Blog Reflection #7

            

Meaningful education ultimately represents the task of enabling students to problem solve both in an individual and communal setting rather than simply regurgitating information. My responsibility and desire as an educator is to construct and implement innovative methods of instruction that will challenge my students to produce solutions to the dilemmas they face. While fundamental skills and knowledge provide a basic and vital foundation for my teaching methods, instruction based on trial and error, group think, and interactive problem solving shall encompass a majority of the methods I utilize. The 8^th-12^th grade students within my scope of certification face a particularly complex challenge of coping with a multitude of external distractions, so my focus will center on grasping their attention with thought-provoking tasks and maintaining that attention by encouraging them to think, work together, succeed, fail, practice, and theoretically pry their way out of an intellectual tight spot in the curriculum. The cornerstone of my education philosophy, however, is the fact that I ascribe to the idea that, as an educator, I am to be held accountable for the success and growth of my students both academically and personally.

            In order to more precisely identify my role as an educator, I must first define the expectations that I have of my students. While the educator is to be held accountable for the success of the student, learners should ultimately command their own path towards knowledge and content mastery. My meaning is that the effort of the educator does not qualify as a substitute for the effort of a learner. The role of a learner is essentially to meet the educator halfway by remaining attentive, putting forth significant effort, and taking beneficial risks in order to truly master the skills being taught. The role of the educator, however, revolves more around a sense of conscientious servitude and production. Effort does not encompass the entire scope of responsibility for educators as they must combine hours of research and study with innovative instruction that produces desirable results in the classroom. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” As educators, we are to take the barren desert that is the learner and provide them with the type of instruction and exercises that allow them to cultivate success on their own.

            Martin Luther King, Jr. asserted that the goal of true education was “intelligence plus character.” My ultimate objective as a teacher correlates closely with Dr. King’s notion in that I will strive to instill in my students both fundamental knowledge and moral integrity. I want to achieve a symbiotic relationship between core curriculum and lessons that teach moral responsibility. More specifically, in my teaching field of English and language arts, I plan on successfully preparing my students for both state-mandated tests and college-level writing. In 2011, the writing and reading scores of Texas public schools from state-mandated exams ranked among the lowest percentage of passing rates out of all the subjects tested. Therefore, my personal objective as an English and language arts teacher is to utilize more interactive lessons that will inspire students to readily analyze literature and individual attention that will prompt students to take pride in the creation and editing of their writing. Above all, I fervently desire for each one of my students to receive meaningful and relevant instruction from my efforts that significantly challenges them to actively learn each day.

            Technology has become an integral part in almost every aspect of education, today. Numerous online software programs exist for various purposes, such as subject remediation, reviewing and editing, and interactive learning, and are made readily available for school systems to subscribe to. I vow to utilize as many of these programs as possible because they not only appeal to the senses of the learners, but they also allow for a smooth and rapid flow of information between educators. By incorporating online instructional program within my curriculum, I can foster in a newfound acceptance for vertical alignment across grade levels. The new technologies within the classroom also serve to entice the students to take part in their own learning. I believe the two main functions of technology in today’s classrooms are to make instruction simpler and learning more intriguing to the learner. However, the purpose and effectiveness of technology only extends as far as the educator is willing to allow it to do so. As an educator constantly competing for the attention of students, I will put forth the effort to master and effectively implement the technologies made available to me in the workplace.

            Outlining exactly how I intend to implement certain educational technologies represents the most effective usage of planning for learning in the classroom. Many school districts employ a technology director to formulate a technology plan for each campus to follow, but I would like to incorporate my personal technology plan into my educational technology philosophy. I have quickly realized that students enjoy learning with tools that are both hands-on and interactive, so I will implement lessons and activities through SmartBoard technologies. I will also teach and allow my students to teach each other by using the online presentation software, Prezi. In order to help my students learn more actively and engage with other students, I plan to maintain an online class blog and podcast forum. The class blog and podcast forum will serve as springboards for student participation, communication, and creativity. Additionally, I plan to utilize an online class wiki as a source for important class announcements and information that the students feel the need to share. Along with the class wiki, I will utilize the online text messaging system, Respond 101, in order to keep my students up-to-date and organized in regard to upcoming assignments, due dates, and other necessary information.

