First Two Days

The first two days of school are done!  Yay!  The school year has officially begun.  These students have a great benefit of seeming to believe that they are adolescents yet.  This gives them a great advantage over those that come into my classroom certain that they are already fully grown or whose heads are so full of certainty they don't have any room in their heads to learn anything else.

Keeping kids on track is really about keeping up with the details and being consistent with our policies and policing.  I am going to work very hard this year to keep up with the drudgery of nipping behavior in the bud before I have to deal with the headache of trying to get students back on the path to learning.

It is near the end of the week and one side of my head says I have really gotten a lot done and I am well on my way towards being organized and well planned for when the kids come to school next Thursday.  The other side of my head, no surprise, suggests that I have a million things that I haven't nailed down yet and I will fly into the school year once again holding on by the seat of my pants.

I have the first two days covered and the first week is covered.  After that I am not certain that what I envision for my classroom is what will take place or for that matter is what I am planning what I want to take place.

One of the fun things about writing a mostly anonymous blog is whether or not I make sense is really not that high a priory or issue.  Needless to say I will know more when I come into contact with my students.  For now all I can do is push the furniture around and hope everything has a place when the music starts.

Begin again

Today was the first day of teacher meetings for the 2012 school year.  This is my second year teaching and I am torn between feeling more confident and experienced as I enter this year and feeling less confident and insecure that I haven't prepared or learned as much as I wanted to from the first trial by fire that was last year.  Time will tell.

I decided to use this blog as a less censured forum for talking about teaching and growing as a teacher.  I wrote every Friday a short paragraph or two on my classroom website last year.  However, the message was presented to both parents and students as a motivational reflection on what we did and accomplished throughout the week.  This blog should be something more of a under the hood expression that is geared for other new teachers or teachers in general.

This post is simply a breaching of the silence that has gripped my writing of late.  I really need to get back into the practice of putting words down on paper. It will make me a better teacher and the skill of writing is something that I have been proud.  I don't want to see my skills atrophy.

Educational Graphics

This isn't exactly a fine piece of graphic art. Instead it is heavy on the instructional side of its function. I created this graphic handout in Corel Draw 6 which is terribly outdated and when I finally upgrade my computer and move to Vista it will be as useless as an 8 track tape.

I played a little with Pixlr for a little while and it seems to have just enough tools and features to be useless. I don't think I could have created the above image with pixlr.

Here's a photo I created last year for my friends.

I added the character names with Pixlr but the cutting and pasting was done with Corel.

Are we running to stand still?

I thought this was a cute technology comic courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. If you decide to check out his other comics I can't be held responsible for what you find.

It does seem that we've invented a incredibly powerful tool for self expression and exploration of the world so that we might watch catch a glimpse of a cat playing piano or be the first to know who won the Massachusetts Senate seat. Are we evolved enough as individuals, as a society to use the power granted to us by technology in a constructive way? Joe Campbell, who is my main intellectual mentor, described the modern world this way (by the way he died in 1988): "Where there was once darkness now there is light and where there was once light now sits in darkness." Is everything a trade-0ff like this? And if so have we given ourselves to the complexity of technological advance for no great benefit to life?

Campbell also described his first computer as a hierarchy of angels. A series of miracles all built on slats. Its workings were as mysterious to him as the turning of the world was to the ancients. As an anthropologist he decided to categorize this new deity as an Old Testament God: Lots of rules and no mercy.

Finally, I am reminded of Arther C. Clarks quote about technology:"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

I wonder how long humanity will be captivated by the magic of seeing a cat playing piano on their computer screen.

The comic panel above is from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. It illustrates quite well the difficulty humans have in accepting and integrating new media forms into our thinking. The more tools people have to express ideas and share knowledge the better off we are as a community. I am not one of those who think that paper and pen are the end all and be all of human expression. However, I feel that as a culture we are still trying to catch the tail of the tiger as it rushes forward constantly morphing into new incarnations of itself. The Internet 2.0 is a good example. My parents still use dial up to access the internet and most of the "new" internet is not only unavailable, but makes navigating the web a pain. The technological revolution has taken place in such a very uneven way. Until everyone has broadband connection with the speediest processors, HD monitors and newest operating systems we are going to continue to have trouble communicating to each other on an equal footing. The computer I am using right now is running Windows XP while the computer in my living room runs Vista and my wife's laptop has the newest Windows 7 operating system. I can't even create a consistent digital environment within my own home. How am I going to hope to create a universal baseline of technological literacy within my classroom?

Until Moore's law is broken and computing power and equipment settles into a stable foundational standard people will continue to struggle to keep up with the changes and fail to use these tools to their full potential. Teachers and students seem to spend so much time fidgeting with and learning how to use gadgets that we loose focus on the essential knowledge and evaluative skills we wanted to express in the first place.

In the breakaway reading a definition for literacy was suggested as: "ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts" (UNESCO, 2004^). This is fine working definition but so often when it comes to digital media learning to use the tool is seen as a higher priority than the content itself. We have a very limited amount of time to capture the attention, imagination and abilities of students so that they might progress academically. I dislike the idea of being so distracted from the concept of literacy by the tools we have chosen to use to help teach literacy.

I enjoy technology. I grew up with it (my first computer was a Commodore 64, my first game system was pong) The communications revolution of the past generation has been an important step forward in our social evolution. But I struggle with my own assumptions about the extent this technology is available and used within the community. A few hours in the computer lab is not going to balance the scales of digital literacy for the student who doesn't have access to a computer in their home. However, organizational skills, essential knowledge about the world and skills that facilitate problem solving can allow for a poor student to balance the scales of experience on their own. This can be done without the use of computer technology at all. When digital technology stops being an augmentation to our learning process and begins to be an encumbrance is when we need to step back and reevaluate our position on how we are going to proceed as an education system.

Computer Use

I've used computers for quite some time but I have never considered myself a computer person. They are essential tools when it comes to creating content but they are not an interest of mine in and of itself.