A school in Michigan has decided to ban its students from having a MySpace account. Period. End of statement. They can’t access the site from school, and next year, they’ll be signing an agreement that they won’t access the site at home, either.
In this day of children being babysat by the television and the internet, I’m certain students will completely comply with the agreement.
I’m personally horrified by this decision. The school has decided that it has the right to control the students’ lives outside school. While their intention is good, the execution is going to prove much more than the school can handle.
If they really want to protect their students from the evils of MySpace (and the rest of the internet), the answer isn’t banning. It’s teaching. The first step is to teach children how to be safe online. The second is to teach them how to evaluate the people they meet online. (The third is how to evaluate the information they find online, but that’s an entirely different rant.)
When you arm someone with a reason, give them the capability to analyze situations for themselves, it’s amazing how often you can prevent most of what you were trying to block. Children feel less likely to rebel against what they feel are pointless rules, so teaching them gives them the concrete purposes for a rule and helps them understand why the boundary exists at all.
Children can be fairly rational, reasonable creatures when they’re given that opportunity. It’s actually part of how they grow into rational, reasonable adults.
Posted by Rebecca as Current Affairs, Reflective teaching at 8:27 AM EDT
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I’m asked that fairly frequently by my students. They figure if overly smart Rebecca doesn’t use the skill they’re working on when she isn’t teaching it to them, that’s grounds for them to not have to learn it.
Usually, I ask them what they plan to study in college. The majority of my students are high schoolers who really haven’t given it much thought, so I win the argument on the fact they’ll need the math class to have fewer classes to take in college (Let’s face it, those remedial classes take up a lot of time.) For those who have decided a major already, it’s a matter of convincing them they need the class to get accepted to college.
Either way, it’s a real fight.
I wish I had a far better answer for my students, but the simple fact of the matter is that knowing an inscribed angle is half the measurement of its corresponding arc probably won’t come up in their normal lives. Upper level math is hard to defend, unlike science and English.
Of course, while my students are learning how to interpret what they read, how the world works, and how to take a differential, they aren’t necessarily learning life skills that already come into play on a daily basis. There’s something wrong with that. If it’s something that will help them succeed in life, it should be incorporated into their schooling somehow. (I feel like a traitor to my content area as I say that. In my defense, I get the necessity of algebra and geometry because they teach necessary reasoning skills, but beyond that is just nice to have completed before the rigors of college.)
Posted by Rebecca as Responsibility at 8:17 AM EDT
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We live in a world super-saturated by available information. It’s just one side effect of living in a world connected by the world wide web.
While the web provides us with the ability to find all kinds of information on topics we find interesting, it also provides us with a new conundrum- how do we know we can trust the source of our information?
What’s truly scary in this new world is that students who once learned how to judge information through school-induced research projects are now being bombarded this information with very little guidance in how to evaluate what they’re finding. An amazingly high number of students will research a topic for a school project strictly by querying Wikipedia. Many of these students have no idea how to find information the need in a book or journal.
Information literacy is a skill these students are going to need in order to survive this new information-rich world. In order to make good decisions, to learn what’s real, they need to be able to determine what information was generated to pass along correct information, and what was created to entertain people. They have to learn it from somewhere, and schools seem to be finding it hard to squeeze it into an already impossibly packed schedule.
What’s the right response? How do we help students learn how to discern a good source of information? No one really seems to be certain yet, but steps are being taken to help create a new breed of information literates ready to take on the world.
Posted by Administrator as Responsibility, Information Architecture at 8:19 AM EDT
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I’m somewhat amazed to discover that Dead Bunny is becoming more and more popular. Many people have questioned my decision to have a mascot named Dead Bunny, but it appears to not be hindering his growth.
That actually pleases me. It means I was right! (I think it also helps that Dead Bunny is dead in name only. I’m not foolish enough to kill my own zodiac sign. Sorry.)
When I first dreamed up the crazy notion to have Dead Bunny mascot the math book (the one the kids asked me to write), I drew up what I felt was a long, yet simple, outline of topics that I would need to cover. I tried to organize it by topic, and then organize the topics into the order I figured one would have to learn them in.
Then, in a fit of total frustration, I created Dead Bunny Educational. Originally, I thought to just work my way down my topics list, writing one post per topic. It really hasn’t worked out that way at all.
Too often, I come home from work inspired by something that happened with one or more of my students, so I’ll blog that topic. Sometimes, I’ll have a series in mind, and post that. Other times, I find useful articles and videos that need to be shared with the world.
Along the way, I’ve been marking up the original outline to link to the post, adding in any that were written but weren’t on the outline. Tonight, I realized that I needed to do some heavy shuffling of the list, so I moved everything to Todoist. It turns out that of the topics I had thought of on my own, nearly half of them have posts now.
It’s pretty crazy, really.
I was surfing around Lulu today, and I’m starting to think it might make more sense to group related topics and release them in smaller books. I don’t know, though. At this point, I feel like I’m just brainstorming, just trying to keep myself moving forward so I don’t get stuck.
I’m just pretty happy that Dead Bunny is indeed going out into the world. I just wish I knew whether or not people are finding him helpful…
Posted by Rebecca as Weblogs at 7:41 AM EDT
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I don’t recall how I stumbled on to my awareness of this book. It was recommended somewhere, and the reviewer was so upbeat about it that I thought I’d like to read it for myself.
