Are we losing out on REAL life when we focus so much on technology?

My second week of Semester 1, Year 3 of my BofEducation(Secondary) study is coming to an end and I am exhausted!  There is loads of things to study (as usual) and assignments to do, kids to wrangle and a house to clean.  I haven’t seen my friends in a while but thank goodness for ICT or I wouldn’t have got all those nice text messages, emails and Facebook posts.  Or am I looking at this the wrong way?  Maybe if we weren’t so rolled-up in ICT, so integrated with ICT in our everyday lives that maybe we would make the time to see our friends more?

I know for a FACT that if I take away the kid’s 3DS consoles they inevitably complain but guess what they do instead?  Play Lego with each other, jump on the trampoline, read books and pretend to be fairies or characters from Star Wars.

I’ve started to wonder if maybe there is too much focus on ICT in Education and not enough of that often yearned-for old feeling of “real” connectedness with “real” people.  Don’t get me wrong, I am an advocate of integrating ICT in Education and I think there’s some great ways to use ICT but I would hate for it to get to the point where we don’t even notice the people around us.  Of course there is a strong case for including ICT in a teacher’s pedagogy and focusing on the way ICT best fits a particular lesson and to make sure that there is something to be gained in doing this. The key here is using ICT to “enhance” a learning experience, not to use ICT just because we have access to it.

“A curriculum for battery hens”

Since becoming a parent I have worried increasingly about the future.  In my bleakest musings I fear the direction that our world-community is going, which seems to be driven by individualism, consumerism & profits.  Inevitably this results in environmental depletion/destruction and an ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor.  I’m not immune to this global direction either, I want a nice house with a pool, a good car, I want to travel and I dream of the freedom I could have if only I would win the lottery!

We are continuously bombarded by the media everywhere that we NEED this and we should HAVE that, we are constantly told how we should look, behave and what we should aspire to. We’re all aware of the environmental problem rushing at us and most of us would like to help the poor, the starving, the misplaced people all over the world. But what do we commonly DO about this?  We get depressed about it, we might make a small donation to a charity but then we go on with our day and hope that someone, some government in the world will finally fix all of these problems facing us (this is possibly a mild generalisation but you get what I mean!).

The CHANGE we’re looking for has to come from us, from our future citizens, our children.  So how?  Education of course!  But is the education we’re giving our children good enough and are we teaching them the ‘right’ things?  I have had a good look at our curriculum here in Australia, specifically in Queensland, and I’ve also done some minor research of Secondary curriculum in North America.  Yes, most curriculum advocates teaching to the child (not the test!), empowering diversity, encouraging critical thinking and using ICTs to enhance collaboration and learning.  BUT, are we not really focusing mainly on the potential income-earning capacity of each student…how else are they to survive our economy if they can not get a decent job?  I suspect that the curriculum is largely based on the CURRENT values of our society, which is heavily influenced by our economic views.

I have had the opportunity to spend time in three different high schools so far (private & public) and the focus has been to “fit” in all the curriculum requirements that relate to the eventual “grade” that a student achieves.  Particularly in High School it is even harder (in my opinion) to foster real critical thinking, to discuss life matters etc., because a teacher does not see the same set of students everyday (unlike primary school).  There is the pressure of a set curriculum, society’s expectations of graduates and University ranking systems.  High school teaches specialisation, subjects are separate and often do not show or offer integration with other subjects.  I agree with the argument that “We live in a world of specialists…People able to see the big picture, those who can synthesize, are in very short supply – which is largely why we are in such a muddle.” (Abbot & MacTaggart, 2010, p. 188).

Have we really created “a curriculum for battery hens”? (Abbot & MacTaggart, 2010, p. 194).  I hope not!

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Abbot, J. & MacTaggart, H. (2010). Overschooled but undereducated: how the crisis in education is jeopardizing our adolescents.  Continuum: London & New York

Don’t be afraid to embed with HTML

Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) tags describes a web page.  It’s not a programing language, just simply a mark-up language.

After seeing/reading the pains that some people go through to embed an online clip, presentation etc, I thought I’d give you some simple tips.  These tips should help you MOST of the time (sometimes depending on where you’re trying to embed and what software you may need to run will limit this capability and so the process may be a bit more complex).  Here’s the basics…..you don’t have to understand the HTML, you just need to know how to use it

1) I want to embed a YouTube clip to my blog post, so I go to the YouTube page and click on the Share button, then the Embed button.  Copy the HTML in the listbox.

 

2) Now go to your blog page, web page etc. and notice that usually where you type your blog or your web entries there is also a HTML tab or a HTML button.  When you click on the HTML tab/button you are able to then PASTE the HTML code that you copied.  The first screen-shot below is an example of the HTML tab found in the wordpress edit page.  The second screen-shot below is an example of the HTML button found in Google sites.

