Education Engineering

It’s fitting for my personal life that we have started talking about information consumption in class.   This past year I have really tried to slash my consumption simply by putting down my phone and engaging more in the moment.  I am guilty of becoming engrossed in social media and news apps as a way of “relaxing” but I have slowly realized it isn’t relaxing for me at all and actually stresses me out.  Just as Liz said in class, I want all the cute outfits I see and feel bad that I can’t buy it all.   I compare my life to the perfect and wonderful life people portray online and in terms of news it is so hard to know what to believe and who to believe.     It gets my head swirling.   I like this NPR article about how to find news that is true (it is crazy how much is fabricated or stretched to be sensational, and NPR is a source I trust).             https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsi...

My group and I had a blast making videos about the design principles and working together as student designers.  Dawn gave us freedom to design and produce videos in any format we wanted and as a result our group felt we could be creative and funny and we were all highly engaged.  It reminded me how important it is to give kids some freedom when you can.   All of the groups at Loudoun showed their understanding of the principles in very different video types but in my opinion it all worked because we weren’t stifled by rigid constraints.   My thoughts about creative spirit lead me to visualize our STEAM lab at school.  The kids LOVE the STEAM lab and the freedom they have to create and be creative.   It certainly isn’t a free-for-all in the lab, however.  The teachers carefully design activities that have a purpose and a learning goal, but they design with creative spirit in mind: tinkering, imagining, experimenting and collaborating are at th...

              I remember when I was maybe four or five years into teaching (2008??) and one of our main goals that year as part of our evaluation was to show that we were teaching our kids 21 st century skills.     The day my administrator came in to observe me I was showing my students how to put a document on blackboard so they could work on it at home and at school which, by the way, was a very laborious process compared to the Google Docs of today!   The goal was simply convenience.   I wanted the kids to be able to keep typing their documents at home without me having to email them to their parents (yep, that was the only option at the time aside from a jump drive which the kids did not have).   Anyway, the feedback from my professor was fantastic: “You are REALLY getting these kids ready for the 21 st century!” she wrote.   I will never forget it.   I was happy but also confused...