The Dumbest Generation

What does it mean to call a group “the dumbest generation”?  Does it mean they make poor choices?  Does it mean they don’t know how to think?  Or, as argued in Digital Nation, does it mean they don’t know how to read or write anymore?

Oh no! I can't read! It's cool. I'll just ask for help on facebook. LOL. JK. <3<3<3 books & stuff!

I learned how to read in two languages at a very young age.  In fact, my mother must have regretted teaching me to love reading so much several times throughout the course of my pre-teen years.  ”Betsy, come fold the laundry!…Betsy!”  I would get so engrossed in a book, I wouldn’t hear her until she literally ripped the book out of my hands.  The smartest people I knew, and know now all love reading.  I took my love of reading a step further and focused on becoming a good writer.  My 7th grade teacher submitted one of my essays to a city-wide competition and I won.  Middle School Spelling Bee?  Winner!

When I think about how my writing has progressed since then, I cringe.  I still remember how to do it:  interesting tidbit or attention grabber followed by the point you are arguing.  Including three paragraphs of supporting points, then wrap it all up with an insightful comment about your points and…scene.   Do students not know how to write an essay anymore?  Is it really all just LOL and jk, totes, that’s what she said?  Are people forgetting how to enjoy reading?  Is it all found on the Huffington Post, Us Weekly, or Google News?

Are we dumber than our grandparents, who listened to the radio, worked from dawn till tusk, and washed clothes by hand?  Are we dumber than the Mayans, who invented the calendar?  Are we dumber than the Miwok Indians who used oral histories to pass down information?  Or the cavemen who drew pictographs?  I feel like you can’t call one generation dumber than the next–or the preceding one!  You can only accept that each generation changes and that we could point fingers at each other for losing what made the preceding generation learn…or we can agree that unless we want to switch back to pictographs and oral histories to provide information we should accept evolving educational technologies.

EDUC 515: Response to Prentsky

Blog assignment #2

One of the most bittersweet viral videos I have ever seen is this one http://youtu.be/APE8M9MeOWA , of a little girl who thinks a magazine is an iPad.  At first, I thought it was really cool that even a two year old could use an iPad, but then I was sad because one of the most fun things I ever did as a small child was play with a box.  (True story—My siblings and I all got to play with the box our new refrigerator came in and we had a blast!)  So what about the kids today?  What’s more interesting—the iPad or the box that it came in?  Clearly, there’s something in the colors, brightness, and responsiveness of an iPad that makes it much more engaging for a child to play with.  However, because that sort of stuff didn’t exist when I was younger, we had to engage our imaginations and it is in this sense that digital technologies have changed the next generation.  I believe their imaginations no longer engage, and Prentsky words this thought as a newfound lack of appreciation for reflection and critical thinking.

Prentsky writes that brains and thinking patterns don’t just change overnight.  I wonder, then, if it was my generation that bridged the gap between the digital natives and digital immigrants.  For so long, our society was training our children to read and at this point—their brains have been retrained.  Prentsky attributes this to the fact that Pong was developed in 1974.  The fact that video games have the ability to suck people, children in particular, for hours on end, has never quite sat well with me.  Now, I’m realizing that it is a different sort of creativity that is being taught through video games.  I realize that in order to develop video games, one must be incredibly creative and be able to focus intensely on a single project.

Students are different now and having recently purchased an xbox 360 with kinect, I can see why.  Why read a book when you can act it out?  Why take a test when you can run through a simulation?  I do feel like the D-generation has seen a whole new world, and we can either keep up with their world or shun it.  I choose keep up.

My Goals

EDUC 515

As an environmental educator for the past 6 years, I have had the opportunity to see how students respond to different types of teaching. For the record, I usually teach thematic lessons on ecology, geology, and current environmental issues based on CA-state science standards. Students learn a lot on a 5-day trip, most significantly because of the reaction they have when taken out of their comfort zones, away from technology, in a classroom with no walls. Because I haven’t had the smartboards and youtube videos, I have had to up my game, teaching-wise, and make sure my lessons are engaging and relevant–so my students aren’t so distracted by deer, waterfalls, or (let’s face it) squirrels.

