Blog Review: Cool Cat Teacher Blog

"We don't all ride camels, you know."
"We don't all act like that comedian Jeff Foxworthy says -

we're not all red-necks in South Georgia."

- The Flat Classroom Project

Cool Cat Teacher Blog

Author Information:
The author of this blog is Vicki Davis; high school teacher and IT director at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. (It does not note what courses she teaches.)Vicki co-created four award winning international wiki-centric projects, the Flat Classroom™ project, the NetGenEd™ Project, the Eracism Project™, the Horizon project, and Digiteen™ with teacher Julie Lindsay. She is also cofounder of the Flat Classroom Conference to be held in Beijing, China in February 2010.

After browsing through hundreds of links to education-related blogs, Cool Cat Teacher jumped out at me. The blog originally started after Ms. Davis went to a conference on technology back in 2005. Since then, she created this blog, and has won numerous awards for it, which made me want to read on (it has to be good to win that many awards! i.e. 2008 Edublog Award for Best Teacher Blog.) I frequently stopped to read her posts as I was skimming through, and as I did there was a central theme I found: introspection, self-awareness, positivity. Her thoughts and ideas make you stop and think once and a while about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Not to mention that she also gives many helpful links to other sites, strategies, ideas, and opinions. I also was drawn to her because I read in her bio about a Flat Classroom Project that she founded. I immediately thought of one of my favorite books, “The World Is Flat”, by Thomas Friedman. Her “Project” is based off of his book. So, I found we have a lot in common and read on.

The posting I selected is related to the Flat Classroom Project. Ms. Davis wrote this with her co-founder of the project, Julie Lindsay, back in April of 2010, entitled, The Flat Classroom: Mobile and Ubiquitous. The blog posting explains the flat classroom project:
“It is a global collaborative project that joins together middle and senior high school students. This project is part of the emerging trend in internationally-aware schools to embrace a holistic and constructivist educational approach to work collaboratively with others around the world in order to create students who are competitive and globally-minded. One of the main goals of the project is to 'flatten' or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working isolated and alone, 2 or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom. This is done through the Internet using Web 2.0 tools such as Wikispaces and Ning. The topics studied are “real-world scenarios based on the book ‘The World is Flat’.”

Go the project's website to find out more information! Very interesting..

Do Learning Styles Really Matter? Yes & No

One should teach in the manner that the topic demands. Another way to put it is, the way one learns is topic dependent. Curwin, 1999

Do learning styles really matter? Yes and No.

Yes learning styles matter, because they are real; they are the way we learn! They must matter. The idea of learning styles has been around for a long time; Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Kinesthetic are the Top 4 styles. But, does it mean that a teacher has to shape each piece of information for each student a different way because of their “learning style”? Perhaps it would be beneficial to survey each class to see what the learning style is for the majority of the students. If the majority are visual learners, then the teacher can use more PowerPoint in her instruction. However, if the majority of the students were Aural learners, she could lecture more, and still be effective (If you believe in learning styles).

Next is my No argument: The article we read in class last night takes the example of the color of a pea and the color of a Christmas tree. If a teacher was trying to explain the difference in the shade of the color green, it wouldn’t matter that my learning style is auditory. If the teacher said the color was different, and tried to explain how by reading about the color, it wouldn’t be too effective for the student to learn what the difference is. The only effective way to teach the difference would be to visually show the students the two different shades of green. Another example is if the subject is geography and a teacher is teaching the shapes of the countries in Africa. Then they should teach in a visual style, even if we know that the student is an aural learner.

This excerpt from an article in the Washington Post gives a great example of why learning styles don’t matter:
“Consider this analogy. Watch kids on a museum field trip and you’ll notice that they stop to look at different paintings: some like cubism, some like impressionism, some like the Old Masters, and so on. You would not conclude that these kids have different visual systems. You’d figure that these differences were due to the children’s backgrounds, their personalities, tastes, and so on. The same seems to be true of learning. Some lessons click with one child and not with another, but not because of an enduring bias or predisposition in the way the child learns. The lesson clicks or doesn’t because of the knowledge the child brought to the lesson, his interests, or other factors.”

