Class Update

1/25: Today we met with our presentation groups. My group has taken on chapter 7 in our textbook. We have decided to focus on philosophies of education. In general, there are four main philosophies, and this is where we will start our project. I believe that this will be a great chapter to work with considering one of our final projects will be to write our own philosophy of education paper.

1/27: Today we learned about a program called Atomic Learning. I have never used this program before, but it is definitely a program that I am going to take advantage of while I have access to it. During this class, we also went over some other useful site, such as:  http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ and http://www.iste.org/. I know for myself, this owl site is going to be very helpful!

2/1: Today we got together with our presentation groups and worked on chapters one and two. To make up for quizzes one and two, we put together what I believe is called and mind web. With the main point of the chapter, webbing out to sub-points. Not only was this a fun activity, getting away from the boring note taking, it was a great learning tool for the classroom.

2/3: Today we watched a clip on the author of The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner. The clip discussed the seven survival skills needed in today's world, which I have already blogged about previously. A point I did not cover though, that I found interesting, was a quote about the longer our children are in our school systems, the less curious they are becoming. I found this to be quite true with most of the children I have had the opportunity to work with. We also briefly discussed a synopsis of The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, by Linda Darling-Hammond. In this article, I found it to be interesting that once the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was introduced, scores for mathematics and science have dropped significantly. Along the lines of this article, we also went over the four inter-related systems. There is education, which in the United States is seen as being complacent, meaning it is just fine the way it is; economic, which, in the U.S., is significantly affecting the outcomes of students across the nation; political/government, which I believe is related to taxpayers, and the large amount of money being spent to house inmates, rather than educating our youth ; and social cultural, which is highly valued across other countries, and is a system that the U.S. needs to work on.