Captains Blog, stardate 13/03/2010

after a prolonged mission into the gassy nebula known as the multiple intellegence classroom, i have returned to the edge to relay this report. inital scans indicated great potential into mining and tapping into this potential power source, but the longer and deeper i stare into the void, the void stares back and i am beginning to feel like a walking improv comedy act.... ok so i get that not all student learn the same way but this is going into the realms of obsence (which has its time and place but this is not it) there has to be some dramatic presentation and some physical artifact for every other sentence i speak. for someone who has ecological concerns as very high in their list this type presentation goes through REAMS of paper, water polluting bleached white paper, tree lumberjacking innocent trees white paper, .....ok i'm better now.....

captain supplementary log..... we have been charged with another 4 weeks in the gassy nebula before we return to starbase for refit and upgrade to my own galaxy class ship (A JOB, GIMME A PAYING JOB... TWITCH) until then communication with the federation will be sparatic as the nebula interferes with having ANYsort of life. upon my return and subsequent grad P-A-R-T-WHY (because i GOTTA) we will attempt a more steady reporting

captain out

shore leave anyone?

as its friday night the issue that POPED into my little tired noggin is this, school year, is 10 months okay, is it too long or should it be all year long? now as a teacher we are VERY use to having summers off and would be hard pressed to relenquish them, but is there pluses to this senario? well assuming no increase to curriculum load per grade came with it, it would give those few extra months that would give wiggle room in a typically hectic schedual to get everything covered propperly to be ready for provincial testing, also it would give days that could be FUN!!!! we could do the field trips and lose a class to a guest speaker that enrich the learning.

just a sleepy thought

Mr Scott, 1 to beam directly to bed. (WHAAAAAA annoying transporter sound effect)

ADHD truth or scifi?

its probally just me being cynical but is it just me or is every child that has behaviour issues or doing poorly coming up with a ADHD code nowadays? its the fix all for elementary kids. Now i am versed in psychology so i do know that yes there is a legitamate case for ADHD but i think it is getting used too much for anything that doesn't fall into another category. So i think having the knowledge of a kid coming into my class with a ADHD label doesn't impress me much (thank you shania) i would be skeptical to see if this is a legit case or a work of clinical science fiction.

Multiple intellegences and wormhole physics

as any good scifi fan knows that not every member of your team is equally compitant at all things. for example you wouldn't want Jack O'Neil to be fixing your DHD to get you home in a time of crisis, thats Major Carters field, similary you wouldn't want Daniel Jackson protecting you in hand to hand combat (although in the last few season that have tried to make him the warrior archeologist not the sneezing academic of the original seasons), thats Teal'c thing, so how is it that such an obvious concept is not applied to childrens education? Of course jimmy the sport star, with great kinestetic ability is going to have problems writing down in words the ideas in his head, i mean he probally couldn't write in words the ideas of how to play his sport well, but put him on the field and let him SHOW you the concepts and he would tear you to shreds. but alas and alack we just need to work on that application of teaching in multiple intellegences and we would be thrown thousands of light years ahead.

Mr Crusher put it on screen....

and thats exactly how it was, grades for every student, some failing, some near perfect, but all shown on the smartboard as the numbers were inputted. i was a bit converned about it and when i quietly mentioned it (thinking it was an oversight) was told that this is how everyrthing was done, on screen so everyone can see, that it was a motivation factor.....ummmmmm. Yes i can see that knowing that everyone will know your score would make you want to do better but for the struggling student that is trying but still resting on that 49% mark, i thought that this would cause some confidenciality issues that would cause parents to complain but apparently not, so what is the general opinion about this practice, am i too OLD school in my thinking that most students don't want to share their low score with others or is it that they just dont care and who care who knows...

wow that paragram/sentence would make most grammar teachers twitch...hehehe REVENGE!!

close channel

Valentines and the student

i'm all filled with squishy feelings of love and happiness (or mcdonalds breakfast) about my family today, but this squeezed a question into my brain (yes it got past the egg mcmuffin and orange juice) to see how we treat students on this day of love. i know that my daughter wrote a valentines card for her kindergarden teacher, and this will probally continue at least through elementary school but when comes the point of not being OK to say they love their teacher? i guess being the highschool teacher its more of a concern to us who deal with older kids but i think that we try to be kind and caring to all students on ALL days not just feb 14 but where do we draw the line when they want to tell us more than we need to know to be just their teacher. Some kids don't have a solid parent figure that they can go and talk to about problems in life (gotta love the teenage years), so it is a bit of a compliment that they feel comfortable enough with you to broach the subject but then comes the issue that they may begin to see you less as a teacher and more friend and lose respect for your teaching authority, and in few cases the feelings grow from friends to more which is a major issue so where is a good place to draw the line so they feel supported and cared for in the class but not too much so that new emotions grow....maybe Data from star trek has it best, no emotion so it can only be logic.

