Web 2.0 Educator

The Web 2.0-using educator that I have chosen is Bill Ferriter, a 6th grade language arts teacher in North Carolina who runs the blog The Tempered Radical.  Bill Ferriter's emphasis is on reading skills, especially in recent posts: he recently conducted a virtual conversation with Kelly Gallagher, the author of a book called Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It.  Bill believes that technology can help teachers be more adept at observing student reading abilities and improving them: one blog post explains how teachers can organize students in an Excel spreadsheet and use advanced Excel organizational techniques to determine who needs the most help to meet the bare standards, so the teacher can focus on imbibing them with a love of reading.  Another post, which looks at an interview between Bill Gates and Jonathan Alter, discusses how we don't need "highly qualified teachers, only highly effective ones" and ignoring technology would be resisting important changes.

Let me give you an example (which I've mentioned on the Radical before): My master's degree is in "advanced teaching techniques." I earned it in 1997. Do you think that the strategies I learned from college professors who hadn't been in classrooms since the early '80s in 1997 would still qualify as "advanced teaching today?"

This blog has a lot of attitude and I think his thoughts on technology, literacy, and education are hopeful and passionate.  I've subscribed to his blog's feed and will keep an eye on it.

Type I and Type II Technology

Type I technology seems to apply to technology that supplements ordinary skills, and has a predetermined single purpose that is built into the technology; there is a given amount of information in the technology that is merely accessed by the user. Type II technology is open-ended and while it may not have information or facts designed into it to be accessed, it allows for the user to assume an active role in the program.

Examples of Type I technology include Jump Start Typing, a typing teaching program that we used in my middle school to teach us to type on computer keyboards. Another example is Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia, which came on my family’s old computer – this was just a virtual encyclopedia that was easy to search. A third example of Type I technology is The Oregon Trail, a historical computer game that has a predesigned course giving a degree of variation to the player’s decisions.

Examples of Type II technology include the TI-83 graphing calculators we used in my high school math classes. These calculators had programming capacity, and we were taught how to make basic programs. I went above and beyond and learned how to make animations and geometry programs on the calculator. Another example is the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel, which has functions programmed into it, but virtually infinite uses for the functions. A final example of Type II technology would be something like Adobe Photoshop, which has many features, but leaves the core and bulk of the content to the user.

Type II Applications of Technology in Education: New and Better Ways of Teaching and Learning – Cleborne Maddux and D. LaMont Johnson from Educational Microcomputing: The Need for Research (1984).

My MEL Experiences

• Student/teacher relationship: In my junior year AP US History class, my teacher exemplified all of the qualities Muir lists for a good relationship. He did things like play songs having to do with history and culture and had an amazing sense of humor with students. He made a very safe environment for students, especially when we had debates in class.  
  
• Helping Students Succeed: My freshman year math teacher had high expectations and very high confidence in our abilities. He had a knack for making sure that every single student in the class had a deep understanding of the concepts we were dealing with before he would move on to anything else.  It may have made the class move a little slower, but he was confident that every student could get it - and every one did!
• Hands-On: During my junior year, my English teacher was finding it difficult to teach poetry (poetry was rarely addressed in my school system, and I think she tried to implement it herself).  She figured that the best way she could teach us about writing poetry was to print off descriptions of different poem styles like acrostics, sonnets, haikus, or sestinas and having us write examples in class, letting us read them to the class the next day.
• Avoid Rewards: Once in an English class, we were asked if we wanted to have a short story reading for stories we had written in class. The students agreed that we would like to if we could make hot chocolate and bring in cookies, and the teacher agreed. However, on the day of the reading, we were too busy eating and drinking, and only a few people shared their stories. It was also hard for us to do sharing in the future because we would always request that type of thing again.
• Context: My senior English class dedicated a unit to writing for the real world, including college essays, job applications, business letters, and other professional writing. It wasn't as in depth as other professional writing I've learned to do since then, but it was definitely valuable at the time, especially the college essay portion.

Learning Style Inventory Results

The results of this seem only somewhat accurate. I tend not to think of myself as a social learner. Also, I think the visual section may be underrepresented – vision is very important to learning as I’ve known it, but I ranked very low in the visual learning style. I know I’m a solitary, verbal, and aural learner, but besides that I’m skeptical about this inventory’s accuracy.

Test and image from http://www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/results.asp

Chapter 2: Respect, Liking, Trust, and Fairness

I was taken aback by the answers that students gave about popularity. When some of the authors were saying they would rather have a really good teacher than a likeable teacher, I remembered how in high school, my peers would get excited if they had an easy or likeable teacher, and seemed to neglect the quality of the teacher. This chapter makes it clear that kids are just as interested in their education as the teacher is.

I guess the reason this surprised me was for some reason I’ve grown this social paradigm where students are supposed to prefer easy teachers to good ones. I suppose I always imagined students saw school in a short-term egotistical view and worry more about the present than the future. It’s certainly good to know that that’s not the case.

Chapter 1: Knowing Students Well

I was surprised that the chapter suggested asking students about their daily schedules. I could relate with this, even without having a busy schedule crowded by sports. The author was saying that because students can have surprisingly busy schedules and teachers are somewhat detached from extracurriculars in most situations, teachers should try hard to understand the time requirements of students, along with getting to know them better.

I think the reason this jumped out at me was because I went to a very small school where teachers often were involved with most extracurricular activities, and had a better-than-average understanding of other things demanding students’ time. Even with a vague understanding, I recognize it is better to have a clear and spelled-out estimate of how much free time students can devote to schoolwork.