Education Engineering

I really enjoyed reading The Victorian Internet this past week.  The author’s format of telling the history of the telegraph and its eerie similarities to the advent of the internet in the form of a story rather than a text-book was very refreshing.  I also enjoyed watching The Day the Universe Changed and seeing the connections in the consequences of technology of the printing press and the telegraph.  I found it very helpful to write down the consequences of the technologies as I read too (a good reminder for me as a teacher to provide a guiding question for my students as they read or watch videos and to give them opportunities to get ideas on paper).   In class we took those consequences and made generalizations. It further solidified my understanding of just how impactful a technology can be not only in a community but also in our global society.  I gained a lot from the discussion we had about these generalizations and the ideas that other g...

Whew!  That Mind in Society book was a tough one.  I had to use some reading strategies of my own to fully grasp what he was saying and understand his beliefs about development and learning.  I found a graphic which helped me understand the zone of proximal development more concretely through the link below and my group and I used this as inspiration for our mind map showing how, according to Vygotsky, developing and learning happen. http://www.innovativelearning.com/educational_psychology/development/zone-of-proximal-development.html             I now understand that Vygotzky believed that development lags behind learning.  The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is the distance between a child’s actual development level and the level of potential development.  There is a huge social component too and Vygotsky believed that development stems from social interactions.  He says, “what children...

The Situated Cognition article we dissected this week was a powerful one.  I found myself wondering why I had never read this article before in all the education classes I have taken over the past two decades.  I think I was really struck by it because it just makes so much sense.   We talk about “real-life” skills and making kids into high-functioning humans who will contribute to society all the time in professional development.  Teaching them through authentic means seems to be the most effective way to make our students into the adults we want them to be, and frankly, why would we teach them any other way??   Well those educational constraints get in the way (testing, testing, testing), but we are fearless teachers and we aren’t scared.  We will design for authentic and engaging learning while meeting the standards (structures) of our content all the while constructing and sharing knowledge.          ...

The Saber-Tooth Curriculum taught us that educational systems must evolve to meet the future needs of a society.    In fact, we focused our discussion in class and our attention in the readings on making our students “future ready.”  When it comes to designing instruction, there are many factors to keep in mind so our students are engaged in learning that will ensure they are ready for the world that awaits them.          It’s week two and it is already acronym-central here in DDLS! When designing instruction, we should keep in mind the PICKLE, the ABCS of activity and the AeCTS.  I am a little overwhelmed with all these and how to meld all these ideas together when I actually sit down to design instruction but I very much agree that all of these ideas are important and worthwhile.   I can see how the Situated Cognition article is the basis for many of the ideas behind the acronyms.  The bottom-line i...

     As luck would have it, our staff’s kickoff to the year started in the auditorium of our pyramid’s highschool .  There, we had the privilege to listen to Ted Dintersmith, producer of the film Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE5XRrfetu4 )  and author of the book, What School Could Be.   Ted’s background is in Venture Capital and the technology world and he considers himself (rightly so) as an expert on innovation.  He makes no claim to know how to be a good teacher; rather he takes his experiences evaluating innovation and his observations about the world we live in to create some compelling arguments as to why we must adjust the way we deliver education if we are to prepare children for the world they will face when they leave school.    As I read Harold Benjamin’s voice this week in the The Saber-Tooth Curriculum , I was taken by the connections the two author...