ragamuffin diva: Little By Little

Hi Mair-Francis, I am new to your blog and blogging period. I had a grad class that required us to set one up and now I'm trying to use it for fun now that the class is over. I stumbled on your writing at the library with wounded. I was so moved by that book, I loved how the character would say share with me Jesus. I have read everything you have out now and can't wait for your next thing. I am amazed at your journey and am in awe at how you allow the Lord to use you. I was born and raised Pentecostal so I got a good laugh out of some of the scenes in Deadly Charm. My hubby of 19 years was attending a baptist church when we married so I converted so to speak but call myself a bapticostal. There are things I love about both denominations. Ok, I've gabbed enough, that's one of my gifts. Can you tell? I enjoyed your post today, it was refreshing and helps me to see how blessed we are and how little we really need. Thanks for your transparency.
ragamuffin diva: Little By Little

3-2-1 Journal 5

The three things I would like to try with my students are glogster, the voki and voice thread. The two things I would want to share with my colleagues especially the school librarian and the technology club teacher are wiki spaces and wordle, I know they would enjoy interacting with these sites and would want to engage the students in these exercises also. Each of these educators show a lot of slides with music, photos and video, to the whole school, but it seems to be a tedious process. If they learned to do it more efficiently they could teach more students as well as expose more students to the final product. Which may intrigue them to learn how to do their own wordles and wiki spaces. The one thing I want to incorporate for professional growth is blogging consistently, this would help me stay organized with my lessons and I could blog about the things that worked and did not work in the lesson plan and refer to my blog on it when I am ready to repeat the lesson.

Digital Storytelling Journal 4

Digital Storytelling is an excellent tool to keep the digital natives of our present time interested and engaged in school. Finding a way to balance the traditional way of teaching writing with digital storytelling would be the best of both worlds and would most likely keep all types of students involved in the educational process. It would have been very interesting for the students and the teachers if the old school teacher and the digital teacher could have co-taught the writing class. This would have help bridged the gaps between the generations and it would ensure that value of quality teaching is not lost while keeping the students current with the times. This would produce a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Cell Phones Journal 3

The use of cell phones would be a great way to further engage the high school students. As we learned from the digital natives article the students are almost always "plugged in" outside of the school setting and it becomes quite challenging to "unplug" for six hours and sit in a class ( in rows) and listen to speaking. To begin using the cell phone as the great asset it could become we would have to start with basic educational cell phone etiquette. The teacher could establish from the very beginning that the cell phones are to be used when assigned only and no outside calls or other forms of communications are allowed during the class time. The teacher could do a complete lesson on cell phone etiquette for school and home use. This lesson would benefit everyone who has been stuck some place with a person talking extremely loud on a cell phone and did not know how to politely tell the person they were too loud for the setting.

The use of the cell phone in the classroom could help the student who struggles to stay focused on the teacher and the lesson. It may even help the student who forgets to record their homework assignment in their agenda. With the cell phone the student could do a voice message in the cell phone,this would ensure they would have it when they sat down any place to do their assignment, because most teens would not be caught dead without their cell phones.

The use of cell phones and other technology in the classroom are avenues educators must begin to seriously explore because reaching the 21st century student is becoming more challenging with all the outside influences the students face. The 21st century "educator/facillitator" must be willing to reach the students by any means necessary and technology in many forms will be one of the ways.

Digitial Immigrants- Journal 2

The Digital Generation Gap presents the perfect opportunity to revisit a system that has not been working properly for a while. It appears that in that last few years or so there have become a great deal of students, in most cases boys, who have been labeled with learning disabilities. While I don't doubt that the students may be experiencing some difficulties learning in a traditional setting, I'm inclined to wonder if maybe the teaching style could be the disconnect in the challenge to reach those labeled students. Even the students in the regular education settings are struggling to stay focused on the lessons presented while sitting in the same chair for large chunks of time. Today's student need movement and interaction.

As educators we have to find avenues to engage all our students most of the time. As the article stated that is quite the challenge when most of our students are plugged in almost every waking hour they are not in school. Many will listen to music or the television while they sleep which in essence keeps them continuously plugged in. I work in the middle school setting and I watch many of the students come in the building in the morning with ear buds in their ears, they know they are not allowed to have them in school but they hold on to every bit of the "electronic connection" until the absolute last possible moment. Before I worked in this setting I would have said, "oh no you're turning that thing off right now or I am confiscating it." But as I have become more knowledgeable about these digital natives I take a softer approach. I allow them to get to their locker first where they have the opportunity to put them away at their own pace and if they don't they will have to deal with the wrath of their first period teacher or the vice-principal who is the school's disciplinarian.

The bottom line for me is this, I want to teach and I want to learn, as an educator I never want to cash in my learning badge. I will never be at a point where I can't learn something new. The age of the teacher should not matter, just like parents learn from their children, teachers will learn from their students. Producing life-long learners is the goal for both parties, while I can impart the passion for learning the digital native can teach me a new method to get them to that learning.

I am very excited about the new ways to learn old things and examining if some of the information is even worth teaching. As the world progresses teachers will be moving away from the traditional teacher to student relationship to a facilitator to student relationship and in some cases a digital native instructor to a receptive digital immigrant "teacher-student". I believe this will give us an excellent repoire with our students. When they see we are still teachable and we don't come across as the final authority on every issue there will be no limits to what we can teach them.

Finally the digital classroom could be a very dynamic tool for all students traditional, itinerant, and learning support. When the class is set up with the teacher becoming more of a facilitator and the students are allowed to work at their own pace. Just like in the workplace people work to their ability and skill, the students could do the same and the teacher could have more time to work with struggling students without singling them out and the advanced students wouldn't be held back from going forward because of lagging students. Initially, parts of the school day could be set up this way and the traditional teaching style could be interspersed throughout the school day too. There are so many avenues to this topic, the main thing would be to have an open mind no matter the case because our ultimate goal is to get our gets to learn by any means necessary.

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"Teaching Zack" Journal 1

I think students should be encouraged to search independently in the third grade on information appropriate for that age group. I think that this a good age group to begin having the students view the internet as a pertinent tool to use for research. The seriousness of gathering accuarate facts should be strongly encouraged. If students are taught right from the beginning that facts should be validated no matter the source they will always check and double their facts before they believe them as gospel or present them as the end all and be all to the accuracy of the information.

The strategy that a teacher could use to avoid what happen to Zack is to build in the back up links into the project to check the accuaracy of the information . The process could be simplified so that the student could not go to the next question without checking for accuracy of the information gathered.