Week 12 Blog – Better Late than Never Part 2

The first blog I shared for this “week” is, “The State of American Education: Not So Great.” Holy CRAP! Only 52% of students in the 50 largest cities in America graduate with a diploma?! That is really pathetic and upsetting. Its quite the eye opener, because I grew up in an area where there was over a 95% graduation rate and our average ACT score was a 27. Its an understatement to say that our education is “not so great.”

The second blog for this week is “A Broader Use for “Fair Use”. I wish Mike and Vanna would’ve seen this blog before we finished our final artifacts! I could’ve had an easier time doing my philosophy of teaching and learning! This project definitely falls under “creating a new artistic expression.” This transformative use will loosen the bind that many teachers currently have because of fair use. Happy day!

The third blog for this week is entitled, “UStream Fun .” This program reminded me a lot of the Adobe Connect program we used for class. Opposed to popular opinion of the class and all of the technical problems we had with Adobe Connect, I think I would use it in the future if it was a free technology. Its a more advanced way to organize a webcam chat or a conference call or a parent teacher conference or blog. I could even one day teach an online course through this program.

So that’s it, I’m done blogging for class…Hopefully I’ll get some time to blog a bit over the summer!

Thanks,

Jeron

Week 11 Blog – Better late than never Part 1

Dear blogging world, I’m back!

All of my blogs this week are from…you guessed it, Weblogg-ed!

The first one I picked was entitled, “Quote of the Day: New Knowledge“

I had no clue what the heck this quote meant at first, and Will Richardson’s reflection on it wasn’t enough for me to pick up on it. So, I went through all the comments and finally formed some inkling of what it might mean.

Oh, the quote is right here by the way:

Published knowledge is old knowledge: The art of intelligence in the 21st Century will be less concerned with integrating old knowledge and more concerned with using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources that can create new knowledge tailored to a new situation, in real time.”

So, one of the comments talked about using older, published knowledge as a means to collaborate with others to create new knowledge. That makes a lot more sense, I wish the author of this quote would’ve just written that. I like the quote because it shows the art of collaboration. This kind of use of published knowledge happens all the time when people write research papers and things like that, but it helps even more when people share their work and the knowledge that they found. So the moral of the story is, share everything you learn. Like sharing your blogs!

The second blog, entitled “Believe What You Want: Finding Truth 2.0,” really caught my attention because it reminded me of talks on perspective senior year in high school. As I read further into it, it different than what I originally thought it was. Basically, It talks about although technology gives us a lot more information, people will naturally steer clear of what they don’t believe in. They won’t read things that they don’t think they’ll agree with, and will read things they do believe in to reinforce what they believe is the truth. Therefore, something about a topic can have two different truths, compared to who you talk to. This is really interesting, especially since the very last blog I talked about was about sharing published works to create new ideas.

The third blog I covered was, Making Kids “Googlable” . I found it interesting that the world is now a place where employers will rely on google to find information about a potential employee. This just stresses the importance of keeping your skeletons in your closet, so to speak, and to leave them off the internet in pictures, facebook, etc. It also points to the importance of publishing positive things about yourself on the internet. I’m glad our class got to do a few things like that this semester, and hopefully we’ll continue to do that. I’m sad that this process hadn’t started much earlier. If it wasn’t for my own interests in making videos, I wouldn’t have had anything on the internet before this year. I think its very important, because it acts as a “featured works” display for people.

That concludes my Week 11 Blog!

State of the Classroom, April 28th

Keeping in turn with the warm weather, our class has begun its outdoors unit!

We kicked off the unit today by talking about our favorite things to do outdoors when the weather is nice. They were instructed to draw some pictures about what they like to do outside. After everyone was done, each student shared with the class. After lunch, we read a book about the summer weather, and then had a discussion about how the book related to their lives. Then, we went outside to enjoy the weather to round out the day. I’ve sent home a permission slip to be signed for the field trip we’ll be having to the forest preserve on Friday.

For your son or daughter’s individual progress, check the progress sheets I sent home.

If the permission slip for the field trip didn’t make it to you, a pdf version of the slip can be downloaded here.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment on here or send me an e-mail!

Until tomorrow,

Jeron Blood

Week 9 Spring Break Blog!

This course so far has been going really well. I think one of the highlights is the fact that we get to choose what we read on a weekly basis. I think it makes us feel more excited about reading because we’re not confined to a narrow area. All of the programs and technologies we’ve been using have been great too. Yeah, some of them haven’t worked so well (Odeo), and some of them didn’t seem to great right away (Photostory), but I think I made the most of what I was given.

