(Coming up with titles is not my forte)
Thanks to Jeff's helpful list of edubloggers, I was directed to Larry's Opinion Drive-Thru, an educational tech blog manned by Mr. Larry Baker, a high school English and government teacher). At just a few posts in, I began to notice some similarities between the issues Mr. Baker focuses on, and the same ideas we've been discussing in class.
For example, Mr. Baker sheds some interesting light on the technology-in-the-classroom discussion by directing readers to this article about the future of technology in education. In his own post, Mr. Baker gives a very neat summary of what he thinks is essential for the future of technology in schools: infrastructure. He raises a very good point that all the advanced gagets in the world won't do much good unless the school invests the time and money to support them. This includes a high-speed internet connection and ample storage space for students to use. This interested me because in all of our discussions, I'm not sure this point even came up. We jumped so far ahead that we didn't think about the foundations (or scaffolding, if you'd prefer?) that would be needed to sustain such grand ideas.
Additionally, it was cool to see Mr. Baker's thoughts on Evernote, the same organizational tool I looked at for our 504 class (he also later touches on Pinterest, another 504-studied tool). Mr. Baker links to another blog that offers quite the helpful run-down of Evernote (that quite frankly, puts mine to shame). Mr. Baker gives his own brief thoughts about how much more organized the Evernote service has made him. Both of these points were placed within a larger post about classroom technology, and how it is changing.
Furthermore, I loved Mr. Baker's mention of of penmanship and how the Common Core does not have any cursive component. He mentions this particular New York Times article, which examines the fate of cursive handwriting. As a calligraphy and penmanship enthusiast, the idea that no one really writes in cursive anymore kind of bums me out. I realize that few people use signature past grade school for anything other than offering up their signatures, but Mr. Baker raises a good point about how cursive advocates note its cognitive and academic benefits. Truth be told, I usually write in a print-cursive hybrid myself, and I don't know that I would make it an absolute requirement for my students, but I would definitely not discourage assignments being turned in in cursive.
Overall, I really appreciated Mr. Baker's overall scheme for his blog. He talks about issues of technology, but is not overly technological. He focuses on English and Government, but I feel like the topics he tackles could be beneficial to many different disciplines. He's been blogging since 2008, so it's really nice to see an educator who's made such a commitment to not only expanding his own knowledge, but is offering up his own tid-bits (or, opinions as his title suggests) for the benefit of other teachers everywhere.
Emily, I'm glad that found some items of interest at Larry Baker's blog, and I very much appreciate the point you flagged about infrastructure. You're quite right that this is one of the more important, and more easily-overlooked considerations as we contemplate the big picture contextualizing some of the things we've talked about in 504 so far. We'll actually be talking about one manifestation of such issues when we look at the coming online assessments.
ReplyDeleteOne other thing. There will be many thing that will distinguish your class/classroom from the others, and I believe rather strongly that cultivating idiosyncrasy is really important for us as teachers. I think it goes back to Rory's point about relationships...kids need to be exposed to adults who are making intentional, quirky choices as evidence that the quirks they possess aren't bad things, and are in fact things to be cultivated. All that by way of saying that if writing cursively is important to you, I'd say that you need to figure out a way to weave it in...