Video Response: Stop Stealing Dreams

In the video by Seth Godin, he talks about the question: "What is school for?"  School in the past was about teaching obedience - getting students to be automated in their actions, their completion of tasks, and their way of thinking.  He goes on to talk about changes in education. Some notable changes were the teacher's role transforming to that of a coach, learning happening anywhere at anytime, open book / open notes all the time, no more memorizing, and more.  The focus of education is turning to the idea that we prepare the students to ask questions, problems solve, continually learn throughout life, learn from failures, and tune in to the student's passion.

Three statements I found intriguing from the video were:

1. We want students to connect the dots not collect the dots. 
2. Put students in a situation were they can fail.
3. Grades are an illusion - Passion and insight are reality.

These three statements apply to what is happening in my classroom.  Students in my class choose the topics they want to learn about, they learn about the topic apply what they learned.  They also are always working with the design process in which they identify a problem, design a solution, build it, test it, and evaluate it.  Students are experience failures but they are learning how to learn from it - how to fix it. 

In answering the question "What is school for?," I believe that the role of school is changing.  We as teachers need to change as well to facilitate this new way learning. This way of teaching and learning is working in my class and I see this continuing and growing.

Video Response: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

This speaker is very entertaining.  He talks about the future of education and how we are to prepare students.  He brings up his belief that creativity is as important as literacy.  I too believe these are equally important.  Students can be very book smart but without creativity they can struggle to be successful in life. Students with degrees use to be guaranteed a job, but now that is not true.  We as teachers need to focus encouraging and growing our students talents and creativity into skills that will lead them into success. We need to encourage students think outside of the box and not to follow one way of thinking and learning.

Twitter Chats

I feel that technology has a good and an evil side in the classroom.  We need to make sure that we are not replacing teaching with technology but instead supplementing our teaching with technology.  If this is done right, students will more likely have a better learning experience. 

Technology can be used in the classroom to increase communication, facilitate discussions, and spark new interests/ideas.  These all add to the human and social lenses of learning.  This week I have been learning about and using Twitter.  Twitter and many other social platforms would allow for students to easily interact with other students, experts, teachers, etc. from all over the world that they typically wouldn’t get a chance to.

Technology allows for learners to obtain knowledge from a variety of sources and to express their opinion and thoughts about this knowledge through different ways of communication.  I think this is great because it allows for students to be more aware of their writing because their audience is bigger.

I definitely feel that literacy is always changing.  Technology has had a major impact on literacy in that there is a wealth of information now accessible to students and this information is now available from numerous resources.  Students are continually finding new ways to access information and communicate with one another.

When using Twitter, I searched numerous hashtags. I found some that worked for me.  Other hashtags, I thought, were too broad.  I liked being able to choose my own hashtag because it allowed for me to bounce in and out of topics that were pertinent to me at that moment.