A lowlight were those nights when I was completely confused about a milestone and started freaking out, but some highlights that have countered those nights have been the Monday afternoons where Mike and Vanna are pretty understanding about our issues. It would be very easy to give us a poor grade if we didn’t understand the technology, but they were willing to work with us to make it better.

Even though I thought I was pretty tech-savvy before this class, I was nowhere near where I am now. All of the tools I’ve picked up along the way will help me in the future, but are even helping me now. I use googledocs to share documents that need to be updated by a group of people, and I use google reader to read the blogs I frequent. I’m also more willing to look at a new program and jump into it and figure it out for myself instead of asking someone to show me how it works. Overall, I’m more investigative with technology, which is one of the best things I could possibly take away from this class.

So, Spring Break was a lot of fun. I hung out with friends from back home, worked about 25 hours, and went to Iowa to  see my Grandma for a couple days. Family time was great too; we had Easter dinner on Saturday night with my parents, my girlfriend, my brother and his new fiancé.  I didn’t have a ton of time to relax, but I think I like it that way. I like to be busy and I’m glad to be back at school.

I’m out.

Jeron

Week 8 Blog #3

    So, I tried to get some diversity in my blogging , but I couldn’t help myself to go back to Will Richardson’s blog this week when I saw his post on Wikipedia.

He started his post by throwing out some numbers on people that visited Wikipedia in the last month. 2 Million views for Barack. John McCain 1.1. Hillary 422K. That’s a ton of people. These people are mostly kids!

Yet teachers around the country are still discrediting Wikipedia.

Ugh, this really pisses me off upsets me.

Every time I don’t know a topic in full from class and its not going to be on Dictionary.com, I go to my Firefox Wikipedia addon, and type in the subject matter I want to know about. I conveniently find my information, and in about 45 seconds, I go about my merry way.

Richardson then discusses how errors are everywhere. I especially like this line: “If we’re not raising a generation of reader/editors, we’re not doing our jobs.” If you’re taking something at face value and not analyzing it to see how it applies to your own life, you’re an idiot. This is critical thinking people! Maybe its because senior year of High School I got the, “Truth is only perspective” bit drilled into my head, but critical analysis is one of the most THE most important skill you could have throughout your life. It gives you the ability to read any person or situation for the rest of your life.

Sure, Wikipedia isn’t some Godsend that is going to be the only place that will be an outlet for information and critical thinking skills, but its flashy and us kids like it. Give us a break.

I’m out

-Jeron

Week 8 Blog #2

    I was curious about the writer of the E-Learning Journeys blog when I saw her name in Cofino’s Outside Voice blog. The blog is done by Julie Lindsay, and this particular post is called, “Shall we call it Collaboration 2.0?“

I chose this post because it had the very trendy (especially nowadays) “2.0″ tag to it. Plus, our class has been talking a lot about Collaboration lately, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Lindsay ends up discussing the different ways that students are communicating with each other to get things done. She touched on social networking, which is a tool that absolutely needs to be used throughout life, and is great that most college students and other teens are catching onto early. One of the points she made was that the teachers need to catch on to these new tools for collaborating and use them to their advantage.

I thought this was funny because both Mike and Vanna are on Facebook and AIM, and made it a point to the class at the beginning of the semester that they’d be available in those places to help us with problems we have.

I guess you guys are just a little ahead of the curve.

I’ve taken an extra appreciation to Mike and Vanna using these different ways of communication to collaborate. Its what a lot of our class already does when we need to get a hold of someone, so I’m glad they’ve hopped in on the fun. My photostory wouldn’t have gotten done yesterday if Mike wasn’t on AIM at around maybe 10:30 at night.

K so moral of the story…keep up the networking stuff Mike and Vanna, rest of the teaching world, you probably need to pick up the slack. This concept has its advantages.

Peace,

Jeron

P.S. – Mike, I’m extra glad you’re on facebook because you’re pro at taking some sweet Emo pictures. Exhibits #1, 2, and 3.  Nice touch with the black and white.

Week 8 Blog #1

    So I was reading up on the Always Learning blog for a change. Cofino did a blog called, “The Outside Voice.” The blog started out by talking about how Cofino went to Qatar to speak on 21st Century Literacy at a school in a city named Doha. She seemed to give off the impression that the school didn’t need her to speak since they employed such a technologically versed woman, Julie Lindsay. (More on her later.) Then she went on to talk about how important an outside influence is on an institution, no matter if the institution is well-prepared or not.

