Standardized Tests

Recently, standardized testing has become a major topic in education today. School officials have been trying to get teacher’s to spend more time on test question than actual classroom curriculum. Teachers are protesting this because it takes away from actual lesions they need to teach. School administrators are stressing these tests so much it almost seems like why learn anything if it's not on these test? I’ve always struggled with standardized tests myself, feeling that they aren’t a true reflection on my education. As a teacher I know I’ll struggle with the stress preparing kids for this test will bring. Researching a little more about this subject, it seems like more and more people are beginning to feel negative about these tests as well. There are six pretty good arguments out there exposing the negative impacts of standardized testing. 

Taking the SATs before college was probably the most stressful part. While taking the test I felt completely overwhelmed and unprepared. With all the stress of junior year it was hard to do the necessary preparation to get a good score. I don’t understand why a test that I was hardly prepared for in class was a major part of a college’s decision of whether to accept me or not. It just doesn’t seem fair that I did all that other work in the classroom that seemed like nothing compared to SAT scores. I feel the SATs are out dated and a new system defiantly needs to be figured out. No one person learns the same and having one test to meet everyone’s needs doesn’t seem to cut it anymore.

So when I’m a teacher I hope preparation can be built into the curriculum. I hope there’s a way to not take away from classroom time but, to design lesions that meet both needs. Maybe if these tests are here to stay, they will at least create different tests to meet everyone’s needs no matter what kind of learner they are. While changing standardized test will probably be a slow process, hopefully the preparation can improve until then. 

Twitter

When I first heard of twitter, I thought it was really stupid. I thought it was just like updating your status on facebook, which I rarely do. Once a friend convinced me to get one, I was immediately hooked. I followed pretty much every celebrity I could and couldn't stop. I was slow at actually tweeting at first but now that I'm comfortable on twitter, I tweet whatever comes to mind. There's so many related tweets I've almost become addicted. I can defiantly see myself using twitter for education by following other educators who have good advice and creative ideas. With twitter becoming as popular as it is, I can defiantly see it overcoming facebook. 

Lesion Plan PowerPoint

In class we got an assignment to create a PowerPoint to teach any lesion we wanted. I chose synonyms for first graders. When first hearing about this assignment I thought it was going to be really hard and not at my education level yet. I was pretty confused for awhile with exactly what we were doing but, once I kind of got it ideas started flowing. I added a pretest at the beginning of my PowerPoint to test their knowledge before i taught the lesion. The kindergardeners then matched up synonyms from columns to help instill the lesion. I ended the PowerPoint with an education game on pbs.org for them to do on their own. I never realized how many different ways of teaching PowerPoint offers. I learned all the different ways you can arrange slides to do pretty much anything you want.It did take way more work than I thought but, I learned a lot. There’s so many more ways to use PowerPoint than I thought. It really got me excited about learning more techniques to use once I am a teacher. Overall it was a good learning experience.

Chapter 1

This blog is my response to a part in Chapter 1 “Understanding the Power of PLNs”. This section dealt with the positive aspects of personal learning networks and what they can offer education. It also dealt with different social media sites and how they can impact a students leaning. The part that I’m going to talk about is Positive Network Effects. The book lists seven positive effects total but, I’m only going to talk about two that interested me.

            The first effect that really stood out to me was that students are responsible for their own learning. To me this means that students are teaching themselves how to use the technologies and then using them to explore their interests. The best way to learn something is to actually do it yourself. Students have unlimited access to the web and can use that to discover whatever they want. Now that I’m in college and have been using things like PowerPoint and the internet since grade school it seems like sometimes teachers don’t give students enough credit in what they can figure out on their own. Most of the time a student can go on a website and figure out how to use it without a tutorial from the teacher. Sometimes educational websites might be hard to maneuver completely but, for the most part students are becoming more and more independent with their school work.

            The next part that caught my attention was classrooms becoming more engaging. Students and teachers alike have access to anything they could imagine on the web. It gives me some relief becoming a teacher knowing there are so many blogs and websites out there giving advice. I will also have access to different crafts and activities to keep my classroom fun. Students also have access to the whole internet leading to different view points of ideas which causes much more discussion in classrooms. This may cause some problems in the classroom though. Students may have access to ways of cheating on homework and plagiarizing and leading them to not get a full education and essentially cheating themselves. I’ve defiantly taken the easy way out of an assignment before and with the internet causing so many temptations, it’s hard to resist sometimes.

            This chapter had lots of good points I’ve never thought of before. Learning about teacher’s blogs makes me excited to make fun crafts and activities in my classroom.