Final Class Thoughts

Jonathan I like the idea of interactive communication with your families. I would like to try the principal's blog as a means for interactive communication with my parents. I also found it interesting to have a podcast to use.

Dawn, love the idea of a professional development page for your teachers. It has so many possibilities. I would love to see a few months from now how many teachers have accessed it.

Suzy, great use of Zoomerang to gain stakeholder input for a big decision for your new school. Gaining input will garner buy in to start the school year off great. It is a good reminder for me to use an online survey tool.

Linda-Sounds like you have many plans for a robust web page to link to your students. What a useful tool it will be for those students wanting a different high school experience from the traditional.

Michael, great use of power point for professional development with teachers. I would agree that getting to the students with technology would also be powerful as a tool.

Entertainment Education

I like the idea of entertainment education as being purposeful in goals for education and social change. Entertainment alone would not suffice for usage in the classroom. Seeking pro social change is an interesting concept to bring into the classroom through entertainment education.

I was interesting to hear about all of the current entertainment that is being used for this purpose: Superbook, Meena, Simpsons, soap operas throughout the world, virtual reality math games.

Getting people to enter the alternate reality works for entertainment education.

It could be overwhelming, but it is an exciting opportunity.

Web Pages

It seems that a lot of thought should precede the creation of any web page in order for it to produce the desired result of having the community have a positive look at the school and all that it encompasses. I need to do my homework. What do I want the stakeholders to go to? How do I want them to see us? What is the message we are sending? I will need to think this through.

Sugata Mitra

Sugata Mitra presents an interesting concept where children can organize into their own learning community using technology with no correlation between ethnicity, socioeconomic differences, or location. It was interesting to see the children work together learning language and a variety of other information through self-discovery and socialization guiding one another to success. I would be interested in seeing this "hole in the wall" experiment tried in the United States in some of our areas that are "remote" in his definition.

Disruptive Learning

I enjoyed the conversation about disruptive learning and innovations. I have been reading the book on my own and it helps to talk about it with other educators to get a clearer picture of what it is suggesting. It has also made me think of some of my students and how I might start with setting them loose with opportunities on line that we cannot offer for a variety of reasons. It is such an untapped resource to expand educational opportunities if implemented correctly. It is also interesting to look at the business model and see how that disrupted some big companies and forced change to satisfy the consumer-that can't completely be a negative direction.

Today's Thoughts about Today's Students

I feel drawn to encourage today's students to engage in their learning in a manner that is creative and relevant to them. Nobody wants to be an empty vessel where information is just poured in. I want to experience learning and so do today's students. The challenge is also to keep them engaged with other people, to interact, to build relationships through conversation and action. I want to explore ways to combine the new way of learning through technology with building human relationships.

Thursday Thoughts

Welcome to my new blog!