Comments on: Looking Forward at Learning

By: Allie

Allie — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:34:17 +0000

I agree to the fact that students don’t learn the same way and definetly not at the same pace. I feel that the teachers need to be very aware, and they also need to teach to all types of learners.

By: Power Learning 21

Power Learning 21 — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:57:20 +0000

I agree that parents are the primary educators of their children.
I personally believe that the important of it all is not who teaches the student, but what methods of teaching are absorbed by the student.
Different people, different kind of techniques in learning something.
We all just need to explore and go to the balance of life.

By: Mitchell Armour

Mitchell Armour — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:34:40 +0000

I to agree with Stacy. The saying “treat every kid the same” is complete ludacris! Kids all learn different ways, and it is up to the teachers to find tthe best way to teach the students.

By: Stacy

Stacy — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:24:41 +0000

I really enjoyed reading this article. I agree no two children learn the same way and as educators and as parents we need to find out how each child learns and encourage them to learn in that way. We need to adapt to the students instead of them adapting to our lecturing technique. We need to make learning fun and easy for them so they will want to continue to learn for years to come. Education never comes to an end and we’ll use the knowledge forever.

By: alison

alison — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:21:32 +0000

Thanks for the great summary. One stumbling block that I’ve seen however, is that some high schools seem to look at digital technology basically as a tool that will enable them to do what they’ve always done only just more efficiently. When researching some local district technology plans, I saw a lot of references to online tutoring, testing,references sites, as well as the usual stuff about using technology to make administrative jobs easier. But there was virtually no mention of the ways in which actual paradigms of teaching and learning would be changed. Considering that these local plans take their cue from the state one, I can only conclude that the “teacher-centered” learning culture is something that the typical school, for one reason or another, cannot bring itself to step away from.

By: Dheeraj Mehrotra

Dheeraj Mehrotra — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:11:12 +0000

Most importantly, our findings show that while personal and non-personal bloggers have some things in common in terms of their ethical beliefs and practices, there are also some distinctive differences. For example, non-personal bloggers valued attribution and truth telling the most, but for personal bloggers truth telling was less important than attribution and minimizing harm. The type of ethics most practiced by the personal bloggers was minimizing harm, while the non-personal bloggers practiced truth telling, attribution, and minimizing harm equally. The personal bloggers were also less consistent in practicing the ethics they said they valued than the non-personal bloggers.

As an ultimate, your blog can also be used as a classroom management tool. Post assignments for your students, reducing the chances that they didn’t know that a project was due. Include links to educational websites that will enhance your students’ knowledge and understanding of concepts and topics discussed in class. Post extra credit assignments on the blog as an incentive to students who check it regularly.

Now the question comes of having a classroom blog will also help parents to be informed of what’s going on in the classroom. This, in turn, will lead to more parents taking active roles in their children’s education. Write up a synopsis of what the class has been studying each month, or at the end of each term. Be sure to get parental permission before posting photos of students on your site. Photographs of in-class projects, science experiments, and the students working in groups will help parents to feel as though they are well-informed of their child’s daily routine.

Now further we need to encourage our students to keep blogs as well. This can be a classroom or an individual project. Blogging will further help our students to express themselves and to practice valuable computer, keyboarding, writing, spelling, and grammatical skills. Also it hence becomes mandatory for the kids to teach them how to upload photos from a digital camera if possible. This is ultimate to their interest and research.

By: Anna B. Scott

Anna B. Scott — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:24:07 +0000

Thank you for going through the article and pulling out the juicy bits. As a professor, I am always struck by the call for digital innovation by administration, but the barriers to it from physical plant, computing infrastructure, and even, administration through assessment of faculty files. True innovation in teaching and learning must necessarily blur the line of instructor/student as well as discipline/process. Parents are important (I am one and work hard to get my son to use his hand-me down laptop for more than gaming, even though I force myself to see the learning inside of his gaming), however, because they often insist on accepting truths from authorities rather than instructing their children how to find facts and then analyze their meaning, there is only so much one can expect from them. 20th century folks trained with 19th century paradigms working hard to not become losers so that their children may do better. I get to see those kids at a point in their lives where they think they have it all figured out, but they have not been challenged to learn and in turn to teach what they have learned; only to memorize what is touted as truth and spout it back to be rewarded for parroting. That is not learning. Right now, I am struggling with the idea of literacy, somewhat addressed in the blog. More and more, I think that reading is not related to writing nor to discussing. This does portend the need for individualized learning in a group process. This blog post is fantastic for the issues it raises.

