Dream Come True
September 15, 2009 by mscronk
I have long wanted to teach students all the amazing things I have learned while blogging. Recently, I have gotten the opportunity to change my curriculum in my Advanced Computer Applications class. I am now calling the Advanced Computer Applications” class the “21st Century Skills” class.
As an opener I played the class a video created by Mike Wesch and his students “Vision of Students Today”. I was hoping that this would be a great eye opener for the kids and to get them thinking about their daily activities interacting on the Web.
Once I am home and have access to Youtube I will embed the video.
The class has only been meeting for one week. So far we have created Netvibes accounts, a twitter account and have subscribed to Weblogg-ed, The Thinking Stick, and The Fischbowl.
I will have the kids also subscribe to this blog as well so they can have insight to my thought process and how I learn. I actually have debated creating a separate blog just for the class, but I want it to be authentic and not contrived. The beauty of this class is that we meet everyday so we can discuss much in class instead of just using my blog as a directing medium, I will use it for modeling.
Now to the good stuff, today ’s assignment was to read Will Richardson’s post on the Obama speech, and the first 20 comments, and to THINK.
I have to admit I was nervous, I have never taught a course like this and I was worried that I would have to pry responses out of them. I was very pleasantly surprised. Let me preface this with the fact that we were not in school during President Obama’s speech. So, this was a non-issue for my district.
The students were directed to look for the “Lens” of Will Richardson, and to find the focus of the controversy.
All the observations were great. I even got comments along the lines of “fear limiting what schools can teach”, some of my students started Googling the debate while we were discussing it, which I totally encourage. The point of the exercise was to have my students think out loud about the post and its comments. One of the things I said to them was
“When I say things like: Where did that come from?, or I don’t know what he/she is talking about. I am thinking out loud for you, I want you to know how I think about these things, and so you become a student of your own thought process. I am not openly disagreeing with the post or the comments, I am just trying to make myself think on them and then I will follow links, think and learn.”
One of the best observations came from Simone who when reading one of the comments said, (I am paraphrasing)
“The more schools are limited, the less we will learn. School already does not prepare us for life, it is only about academics, not life.”
Just gives me more to think about…
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
I totally agree with this post. Teachers and students are living presently in a technology world. We have the ability and the resources to achieve this goal. Chalkboard lacks many criteria that can put learning to a slow motion not a full stop. A Interwrite Board lets the Students interact with their studys and homework. Therefore we like in a computer world and we have to wake up people who never knew what a computer is.
i did not think obama speech should be viewed in strictly in school as it should be optional. As many parent or staff members of school of republican states .Would be offended by the speech playing in their school.
When you when presented this topic to us, I didn’t really know what to expect or much about the Obama Speech. As I read the blog and began to make my own opinions on it, i realized that he had a point. Schools are stuck on just teaching us the curriculum instead of things that were going to need in life. I appreciated this discussion because it opened my eyes to an issue that I was unaware of before.
computer class is not how i thought it would be. i thought it was about typing skills and how to work excel. when i came to the class the first day i was told i would be teaching myself, blogging and more. so when we came to the topic of the Obama speech i was kinda excited. i had heard about the speech but i have never seen it or talked about it. we read a blog commenting on the speech. then we were asked to discuss this with the class. new things opened up to me. why didn’t we see the speech in school? even though it was done before school started, i still think we should have been able to see it. we should of had it shown the first or second day of school. we discussed the topic and it was very interesting.
First off, thank you for giving me credit on that quote you posted. Reading about President Obama’s education speech and how it affected families as well as school districts around the country really got me thinking about my own education and learning experience. It made me evaluate the information that I am being taught on a daily basis in my core classes. I think you did a good job engaging us(students) in a discussion about the education speech. It was nice to be able to voice our opinion and see how others felt. Personally, I think it would’ve been helpful for students to see President Obama speak, especially since his monologue was directed toward the youth. Maybe a permission slip to watch the speech live would’ve made parents more comfortable, but I think that in order to learn, people should be able to see both the positives and negatives. Students should be able to form their own opinions and if you look at it, the parents are the ones restricting their children from learning about other ideas and opinions.
Ms. Cronk
It seems that I have underestimated this class a little bit. I loved the videos that we watched as they were learning experiences. I liked how we talked about the Obama speech. It seems that the schools were making a huge deal over this speech by not allowing their students to watch it in the school building. The whole day when we talked about the speech was great and I loved some of the comments that we said in class. It was surprising how we could make the speech more complex by just talking about it and reading some of the comments left by the viewers. I hope to do this throughout the year.
When talking about the whole speech it gave the class a look at all the different points of view people had on it and how it affected them in different ways. Not only did we get to see others prospectives but we got a chance to elaborate on it ourselves and give our opinions from our point of view.
As a student in the Advanced Computer Applications class taught by Ms. Cronk, I have learned a lot and thought i would never learn about the blogging world. While in class reading and learning about the Obama speech to all the kids in America have got me thinking and that he wants all of us kids to stay in school and learn. I think that he is right and today teachers are teaching us more stuff than what people have learned 20 or more years ago. Also I must say that i think that politics and also parents have gotten in the way of students learning. I understand parents want the best for the kids but do they really know what there kids are learning everyday? Also many teachers in the world know what there doing and stick to it and some student may have some and some will not, but that is the process of learning and knowing what to see when you go to college and your prepared for the real world. I think the Obama speech will help and inspire students to learn more and stay in school to be prepared for the real world and get the dream job they have always wanted.
I thought yesterdays conversation on the Obama speech really was thought-provoking. I still don’t totally understand why certain groups of people were judging the speech before he even got to say it, but in Will Richardson’s blog it was clear that this speech was being opposed and that Will himself, seemed to feel that such an ‘uproar’ was unnecessary. Many people thought that Obama’s speech was/is going to change the way kids think about their values instead of how important education is, but i honestly feel that this is not so, and that kids learn many of their morals from their parents/elders and not from one speech, but they can learn about how important education is from this speech. Someone commented on the blog saying “What happened to respecting the position regardless of the person?,” this is what jogged my mind and made me start to think about how disrespectful people are being to our own president. All in all, I think anything involving Obama is interesting, so this blog definitely sparked that interest, but the realization of how distrustful our country is of out leader that we chose, is upsetting and disappointing!