The Courage to Teach came across more as an inspirationally-toned solution book than anything else. Despite my resistance to the tone, I did find some of it very thought-provoking.
Parker J. Palmer returns repeatedly to the idea that good teaching stems from a person whose sense of identity and integrity are in alignment. This repeated theme combined with ideas on creating a safe space for students to create and think freely, to work within communities, that it painted a classroom scene that was actually fairly worthy of well-designed Web 2.0-enabled classrooms.
It was rather interesting to watch the ideas unfold. I’m going to review my notes a few more times over the next week as I watch my own teaching, and how my colleagues work with their own students because I really am curious to see how this idea of integrated identity and integrity work together to produce a well-crafting teacher.
Posted by Rebecca as Information Architecture at 8:20 AM EDT
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Dead Bunny (growing quite healthily) may not have a single thing that draws people to him, but I know for a fact that in the month (less, actually) that he’s been sharing his math knowledge with the world, he has drawn a lot of people to him. I attribute this to the fact people are scared of math and are willing to go looking for help when their child brings home some homework that scares both child and parent alike.
Dead Bunny is tightly focused on helping teach people math as painlessly and clearly as possible.
Imagine my amusement when I read the following in Killer Flagship Content: How to Create and Promote Truly Compelling Blog Content:
As busy web users, we want
one trusted resource,
that fully answers the question,
in language we understand,
in a place we can easily find.
I don’t know that any of my other blogs accomplish that. I’m certain none of them really has anything that could be defined as its flagship content. I do know that Dead Bunny manages to meet these four lines, if the numbers are any indication.
Outside of making me feel like an incomptent blogger, this e-book is actually a great read for anyone just starting out in blogging. It offers all of the routine advice in one place, and it’s an easy read. (See? I get that he was reinforcing his message in practice!) Even more experienced bloggers will likely find some inspiration to refocus a blog that may have decided to run a bit wild.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:31 AM EDT
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I’ve decided I really need to move from tutoring (my current flavor of informal education) to something more technologically relevant to my preferred teaching method- facilitating.
I really enjoy being an information node, but I know that I’m just one node in a student’s diverse experiences. I may be just what they need to learn the skills they need, or I may be able to offer supplementary activities to help them build the skills they’re already working on. This is probably what has always led me down the informal learning route (despite everyone trying to push me into a classroom);
While I enjoy the face-to-face, I often feel like I can’t reach or do as much because I’m only affecting a small population, and they’re often just taking from me. I never get to see what I’ve taught blended with what the student has learned elsewhere to create a peer-teaching moment. I get to see one moment in time, instead of the larger picture that results.
I want to see students’ personal learning environments. I want to see their e-portfolios if they create one. I want to be part of a student’s Rip-Mix-Burn process, but I’m not positioned to help with that because I’m not working in that type of environment myself. Skills-wise, I’m armed and ready to assume a facilitator’s role in a student’s creation of their own learning environment, but my experience is woefully lacking.
Step one should be to facilitate my own rip-mix-burn activities. Step two should be to figure out how to maneuver myself into a position to help others create their own rip-mix-burn activities.
Suggested reading
- I can’t teach properly (Just because it’s so very good, and so true.)
- Signal vs. Noise (Just because it’s interesting and has led to some sleepless nights as I try to decide what it means for me)
Posted by Rebecca as e-learning, Experiential Learning, Learning methods at 7:33 AM EST
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Games teach problem solving.
No, seriously. Probably 95% of my problem-solving skills came from a life spent playing all variety of games and puzzles.
More research is being conducted every day that shows this phenomenon is true for most of those who engage frequently in games.
What’s really cool is that the engineering sector is saying that a specific game can help kids develop the thinking skills necessary to succeed in engineering.
Where some people see a video game as someone sitting glued to a television for hours on end playing the same game, some of us understand that we’re learning to take risks, think situations through, trying out different combinations to find a solution. Where some people see the MMORPG as a great way to lose a loved one to a virtual world, some of us understand that some level of communications and social development is taking place.
The results are trickling in, and games can actually be beneficial for developing skills that serve adults well in the business world, regardless of the sector.
Posted by Rebecca as Problem Solving, Games at 8:25 AM EST
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I’ve often felt, as many people do, that the correct way to protect children from online predators, identity thieves, and less-than-credible web sites is to educate them. It might just be my inner teacher talking, but information is often the best deterrent.
Think about it. As adults, we know we can make better decisions when we’re informed. It’s the same for children (defined for these purposes as those under the age of 18). If we explain to them why giving any of their personal information to someone they just met is a bad idea, they have a better chance of making a good choice than they do if we just say, “Don’t ever give out personal information to someone you just met.” Children, by and large, actually have the capacity to understand reason, and many of tweens and teens actually appreciate it when you respect them enough to inform them rather than just impose rules that they see as pointless and in much need of being challenged.
What’s interesting is that there are more areas online that cater to helping parents teach their kids how to navigate the web safely. A couple of kid-friendly social media sites have recently appeared as another set of tools to help kids learn to balance sharing their life online without sharing too much of it.
Don’t block. Help them understand. It’s just like anything else. Children can excel at making good choices, but only if we arm them to understand what constitutes a good choice and what constitutes a bad choice.
Posted by Rebecca as Responsibility, Current Affairs at 8:13 AM EST
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