Adam Bellow ~ Educational Tech Commandments
Class 1: Theoretical Reflection:
What aspects of Bellow's talk resonated with you as an educator?
I loved that he used so many slides to support his presentation! Visual imagery is so powerful in getting your points across, and when you use more than one mode, visual and audial, understanding and retention goes up. Vision is by far the dominant sense, so having that many slides is powerful, not the opposite. I'm glad he proved the doubting emcee wrong! The crowd loved him!
As with his audience at the presentation, he is "speaking to the choir" when he speaks to me. We must be about the same age. I remember going to the computer lab at UCSB for my Statistics class back when the printers were still "daisy wheels". It was the only 5-unit class on campus at that time, one extra unit for the lab. All the computer geeks, all males not one female, flipped their heads around and stared at the blonde, skinny girl entering their sanctuary. I honestly felt like an alien and went and dropped the class. (Happy ending: I got braver, took it later, and passed.) This was back when cutting and pasting actually meant cutting with scissors and pasting with glue. Your college dorm floor would be covered with the bits of paragraphs you were rearranging. Anyone remember? I also remember not being able to get out cash on the weekend and not being able to talk to my mom for too long because I couldn't afford the phone bill. I didn't have a car, so a 10-hour ride on the old Greyhound bus was the only way I could see my mom's face. It is nothing like that now for me and my daughter who is in San Diego. I'm so glad. I love the connectivity of this brave new world.
I agree completely with his point about bringing technology that we are already using into the classroom and harnessing it to guide student learning. If we don't do this, we (the educational establishment) will become irrelevant. At the recent Education Exchange 2014 in Napa, I listened to George Couros (also many powerpoint slides and fast talking) give the keynote address, and he had the best point. He asked us to think about the message we are sending teachers when school administrators block them from using Youtube in the classroom. "I trust you with my child, but I don't trust you with Youtube." It is so true! When schools block Twitter and Youtube and Facebook they are missing golden opportunities to harness the power of these media and also to explicitly teach digital citizenship.
I get it; the world is rife with people who can and will sue when things go wrong. They won't say that failure is part of the learning process; they will say your daughter bullied my daughter online while she was in class, and I am suing the school. It is a real problem, but as Couros and Bellow and many others have said, the positives outweigh the negatives. We need to put these risks into perspective. Think about it; the most dangerous thing you do in the school day is to put your child in the car to get them there. No one complains about that risk, although it is the most statistically significant. "We can't let these children get into cars each morning; there are drunk and distracted drivers everywhere!" A car is technology and an extremely dangerous one, but no one advocating delivering children by horseback! ~ Kathy Moorehead
What aspects of Bellow's talk resonated with you as an educator?
I loved that he used so many slides to support his presentation! Visual imagery is so powerful in getting your points across, and when you use more than one mode, visual and audial, understanding and retention goes up. Vision is by far the dominant sense, so having that many slides is powerful, not the opposite. I'm glad he proved the doubting emcee wrong! The crowd loved him!
As with his audience at the presentation, he is "speaking to the choir" when he speaks to me. We must be about the same age. I remember going to the computer lab at UCSB for my Statistics class back when the printers were still "daisy wheels". It was the only 5-unit class on campus at that time, one extra unit for the lab. All the computer geeks, all males not one female, flipped their heads around and stared at the blonde, skinny girl entering their sanctuary. I honestly felt like an alien and went and dropped the class. (Happy ending: I got braver, took it later, and passed.) This was back when cutting and pasting actually meant cutting with scissors and pasting with glue. Your college dorm floor would be covered with the bits of paragraphs you were rearranging. Anyone remember? I also remember not being able to get out cash on the weekend and not being able to talk to my mom for too long because I couldn't afford the phone bill. I didn't have a car, so a 10-hour ride on the old Greyhound bus was the only way I could see my mom's face. It is nothing like that now for me and my daughter who is in San Diego. I'm so glad. I love the connectivity of this brave new world.
I agree completely with his point about bringing technology that we are already using into the classroom and harnessing it to guide student learning. If we don't do this, we (the educational establishment) will become irrelevant. At the recent Education Exchange 2014 in Napa, I listened to George Couros (also many powerpoint slides and fast talking) give the keynote address, and he had the best point. He asked us to think about the message we are sending teachers when school administrators block them from using Youtube in the classroom. "I trust you with my child, but I don't trust you with Youtube." It is so true! When schools block Twitter and Youtube and Facebook they are missing golden opportunities to harness the power of these media and also to explicitly teach digital citizenship.
I get it; the world is rife with people who can and will sue when things go wrong. They won't say that failure is part of the learning process; they will say your daughter bullied my daughter online while she was in class, and I am suing the school. It is a real problem, but as Couros and Bellow and many others have said, the positives outweigh the negatives. We need to put these risks into perspective. Think about it; the most dangerous thing you do in the school day is to put your child in the car to get them there. No one complains about that risk, although it is the most statistically significant. "We can't let these children get into cars each morning; there are drunk and distracted drivers everywhere!" A car is technology and an extremely dangerous one, but no one advocating delivering children by horseback! ~ Kathy Moorehead