Even proponents of learning styles have said that learning styles change over time. They are not static. There is no way a teacher can constantly test a student to see if their learning style has changed, and then adapt the lesson to their new learning style.
Maybe educational researchers and everyone involved in education are putting way too much emphasis on learning styles. In my opinion, adapting to learning styles, in all reality, would make a teacher’s job much more difficult, without any real benefit being given to the students.

Sources:
http://www.learningstyles.webs.com/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/daniel-willingham/the-big-idea-behind-learning.html

In Reaction to Arne Duncan's Remarks

In reaction to: Beyond the Bubble Tests: The Next Generation of Assessments -- Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks to State Leaders at Achieve's American Diploma Project Leadership Team Meeting

The article, Beyond the Bubble Tests: The Next Generation of Assessments -- Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks to State Leaders at Achieve's American Diploma Project Leadership Team Meeting, relates well to our last class discussion, greatly in part to the issues of standardized testing. Many students cannot be accurately tested with norm referenced tests for many reasons. For one, many students get nervous when taking a standardized test, also, the tests are very “black and white” and do not have much dimension or show other higher-order thinking skills that students may possess. These types of assessments serve their purpose mostly for accountability, to prove that it was taught by the teacher, but just as students cannot be accurately assessed with these types of tests, neither can teachers. These types of tests don’t “prove” what other skills or concepts the teacher might have taught.

I think the new “2.0 Assessments” will be a major positive step for Business Education. Recently, funding has been taken away from Business Education programs in schools because they are relying so heavily on what is being tested in the state assessments. The idea of a more well-rounded curriculum that supports not just Math and Reading, but other subject areas as well, is a huge step in the right direction for Business Education. It was even noted in the article that, “The administration has proposed to spend more than a billion dollars to support a well-rounded education in high-need schools—including $265 million in grants to strengthen teaching and learning in the arts, foreign languages, history, civics, and financial literacy.” I was so happy to see the words "financial literacy". This proves that the education administration believes business ed. courses are just as important as the core subjects! I think this will bring more awareness to business education and hopefully shed light on the importance of personal finance and other courses. In the 21st century, students cannot afford to go without these classes, no matter what their future plans are.

The First Days of School..

One of the most useful and influential courses I took at Bloomsburg was Classroom Management & Effective Discipline with Dr. Gates. In this class we learned about how important the first days of school are for a teacher. He often referenced Harry Wong's book, The First Days of School, who said that the first day is the actually the most important day of the school year. Harry Wong believed that what you do on the first days of school will determine your success or failure for the rest of the school year.

Did you know that the single most important factor that governs student learning is classroom management? An article from Educational Leadership found 28 factors that influence student learning, and classroom management was #1. That is why the first days are so important. If expectations are not set in the first week, students will not change months from now when the teacher realizes that something isn't working- perhaps the students aren't learning and the teacher has no control of their classroom.

Harry Wong, author of The First Days of School, believes what is most important and needs to be established on the first days of school is: Consistency. Students want to know exactly what they will be getting and what will be happening. This prevents the never-ending, "What are we doing today?" questions. Teachers need to spend time organizing and structuring the classroom so the students know what their role is in the classroom. Teachers also need to teach procedures that create consistency. They should then go over those procedures many times in the first weeks so the students understand.

Some tips that I found helpful from the First Days of School book are specifically for Day 1:

• Stand at the classroom door and greet students with a smile.
• Have your room ready, with all materials, and seating chart. (Ex: Have names on place cards at their desks.)
• Have the first assignment ready. The assignment should be short, interesting, and easy to complete. Bell-ringers or ice-breakers are great assignments for the first day.

Ice-breakers & Bell-Ringers

• I found some great first-day activities, (geared more toward the elementary classroom, but could be useful for any age group) including ice-breakers, in the link below: http://www.cbv.ns.ca/sstudies/activities/1rstday/1rst.html
• More useful activities for first day are in the link below: http://www.proteacher.com/030005.shtml