Weekly Reflection 8: Child Find

Last week I went to a meeting at the Seattle Public Schools about Child Find. Child Find is the Seattle Public Schools obligation to find and evaluate children in private schools. This meeting was basically about a chunk of money that could go to the private schools for children who are not in IEPs, but who need more support than they are receiving. This money was referred to as equitable participation or proportionate share. We were at this meeting to help decide how the money would be spent. Students on an IEP cannot receive money from this fund. However, the student can be on a service plan or student accommodation plan.

An example of a child who would qualify for this proportionate share money would be someone who is evaluated by the public school and who qualifies for an IEP, but is not on one. A reason a child would not be put on an IEP, for example, is a situation in my school. We are a dual curriculum religious school. It is sometimes not worth it for the parent to choose to have their child sent to the public schools and miss out on some of the short amount of time the students have in general studies (since this would then defeat the purpose of a double dose of the subject) or the student might miss some of the religious studies, which the parents also don’t want. We (meaning a decision between the parents and teachers) often choose not put children on an IEP and send them to the public schools because it is not worth the time.

At this meeting we were asked to decide how we would use this money to support these students. One more important detail that played a part of our decision was that, if we have a student on an IEP and they are currently getting services from the public schools, we are to encourage the parents to keep their child on the IEP and not access this proportionate share money. The reason being they get more services through the IEP and the students are then being served through FAPE, which then requires us to service the student and move them forward. Where students on a service plan are not covered under FAPE and may receive services only once a week or not enough times to move them forward at the pace they deserve. And once this proportionate share money runs out for the year, and then it is gone. This is also the first year we have this money, so there is a lot of unknowns and we will just have to see how the decision we make works out.

We decided that a lump sum of the money would go towards equipment, such as FM systems. Then the rest of the money would go towards hiring tutors, particularly in reading. The tutors can be hired by the schools individually, but SPS would also provide a tutor that would come to each school for 1.5 hours a week. This was the proposal put together by the team that was at the meeting. It still needs to be approved. It was pretty cool to be a part of the decision making process that determines where and how a chunk of money is used to support our students.

Carr gave me a lot to think about this week…

One thing Carr mentioned that stuck out to me in this week’s reading was about how people often have three screens open in front of them at once. This struck a chord with me since I have found myself in that same situation, sometime with even four screens in front of me at once. This has been especially true since I have been in Graduate School.  I imagine what it is like for our students who are growing up with this being the new normal. That having multiple screens around and being constantly surrounded by this technology is expected behavior.

According to Carr (2010), print is falling from popularity in so far as how often it is read. This includes not only newspapers and magazines, but books as well. This makes me kind of sad, no matter the benefits of reading on a screen; I don’t think I will ever prefer it, at least when reading for pleasure, over reading a book.

I wonder how Prensky would categorize reading books vs. the same book digitally? Digitally wise, or digitally clever?

This week Prensky (2012) goes into great detail over different actions that make us digitally wiser.

One example is email. This I, I think, really important to pay attention to since it seems like there are so many ways to be digitally dumb, when it comes to email. Mistakes can be made that could not be made while penning a letter, which leads to another interesting thought by Carr. About how some outdated technologies still get used, like vinyl records, but that using this outdated technology is a progressive “dead end”. It does not move us forward in developing new technologies. Letter writing still gets used, and “snail mail” is still around, but it is not progressive.

Another topic Carr (2010) mentions that I found intersting is this:

I had always looked at it from a different perspective. That being able to physically highlight in a textbook for example, is better because it involves more cognitive processes. Where Carr uses the same argument for why reading on a computer is more beneficial. Hmmm… that is something for me to ponder.

Here is something else for me to think about as a special ed teacher.

Having all these distraction can be extremely detrimental to some students. So there is a fine line between making sure our students are being taught the latest and greatest technologies, but also helping them to figure out what kind of learners they are so we can teach them to sift through and find the right type of technology for them. And the flip side, some amazing things are possible for children with disabilities because of technology as well, so teaching the right tools for each individual student is part of what we should be doing as well. I think Prensky would agree, doing so, would be digitally wise.

~I was actually starting to get used to reading, highlighting and taking notes on the computer for this assignment. I finally felt like I got a system going between flipping between the screens with the books, creating screenshots and taking notes on word. THEN I needed to highlight two words on a page in order to take a screenshot. It was the first two words on a page and it was continuation of a quote, so I really needed it. I could not get it to work. It either highlighted everything on that page, but the first two words. OR when I got it to highlight those two words, the “highlight or note” screen did not come up. After about seven tries I gave up. Then a fellow classmate suggested I download the Kindle app for my computer and I was able to get the two words highlighted, but that was a frustrating experience I had this week.

