Dan Brown 2

Dan Brown is currently posting about a new initiative by the government to make the teacher preparation programs better. From the government's website "We need to give schools the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and give teachers the flexibility to teach with creativity and passion." They plan to do this by imposing regulations on teacher education programs. This could be a good idea or a bad idea. It is generally a good idea to want better teacher education programs. No one can argue that. The problem is, what determines what is a good program? Teaching is not an exact art. Different things work for different teachers. If they were able to pinpoint exactly what makes a great teacher, the US wouldn't be below average in many educational statistics. So I will take a wait and see approach with this new reform. However, I will not be too optimistic based on the failures of No Child Left Behind and so on. 

The Male Teacher post 2

This post from the Male Teacher is about managing stress at school. This is not a blog post that is targeted just to male teachers like the rest, this post is applicable to everyone. He offers great tips to follow in how to manage stress. The first he mentions is managing your time better. This is important because I know many teachers that work long past their contracted hours. This isn't healthy and you need to have your own life outside of school or you will go crazy. That goes for any profession. The best tip from the Male Teacher is to "be a comedian". I like this tip because it is exactly how I handle stress. If I am stressed the best way for me to reduce it is to make someone else laugh. It is almost medicinal.  I'd recommend this post to anyone having trouble with the stresses of their job.

The Male Teacher

This is a fairly new blog for male teachers. They discuss issues that might not be normally discussed in a normal education blog. In one blog entry they discuss respect in the classroom. Apparently here is a misguided notion that being a male teacher in a younger classroom will automatically give you respect. This blog post wants to dispel that notion, and offer advice how to receive that respect. A lot of the advice I agree with. One piece of advice I find especially important, and that is to be honest. Many teachers think since they are in the position of authority that they can lie to their students. I do not think that is appropriate. Many times, students are smarter than teachers give them credit for and they can see through some transparent lies. This is especially true when they ask a question that you do not know the answer to. I think it is very important to say "I don't know" rather than making something up. Often times a made up answer will be remembered and they will carry that false info for a long time.

Gaining students' respect

@TheJLV 2

This blog post is about the twitter user @TheJLV. I posted about him a couple of times, but today was an interesting day to follow him, mostly because of what happened last night in Ferguson. He has not been shy to speak his opinions on race in America before, so today was a good vessel to get his message across. However, one interesting topic came up in that how do you talk to your students about what is happening. Unfortunately, to me anyway, many teachers will shy away from the topic. @TheJLV was direct with his students and gave them a place to vent and discuss. I think this is important for the students. A lot of their time they are in their own echo chamber, if they get to hear other points of view it can be good for getting a better understanding of a topic. This will be how I handle my classroom if ever an important event happens like it did yesterday.

If this keeps happening...

My blog post for this week comes from the blog of one of the people I follow on Twitter Jose Vilson. He posts a response to critics of the article he was featured in about what makes a great teacher. He explains that he foolishly looked into the comments section of his article and found many people complaining. Mostly these people were complaining about teaching being a thankless job and they complain that the teachers being interviewed often leave the profession and become advocates or administrators. He is right that he made a mistake looking into the comment section of the article. 99% of the time the comments section will be full of people who want to complain, rarely do people comment to say anything good. However, I don't agree with the main idea of his article. That is, he is lumping all these people as having one hivemind. The complaints given by these commentors make sense alone, but not when they are lumped together, which is what he has done. I can understand his instruction, he should avoid the malcontents next time.

If this keeps happening...

Dan Brown

This post is about the newest twitterer I am following, Dan Brown. He is the Executive Director of Future Educators Association, an organization for high school students who plan to become teachers. Mr. Brown is a certified teacher as well. He often tweets about standardized testing and new technologies to use in the classroom. On the 15th he retweeted an interesting article from the Washington Post by Valerie Sheets titled "Teacher to parents: About THAT kid (the one who hits, disrupts and influences YOUR kid)" It is written by a teacher to parents about a disrupting student. The article is about how the teacher can not tell parents what is wrong with another disruptive child that isn't their own, but that she is doing her best. This article is heartbreaking. It is a window into the life of a teacher dealing with a child that might have a rough background. I can see why Mr. Brown retweeted it. It is useful to not only teachers but also parents who might worry a disruptive child might be getting in the way of their child's education. I agree with everything she writes and highly recommend reading the article.

