Monday, August 6, 2012

The end of an era

This marks my last post of the semester. I would like to take a second to reflect upon blogging. Being an old man that is grumpy and despises everything in some way, I was not thrilled when I learned we'd have to keep a blog. Thus far, however, it has not been that bad. I often spend great amounts of time writing quirky emails for friends and in ways just an extension of that. I really would like to make my blog a little more interesting and include some photos to supplement my writing.

In our last class, I was happy like most other students to be able to listen to life passed MAC. I am not sure how you selected this group of teachers, but they all seemed exemplary. I really hope that I can live up to their example and be as dedicated a teacher as they have become.

In terms of technology, I was a bit disappointed. I have never heard of internet working with such infrequency or failure of integration. Scarlett's wifi seemed to work quite well and all of their computers were up to spec. Is this a rarity? The kids all seemed very familiar with edmodo and technology in the classroom seemed to be in perfect harmony. Was I missled?! Many of the new tools we have learned about in class are rather new and so I think a few bugs should be expected. Youtube being banished is just silly though. I wish teaching and teaching with technology was just less of a struggle.

Until next time, I hope everyone enjoys our rather short summer break. May it be filled with technology and learning!

Friday, August 3, 2012

Blogging about Blogging

I spent a couple of hours scrolling through the different blogs on Kristin's and Jeff's lists. I was happy to see Nytimes education and tech page as I frequent both for fun reads. I am somewhat of a nytimes junky and dedicate a significant portion of my free time to reading article after article. Unfortunately,  I have never found the nytimes education page to be very inspiring. Most articles pertain to budget cuts and fairly gloomy outlooks for the field. Those are at least the articles that stick out in mind, which might say something about my personality.

I also enjoyed reading a blog called "Speaking of History," which is written by a middle school history teacher. The author seems to share some of my dorky interest and I really enjoyed reading about his trip to Monticello. He had posted a picture of Jefferson's portable ivory journal and it made me want to explore a museum myself and post about some unusual finds.

Looking back through some of his older posts, I found a number of articles about software he uses in his class. I think this would be a great way to stay current with technology once I leave the mac program and find projects/exercises that work. While in Japan I had great success using blogs as a resource of ideas. As I lived in an extremely remote region, I was sort of an island amongst myself. If I wanted to share ideas the best resource was blogs. Many a times my class was saved by a quick search on a blog called jhsenglipediaproject. Games were sorted by lesson topic and rated, which was most useful as lots of stuff out there is terrible. In all, that site saved me hours of prep time and made my class much more diverse than if I had just relied on my own ideas. Sharing information is always beneficial to creating a better product and education is no different.