 

Carr, N. G. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: W.W. Norton. (Kindle)

Prensky, M. (2012). Brain gain: Technology and the quest for digital wisdom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (Kindle)

Digitally Wise or Digitally Dumb?

In the book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain, I LOVE how Carr always gives us a historical progression of technology. I particularly found chapter 4 in the book so interesting! I love reading about how people originally wrote on anything they could scratch symbols onto and how the development of different writing mediums changed over time. What makes the chapter even more intriguing was reading specific quotes or feelings of people during the time of change when writing became easier and more personal. This quote by Isaac of Syria is AWESOME; it is exactly how I feel when I get lost in a good book.

On the flip side, as Carr progresses through describing how printing became easier and how much more accessible the written word became to people; there was a lot of “low-minded” publications that were being printed. Such as, gutter journalism, propaganda and pornography.

This for me connected to what Prensky wrote about in chapter four of his book, Brain Gain. Although he did not make the connection I am about to explicitly, I see one. Prensky refers to the idea of being digitally wise vs. being digitally dumb. He describes a criterion for being digitally wise in the screenshot below:

He describes being digitally dumb or stupid as something that most people do at some point, but we should know better to avoid that action. In the screenshot below is his explanation of digitally stupid and one example that resonated with me. In fact, he is pointing out to me that I am REALLY digitally stupid, because I had that exact same scenario where I lost all of my lesson plans and assignments etc. from 6 years of teaching, and I still have not backed up the computer I have been using for the last two years!! (And I consider myself intelligent and not among the “old” people who just don’t know better).

I also think that being digitally dumb can be compared to using technology for dumb things, like Facebook could be digitally dumb. Prensky refers to how it can be digitally benign or digitally clever, but it can also be digitally dumb. I have seen posts by people that seem so ridiculous to me that anyone would even think about posting and sharing that information. One post I saw once was by a girl who is 24 years old and she posted how she cut herself shaving so she felt like she was 13 again. Really? Who wants to read that? Those kinds of posts and shares seem to me to be a digitally dumb way to use a social networking site.

On that note though, just like when the printed word became a mass phenomenon and it is and was totally worth the “low-minded” stuff that went with it, I think that that it is worth us taking the digitally dumb in order to have the technology and become digitally wise or digitally clever. The technology does push us forward; it is a matter of how we use it and how we teach our children/students to use it.

—-I have continued using the computer to read the two books. I don’t really enjoy reading on the computer. It makes it feel too  much like I am reading because I have to, not because I want to. And I am actually enjoying the two books for class, so it is sort of disappointing to me to be reading on the computer. I also have a hard time not being able to flip through the book to see where I am in a chapter. Instead I have to scroll through the pages and then go back to where I was. Since the pages are not numbered, if I don’t remember to click on the page I am on to see the page number, I have to spend extra time reading parts of each page to find where I left off. The thing is though, if our students are introduced to reading on the computer or an iPad earlier on, they probably won’t feel a lot of the frustrations that I feel.

 

Carr, N. G. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: W.W. Norton. (Kindle)

Prensky, M. (2012). Brain gain: Technology and the quest for digital wisdom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (Kindle)

Weekly Reflection 7: Sustained Silent Reading

This week my Principal gave out an article to the Lower School teachers entitled, “Making Sustained Silent Reading Really Count: Tips on Engaging Students” by Katherine Hilden and Jennifer Jones. We discussed the article and what this could look like in the different classrooms. The article focuses not on the research as to whether or not sustained silent reading is good for kids, but about how to make sustained silent reading (SSR) meaningful and useful time spent for each student. The authors of the article put together a profile of different types of readers. It is written on a continuum and shows types of readers and how much teacher support is required for each level. For example, the student with the highest need for teacher support are the ones they reference as “fake readers” and the ones that need very little teacher support are called, “bookworms”.

