There is no magic potion. 438 Post #2

I am feeling so overwhelmed today! I have started a new blog  and wishing I would have stayed on track with the original; I am incorporating graduate class assignments with the creation of new materials for fall technonlogy workshops and…on top of thatl, I am having operational challenges with technology that are making my head swell into a throbbing bulbous annoyance rather than the swiftly streaming sensory player I appreciate and respect. 

Escape…I’m off  to the “Cool Cat” teacher blog for some insight and I find another conference I want to attend, but what, in June–just days away.  And then I slow down…yes slow down and reread. It’s an online conference  with our own, Dr. Cheri Toledo as a presenter and  I’m already registered. As a matter of fact, in the time I linked the conference registration to this page, I received confirmation of participation and list of archived conferences with topics near and dear to my heart, including connectivism. Already, the throbbing bulbous appurtenance atop my shoulder is beginning to feel once again like an essential part and not a hiderance.

Yet another item on the Cool Cat page that inspired me was a link to Virtual Worlds in Education wiki . I am working on a distance learning project that will serve as a resource to “digital immigrants”  as they teach digital natives about creating wiki spaces for learning. Wow!! what a template the Horizon Project Virtual Wiki offers!

I am feeling less stressed. My morning started with James Lang’s “A Brain and A Book” arguing whether we need to accomodate teaching to the needs of the digital native or whether there is value in the past and the mediums by which we (the immigrants) learned and formed communities. His notions were in response to Marc Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants , a text admonishing those of us from a certain generation to quit whining and “Just do it!” –take the leap of faith into the world of technology.

As I continued to read through blogs and logs, emails and assignment rubrics, I felt overwhelmed by what I don’t know and what I don’t know how to do. Technology and my own personality have a way of teaming up on me. I often blame technology for speeding me up, instilling impatience, and adding to my personal list of what I could or should do, and so now, I am ready to slow down and accept for a few hours the fact that the more I learn about technology, the more I learn I don’t know. My day to day tasks are small in the ripples of real time and not worth the pain of a throbbing headache.

The throbbing is gone; I am in a state John Keats called “Negative Capability”–“when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I am content, for the remainder of the day, to not strive for SBR as a foundation for motivation or reasoning. I will read and enjoy these moments and hold the notions of others loosely in my mind.

Assessing distance learning. 538 post #1

Many educators have the notion that assessment is something they do after instruction is complete. Assessment, then, they see as a means of evaluating a student’s learning. I call this perception of assessment a “notion” because definitionally, that is just what it is…an idea, “a mental apprehension.” According to Merriam Webster, the meaning of the word “assessment” can have connotations of evaluation, but also included in the definition is the word, “installments.”

In an educational sense, a sense for which MW does not provide a definition of our term, Grant Wiggins applies the concept of installments as he explores the differences between assessment and evaluation. In his discussion, he attributes the qualities of assessment with those of feedback whereas the qualities of evaluation are “value judgments made about the facts and their impact.”

 So what. One of the concerns many have regarding distance learning is the ability of the educator to assess and evaluate the progress of the learner. From the standpoint of assessment, if one (like me) subscribes to Wiggins’s theories, assessment is key to distance learning. Assessment is ongoing and informative; assessment flows in two directions, from student to teacher and teacher to student–it is Socratic in that teachers and learners are involved in a process of questioning and responding and adjusting and reflecting and questioning. Learning doesn’t end; the time in which one has to demonstrate their learning comes to a close. And all of this activity is done promptly, unlike the classic educational systems that place time limits on learners without like constraints on evaluators. Assessment is the flipside of feedback. To see assessment not as evaluation but as a Socratic practice that benefits all involved in learning is to put a positive spin on one of the most needed aspects in education today…a motivation to learn and prove that learning.

Using etools for distance learning. 438 post #1

In my soul, I am a writer and I am a teacher and sometimes I have been a teacher of writing. Because I am a teacher and writer, I was afraid, at first, of technology. I saw it as having a power to undermine the beauty of langauge and world of books, two things I love.  And I worried about technology being misused as a mechanistic replacement of the act and art of teaching. But for a long time, now, I’ve appreciated the power of technology as it enlivens and enrichens langauge, stretching the reach of the written word and giving words lives they otherwise may not have had.

 I encountered a site today that clearly does all of this. Voicethread incorporates teaching and technology through words and graphics that are author centered, but socially networked.  Although Voicethread provides its own tutorials, a blog on Voicethread offers an engaging mental model of what Voicethread is and can do. Publishing on the site is free and the process is guided by a gentle easy-going voice. It took me about ten minutes to set up my site and though I haven’t yet added audio, when I get it done, I’ll invite you to share in my photo album.

Voicethread can be a powerful etool to engage students in language and communication through its combined powers of pictures and instant communication. Not only can it be an expression of students’ personal lives, therein lies powerful opportunities for them to share experiences that connect to academic and life learning.

Technology Immortalizes

I’ve always loved to write and so the act of blogging is one that comes quite naturally to me. As a matter-of-fact, I have a well-document life’s record, words posted on a hidden pages in the depths of drawers forever lost to time. Once I got a computer, my thoughts raced across the screen to be saved in the box until one machine was replaced by another and /or the battery died. The opportunity today’s technology offers is so valuable for the safe-keeping and the sharing of ideas. How many good thoughts and well-turned phrases have been lost because they were given life before the support of blogging could offer them immortality?!