            My approach to teaching combines the pragmatist and idealist schools of thought. The methods and instruction that I utilize incorporate both the real-world usefulness of pragmatic problem solving and the devotion to classical thinking, literature, and history of idealism. In order to accomplish the desired outcome for each lesson I implement, I plan on drawing from both of these schools for inspiration and organization. Each and every concept that I teach should undoubtedly possess some functional purpose within the scope of the learners’ curriculum and standards. These concepts should also remain true to the significant lessons provided by the classical canon of literature and historical texts. By combining the pragmatist and idealistic aims of education, I believe I can effectively inspire my students to better understand themselves, their social surroundings, and the nature of truth in their own lives whilst still remaining true to a core curriculum.

            Identifying what he stands for, wishes to accomplish, and how he intends to do so embody the three most essential components that an educator should consider. By defining my flexible parameters for these three fundamental ideas, I can then build a specific curriculum designed for active learning upon my personal foundation of educational philosophy. Before I know what and how I should teach my students, I must first know what I believe in. I place my faith in a fusion of classic material and interactive, group-based learning. I will resolve to implement new teaching strategies, software, and innovative technology in my instruction so that students under my watch will constantly be intrigued with the prospect of learning. From this basic philosophy, I can begin to discover myself as an educator and hopefully become a catalyst for active learning within the classroom.

Blog Reflection 6

I truly appreciated Deal's article on teaching through podcasting because of its functional value and application. Almost all noteworthy scholarship possesses information that the reader can use, but exceptional scholarship informs and inspires the reader on how to utilize such information. Deal's article provides the reader with a multitude of possibilities for the implementation of podcasting inside and outside the classroom. Personally, I basically am only aware of the concept of podcasting and have maybe used the technology once or twice to listen to a lecture in an online class. However, the article goes into great detail on the specifics of podcasting, how to create podcasts, and the possibilities for educational instruction with podcasting.

One characteristic of the article that I really appreciated was Deal's explanation of the differentiation between simply uploading media files to the internet and podcasting. To my understanding, podcasting is much more scholarly in its approach and maintains documentation of source information similar to that of electronic periodial databases. I was unaware of this differentiation and now have a greater appreciation for the process of podcasting. The article highlights the topic of podcasting lectures for review, and I certainly subscribe to this idea. As a new teacher, one of the most frustrating obstacles to deal with is student absences. You must stay on schedule with the rest of the class but also concurrently catch the absent student up when he or she returns. By recording all of my lectures or class discussions and uploading them into a podcast portal, my students would be able to access class periods that they missed or simply wish to review. As the article states, recording lectures is a very old practice, but I have never thought of recording and podcasting my lectures as a means of review for my students. This would be a fairly easy process that would end up saving my students and myself valuable time and energy. I even have an application on my iPAD that allows me to record my lectures an a Quicktime audio file, email the audio file to myself, and upload into an online databse for podcasting.

Overall, the article continually builds up the argument for implementing podcasting into classroom instruction and review. Like all new technologies, educators will have to familiarize themselves with the format and sacrifice the time to make and upload audio files, but the results reported in the article make the entire process seem absolutely worthwhile. As Deal states in the article, "Podcasting does not contain any inherent value," so educators must depict the application's worth by putting time and effort into utilizing the technology (12).

When I first starting taking undergraduate courses as a sophomore in high school (2006-2007), most of my online courses utilized podcasting in order to distribute lectures. The technology is already widely spread and used, but I foresee podcasting transcending the realm of higher education and reaching into grade schools as students become saturated with technology at a younger age. I also think that, as more secondary school teachers begin to model their instruction after college courses, they will begin to utilize podcasting for discussion recording and review, class discussion, student projects, and video podcasts. I can also see video podcasting becoming a source of teacher evaluation and peer resource.

At the moment, I am not exactly sure how I will implement podcasting in my current classroom. The inconvenient truth of my situation is that I teach freshmen in a low-income school district. Most of my students do not have access to a computer or the internet at home despite our culture's saturation of technology. In fact, while I would consider young people today to be among the most technologically-savvy people in our society, my students struggle with instruction on technology and software. So, I am not sure how they would react to using an online podcasting site so early in their high school career. My hope is that I can eventually create a model video podcast of a presentation on a novel and then have my students view my presentation and create their own. By completing this project, I would have recorded documentation of my students' presentations for future reference, and they would have something to be proud of and share with other students, teachers, and parents.