to focus or to scatter, that is my question...

i've started obbserving with a teacher that is BIG into multiple intellegences and he doesn't plan to do much note taking type classes with his class and then i will take the reigns and i have been predominantly a lecture with a few side activities to highlight other "intellegences" but if you aren't able to follow the main theory push in the beginning then how effective will the activities be? so here is my delemia, to continue in my tried and true method that focuses energy on the traditional method that most students have been taught in or do i diversify so that everyone get a little bit, but will that little bit be enough to sustain the learning? if i focus i know that i will miss some students but i will hit a good % and i know that those will get enough out of my classroom antics to learn, i only have to do additional help for the other "intellegences" at other times.

teacher evaluations, its a double edged bat'leth?

So we had our battery of teacher evaluations today and as i was filling out the 3rd one i wondered about whether it was teacher evaluations or assessments, now that may be a bit nitpicky but what we did was not give a grade or number score but gave our opinion about the capabilities of these teachers. one thing i have learned, especially being the biology teacher, is that opinions are like butts, everyone has one so dont think you are special because of yours. so what real worth are these reports, i understand the theory behind the idea that it is to give feed back so that a teacher can see from the students perspective how they are doing and improve where they can, but REALLY, i think that my 2 years of teaching high school has taught me a few lessons and one is that a good teacher knows that being the popular teacher doesn't mean that you are doing things the best on the acedemic front. so what does that mean...well i think that these tests SHOULD be done unbaised but if the teacher has spent the semester returning C grades to you (whether its because you are slacking or they are being hard on you) the view on that teacher will come up at review time.

i'm not saying that we shouldn't because some people need to know how out in left field they are but maybe another method could be devised.

computing in the cloud

so heres the debate, computing in the cloud is using online software to do everything (ie my hotmail account is not on just one computer it everywhere... insert evil laughter here MWAWAWAWAWAWA) compared to the installed on the home computer MS office 2007 which is only on that computer (insert snickering here because its on all 3 computers in my house) but hopefully you get the idea, that there are pros and cons on both side of the issue. is it better to suffer the slings and arrows of students excuses "the network was down so i could print my essay today" or the apathy of "i forgot it at home so i cant print it"...its like the federation vs the klingon empire, one has the moral high ground, the other has cooler ships and metal clothing...i'm torn.

but if i can bring an iota of reality back here, computing in the cloud has the mobility advantage that allows access wheneveryou can connect to the internet, but there is the potential issue of security for data, big sites get hacked quite commonly. The other issue as mentioned in the excuses above is that network connections can be tempormental at times so this could effect productivity if your online service is down for maintence.

ok compare that to the COSTLY purchasing of a microsoft office suite that is only accessable from your home, now when your there it should always be available and work in mostly secure settings.

so friends, romans, lend me your fingers and tell me what you think is the better option. (ARGH i was tending toward the literary themetoday wasn't i? must have been sitting too close to english teachers types) [yes you too lori, even if you are so far far away]

Assessment Vs Evaluation, its gould Vs Tokra

ARE they the same or are they different? THey have elements the same but the end result are different....
so the tokra they are "technically" paracitic gould but they dont force themselves on the host like gould, assessment "technically" tells you what the student is doing in your class but it doesn't force a final grade , that and it is much more curriculum objective based. for ex: Donnie has learned to use a blog effectively in EDIT350 would be an assessment, but donnie gets a B is an evaluation of his blogging skills. Summative year end Evaluations are problematic because for the overall year you may get a C but that doesn't tell you that i got all A in science but all F in english class, so what does the C really mean? i know that unless we go to a system of modularize every section of a course and give grades on each one and allow individual modules to be repeated then we can't really change the summative grades for a class but i just think that maybe we should tweek the norm to get a better assessment (or evatuation) of what the student knows.
(insert glowing eyes and wierd voice here)

Diverting power to forward shields...

just over one week.... thats all left of class time for this professional term, so as the title indicates divert that power to just holding together, we have quite a few micro (and some not so micro) teachings plus a few decent sized assignments but then (cue inspirational music) obserations and exam...ummmmmm

N E ways thanks for your support and comments, i need em for this last push to the finish.

its now time for more muscle relaxants so i'm off to find a little piece of oblivion and fall in for the next 8hrs, see ya on the other side of the wormhole

mike

Beuler, beuler, anyone seen beuler....

ok so a slight diversion from the scifi theme to something a little more education based (as education based as ferris beulers day off can be but at least there is a school in it!) and running on the idea of absentism i find myself laidup with a slipped disc in my back and loaded up on muscle relaxants and antiinflamatories so if spelling gets a little "hooked on phonics" its cause higher brain functions are now on a need to know baisis and spelling isn't need to know right now.