What I Wish I'd Known as a Teacher

This is a blog post from Edutopia from contributor Elena Aguilar. This is an extremely insightful article about Mrs. Aguilar's first year of teaching and what she wished she knew. This is not the first article I have read that explains how extremely stressful the first year of teaching is or can be. Because this seems to be common knowledge, I try to seek out as much information as possible to prepare myself for that year. At the very least, if I do get extremely stressed out that year, I will know it is normal. This article doesn't give any concrete strategies or classroom management ideas, it is just an article about managing stress. She makes sure that you know that if what you do comes from the heart that you can rarely be wrong. One thing she mentions that I find a very important piece of advice is to find a mentor. This will be the first thing I try to do when I get into a classroom. I can see the value of someone with an unbiased view telling you what you should do or not do. She says finding a mentor is so important that if one is not available to you, you should change schools. I agree with her that finding one is that important.

What I Wish I knew...

@TheJLV

This post is about the Twitter user Jose Vilson. He is a teacher from New York that posts about education and social inequality. He often posts about the inequality of "bad" schools and "good" schools. He emphasizes that this divide in quality of schools comes down to funding. He offers some solutions to problem such as fundraising, but recognizes that the solution will probably come from a higher source. What Mr. Vilson posts about is an area I have a lot of passion about. The fact that income inequality gets worse every year is maybe the most difficult problem America faces. Mr. Vilson also recently was featured on a NPR article about what makes a great teacher. NPR Article This article is great for aspiring teachers preparing to go into education. I learned a lot about what to expect and what to emulate when I get my first classroom.

Twitter post

I am following a Twitter-er-er-er named Lyn Hilt (@lynhilt). She is a former K-6 principal who now works as an instructional technology integrator for her district. She has over 16k followers on Twitter and she posts fairly regularly. As her job title suggests, she posts often about technology and its uses in the classroom, but she also branches out and talks about general education as well. Many of her posts involve retweeting various articles relating to education.

One cause that she has retweeted and is now supporting is #internet4schools. This is a movement about getting better internet access to our schools. They make the case that schools have the same internet access as a everyday home. If 200+ people tried to connect to your wifi all at once there would be problems, which is the case in many schools. I know from experience observing in Atlantic City when they take out the chromebooks, that the internet goes incredibly slow for the students. This causes frustration, and they do not get as excited to use the chromebooks because of it. In a few weeks the FCC will be voting on whether to expand broadband services to all schools.  So this hashtag trend is trying to force the FCC's hand and vote yes on the issue.

Connected Learning

I agree with the author that there has been an overreaction to the negative effects of social media. I agree that there is value in face-to-face interaction, but I don't think it is going away. I am in my mid-20's and rarely use social media (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr) for communicating to my friends. I still do the majority of communicating face-to-face or through texting. Now I know this may be anecdotal evidence, but I would not be surprised if that's how it was for the majority of the populating that is my age.  I agree with their sentiment that social media does not take away from talking face-to-face, but instead takes away from alone time.

I enjoyed this article because it does not look down on change. It takes a step back and realizes just because the way people use information is changing, it doesn't mean that it is for the worse. I especially liked the part about how the way people read has changed. The author points out that scanning passages may have overtaken close reading as the preferred way to read. Now normally that idea would be painted in a negative light, but here the author just says what is happening. Because there is so much more information out there, and it is all readily accessible the way people consume information had to adapt. From a video in class we heard that all of human knowledge is rapidly multiplying. It shouldn't be looked down upon to try and skim information to find the relevant bits that interest you.

The change in how people consume information should be noticed and used by teachers. It is important to know that their students take in information much differently than they did at that age. Teachers need to be adaptable to this changing landscape and try to turn it in their favor.

