Letting Go

I think that most of our students understand that the final objective of an education is to find a job, become a productive member of the society and provide for their independence. With that said, I do not think schools are doing a good job of preparing students to go out into the business world and think on their own two feet. With the focus on CCRPI scores, testing, and grading, students do not have a lot of opportunities to make mistakes, to learn by trial and error, and to show how they would apply the knowledge that they have learned to new situations. As Wiggins says on his blog Great Teaching Means Letting Go, we need to help our students become “autonomous learners” by turning ourselves into facilitators and mentors that foster self-esteem and good problem-solving skills.

Teachers are taught and told that scaffolding is a fundamental element of effective teaching and that we must use this technique in combination with differentiation to help students’ transition from the lower levels to the upper ones. Now, this article Great Teaching Means Letting Go, tells us to let go and allow our students to learn from their mistakes and to use all of their resources to find out which one is the most appropriate for the situation that they are facing. This is a big change and a challenge that I think it will take a long time to spread all over the educational community, especially now that the government wants to tie teachers salaries to students’ performances. I enjoy what I do and I’m not afraid of changes, but there are a lot of teachers who fear new things, and this will be a significant shift in the way we educate the next generation.

I like the idea of allowing students to make mistakes and find things by trial in error, in places like a classroom, where mistakes do not have extremely serious consequences, and where we can look back at what went wrong, fix it, and try it again. I think the hardest part of this shift, will be getting administration and parents on board with performance-based evaluations, where a grade is defined by the student's ability to problem-solve not by the capacity to recite facts, dates or subject vocabulary.

Another thing that I had never thought about and Chris Lehmann mentioned in Inquiry: The Very First Step In the Process of Learning, is the fact that we put our students in a situation of having to deal with multiple bosses/teachers on a daily basis. We ask them to learn, retain and show comprehension of material learned, while at the same time dealing with different personalities, teaching styles and expectations. I know every teacher brings something new to the classroom, and maybe developing more cross-curriculum lessons where several teachers can be involved in the process of creating the lessons, the objectives, and the final evaluations, can help with those transitions.

Reflective Searching

Reference links: 

Information behaviour of the researcher of the future 

How Teens Do Research in the Digital word

According to the article “Information behaviour of the researcher of the future”
I am a member of the “Google Generation” with a small difference in my attitude towards social media. I do not think that having a busy and updated social profile is an essential part of my life, and out of the social networks I only use Facebook to stay in contact with family, but I do not check it every day. I also use Pinterest and Symbaloo to create collections of personal and professional resources that I curate from the web, and I prefer the Google platform to find information that I need when I need it.
Physical libraries and paper books have become a thing of the past for me, and I check online libraries for resources and buy books and magazines online.  These provide me with immediate accessibility to content, anytime and anywhere, and the convenience of having the next book in a series or a follow-up article has become very appealing.

Google and Google Scholar have become my favorite search engines, and I’m slowly developing my research skills. Just like this new generation of students, I’m a very impatient searcher and get frustrated when I cannot find the right material fast. Because I’m a Foreign Language teacher, I also rely on YouTube for tutorials, language practice and cultural resources.In the article “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World” some teachers agree that the enormous amount of resources and information available to students causes distractions from academic search, and I strongly agree with this idea. Today’s Internet is using individuals past choices and browsing preferences to bombard us with information and products, and every time I begin a search or find myself looking at a YouTube video, my computer shows me ads for things that I’ve searched in the past. Because I’m a visual person, I get distracted and follow the links, which make me spend more time going off on tangents than following what I need to look for.

I think as modern, up-to-date educators, we must embrace the constant change in the technology world and make sure that we are teaching our students and ourselves how to search for reliable and accurate information and resources from different sources. We need to guide students, create scholarly networks in school libraries and classrooms using the technology, social media, and search engines that today's students are utilizing. If we use what they are accustomed, when we give them a challenge, looking for information will become something that they feel confident doing, even if we restrict a little, the sources that can be used. 

Blog Post #2 - Reflective response

These articles and video show a necessity for keeping up with today’s distribution of information. Today’s students live in a world that has changed drastically and thanks to resources of YouTube, Pinterest, Tweeter and others, anyone can be an expert on a subject in a matter of hours. The challenges become apparent when we try to sort out the information into categories such as reliability, usefulness, accuracy, and validity. Educators need to change the way they think about teaching and sharing information because now the focus needs to be set on giving students the tools needed to identify the correct sources and maintain their attention on the tasks at hand when they are surrounded by all this information and distraction.
These resources also refer to the fact that educators need to establish routines that incorporate personal and professional connections to social media to develop a collection of resources that will help each one of us become successful, proactive and engaging teachers. Without these routines, educators will find themselves obsolete, teaching a generation that no long looks to them for knowledge but instead looks for facilitators, guides, and mentors.

Blog Post #1 - Learning goals

Goal #1  

I want to create a list of resources that will be useful to me as a teacher and a student in my field of certification (Foreign Language) and the technology field. The old way of teaching, in front of a classroom lecturing students and drilling them on information, is a thing of the past. Teachers need to approach new technology with open arms and develop efficient strategies that can be used in classrooms on a daily basis. With an organized collection of age appropriate and valuable resources I can provide my students with knowledge that will broaden their horizons beyond the borders of the classroom and their community.

Goal #2

I would like to develop my investigation and research skills. I want to be more efficient in finding online resources, analyze them, evaluate their accuracy and usefulness to the students in my classroom and utilize them in efficient, productive and in ethical ways.

Goal #3

I want to be able to learn more about inquiry-based learning to develop methods, get ideas and stay current on changes and innovations on web 2.0 and social media resources that will allow me to prepare students to be successful in today’s digital world and competitive job market.