ok so to my quandry....how to deal with the student that is constantly absent, where do we draw the line on how much we bendover backwards helping the student catch up and when they are taking advantage of a kind teacher? I have always tried to help because i know that things happen( i am the case in point right now) to good people but when its every other week and then the expectation of "you can't test me on this i wasn't there"....oooohh that one REALLY makes me happy.... how do we tell them, its your responsibility, deal with it. and isn't it interesting that the students with those attitudes are the ones with the parents that have no quams calling and complaining that their little angles are failing my class. (also the parents that take kids out of class for 2 weeks so they can go for a vacation and expect the world to freeze until they come back, if you miss class you need to catch up with us when you come back, is that fair or am i ranting again?)

ok i think i have broken every known grammar law, sorry english teachers, so i will sign off.

JOFFA KREE, and other useful gould phrases.

OK so as an extrension to the last post with the question of videos as a viable form of presentation, TV has come to mind. Now i think that some TV has an educational place, for example, The magic school bus is a great cartoon, my daughter (remember the 5yr old with the dinosaur poop fixation) come to me with profound knowledge about science and when i ask her where she learned it she says magic school bus. I have no problem letting her watch this type of TV (when she understands digestion better then some of my highschool biology students it scares me, and makes daddy so proud of his little geek SNIFF)

Now there are other shows.....hearing the theme music can send my IQ into a deep downward spiral, but thats just my personal opinion. So i guess the main point (other than to say JOFFA KREE in a gould voice) is that not all media presentation is created equally so if we choose carefully you can have good results.

tek ma tay T'ealc

dilema dilema

ok so this is what comes out of thinking about stuff, it gets you introuble. i thought i had a great thing when i found and used this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODwt6OdN-8Y

it was great for reviewing the topic of mitosis, it told all the vocabulary, it explain where it is used, it even has a catchy tune (sorry if you start singing it) but would it actually helpp students learn or would it be watched and filed in their schema as junk? tell me what you think, is watching a video an effective way you cement ideas in a students head?

The digital divide

The 21st century version of the haves vs the have nots, can this factor throw an old school monkey wrench into our carefully crafted, technology integrated lesson plan? we are being taught to apply all the new toys to connect to the digital learners that populate our classes but what about the few holdouts of the 20th century. i guess like anything in life we need to know the skill but we also need to know when to employ it.

WERE UNDER HEAVY ATTACK, HULL BREACH ON DECKS 1-6!!!!

Have you ever had one of those feelings???? i've got Klingons all over me, i cant shake em.

i guess this would be a good time to discuss time management. Instead of disruptors and photon torpedoes i've got an exam and microteaching and journal assignments battering my temporal shields down,and i dont need scotty to tell me "I Kin na do it capn, i DONT have the POWER!!!

I think that its a pittrap that i (probally others but i will speak for myself now) fall into too easily. I have often reminded myself that for ever assignment and test that i inflict on my students i am assigning 20+ correcting assignments on myself, and nothing is more demorilizing to me than looking at that pile of correcting on my desk when there is new stargate to watch. So here is a question with a valuable answer.... how do we do authentic assessment of learning without creating a pile of extra time comsuming work? technology has allowed the multiple choice test with nice answer keys so we can streamline it like the enterprise jumping to warp. there are online quizzes that they can do and get results right back but i cringe at the cheating possibilities for them.

so i guess thie time for more metacognition on what i can do to reduce workload without compromising quality of assessment.

Mr. Crusher, set a course for starbase 183 for repairs, warp 3 engage.

its happened, she is one of THEM

ok so this weekend opened my eyes to the fact that even 5yrs olds can be teenagers in disguise.
Picture it lacombe 2010, a slow sunday morning with my on my computer and my daughter on hers. She has already shown great abilities with computers since she was 4 she could turn on the computer and open "the blue E" then use favorites to go to her websites (PBSkids, NICKJR, KIDSCBC ) so when we are doing kitchen stuff she comes in and starts watching videos or playing games on these sites. on the sunday in question she pops her head out with "daddy did you know that paleontologists have found fossilized dinosaur poop and it wasn't soft." ..... ok your 5, since when are 5 year olds knowing palentologists and using it correctly in sentences??? when asked about her new knowledge of dinosaur poop she told us she learned it from the internet. SHE IS ONE OF THEM.....digital learners! so its not just the teenager in your grade 10 class that we have to be watching for technology tendencies, APARENTLY ECS is a hotspot for multimodal, downloading of all things fecal (dinosaur poop) into my daughters brain..... i'm traumatized.

Unschedualed offworld activation, incoming wormhole, closing the iris...

