The Role of the Wiki in My Classroom

After investigating wikis and trying to build a wiki on my own, I can see that they could be a useful tool in my math classes.  I would design a wiki for each course I teach and organize pages by course content.  The wiki would have generic titles of pages by topic instead of by chapter or section.  This would allow it to be a work in progress and not tied to a particular text or program.  Any notes that I would post would be under the appropriate page.  It would be great if Tegrity videos could be posted under a page as well. 
I am not sure how I would make this a requirement in my classes at this point.  However, I do see it could be useful in getting students to share their problem solving strategies.



http://mathforelementaryteacherscourse.wikispaces.com/

What Will Become of American Education?

What Will  Become of American Education?

After looking at Will Richardson’s post “Crazy Days”  on Feb. 19, my grandmother’s words come to mind—“We’re all going to hell in a handbasket…”.  This seems to sum up the state of the American education system after looking at the newspaper headlines and happenings across the country with regard to education.  In Arizona, life for the K-12 teacher started to really get rough when the security of having tenure was eliminated.  That coupled with budget cuts eliminating positions and any possibility for wage increases makes the teaching profession even less desirable than ever before.  Truthfully, why would any sane person go into such a profession?  What I see is that the education system that is currently in existence will cease to be in the same format.  For fiscal reasons, I predict that online education will be the primary delivery system of education not only at the college level but at the K-12 levels as well.  This has some very serious pedagogical implications.

Some of these pedagogical implications are exposed in the author’s post entitled “Online Learning is not Learning Online” where he shares a list of “benefits” of online learning supplied by high school sophomores in Utah.  The author is not impressed by this list and neither am I.    “I can do all my math for the week on one day if I want to”  and  “I can work around a busy schedule” are just a couple of items on the list.  Such reasons are superficial and imply that online education is a means of convenience.  Students don’t mention anything about “learning” at all.  The author is chagrined by the students’ views on online education and argues that they may doing coursework but are not getting the connections needed to sustain them beyond the class.  Essentially, these students are not demonstrating that they are becoming the “life-long learners” that educators hope they become.

So what does all of this mean for the current teacher?  It means we have super challenges ahead of us.  We will need to sort out meaningful from non-meaningful technological activities that we require of the online student.   If our goal is to have students become critical thinkers and lifelong learners, we will need to require activities that require much from the student.  Activities in which students can “click” their way through the course should not be the focus.  Activities that require the student to seriously reflect about their experiences should be the norm.  Easier said than done…

My Teaching Philosopy

            My teaching philosophy is centered around the idea that the student is ultimately  the one responsible for his or her learning.  The role of the teacher should be as facilitator.  The teacher should provide the student with tools to guide learning.  These tools are vast in nature depending on what subject is being taught.  For example, in the area of mathematics education, the tools would include problem-solving models and instruction in the use of technology.  

In an in-person class, my view of an ideal classroom is one in which the teacher uses a rather Socratic method of teaching.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method  I visualize the teacher answering a student question with a question to invoke critical reflection on the part of the student.  However, there are a couple of things that prevent this method from being a common reality in today’s classroom.  First, there is not enough time to cover the required material if there is a lot of individual reflection of each problem situation.  Second, today’s students want instant answers.  They are used to “Googling It”  and getting immediate results.   They want to see how to do the problem, but don’t want to reflect on the problem-solving that goes into it.  They see the answer to the problem as the desired end.  I see the problem-solving that goes into getting the answer as the focus. Further, getting students to share their approaches with other students is valuable. As students witness other approaches, they are broadening their experiences with problem-solving and are essentially adding to their “toolbox” to draw upon in future problem solving situations. 

In many ways I see that online education as an ideal opportunity to achieve the goal of making students responsible for their own learning.  Online education is definitely student-centered. They must be active and participative in classroom assignments.  They aren’t permitted to sit in the back of a classroom somewhere  “learning by osmosis”. Students must take advantage of tools within the online course to direct their own learning experience.  Again, the role of the teacher should be as facilitator.  For me, personally, this is a giant leap out of my comfort zone.  I welcome the challenge in creating the tools needed to enable students to learn in the online setting.

My Test Blog

Where oh where are you Spring????? What does that Ground Hog stuff mean anyway?