 

 

Here is an example of an embedded YouTube clip in my blog; enjoy!

Fostering critical thinking in highly disciplined & structured schools

I think I may lean towards a socialistic view and therefore am a strong advocate of public schools and teaching every child equally.  To be fair I have only experienced one private school but that led me to write the following short inquiry/essay and I am still struggling to find the answers!

Is it possible to foster critical thinking skills in students in a highly disciplined and explicitly structured school culture?

There are many advantages for teachers, students and parents when a school’s culture is structured on highly disciplined rules and expectations.  Yet, is this culture negatively impacting the potential for an increase in student’s critical thinking skills?  Critical thinking education which has been defined, explored and promoted by educational philosophers such as Giroux (1988), Freire (1997) and Dewey (1966) is greatly influenced by the idea that education should focus on creating a democratic citizen capable of viewing the current state of society, identifying problems and then influencing transformational change in society.  Critical thinking should be a major aim of education to allow for learning that can “…be used to expand the public good and promote democratic social change” (Giroux, 2007).  It could be argued that these critical theorists are utopian and unrealistic but I subscribe to the idea that “Without a vision for tomorrow, hope is impossible” (Freire, 1997, p. 45).

I believe the aim of education should be to create an environment that promotes a democratic community for social interaction that allows students to question society’s views and values.  For learners to become democratic citizens capable of questioning norms and possibly transform society, they require the ability to think critically.  In my view, critical thinking is imperative; it is required before a person is capable of identifying a problem in society and ultimately affecting change by their actions.

So, is critical thinking occurring in schools that follow a culture based on a highly structured discipline?   To maintain such a culture within a whole school often requires that there are set routines, expectations and strict consequences for students and teachers who do not follow the rules.  This leads to a continual focus on control and how to maintain this control.  The advantage of this controlling nature within a school environment is likely to result in higher educational gains and less room for negative student behaviour such as bullying and poor performance.  This type of control however, often requires a Skinner-type technique to control student (and teacher) behaviour which may results in a reward driven individual that destroys “…the notion of the self, individual responsibility, and self-reliance” (Ozman & Craver, 2008, p. 214).  A controlling environment, specifically a controlling teacher, may not be able to foster a caring relationship between teacher and student.  Kohn (1993) argues that teachers that are constantly controlling student’s behaviours by using behaviour modification and rule enforcement are unable to foster a caring relationship.  A truly caring relationship between teachers and learners, based on an “ethics of care” (Noddings, 2005), is required for a critical and democratic classroom to exist.

How can a controlling school culture, with all its inherent benefits for students and their parents, avoid the potential of their controlling nature to negatively impact the freedom that is arguably required to foster critical thinking in our future citizens?  Is this possible?  Are highly disciplined schools and critical thinking mutually exclusive?  Are the benefits of a controlling school culture at odds with the idea of creating critically thinking citizens?  Is the key to successfully fostering critical thinking in students at such schools to have teachers that focus on creating democratic classrooms with an underlying educational philosophy that includes an ethics of care?  Can a classroom be truly democratic in such a school environment?

Dewey, J. (1966). Democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Free Press.

Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the heart. New York: Continuum

Giroux, H. A.. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Granby, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey.

Giroux, H. (2007). Youth and the politics of disposability: resisting the assault on education and American youth.  Retrieved on May 20, 2011, from http://www.stateofnature.org/youthAndThePolitics.html

Kohn, A. (1993). Punished by rewards: the trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A’s, praise, and other bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Noddings, N. (2005). Caring in education. Retrieved May 20, 2011, from http://www.infed.org/biblio/noddings_caring_in_education.htm

Ozman, H., & Craver, S. (2008). Philosophical aspects of behaviorism. In Philosophical foundations of education (8^th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

First blog post! Why?

Ugh, my first blog! It had to happen eventually I guess. I read other people’s blogs and I like the idea of using a blog in the classroom, but oh why me, why do I have to blog too?

When I was younger, maybe 10 years of age, I wrote in a diary. Actually I also attempted a diary when I was a teenager. Each time I would write for a few weeks, maybe a month. Eventually the anxiety of someone possibly reading my diary would build which would result in me ripping up the diary into tiny little unreadable pieces. Nothing extraordinarily ‘bad’ was written in my diary, I just didn’t like the idea of someone reading it and potentially misinterpreting it.

So why now? Why start a blog? Will I be deleting all my blogs in a few weeks time? Maybe! Well, first off I suspect we’ll be encouraged to create a blog soon in one of my University subjects. Also, the use of blogging in the classroom will most likely be the topic that my group will choose to explore in a current subject. I have used blogging as an activity within teaching lesson plans, so I should probably have my own blog if I’m going to ask students to blog.

Good luck to me!