Its really funny that I stumbled upon this article tonight, because my Fraternity’s Field Secretary is in town. Although our chapter has a lot of things going well for us and we have a lot of talented people in committee chairs and things like that, it was great to get his advice on things. He’s lived a different life and was in Fiji at a different school, so he’s seen different things. Each of our chairmen had meetings with him today and I think we all benefited from what he had to say.

This is exactly what I think this blog is getting at. No matter who the person is giving advice, its great advice because it comes from a different place. No matter how good the people within your institution are, they can never be as good as having other people as well, because the people involved in your institution are all exposed to different things. This has a lot to do with collaboration, which is the topic of my next blog.

-Jeron

Week 7 Blog 3

Wow. Technology doesn’t like me at all tonight. The video response I’ve made still isn’t uploaded, and I just spent the last 10 minutes figuring out why the 2nd blog I did tonight was randomly preventing me from making paragraph breaks when I wanted to. Thankfully, I could get into the code and do one of these puppies <p>. Hopefully I’ll be able to do this blog without technology screwing with me.

The third blog I read was another by Richardson entitled “The Distributed University.”  It was pretty good, but it more importantly helped me find my other two blogs for the evening. This blog had a lot to do with the other blogs; it kept the tone of atypical ways of becoming educated. Richardson is basically blogging about another blog a guy named Jeff Jarvis wrote about how higher education “should be done.” (I find it funny that I’m blogging about a blog that was about a blog.) So Jarvis basically says that in a Distributed University, students would coordinate with teachers and other students to learn what they want, where they want. This would promote lifelong learning. Sounds good, right?

Yeah, except for one big problem: You don’t get a diploma! Jarvis says that this is why nothing like a distributed university ever happens. It also never happens because institutions would fall apart; they wouldn’t be getting all the money they get by monopolizing the higher education industry.

I personally like the idea, and so does Richardson. He sees that it is becoming a reality. I guess I’m either blind or don’t have that faith that Richardson has because I don’t see it. There will always be propaganda from colleges saying that you need that bachelors to get anywhere in life. At least until they start saying you need your masters, that is.

Unless all the stats people throw out about the advantages to going to college, employers won’t take a High School diploma and a large repertoire of work that Richardson talks about in his “Don’t go to college blog.”

Distributive University…great idea, not happening anytime soon.

Peace, 

Jeron

P.S. The video blog isn’t up yet, I wonder how long I’ll be awake tonight trying to fix that…

Week 7 Blog 2

So “Is Reading Dead?“ really caught my eye as I was finishing up Will Richardson’s blog on convincing his kids they don’t have to go to college. As a side note, I love Richardson, he’s got some really good stuff…he’s a genius. (I like doing the links with the text in case you didn’t notice.)

Okay so about the article…It caught my eye because the title seems to be a question people ask a lot lately. He mentions the initial “unsettling” feeling he got when his friend mentioned the way kids aren’t using traditional texts anymore. This reminds me of the phrase Mike uses in class; “Kids these days,” or something like that.

I’m glad that Richardson eventually comes to the realization that reading isn’t dying…its changing. Its not good or bad, its just different.

How can students read something that they just can’t relate to? If something is flashy or a more exciting way to read, encourage it, don’t write it off completely. Learning on the net is where its at…Web 2.0. Hell, its what our class does every Sunday when we use google reader to read different blogs. Its a flashy new way to read compared to the readings that would have been assigned if it were a typical class. (Speaking of flashy new ways to read, I LOVE this. Book 2.0 baby.)

Unfortunately, most teachers haven’t come to the realization that teachers like Richardson and Mike and Vanna have come to. They think that we’re destroying the institution or something. As Richardson says, they’re, “chained to their old definitions of reading.”

Great blog, I’m out.

-Jeron 

P.S. – Youtube is still uploading my stupid video from my blog before. It should be up soon.

P.P.S. – Sorry about the linking. I’m obsessed. I’d say its a healthy obsession though. 

Week 7 Blog #1

Hey guys, this is my video blog about Will Robinson’s Blog entitled “Dear Kids, You Don’t Have to Go to College” <—-There’s the link. The video might be a little hard to follow because I ramble a little bit, but I also explain why.