http://oedb.org/library/features/top-100-education-blogs

The two blogs I chose to add to my feeds were:

http://www.techlearning.com/rss/all.php

http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/connectingnews/feed/

The Tech Learning blog is great because it features technology articles which are relevant to teachers.  There was even a recent article about a teacher from Boyd County, Kentucky who received a technology grant.  There is also information on grants and grant writing.

The Connecting News feed has articles that relate to science and mathematics.  I thought I would post it for the science teachers out there.   It covers topics like genetics, alternate fuel sources, game theory and viruses (my favorite), and much more.

http://www.kyvs.org/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_123_1

I have done the Algebraic Patterns and Virtual Manipulatives programs and got lots of good materials.

My page is located at pamcallahan.wikispaces.com

I will submit it for grading on Monday, just in case I decide to revise it again.

I have about ten links to math sites to add to my page, then I will begin to work on my idea of getting other schools to collaborate.

With secondary teachers, learning tends to be in the form of professional development or conferences.  At the post-secondary level, I think that professors tend to teach themselves or collaborate with colleagues to make this work. Whatever the means of learning, I believe that it is important to know how to be effective.

While browsing through the OLDaily articles, I found this interesting article on Celebrating Failure. The point made by this article is that we learn through failure (i.e. video games), and why can’t schools take this approach to help students learn, especially in math? It seems that math teachers tend to use the summative assessment as the guiding force for evaluation, when really, we should be giving lots of formative assessment, letting our students make mistakes, and then using the mistakes they make to help them learn math. If a student is incorrectly solving an equation by not combining like terms on the same side of the equation, then we work on that skill until they get it right. If there is a problem with integers, then we work on integers, or teach them how to use the calculator well so that they overcome the “fear” of not knowing how to do integers.

I love coincidences, and on Friday of this week, I attended a conference for math leadership. In addition to showing us a video on formative vs. summative assessment, they gave us a paper copy of an article by William and Black called “Inside the Black Box.” This article is about how to effectively use formative assessment in teaching. There is a hyperlink to this article about halfway down. I highly recommend everyone read this article because it helps answer the question from last week, “How do we know our students are learning?”

My life lesson for this week has been that I am not doing enough formative assessment in my classrooms, and that by changing the way I teach and adding more formative assessment, I will be better about to know if my students are learning, even if it is only in the short term. By adding more conceptual learning, I hope to increase the retention of student’s math knowledge.

What I like about the new direction of portfolios is that it is more real world relevant. Because we are in an information age, the relevance of technical writing has come to the forefront. What I saw before in the way of transactive pieces were brochures about the same topics (drug abuse, proper nutrition). This past year, I saw more descriptive pieces about these same topics in magazine article format, the detail was richer, and the writings more comprehensive.

I enjoyed reading what Remona wrote in her blog about a presentation by Kathy Mincy of MSU (a wonderful lady, by the way, I got to work with her briefly in 1994).  She says:

The faculty survey revealed that, contrary to some popular opinion, teachers have seen freshman writers fairly evenly holding their own or improving in basic skills, with many more seeing improvement in the last 5 years. Also, when it comes to being writers, first-year college students are demonstrating significant improvement in understanding the writing process and showing more comfort with writing.

This was in reference to a survey given on the effective of the high school portfolio.

Article title: “Turning Teaching Into Learning: The Role of Student Responsibility in the Collegiate Experience”

This article brings out a very valid point about student learning. In order for students to become learners, there needs to be a sense of responsibility in the student for their own learning. Colleges need to be able to foster this responsibility by letting students know the expectations and by putting into place policies that foster student achievement and recognize it.  When students are active learners, and professors provide activities to engage students, the “quality of effort”, a measure of student learning, is greater and students are more successful academically and socially.

I believe the principles in this article are applicable to the secondary level, too.  If we, as teachers, can provide learning activities that get our students actively involved, then we can produce a better quality of learners.  Sometimes, secondary teachers fail at engaging students because of time constraints, lack of resources, and low student motivation.  We, at the high school level, have lots of obstacles to overcome.

I believe that a teacher defines their own role in the classroom, based on their own experiences.  There are many outside influences that make a teacher who they are.  What courses have they taken; did they go the traditional route of teaching (student teaching experience) or take the alternative certification?; what kinds of things did their mentor teacher show them?; how many years of experience do they have in the classroom?; have they engaged in professional development?; what kind of support did they receive from administration, from other teachers, from parents?; and do they have a strong work ethic?

This last question is a quality that good teachers have.  Teachers with a good work ethic will take the time to find activities that make the classroom interesting to students.  They will see out advice from colleagues when something doesn’t go well with a lesson.  They will spend endless hours searching the Internet for any information to help them do a better job.  To answer the question of “Is teaching imposed on you?” or “Does it rise from within?”, I say that good teachers possess a certain quality that rises from within; it is like they are naturals at their jobs.  I have seen a first year teacher exhibit the good qualities of a veteran teacher–how did she do it?  I wonder the same thing myself.  She did come from a family of teachers, her mom, her sister.

Then there are teachers who have teaching imposed on them.  They have outside influences that lead them down the path of teaching, and they do what they need to do in order to do a good job.

The role of the learner is a hard one to define.  In many ways, we are all learners.  We are still acquiring knowledge from events and social interactions around us.  In the educational setting, it is a structured relationship between the teacher and the student.  We hope that with whatever method we choose as a teacher, that students will gain that knowledge, thereby making them learners.  Learners are those who are being educated, and it isn’t always by teachers.  Kids are good at teaching each other things, family members are good teachers,  strangers can be good teachers, television can teach.  I think learning is when someone knows something in the moment that they did not know before a given experience, a social interaction, a given circumstance.

The role of a teacher in the classroom is to be a facilitator to guide students towards learning.  It should be more than just lecture, it needs to have student involvement, whether it be discussions or projects or group work.  It needs to build on prior knowledge.  Sometimes, the role of a teacher is to review, to bring back the student’s remembrance of that prior knowledge, in order to lead them forward into learning new material.  A teacher is supportive, giving extra assistance where needed, showing students where they are going astray and bringing them back on the right track.  Teachers are motivators, encouraging students to want to learn, and giving them sound reasons behind what they are learning.

The online classroom has taken away the face to face element of teaching, but it offers innovative ways of learning that can be incorporated into the regular classroom.  Expectations are clearly posted at the beginning of the course, readings are posted that enhance learning in the course, online learners are required to communicate with each other via emails, discussion boards, blogs, chats, etc. , assignments are communicated with specific deadlines, and because they are accessible to everyone, there is no need for coming up with makeup work.  Online students are responsible for researching topics as needed.  The intimidation factor is removed because communication takes place via written word, which is very precise, versus spoken word, which is subject to interpretation.

But getting to the question at hand, by rebuilding my curriculum map, it is much easier to create lesson plans because I know what needs to be addressed for each lesson and each standard.  A simple checklist of each section taught during the year lets me know that each core content statement and each program of studies is taught and when it is taught.  Yet, there is always a catch–and here it is–I never get as far in the curriculum as I plan, and there are standards that get left out, that don’t get taught.  Do I believe the list is too broad?  YES.  Do I believe it all is relevant?  NO.  So I do the best I can do with the time I have and the lack of motivation of students to always learn the content.