Now there is a nice idea, being able to close the iris on our lives and nobody be able to see what is happening behind it. Stargate is scifi in many ways but this idea is the one that is quite fantasy, because as a teacher there is no way you can be a teacher in the classroom from 9-4 then go home and do your own thing. Having taught in an adventist school the fishbowl life is even more pronounced then if we taught in public school, the parents and students see where you go to church, if you go to church, do you stay for potluck, do you drag you kids out when they are loud. all these thing add to their perception of you.
Is it fair that just because we have chosen the mantle of teacher that we morph like odo from DS9 from michael Crews normal person with quirks like everyone else to mike crews B.Ed superhuman with no flaws..... see it is lol-able when we read it in print but thats kinda the mentality alot (not all but alot) of parents have on teachers. Example if bob smith works in an office and is seen staggering home one night and comes to work looking a little rough the next day, his coworker will giggle and move on because "thaht just bob"....now if bob is a teacher who is seen staggering home and come into the class the next day looking rough there is outrage and probable complaints from parents. why the duality? bob the office guy could be dealing with multimillion dollar choices when hungover and its laughed off, but bob the teacher has a day of videos and work on assignments and its not acceptable. (THe previous rant is not a personal experience or plans for next week but just an extreme example to support my point)
ok with that i need a pangalactic garglebanger and some vogon poetry (see if you know scifi literature as well as shows)

Teaching in the fish bowl

ok so today we learned of julie amero the subsitute teacher that was almost jailed for having porn popups occur during a class with grade 7's. i have a few choice questions here.... first if a person is educated enough to be a teacher hopefully they would be smart enough to not come to school and start surfing porn, now that being said i dont know Ms. amero, she could have the same porn fixation as a 17 year old male, but common sense (which i must say is NOT common anymore) should have prevailed. Second if you have any knowledge of computers you know that popups can come from anywhere (as in this case it came from hair salon products web page). Finally had the justice system never seen those movies where you hear a gun shot, go to the room, see the body and gun, you pick up the gun and then the police burst in...while you hold the smoking gun, this is pretty much what happened to julie wrong place at the wrong time.

ok i need to relax, i'm going to the holodeck

electronic cheating

Captain supplimentary blog, stardate 20/01/2010

Continuing our course through the digital sector of the neutral zone we see potential cheating issues popping up like uncloaking romulan warbirds...all green and shimmery.... what i mean is that now that every student has a photo capable phone and iPod that could have anything loaded on it, how do we keep control of movement of information, it use to be if we seperate students so they couldn't glance at the neighbours paper we had won, but now if they can set a phone to viberate and get texted answers and unless we hear the buzz or see the glances under the table we wouldn't know whats going on. So is the answer a militant NO ELECTRONICS DURING TESTS! i guess that is what the government standardized test rules are so maybe gov knows best.....scary

ok i'm thirsty so Computer, earl grey, hot...BUZZZZZ

Digital Learners

Ok so yes we have moved into a new era of teaching with the influx of technology into the class and into students hands how do we stem the tide of problems we face with it? (it like little replicators invading an asgard ship (yes i jumped "star" programs to stargate but set your inertial dampeners to full power cause i will do that alot)). So what do we know, we know that these kids that we see in our classrooms are from a generation that watches HD everything and feels its a major infraction of their prime directive to manually have to do anything that doesn't involve a rechargable battery. This has given us an achillies heel to work with, even though the "this is boring" and "why do i have to learn this" shields are still at full power if we use this addiction to technology to get our message through the iPod shields we can tap into their love and knowledge of the media to promote the message. (students are sounding quite borg or replicator arent they???) N E WAYS....
so if we can use their precious (yes my precious precious...gollum gollum) ipod for podcasts of the subject area instead of the DREADED video presentation that involves, dramatic pause, VIDEO CASSETTS you have to rewind, we can use that to endear it to them... now i will be the first to admit that when i put these on during my bio class i was the first to make comment on the fashion and hair styles of the 80's and 90's BUT getting beyond big hair and brown suits we see that the underlying science is still sound (and i added running commentary if it was an outdated theory)
Another idea is the youtube phenomon, find a student in your class that cant go to you tube and search for stuff and spend hours watching and you will have found the enigma in a riddle child. so find a topic and send them to youtube to find video or animations, i used the animation search in my classes to aid the visual learners. (granted this idea will require more monitoring of student activities to make sure what they are watching but remember the ALT + TAB combination...i have caught many students trying to hide minimized windows.
ok that has been cathartic so i will "set a course for the alpha sector, maximum warp, engage."

Captains blog, stardate january 12 2010

Our mission is to boldly go where this blogger has never gone before, to explore new websites and seekout new civilized people... ok so it was a rough translation of startrek start but it works for this instance. This blog will follow the "ADVENTURES" of the final semester of my education degree, so you may hear much of assignments and practicum rants but will be done with the highest levels of scifi references and other obscure content. (if you know me you will probally understand).
So with this in mind, number one you have the bridge, i will be in my ready room if you need me.