Reading Film: The Story of Movies

This curriculum they showed was very interesting. I would not mind to take a class like this. It looks like it is very engaging and offers more than just spending 2 hours watching a movie. The science experiments done with the light teaches more than just movie tricks, but it also teaches about light in general. I think it has value for the students to learn how movies are made and what the different elements elicit what response. I am sure this is the kind of class that George Lucas would prefer to take place just as often as a math class. However, I still feel that this class works better as a special class in elementary or an elective in middle/high schools. This class is perfect for students who want to go into tv/movie production.

Life on the Screen: Visual Literacy in Education

I am a huge fan of George Lucas' work. From Star Wars to Indiana Jones, he is/was a creative genius. (I will not count the new Star Wars or Indiana Jones against him.) However, I do not agree with his assessment of education. I feel he puts too much value in the graphic arts and music. Obviously, they are very important, but this article places them at the same level as language arts and math. These subjects are more important because they are used in everyday life. You need to learn how to create a complete sentence way more than you need to know how to create a musical piece. There are only a limited amount of fields that music and graphic arts are used in, but almost every field of work uses language arts. In most schools, students already have the option to explore these more arts oriented classes if they would like. This is the way I believe it should stay, as there is already a ton to teach in school without adding those subjects as well.

Why Some Schools Are Selling All Their iPads

When I read the title to this article, I thought it would have been about the iPad "experiment" failing. However, this article is more about the different choices available to schools than it is anti-iPad. There were some strategies I disagreed with in regards to the schools. For one, Los Angelas schools were giving the students a choice if they wanted an iPad or laptop. This makes it difficult for teachers. iPads and laptops are very incompatible. If there is a classroom full of students and they all have different devices, it would be impossible for a teacher to use those devices for anything but word processing. The same problem arises in the schools that are implementing 'Bring your own device'. If a school wants to join the world of interactive learning, they should be uniform in their device choices. Personally, if the choice was between a chromebook and an iPad for a classroom, I'd choose the chromebook. It is cheaper, and it is a lot more practical. However, if I was teacher younger children, I would go for the iPad. Word processing would not be as important in lower grades and the apps would be much more engaging and easier to use than anything on a chromebook.

Why some schools...

What Will It Take for iPads to Upend Teaching and Learning?

This post showed a positive example of a school utilizing iPads in the classroom. After reading this article it is easy to be excited about the possibilities of using iPads. If I am lucky to get into a school that has the funding to have an iPad for every student, I would be sure to utilize that tool. From the article you can see that the kids are much more engaged when using the iPad. Engagement is a precious thing to achieve.  For ESL, where I plan to end up, engagement like this will be invaluable. If I am having trouble communicating with a student, the iPad should make it a lot easier to do so.

What will it take...

The ESOL Odyssey Part 2

This next post also from The ESOL Odyssey stays on the topic of unaccompanied minors. This post however, details what to do if one of these kids ended up in your classroom. In general she recommends being as accommodating as possible. As teachers, we cannot ask outright about a student's immigration status, so we have to use the info that we do have. Teachers will have to recognize any difficulties a student might have, like lack of lunch or school supplies. She relates one experience where a student had no winter clothes so she asked her older class to donate some old clothes to him. This is another handy post for any teacher with a down on their luck ESOL student.

Unaccompanied minors part 2

The ESOL Odyssey Part 1

In this blog post I will be writing about The ESOL Odyssey. ESOL stands for English for Speakers of Other Languages. This is a teacher from Maryland that coaches ESOL teachers and schools to better teacher ESOL. In this first post she writes about the unaccompanied minors that came across the border. It was an important news story this year. This is a great blog post as a review of the facts of this major story. She breaks down who they are, where they come from, why are they coming, and what happens when they get here. It is highly recommended reading for anyone who wants to learn about this topic.

Unaccompanied minors Part 1

Ladybug's Teacher Files Post 2

This next blog post was about a pretty simple topic, decorating a classroom. The blogger starts the post explaining her previous classroom set up. She used many different neon colors contrasted with black. Her students seemed to enjoy her classroom set up, but she worried that the many colors distracted her students. So she developed a system that color coded all of her different subjects. Orange was writing, green was science/history, pink was math, and yellow was reading. Now, she believed, it was less distracting for her students and it made it easier for both her and them to be organized. I think this is a good idea, as someone who is not very organized at my best and a complete mess at my worst anything that can help me is great. However, I have my doubts that a colorful un-color-coded classroom would be that distracting to students, especially 5th graders who should be old enough to not be distracted by something like that. So while I think this is a good idea, I don't believe it needed to be done.

