The Changing Role of the Teacher
The role that teachers play in the classroom has changed just in the past eight years I have been teaching...and the change since I was the same age as my students are today is mind-boggling. Living in a world filled with instantaneous information has made us as a society very impatient. We have answers literally at the tips of our fingers. A simple tasks such as searching through a dictionary for a definition or proper spelling, no longer exists. As educators, it has always been our goal to meet the needs of our students...but what do they need? A 15 month toddler knows how to navigate through a tablet and identify letters and the sounds they make. So is writing spelling words repetitively and taking a paper pencil spelling test appropriate? Not today. We need to find ways to guide students through their own discovery of learning thoughtfully.
As I began my journey into Blended and Online instruction, I was overwhelmed by how much I didn't know. I consider myself relatively tech savvy, but there is so much more to this direction in education than finding websites for students to play games or word process a paper, and it changes daily. My role as a teacher today is about guiding students through the discovery of the world in front of them - much different from the world where we discovered in a classroom, sitting at a desk, and listening to a teacher teach us. We live in a constantly changing world now and as educators we have to be ready to move forward with it. Before implementing some of the processes I discovered on this journey, I found my students to be lacking in motivation and extremely impatient. I honestly thought they had never learned to think about anything. What was revealed through purposeful integration of technology with students, is that they do think; they just take a different path to figuring things out. Students today think as they search. If they are taught to search through practical application, they become very deep thinkers. My job is to give them the tools and the guidance to help them search and discover meaning in their world. Students today need purposeful and meaningful paths to take to knowledge; just as we did at their age but in a different way.
Successes and Challenges
Most of my successes have to do with student engagement and excitement over different ways to create meaningful learning. Students would rather search for information than be "taught" it. Unfortunately, this works best for the highly-dedicated students with intrinsic motivation. Many of the other students want to be "fed" the information and find any "work" on their part to be overwhelming. Some major challenges I have encountered are mostly with the antiquated infrastructure and the lack of funding for 1:1 computers. Hopefully, that will be changing soon with the funding coming from the latest legislative session. I have done my best to use the Rotation Model to deal with the lack of computers.
So what is next? First of all, I don't give up. I continue to learn more about what is out there to better engage my students. I continue to monitor and collect data to show proof that Blended Learning is highly beneficial to my students. I continue to hone the current plans I am using and create new learning paths to afford my students the opportunity to discover and take more ownership in their education. I continue to listen to my students and adjust my planning for them based on their needs. I continue to fight for my students, for more effective infrastructure, and for better equipment. I continue doing what I have been doing since 2007 when I began this journey at the age of 49 - make a difference in the lives of children in Nevada.
Student Benefits
Students appreciate the opportunity to take control of their learning. Most of my students use these occasions to not only excel, but prove they can do it without me. The recent use of Google Slides was not only revealing to me in what they produced but to them when they each presented their slides. The feedback from their classmates was very valuable. Most of the feedback was focused on the visual appeal of the slides, which was justified since we live in such a visual world. Some of their comments about the content on the slide was very insightful, pointing out how clarity of information was a problem with some students' work. Other opportunities, such as the use of Class Chatter to respond to a novel study, gave the students who struggle with writing and opportunity to easily write and revise on the blog. The quality and quantity of responses were much higher than when I used paper responses. During the fourth quarter I implemented the use of ClassCraft as a classroom management tool. My students loved it and I was able to ward off the fourth quarter misbehavior through the use of it. I will definitely begin the year with it next year. Finally, students enjoy using Padlet, Today's Meet and Google Forms when they can see the responses and data immediately. As I stated earlier, our students live in a world filled with instantaneous information. As educators, we need to use this to our benefit instead of fighting it.
Self-Evaluation Rubric
The role that teachers play in the classroom has changed just in the past eight years I have been teaching...and the change since I was the same age as my students are today is mind-boggling. Living in a world filled with instantaneous information has made us as a society very impatient. We have answers literally at the tips of our fingers. A simple tasks such as searching through a dictionary for a definition or proper spelling, no longer exists. As educators, it has always been our goal to meet the needs of our students...but what do they need? A 15 month toddler knows how to navigate through a tablet and identify letters and the sounds they make. So is writing spelling words repetitively and taking a paper pencil spelling test appropriate? Not today. We need to find ways to guide students through their own discovery of learning thoughtfully.
As I began my journey into Blended and Online instruction, I was overwhelmed by how much I didn't know. I consider myself relatively tech savvy, but there is so much more to this direction in education than finding websites for students to play games or word process a paper, and it changes daily. My role as a teacher today is about guiding students through the discovery of the world in front of them - much different from the world where we discovered in a classroom, sitting at a desk, and listening to a teacher teach us. We live in a constantly changing world now and as educators we have to be ready to move forward with it. Before implementing some of the processes I discovered on this journey, I found my students to be lacking in motivation and extremely impatient. I honestly thought they had never learned to think about anything. What was revealed through purposeful integration of technology with students, is that they do think; they just take a different path to figuring things out. Students today think as they search. If they are taught to search through practical application, they become very deep thinkers. My job is to give them the tools and the guidance to help them search and discover meaning in their world. Students today need purposeful and meaningful paths to take to knowledge; just as we did at their age but in a different way.
Successes and Challenges
Most of my successes have to do with student engagement and excitement over different ways to create meaningful learning. Students would rather search for information than be "taught" it. Unfortunately, this works best for the highly-dedicated students with intrinsic motivation. Many of the other students want to be "fed" the information and find any "work" on their part to be overwhelming. Some major challenges I have encountered are mostly with the antiquated infrastructure and the lack of funding for 1:1 computers. Hopefully, that will be changing soon with the funding coming from the latest legislative session. I have done my best to use the Rotation Model to deal with the lack of computers.
So what is next? First of all, I don't give up. I continue to learn more about what is out there to better engage my students. I continue to monitor and collect data to show proof that Blended Learning is highly beneficial to my students. I continue to hone the current plans I am using and create new learning paths to afford my students the opportunity to discover and take more ownership in their education. I continue to listen to my students and adjust my planning for them based on their needs. I continue to fight for my students, for more effective infrastructure, and for better equipment. I continue doing what I have been doing since 2007 when I began this journey at the age of 49 - make a difference in the lives of children in Nevada.
Student Benefits
Students appreciate the opportunity to take control of their learning. Most of my students use these occasions to not only excel, but prove they can do it without me. The recent use of Google Slides was not only revealing to me in what they produced but to them when they each presented their slides. The feedback from their classmates was very valuable. Most of the feedback was focused on the visual appeal of the slides, which was justified since we live in such a visual world. Some of their comments about the content on the slide was very insightful, pointing out how clarity of information was a problem with some students' work. Other opportunities, such as the use of Class Chatter to respond to a novel study, gave the students who struggle with writing and opportunity to easily write and revise on the blog. The quality and quantity of responses were much higher than when I used paper responses. During the fourth quarter I implemented the use of ClassCraft as a classroom management tool. My students loved it and I was able to ward off the fourth quarter misbehavior through the use of it. I will definitely begin the year with it next year. Finally, students enjoy using Padlet, Today's Meet and Google Forms when they can see the responses and data immediately. As I stated earlier, our students live in a world filled with instantaneous information. As educators, we need to use this to our benefit instead of fighting it.
Self-Evaluation Rubric