525 Week 1

In reading the Principles of Teaching and Learning, there were a lot of ideas I was glad to see presented.  Not being a strong believer in learning styles, I'm always glad to see a philosophy of education that doesn't put balancing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners at the forefront.

An interesting fact that they did bring up, though, regards students' prior knowledge.  We know that activating students' prior knowledge can be effective (though maybe not as effective as we thought, according to the Power Point presentation) in building schema necessary for fully understanding new material.  This article, though, mentioned the possibility of inaccurate prior knowledge.  Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I've never seen much attention paid to the possibility that a student may know of Tom Sawyer, but have the completely wrong idea about the character.  It will definitely make me more careful about taking the time to define the basic concepts at the beginning of a unit, and if I use an example to explain a concept, I'll make sure I know what I'm talking about.

One concept I found difficult to apply was brought up often- setting clear goals and expectations.  As a Language Arts teacher, our goals are sometimes not as clear.  Reading comprehension is not as concrete as something like math.  Six traits makes writing somewhat more concrete, but Voice is not something easy to measure.  I definitely agree that clear goals are important, but that is easier to accomplish in some areas than in others.

I was also happy to hear that we'd be examining a meta-analysis.  I recently started looking through Visible Learning to inform my instructional methods as my school moves towards RtI.  The article mentions the "soft science" surrounding education, and I am often frustrated by that.  It seems very rare that I can read about an instructional method and know, simply, "Does it work?"

The first thing I noticed about the study, though, was how little I really know about statistics.  Being a Language Arts teacher, numbers aren't exactly a big part of my day.  Statistics and measurements have been a little bit of a hobby for me, but I'm very far from having a strong background.

I was surprised, also, at how much the studies varied.  To go from over 200 studies down to just over 40 speaks to just how difficult synthesizing data must be.  If schools rely on studies like this, they had better be confident in those putting the study together, or have someone able to fully comprehend the data and the way they are compared.

I happy to see that the study came to what seemed like a pretty logical conclusion.  Instead of presenting technology as a panacea, it seems to be simply part of a good teacher's repertoire.  Using technology enough can keep students on task, but using computers entirely can diminish their attitude towards their lesson.  In the conclusion of the study, it is stated that more research will be done in the field of technology, and hopefully with a more standardized set of criteria.  I think that would be a good thing.

Copyright and such...

This week's assignment was quite interesting.  My school, like many others, has regular debates about what constitutes copyright infringement and what doesn't.  I was glad to learn that anything used for an academic purpose is fair game.  So I can show parts of movies in my class, or students can use them for their projects.  I think.

The gray area for me comes in what constitutes "academic".  (Pretty sure I'm not the only one.)  If I use a song in the background of a video made for the school's drama club, is that ok as long as I don't sell DVD copies?  I'm not sure.  I've been using copyright-free music for the last few years, but I'd really like to have everything be fair game.

Our librarian is a big proponent of "when in doubt, just get permission".  Apparently, if you contact the legal department of some copyright-holding corporation, their willing to give some leeway to schools.

I suppose any laws that cover an area this vast have to be complicated, but I would really like to see someone put together a straightforward approach to copyright laws for schools.  Chances are, most schools are looking to do pretty much the same things.  And none of us are trying to copyright our Elvis sighting.  I hope.