By: April Maria

April Maria — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:58:54 +0000

I agree completely. I am a parent, and I have always been hands-on with my children’s education that includes their introduction to and use of the computer and internet. Despite the current national educational focus on standards and testing I have been able to keep my children excited about learning through the computer and of all things THE LIBRARY! My son is in 6th grade and this is the first time in his education history that his teachers are using the internet to communicate with both me and my son. It is exciting! But why has it taken this long, and why is my daughter’s school not doing the same thing (they are both public schools, but his is a magnet).

I am not only a parent but also an educator. I am currently working on an education reform project at http://www.futureofeducationproject.net. The changes that I am experiencing with my sons school CAN become the norm. We just need to get to work making it happen. If you are interested in doing some of that work log on!

By: Akhil Gupta

Akhil Gupta — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:37:40 +0000

I definitely agree that parents are the most important people in a child’s life. It is therefore very important that they have the desire and need to be the kind of parent their child deserves. Many parents do feel that they would like to spend quality time with their children but are not able to do so. They are at a loose end with what they can do with their child. One such blog that I feel really helped me was http://www.learninginafreeenvironment.blogspot.com.
Try it out. I felt it was worth following. I follow it for my parenting needs.

By: Gary Stager

Gary Stager — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:47:28 +0000

Like so many articles about education, the excerpts here confuse learning with teaching.

By: Sue

Sue — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:48:10 +0000

Education has always been so political.

This excerpt from the article got me thinking.

As we educators grapple with what is or is not true, and with who is asserting “their” truth and to what benefit, we might continue teaching students by demonstrating how they might make up their own minds about what the truth. The truth does seem to keep changing, depending on who is “in charge.”

By: Ross Thomson

Ross Thomson — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:47:10 +0000

Here’s a complimentary, but differently angled, vector concerning history, education, and Web 2.0 culture — the latest blog entry at ParticiFaction, “Goodbye Gutenberg, Hello Hive Mind”:

http://particifaction.blogspot.com/

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

By: Ira Socol

Ira Socol — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:04:51 +0000

Education-as-we-know-it is a much more recent concept than you suggest here. Yes, some elements were crafted during the Reformation by Luther and Calvin (the source of both the “one way” idea and the dependence on “single-person literacy”) and this came to North America with the Puritan fanatics. But really, what our classrooms are like are a specific creation of the “second industrial revolution” – crafted in the 1830s and 1840s by William Alcott and Henry Barnard, and refined and organized by the Committee of Ten at the turn of the last century. It was a design solution for a specific idea of citizenship and labor.

But it survives because it works perfectly with American capitalism. It has fought off all technological changes in since the Chalkboard (about 1840) because it works perfectly with American capitalism.

It divides students into “winners” and “losers” based on socio-economic classes and thus preserves elite power. Suggesting that New Media will change this is more difficult than stating that it WOULD change it, if schools actually altered their power structures.

By: Maryann Molishus

Maryann Molishus — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:51:09 +0000

And here is where I think our focus needs to be: parents. This topic (parents, I mean), for some reason, has come up often this week. We need to remind parents, or tell them for the first time in many cases, that they are the primary educators of their children. We need to teach parents how to use/navigate through the current technologies and how to best use them with their children because their children should be, and are, using these tools outside of the classrooms. Start when the children are young and when the parents are most (usually) involved with their children. Of course, the availability of certain technologies varies by location and the socio-economic make-up of a community. But, more and more families have access to the internet, cell phones, etc., that give them the tools they need to participate in the new learning experiences about which you discuss. And when parents, children, and teachers are collaborating, that is very exciting, rewarding, and what it ought to be!!