Blog Post 2

Dr. Strang's Did You Know video is a real eye opener.  Let me get on my soap box for a moment.  I was a para-educator at Foley High School in Foley Alabama from late January 2011 to December 2011.  I was working within the special education department with students who were supposedly behavior deficient.  When I first got there, I noticed the students were using computers that I was using back in 2000.  They were all scheduled to be working on a credit recovery program for a specific subject each block throughout the day.  The first problem was that there were not enough computers for each student, so some students would sit idle while others worked.  The second problem was that the computers they were working with were so old that it took forever for the internet to do anything, if you could get it to work in the first place.  The third and worst problem of all was that the credit recovery program itself (called A+) was formatted in the same old "burp back" education style of teaching that most of us grew up with.  There would be a lesson that would read just like a text book which would be followed by a multiple choice test.  It was archaic and based on memorizing the content versus actually understanding what the content was talking about.  The students would actually end up opening a google window after copying a test question and pasting the question into the search box.  (I actually thought that was kind of resourceful.)  They would press search, find their answer, and check the box that contained the answer on the test.  The only thing I felt like they learned was how to copy and paste.

At the end of the day, I am all about technology in the classroom.  However, I think the fact that it is being used in a second class manner in our public schools is giving our students another outlet to be lazy.  I don't think that just throwing technology at this problem is the answer.  We must use the new technology in a dynamic and thoughtful way for it to be effective in the classroom of tomorrow.  In this new generation of student that is determined to let technology do all the work, we have to find a way to integrate traditional fields of study in a way that the information that is important can be retained to a degree that that student can be an effective communicator.  No one likes a boring conversation, yet that seems to be the trend were all heading for.  I don't care how many Chinese or Indians or even Americans speak English.  If the conversation is boring, who wants to talk to them anyway.       

I laughed out loud when I watched Mr. Winkle and his awakening, or maybe I should call it his non awakening.  I was swept away by the fact that this is exactly what I was just speaking of in my response to the previous video in the previous paragraph.  I'll bet Mr. Winkle was very comfortable in that school.  

One thing that many people don't know is that had Mr. Winkle actually logged on to that dusty old computer in the classroom like he did in the office building, his web experience would have been censored to limit his communication with others.  In Baldwin County Alabama schools, every computer connected to the internet is under the watchful eye of the county board of education.  You Tube is blocked from the web.  My space is blocked as well.  Our board of education is so worried that there might be an inappropriate conversation that takes place between the minority of immaturity, that it censors the majority of mature responsible students.  It seems to me that our board puts very little faith in the ability of the majority of our young people to behave in a mature and professional manner in the pursuit of a dynamic learning experience.  Unfortunately, this sense of worry that our leadership in schools feel in terms of what our kids should be exposed to will only go away when we wake up to the fact that it's a different world than it used to be and the internet is not the devil!


The first thing I thought about when I watched the Importance of Creativity video, was a student in my classroom at Foley High School.  For discretional purposes, I'll call him Bob.  He very rarely turned in any of the assigned work.  However, he could almost recite the text word for word.   He was a quiet and extremely smart student, but his personal hygiene practices were something of a concern.  All the other students would pick on him about the way he smelled until he would lash out and become violent which was unacceptable within the normal  high school environment.


One day Bob brought his guitar to school with him and he asked me if he could play it during some downtime. I reluctantly said yes, but honestly I was really not interested in hearing someone just pick around.  To my surprise, he was actually pretty good, and able to play full songs.   I listened to him play for a few days and decided he needed to be in a class for music.  I took the matter to the special education department head, but they told me this was not possible because he would be a distraction to other students in general population.  I thought it such a shame that someone with so much talent and had been self taught, was refused the opportunity at some education in the thing he really loved.  I guess our education system did not care very much about Bob, because he did not show the potential to be “strip mined" by the system.  I really enjoyed this video, and I think it should be required viewing for all teachers throughout the United States.  

     I can't tell you how many times I've sat in a classroom and listened to a student reference a piece of history or some other subject from a video game or a television program. Often times, the information being referenced is incorrect or skewed to some extent for entertainment purposes. Many of my students believe that most of what they see and hear on television and in video games has a large bit of truth to it. Don't get me wrong, there are many programs within the realm of multimedia that are very accurate in terms of history, science, and reality. One thing that is important to remember is that we would have to teach our students to be able to distinguish between what is entertainment and what is viable information. I love the idea of introducing interactive software into our classroom environments as a visual referencing tool, especially in specific subject matter such as history and science.

Our education system needs to step up to the plate. I don't understand why our education system and our multimedia industry can't come together and find a way to integrate viable media into our classrooms. Television channels such as the History Channel and the Discovery Channel have vast archives of quality programming we could integrate into our classrooms today with little effort. Why should teachers have to spend their own hard earned money to bring in media outlets to their classrooms? I would be willing to bet that with the amount of money it takes our school system to furnish one student with books, we could furnish that same student with a laptop computer.

The Digital Generation Project seems like a wonderful way to get students connecting with other students and sharing ideas with each other. Students that are able to interact, learn, and then teach each other what they have learned through interaction have truly understood the information that they have been taught. It seems to me that this is the goal we as future educators are trying to achieve. Students that take in the information and are actually able to apply that information with understanding of that information is paramount in the new generation. It's almost too late for a student to come to college and be thrusts into a global learning environment without ever having experienced that environment before. I think it is important to start students out in the global communication environment early and often.

As always, the problem with introducing young people into the global communication environment is trusting those young people to interact in a mature and professional manner. Introducing young people into this environment requires that we teach things such as ethics, maturity, and professionalism when interacting with other people. I think this also requires a certain amount of supervision in the classroom. We would have to rethink our common disciplinary action in terms of what we do when certain individuals deviate from mature and professional interaction. However, I think as we integrate our classrooms into this new way of doing things, each new generation would become accustomed to proper communication, and we as educators could slowly phase out this new although important curriculum.