I think this is a great way to aggregate conversations that are quick and to the point. Sometimes we get so lost in what we are trying to say that we don't say it. This way you get to the point but also get to go back and create a record of what was discussed.
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I've come back to this video numerous times in order to receive inspiration for my profession. Sir Ken Robison (2013) mentions that there are three principles for the human mind to flourish. When I first came to teaching I didn't know a standard from a formative assessment. It took a professional credential program to teach me these names and strategies, the unfortunate and fortunate thing was that it didn't teach me how to teach. As Robinson mentions (2013) teaching is a creative art, which I fully believe in. After my credential program I began the process of teaching a 7th grade class and the first year I was awful and I attribute that to my lack of creativity. Instead of teaching for the sake of having my students learn, which was the focus for my university (UCSC), I was focusing on having my students pass the test. After that first year I learned a valuable lesson, I learned to teach like I wanted to learn. Yes as Robinson points out, I still had to adhere to standardize testing and making sure I had results to back up my lesson and my form of teaching and for the most part I did a bit better than my fellow teachers which allowed me to switch one of my classes to a project based focus.
When I watched this video for the first time about a year or two years ago I became enthralled by its message to let creativity free. In my own career, only after a year of teaching did I feel myself trapped by the need to provide test scores and results. Knowing full well that this was not and is not the way (well not in terms of how you teach at least). I haven't learned everything I need to learn in order to feel like I have made an impact for my students but as I think more about the process of how I teach and what I teach and when and how I start to discover new ways, which are probably old ways of teaching. As I look back at this year I'm discovering that my class has transformed from a middle school class to something resembling a mesh between that and a college class. I fear for some of my students because when they reach high school I don't know if they will have the same experience they had with me, I hope they have a better one but if they don't I fear some might get discouraged and not do as well or even worse drop out because their creativity will be stifled. Reference Robinson, K. (2013, October 10). Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley. Retrieved June 12, 2015. As I began my position as Director of Technology at my school I soon realized that one thing I needed to work on was how to give presentations. As a teacher I never thought about how I would deliver a lesson because for the most part I felt I had that down and when I didn't I could improvise, but in my new position I soon realize I was losing my audience when I presented. In order to improve this I have begun to look for resources on how to present and what an effective presentation look like. The interesting part is that my issues with presenting are the same issues I have seen with my students when presenting to the class. Recently, because of the book Why School? by Richardson I decided to provide my students with the opportunity to create their Personal Project where they chose to teach us whatever they wanted, while also grading themselves based on their own ideas of what a good presentation should look like. Unfortunately what I found is that I hadn't prepared my students to provide effective presentations just like I had not been taught how to provide effective presentations myself. For this reason I looked up in TED Talks how to present effective presentations and found this great video by Nancy Duarte entitled "The Secret Structure of Great Talks" (2010).
In her presentation Nancy mentions that an idea is the most powerful thing a human being can have and that many ideas are not adopted, even if your idea is better than another ideas, because we aren't able to communicate our idea effectively. While watching this video I soon realize that my students have great ideas and that just like me they can teach the world many things but that unfortunately I have not been the effective teacher I need to be, to properly allow them to communicate their ideas. Duarte (2010) mentions that the presenter is the mentor of a story while the audience is the protagonist, which makes a lot of sense because as teachers we are the mentors in the classroom, so it is parallel to being a presenter at a presentation. Duarte goes on to diagram how a presentation should look and how we need to go back and forth between what should be and what it is and that just like a sailboat we need to go back and forth between resistance and what could be. Now you might ask how this all relates to technology and leadership, well for the leadership part it is pretty straight forward, if I want to make a difference I need to have my staff buy into what I want them to do, not just tell them they have to do it, which has been my tactic in the past. On the technology side, we as leaders in this field know that resistance by teachers, specially older teachers is a given, after seeing this presentation I realize that I need to use the resistance that we confront in order to lead our teachers to where we want them to. In my case that would be using more technology in the classroom and giving students more options. Reference Duarte, Nancy. "TEDxEast - Nancy Duarte Uncovers Common Structure of Greatest Communicators 11/11/2010." YouTube. YouTube, 11 Nov. 2010. Web. 11 June 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nYFpuc2Umk>. Richardson, W. (2012). Why school how education must change when learning and information are everywhere / Will Richardson. New York, NY: TED Conferences.
Why Schools? by Will Richardson brings up several key ideas about the state of our schools at this pivotal moment in time. Richardson states that the are two types of schools that are being created by the evolution of technology in our classroom. One model of the use of technology in the classroom uses technology as a tool that creates or continues the same process that has happened in classrooms. According to Richardson "They see schools as places where technology is increasingly a tool to better deliver content" ( loc 219). The second form of looking at technology as a way to release information from the confines of where it finds itself now. Technology and education together can create a schooling system where change is real and students are do not focus on answering questions to a test but to solve real world problems. For me this second way is how I try to run my classroom. It is still a work in progress because we are a data driven school but when as i learn about project based learning I see the benefits of getting rid of the limits on education. Additionally to the school debate expounded by Richardson there is also a section where the author challenges us to think about what it takes to be an educator in this new century. For my part I know that 5 out of the 6 different unlearning and learning ideas I currently use or are going to implement in my school. Just last week after reading this book I decided that my 8th grade students would be able to create their own project, by this I mean they would create their rubric to grade themselves, the questions the would like to answer through the project, as well as how they would present the project. The only requirement I asked was that they needed to be able to digitally have it in some form so that the next year class could learn from it. Having said this I know that the one idea that I have will have the most trouble committing to will be Share Everything the reason being of my competitive nature which gets in my want to share what I have learned. References Richardson, W. (2012). Why school how education must change when learning and information are everywhere / Will Richardson. New York, NY: TED Conferences. |
AuthorI'm Mr. D and I have been teaching technology for a better part of 12 years. Welcome to my blog! ArchivesCategories |