I was one of the first outdoor educators in Yosemite to want to incorporate technology into my teaching, but I never knew quite how! I could get my students to take interesting photographs and make a movie when they returned, but that was out of my hands. I did Skype visits with classrooms, both pre- and post-trip, but felt that my skype lessons needed to better make the connection between their homes and the national park they would soon visit.

What I want to learn about, but haven’t yet, are some tools I can use in the field (while on a hike) that my students could use to gather data, to then take back into the classroom and follow through with a long-term project. Ideas I have include measuring weather data, water and air quality, wildlife sightings, soils, and lichens. But what would be the best way to collect this data while on trail? Would it be to write it all down on paper, then spend some time doing data entry in class?

There are several people I know in the EE community that have begun to incorporate technology into their lessons. In the Channel Islands, park service has begun to do live dives and students can watch as divers collect data. In the Santa Monica Mountains, students measure windspeed at the top of Sandstone Peak and at Leo Carrillo State Park. The organization I currently work for recently received a $4million grant to be used in part to implement technology so I feel that anything I learn in EDUC 515 will be valuable information to use at work.

A Grad School Assignment #3

I first learned how to build a webpage in my seventh grade technology (elective) class. In that same class, I learned that by knowing codes, I could get more money to play Sim City 2000. This knowledge also made me more popular with my classmates. I learned html code from myspace. True story. I remember trying to figure out how to make the background pink with stars. In college, I took a technology course where I learned how to effectively use Photoshop, Powerpoint and Word. In my few months of unemployment after college, I taught myself how to use Sony Vegas, a movie making program. Every single one of the lessons I have learned have led me to my current position–one of the most needed people at the organization I work for, and even though iMovie and Live Movie Maker have made it child’s play to make a movie, I think it is this skill that has propelled my career the most.

In order of importance, I would argue that students should learn about hardware, operating systems and personalizing computers, Microsoft Office Suite (including Word and Powerpoint) and Movie Making programs.

At a board meeting last week, I was one of the only people that knew how to connect a laptop to a projector. I thought to myself, “really?” but the reality is that unless we are taught (or have natural tinkering abilities) hardware won’t get learned. I find that most people nowadays are intimidated by technology and rather than try and learn, they leave it to …well…me.
“Do or do not. There is no try.” – Yoda

A Grad School Assignment #2

Cheating

My experience in a classroom setting is limited, but two years ago, I was visiting my friend Sally who worked for a private school as a Biology teacher for grades 9-12. I was helping her grade the quarter exams so we could go celebrate her birthday sooner. I was going through the multiple choice questions fairly quickly because she let me compare with her answer key. The short answer sections were very hard to grade because her answer key was incredibly vague. She knew what answers she’d be looking for so for one question on the transcription process, she answered, “They’d be missing a friend, aww!”

So here I am, grading one of the tests and every single question is right on! Even the short answer questions are practically word-for-word. I got really suspicious when I read that answer on the transcription process, where the student wrote “It’d be less sad and lonely with more friends, yay!” I stopped grading and turned the exam over to Sally, whose jaw dropped about halfway through. I said, “either this kid is a genius, or he cheated, yeah?” We noticed that almost every single answer had been erased,Sally took the test to her administrator along with her answer key

Sally’s eyes lit up and she said, “I saw him coming out of the classroom early this morning! We took the test yesterday, I filled out the answer key during the test and put everything away in my top drawer!” Sally took the test to her administrator along with her answer key…

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As it turns out, her administrator believed her but the parents did not. They fought the standard expulsion and threatened to sue, even. Apparently this was the last school in the area that would take him. The administrator caved ($$$) and the student got to stay, but Sally had to create a whole new test so as not to single this particular student out and every student in the class had to take the test again.

What she and I learned from this experience was that given the opportunity, students will cheat. The temptation is too great and the pressures are really high. I have heard of students cheating by leaving their ipods in their ears and having pre-recorded answers as their music. There are some who will write answers on hands, shorts, even the plastic on waterbottles. I remember the student aide in my high school trig class would make a copy of the exams and give them to friends in later periods.

