Please take the time to look at this clip from "60 Minutes" this past week and then play around with the Kahn Academy site. I would like to talk about this more at our in-service on April 12th.
There is a lot of talk about doing new and innovate things with technology and education, but I believe we have an example here of someone who has gotten it right.
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ReplyDeleteremoved comment, you must have had too many typos by the english guru and felt bad, what the heck? Ha!
DeleteIt was interesting but very time consuming. I didn't spend a lot time there, but it was very refreshing to see math and algebra topics. Computers were designed to crunch numbers, but are rarely used to teach math.
ReplyDeleteI caught part of this on TV the other night as well. My first thoughts are that “If you build it they will come”. However, the effort didn’t start out as a “Field of Dreams” but from a person who just wanted to help someone they cared about and used free web 2.0 tools to get it done. They had creativity, passion, and a positive attitude to make a difference.
ReplyDeletePeople following of the effort makes me first ask why? …Students and parents are looking for resources to help their kids outside the classroom, on their own incentive/motivation. …So there is a type of student that will access these resources? Who/what is getting students to focus on academics?
I wonder how the student accountability works in the pilot school. What are the student characteristics using the resource and how does that match up to those completing tasks? To me this example is just showing students who are taking responsibility for learning, there must be some type of support system there to encourage them.
Additionally the school in the video mentioned the computer lab staying open until 10pm in the evening for kids to have computer access. Do we see that happening in SD schools or even having the willingness to provide this to our local students?
I think we continue to build walls around our students and have too many excuses for not helping kids outside of the 8-4 school day with academics. Who is having fun teaching? Who is creative in their teaching? In my opinion and observations we, overall, unfortunately have a poor mindset with helping students academically, especially for those that continue to struggle. We are not working with them to find other options to find success beyond the classroom. Our focus is lost. Ask ourselves, do we spend too much time complaining about student problems versus being problem solvers?
Lastly it is just one “tool” in an educator’s toolbox, how we use and develop our tools for the classroom and finding the time to do so is the challenge. A step we have just worked on has been to look at the four day week. Despite being scaled back from what I see as old school thinking, self-serving motivations, and continued blinders to problem solving solutions the district is trying to help staff by increasing professional-development time, it is a work in progress; but time is passing by and while we sit, the world is passing us by.
This effort is simple; a person cared, took time beyond what they had for responsibilities, and made a difference. I didn’t hear any excuses on why it couldn’t be done, he made it work!
Dear Mr. Robbins, out of respect the English language, please capitalize the first letter of the term English. Yepper, you pretty much nailed my deletion. I failed to capitalize an I. Small mistakes that kill ya are called sibilaths.
ReplyDeleteHmm, this sounds like the first step to this :)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvMxLpce3Xw
It would be interesting to see a hybrid "Electronic Education" in the morning followed by a teacher led social projects in the afternoon.
At the college level they are doing this already. It does have some issues in that it reduces the amount of teachers you need so it is not to popular with the professors.
They are looking at something similar in the medical field. Auto-diagnosis ect.
The model for schools would look like this: The state or fed government would create content in line with the testing requirements and students would do drills on it. I doubt they would try to do this all day, so you would still need social interaction with a teacher and classmates. It would lighten the teachers burden and they would spend the mornings in a "tutor" role helping struggling kids and planning the afternoon activities.
It seems like it would be a plus for K-12 teachers because they would not see a reduction in force due to the fact that instruction is not the only thing they do compared to a college professor, who only teachers class and doesn't have to actually take care of students while they are on campus.
Okay, this makes the inner math nerd in me want to go relearn Calculus...haha. Very cool...wonder how this would translate into our classes.
ReplyDeleteI looked at a few of the videos, and I liked the information that was on 60 Minutes about the pilot school and how the one teacher is using the program in her classroom. I agree with Dan that it could be another tool in a teacher's toolbelt, but I don't think it should be the only tool a teacher uses. I wonder if the questions that are asked of the students ask them to explain how they came to their answers, because Common Core is going to be asking for that. By the way, is it just me, or does anyone else think this Khan guy looks like Ray Romano?!?
ReplyDeleteMy philosophy is you don't know until you try it. Change is happening in education and most of that change is occuring due to the change in technology. We CANNONT be afraid of that or we will quickly get behind. When students are more aware and 'savy' with technology than the teachers, we have a problem. I could definitely see this working as an educational tool in our classrooms.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's just me, but I found the handwriting in different colors on the black screen distracting. Going to Khan's sight to check out his video's now. Hope there's some good music tutorials. If so, I'm sold!
ReplyDeleteI posted
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