Week+4+Journal+Entry

Weekly Learning Goals for Week 4 
 * Continue to examine 21st Century Skills to support development of a Student Needs Assessment,
 * Work collaboratively with your team members,
 * Share your work with other colleagues, and
 * Develop a Student Needs Assessment for implementation in Week 6.

On the video clip, [|3 Steps for 21st Century Learning] by Jackie Halaw, I really liked that opening quote, "The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those that cannot read or write, but those that cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn" by Alvin Toffler. The 3 Steps Halaw writes about are Competition, Cooperation, Collaboration...with the world.

The first step is to "transform our classrooms into a creative learning space by letting our students talk, build, create, and collaborate in a beautiful, comfortable, student-centered space." My dream! The reality: The picture they have of a 1960s classroom looks so much like mine, with so many rows of those awful desks. From the time I started my teaching career, I have always stated to my students and their parents that my main goal is to teach them how to become lifelong learners. Although my classroom is definitely stifling, this is still my goal some 20 + years later, and I hope that I will be learning how to do this while introducing them to their global peers, learning to be culturally literate. I need to learn how to help my students become active learners.  The second step is to "teach students the skills of competion, cooperation, and collaboration." We need to get our students to compete with themselves and cooperate with others. It contained a quote that really startled me, ”The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher.” by John Holt. I did much less talking when I taught Language Arts, Ohio History, and U.S. History. I do most of the talking in my math classes. I do have students tell how they solved their problems, having other students ask them questions when they don't understand what they are saying, usually because they leave some of the work out of their explanation, but I definitely spend too much time in front of the room talking. Again, I hope that throughout the next year or two, I will learn how I can have students, that don't seem to remember much of what has been taught to them previously, to be able to lead the learning, to discover methods to solve problems, to be able to work with others to help their own learning as well as to help others. Too many students have been o.k. with doing poorly if it means they can do less work. I work all year to try to get my students to have pride in their work and in their learning. If they lead the way in the room, I know this would happen naturally. At the middle school age, our students are all into being social. I need to tap into that to help guide them to learn cooperatively and collaberatively.

The third step, Halaw states that we need to "Introduce our studnets to their global peers and provide the opportunity for them to collaborate. She mentions sites I have not used, [|The Global Schoolhouse], [|Friendship Through Education], and [|eParls]. I have only had a short time to look at these, but plan to see if there is some way I can use them in my math class. I also found [|iEARN] which looks like another site to look at. It mentions using the following tools, [|skype], [|Ning], [|del.iciou.us], [|facebook], google (too blurry to see which google tool they were referring to), [|pod-o-matic], [|blogger], and wikispaces to help our learners become connected to the world and to learn collaboratively. I wonder how many of those tools we have access to at school.

After watching this video, I looked at some of the other videos and found [|"Learning to Change, Changing to Learn"] It can also be found at []. It starts out stating that "the US Commerce Department ranked 55 industry sectors by their level of IT intensiveness. Education was ranked 55th, the lowest, below coal mining." More information on this can be found at []. The experts talk about the need to use the social networks for rich learning experiences but schools ban these. I highly recommend this video for all of us to watch.

In the readings, there was a link to [|ICT literacy maps which included math maps for 4th, 8th, and 12th grade]. I think they will be helpful in giving me some ideas. I was frustrated looking through the other sites, looking for examples of lessons or techniques I could actually use. I found ones I'd use if I still taught Language Arts or Science, but felt there lacked free ideas to use with math. I'll keep looking and hope others will let me know if they found any good math sites using global resources. 

I did have fun working with the Monkey Survey site. I am looking forward to the results and seeing how the site collects the data. I will create an excel graph to show the data for our take home survey. It has been sent home but we are still missing data from several students. I'm hoping to have it all before Thanksgiving.

Enjoy the break and time with your families! I'll be looking for my loose fitting clothes! :o)