I think I would allow the student to make a cheat-sheet for big exams with the stipulation that it needed to be handwritten and not a copy. I think that “cheat-sheets” might take some of the pressure off…and would then create test questions that required analysis of concepts instead of memorization.

Digital Equity: What does it mean?

Guilt. This is what I feel when I think about digital equity because I am currently getting my master’s degree in digital teaching in learning. I recognize that a large part of the audience I identify with doesn’t have access to the type of technology I am learning about. I grew up at a time that computers were starting to become a household staple, but without a computer in my house, I needed to be resourceful in order to complete the assignments that needed to be printed and typed.

I didn’t know much about my parent’s financial situation, but I knew enough not to ask them for money. They more than adequately provided for me and my siblings, but when my teachers started giving extra-credit for typed papers or would require them to be typed, my heart would drop. My family could not afford to buy a computer, and the computers at school were only open until 4o’clock. That meant that I could have at most 45 minutes to type my paper after school.

For a couple of years, I would use a typewriter to type up my papers. Ugh. I still remember the frustratingly slow late-nights spent typing and correcting my mistakes. To add fuel to the fire, my teachers would mark me down for having a “messy” paper. The word processor wasn’t that much better, but it did make a bit of a difference my senior year of high school.

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When I think of digital equity, I think of my brother. A great writer, my brother did not turn in his research paper for his 7th grade science class on “Animals in Space” because he knew he could not complete the required assignment. Years later, he still remembers feeling embarrassed when his teacher asked him, “what was so hard about putting a couple of pictures and words together on a piece of paper?” He remembers thinking that the hard part was doing so without a computer to research, format a nice typed Word document, and put in cute animal pictures from the Clip Art. When I think of digital equity, I will remember to give all of my students sufficient time to research, especially if that means they need to stay after school and work on school computers. I will remember to teach my students how to insert pictures into a Word Doc or how to use the technology I’m asking them to use before I require them to do it. And of course, I will ask students to tell me, individually if they prefer, whether or not they have access to a computer, and what that means. I may even tell them my story…I think it has something to do with why I care about technology so much.

Better than Google

One of the ways I connect to nature is through birds.  During the Ecology unit, we will be learning about the ways birds connect us to nature and vise versa.

Here are some sites for more information on the birds we’ll be studying.

Audubon site - http://www.audubon.org/

Ebird site - http://ebird.org/content/ebird

Cornell birds site - http://www.birds.cornell.edu/Page.aspx?pid=1478

Nature is inspiring!  Here are some places to read poems inspired by nature.

Ecology poetry – http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/maryoliver.html

http://www.ecomall.com/biz/forum.htm

Maybe you are inspired to help make the world a better place?  Here are some volunteer opportunities:

http://www.publiclandsday.org/

http://www.ecologyproject.org

http://www.ccc.ca.gov/Pages/default.aspx

http://www.treepeople.org/who-we-are

Our government is creating policies that affect how we treat the earth!  Read up on how these Government Agencies are trying to inform the public:

http://www.usgs.gov/

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/index.html

Keep yourself informed:

http://ladpw.org/

One of the first environmental science sites I ever found

One of my assignments is to come up with a list of websites that would be good to share with students.  In order to do so, I have to pretty much pinpoint who my students will be.  I am leaning towards 9-12 environmental science students, but am also considering sticking with 9-12 Biology and focusing on the ecology strand of the state science standard.

With both of those hypothetical students, I would be able to direct their focus towards 10-15 science websites that focus on the human connection to the natural world.  One example of this is treehugger.com.

I discovered www.treehugger.com a couple of years ago, and even though the website itself is a bit hard to navigate (is is just me, or is there a lot of clutter?) there is is a lot of valuable information.

Does anybody have any other favorites?

Also, something new I learned today is that I can get around the youtube block in certain school districts by embedding the video in a powerpoint presentation.  Woo hoo!  I love clever tricks!