This week, we learned about starting and keeping blogs. This is something with which I had little prior experience, so I knew that getting into the habit of multiple weekly blog posts (for multiple classes) would be potentially difficult, especially while balancing single parenthood and my stage production for the first five weeks of the semester.
The video Most Likely to Succeed was about a school (High Tech High, a Charter School in San Diego, California) that was abandoning the traditional, didactic and academic approach to teaching in favour of a more hands-on, technology-heavy and project-based approach. Although the documentary did raise some interesting points about how potentially out of date traditional learning is, I really felt that promoting a charter school as an alternative to conventional public school should be viewed in context as a potential attempt to erode confidence in public education, thereby exacerbating the USA’s already huge class/income-based access disparity.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/30/18076968/charter-schools
So far, I have been fairly impressed with both the quantity and quality of tech resources available for educators. As someone who graduated high school in a different millennium, I had a very different experience from what students have with technology today. When I was in school, technological enhancement of learning consisted of a video displayed on a VHS trolley that took the teacher an average of 7 minutes to figure out. I look forward to learning more about all the tools I could have in my teacher’s toolkit!