Atlanta in the near future, the MARTA train system is an inexpensive and wonderful way to see the sites of the city.  The people are very friendly, and there is lots to do in Atlanta.  I hope to travel there again sometime soon.

I have gotten three SNS site subscriptions going, and am starting to collect friends. So far, I have only people that I know, either from class or from my school. I will next try to go out and recruit educators from other places. None of the educators at my school do either Facebook or MySpace, so I am going beyond the local boundaries. More to come…

TechLearning has some great articles about current technology practices for teachers, tech coordinators, and administrators.

Well, I am totally revising what I had in the space earlier in the week. I am closing out the Twitter account and have created a Facebook account. It was very easy to set up, and I personalized it with some of my own photographs. For those of you who are nature lovers, I have photos to share from my area (Stanton). I have added a couple of friends to my page so far and signed both of their walls. I even got “bitten” by a Zombie. I see why kids love the SNS pages. It gives them a chance to share their creativity. Several kids are still trying to talk me into a MySpace page, so they can add me as a friend and get the chance to show off their page. Guess I know what I will be doing this evening…

Addendum: http://www.myspace.com/education4ever is my url for MySpace

I have really enjoyed reading this book, and I agree with several of the points that have been brought up in the first chapter. First, education is extremely slow in adopting any change, even though the ideas of revolutionary significance have been there since the turn of the century. Dewey definitely had the right idea that we need to focus more on our students participating in the learning instead of having them listen and learn. Maybe with the growth and expansion of technology, Dewey’s time has finally come. I liked the comparison to Da Vinci, who had the right idea for flight, just not the right materials. We now have the right materials.

Information has also become more widespread since the date of this book (1993), so the four year old who wanted to know how giraffes sleep could look it up on Google or have an adult do so. I didn’t know the answer to this question, so I googled it and found out that they sleep less than two hours a day and always by standing up.  I had always thought they slept like horses did.  When I was growing up, if I wanted to know something, I would ask an adult, and if they didn’t know, I went to the library and looked it up in the encyclopedia.  I don’t remember having something that I could not find the answer for.  We, as teachers, need to teach our students how to be researchers, too.  Kids are good at looking up what they are interested in, like cars and prom dresses, but I don’t feel like kids are good at looking up topics that would help them academically.  Not many students use the Internet for assist in homework, whereas if I were a kid, I would be finding all I could find.  I know that teachers were once good students, but I wonder where the spark for learning has gone.  I don’t see it in many of my students, probably only 10% or so.  Maybe if teachers could follow Dewey’s idea for more student-centered learning, and start with students as soon as they enter the educational system, we could gain back this spark, making it more satisfying for teachers in secondary and post-secondary education.  I see some of this change happening in our own district, but it will be several years before these kids reach high school.  Time will tell, and I hope for the best.