Wendy Farkas' Tumblr

Jul
15th

Tue

"technology = happiness"

This is an interesting blog discussion about how integrating technology into the classroom really helps to increase student involvement. One of the things we’ve been discussing is how to increase student investment in their own learning. By brining technology into the classroom, we make it fun and interesting for our students to learn. By making it fun and interesting, we are bringing learning to them, rather than hoping that they will find their way to what we are trying to teach them. In reversing the process, so to speak, we are inviting students to explore the areas we want them to see and we are inviting in new ways of thinking about the world and what it has to offer.

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
- confucious

— http://www.quoteland.com/topic.asp?CATEGORY_ID=92

Students using technology and collaborating in the learning process.

Why Bring Technology into the Classroom?

The essential question we are all wrestling with is the idea that we may be doing this for some inexplicable reason. We need to disabuse ourselves of this notion. The idea that the world is at our fingertips is only one reason to bring the internet and its tools into our classroom. The important pedagogical reason is that it heightens and utilizes different intelligences and opens conversational doors that would otherwise remained closed. Web 2.0 is a means of giving our students windows into their own metacognition and allows them flexibility in exploring their apptitudes and does so in a way that is meaningful to them. The oft-heard lament of educators today is, how do I make this relevant to my students? The fact of utilizing technology in a creatively interactive way rather than just as a research and writing tool makes learning and thinking relevant and enticing to out students.

While the geometric progression of advances in computer technology has resulted in virtual reality games and learning simulations, Internet feats of library access, and world wide web exploration, as well as twenty-four hour electronic mail and other cyber space innovations, English education in the 1990’s still includes a major emphasis on the teaching of literature from books. Even though the current teaching of literature reflects the wide scope of all the literary and pedagogical movements of the twentieth century, and in spite of all the technological advances and disparate theories of literature, one practitioner’s theory of literature education seems to be more widely cited and referred to than any other’s since it was first published in 1938. During the six decades of teaching and learning which have passed since Louise Rosenblatt first published Literature as Exploration, critical theories have risen and crashed, but the preeminence of her theories, particularly since the mid 1960’s, underscores most of the “innovations” in critical theory associated with the dominant teaching approach since then: Reader Response to Literature.

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The Significance of Louise Rosenblatt (via paulallison)

I couldn’t agree more - it seems so simple when she presents it, yet so profound.

Jul
14th

Mon

Ubiquity - Maybe Not

These are the 10 personal questions that immediately popped into my head:

How am I going to remember all the stuff I’m learning?

What am I going to do with all the stuff I’m learning?

Will I be able to use all the stuff I’m learning?

How can I communicate better with all the stuff I’ve learned?

Will I feel rested when I go back to work in September (well, really August)?

Am I going to enjoy my vacation knowing that I will have to go to work as soon as I get back?

Will my sister notice that I am not inviting her to my house anymore?

Will my parents hassle me about the above?

Why is communing with nature through gardening so important to me?

How can I make the most of the three weeks I have before we leave for SF?

These are the 10 world questions I immediately thought about:

What will happen when this stupid country elects yet another idiot as President of the United States?

Should energy conservation be mandated by the government for all individuals?

Why are oil companies being permitted to earn record profits; why are they earning record profits when the cost of oil is so high?

Will women eventually lose the right to have an abortion?

Why doesn’t the Supreme Court understand that preventing local governments from legislating against hand gun ownership creates an overwhelming threat to public safety?

Will the new president do away with NCLB?

Is the New Yorker cover out of line?

When will our presidents realize that it is not our responsibility to police the world?