Color Coding the Classroom

Ladybug's Teacher Files Post 1

I have found an interesting blog called the Ladybug's Teacher Files. It is written by a 5th grade ELL teacher. It has yet to be updated this school year, but her past posts have been interesting. This first post is about a blog post she wrote up in April called "Don't Answer Questions." What drew me to this post was the absurd nature of the title. Obviously as teachers you must feel compelled to answer questions students might have. However, her blog post was not about letting students have unanswered questions, but instead letting other students answer the question for her. This technique opens up discussion and critical thinking and does a lot more teaching than if she answered the question herself. More so, it creates an engaged classroom, which is perhaps the most important factor.

Don't Answer Questions!

ELT Notebook

In this blog they offer advice and tips to English language teachers, this includes English as a second language teachers as well as English as a foreign language. In this post a teacher in Japan posts about the importance of making her lessons fun. She only sees individual students up to 2 hours a week, so she tries to have her lessons stick after they leave her. When she first took her job, all that was given to her was a box of unorganized flash cards. She soon realized how bored this made her students, even the most well behaved students were bored. This inspired her to make a ton of activities. She made a crepe building station where students had to order a crepe from another student. This taught them food and numbers vocabulary. It also had them speaking in full sentences. She goes on further about all of the other activities she created for the students. This goes back to the gamification from the Horizon report. Students actively want to learn if they can have fun while doing it. While her classroom in the beginning sat there bored out of their mind while reciting flashcards they weren't learning much, but now they request to play games that actually teach them more then the flashcards ever taught them. I am completely impressed by the creativity of this teacher, she shows pictures on her blog of all the different activities she created and they are all well crafted. It is also impressive that she did this all without any guidance from her administration.

Early Learners want to play!

Horizon Report

After reading the 2014 Horizon report it is easy to be very excited about the future of technology in the classroom. I believe more technology in the classroom is better for both teacher and student. Technology enables teachers to personalize lesson plans to different types of learners in a way that they were never able to do before.

One of the technologies highlighted in the report is gamification. This is one technology I am especially excited about. When I was growing up, when everything was still on floppy disks there was always educational games. However this never had much of a penetration into the classroom. Now it looks like they are finally adapting this resource that has been around for decades. Though they cite examples in the report that are not strictly video games. For example they cite FourSquare as a structure in which the education field can structure lessons around. With FourSquare they were able to amass millions of users despite the main function being just letting people know where you are. They were able to do this by giving out titles and points that made it a game. By applying something simple like that to education, gamification can have a big impact on students interest in lessons and how much they get out of school. Using Minecraft in school is an exciting proposition as well. I have played the game once in my life, so I do not have much experience with it. However, while I was teaching in Korea, almost every boy in the class played Minecraft constantly. Also, they mention in the report that it can be used to introduce children to programming which I think is an excellent idea. I wish I had the opportunity to learn programming at an early age. I tried to teach myself a year or so ago and it was very hard to pick up without any background. If they can teach them at least simple tasks early, it will be much easier for them if they want to delve deeper into programming later.

The other technology that interested me the most was learning analytics. This one interested me because of the current state of education in the US. Right now the country is assessment crazy. Students have to take endless standardized tests. However, these tests are not being used in the right ways. Now they are being used to determine teachers' effectiveness or which schools are wasting resources. This is a terrible use of these tests. However, the technologies highlighted in the learning analytics section of the report use this assessment data the right way. This data is being used to craft lessons to different leveled learners. This technology enables us to craft a student's experience in the classroom to fit their needs. It also has long term uses as well. The article points out how using this data can show if a student is a high risk to drop out of high school in the future. So with the use of this data you can hopefully steer those high risk students in the right direction.

Welcome!

My name is Zach Tannoia. I have my B.A. in Historical Studies. I aspire to become an ESL Teacher in an Elementary School.