The article mentions that in order to keep tabs on the types of readers you have in your classroom; it will take regular conferencing with the students. At this point in the article we spun off into an engaged discussion about how to find time to conference with all of our students in the classroom. We are a dual curriculum school; this means that we only have about three hours to teach all of our general studies to our students. This does not leave much time per subject and our teachers have to be creative as to how to spend their time. The fifth grade teacher was struggling with how to find time to conference with so many students. One idea that was suggested in the meeting was to conference with a few students per day, and expects to get to each student once every two weeks. This would be enough meetings to gather data to find out where the students are in their reading, but not be overly stressful or overwhelming for the teacher to find time to do this. Another suggestion was to conference with a couple students at a time who are about the same level, or perhaps reading the same book. The fifth grade teacher had another great idea involving a journal. Instead of having the students write a summary in their journals of their reading that week, she has the students write her a letter. She provided the students with a rubric as to what she wants included in the letter and a sample that she, the teacher wrote. I thought this was a great idea, it gives the teachers specific information about the book (because of the rubric) and allows her to monitor if her students are actually getting through the books since she has expectations of how many books they should read by the end of the year. I really enjoy these meetings with the Lower School teachers because we tackle practical issues the teachers are having. It is inspiring to see that when teachers get together and have the opportunity to share, how much they can learn from and help each other!

Hilden, K., Jones, J. (2012). Making Sustained Silent Reading Really Count: Tips on Engaging Students. Reading Today, 17-19.

Should we be Digitally Recording all of our Memories?

In the Brain Gain Prensky talks about what makes us digitally wise. He poses a series of questions for us to ponder and think for ourselves if these technological advancements make us wiser. The first one he mentions is, “Are we wiser if we record everything our senses experience?” This really struck a chord with me. As a mom, I feel like I am constantly scrambling to make sure to record as many memories as I can of my children. I take pictures easily, but I have to be more conscientious to remember to take video or to write down things the kids say that I don’t want to forget. Recently, I have run into a dilemma; what to do with my kids artwork? There is so much of it; it comes home almost every day. How do I decide what to throw away and what to keep? I don’t think I can. So here is an idea: keep a few pieces of artwork and lay the rest out and take pictures of them! This way I have a recording of all the artwork without all the clutter. What a wise solution that supports the idea Prensky poses of recording our experiences. I think though, that in cases like this, having the ability to record does make me wiser- and neater. But I also wonder if we start to rely solely on our devices to remember for us, will we re-wire our brain (like Carr describes in relation to our brain’s neuroplasticity) and forget how to remember? I hold, as I do with most things, that it is about how we use it and moderating its use. This might look different for different people, so it is up to each individual to decide how to use the technology; if/when it becomes available. As for how this helps us as teachers, it is important that we keep up with new technologies so we can help guide the youth.

Carr shares a story in Chapter three of his book that mirrors my question above.  Will we forget how to remember if everything about our life and our experiences can be digitally recorded? In Carr’s story Socrates is sharing a story about the Egyptian god Theuth and one of Egypt’s Kings, Thamus. The story is in the screen shot below.

At the end Socrates explains that he is concerned that if we begin to write everything down, we will begin to forget since we won’t have to remember anymore. After reading this and knowing that just because we write things down doesn’t mean we will forget, maybe my above concern is a moot point?

It seems, as Carr says, that these conflicting views of Plato and Socrates are similar to what people go through as each new technology has been introduced over time. It is just that recently technology is moving so fast people don’t have time to process these conflicts before having to make a decision.

This week I did my reading on my computer rather than my iPad. I need to update my iPad in order to download the Kindle App to be able to highlight. I also needed to download a different browser for my computer in order to visit the cloud reader website. In the end it was easier to download a new browser, so here I am reading on my laptop. I do enjoy reading more on the iPad. The backlighting on the computer makes it difficult to keep my eyes on the screen for too long. However, I do feel pretty accomplished for figuring out what is wrong with my iPad (with help from a classmate), and what is wrong with my computer. I also figured out how to take a screenshot on my computer. So even though the reading experience was not great, I feel like I accomplished a lot of tasks I did not know how to do before.

Carr, N. G. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: W.W. Norton. (Kindle)

Prensky, M. (2012). Brain gain: Technology and the quest for digital wisdom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (Kindle)

Weekly Reflection 6: Science Lesson

Today I met with the science teacher at the school to discuss a new idea for a lesson tomorrow. Several teachers have been having difficulty with one of the classes in the school. There have been some meetings around how to best handle them and a new discipline policy has been put in place. One of the modifications for the students is that they cannot be in the science lab for science class; they have to earn back the privilege. The science teacher had been trying to conduct some really engaging lessons, but they involved a lot of movement and the lessons were unsuccessful.

The science teacher thought about how she can plan a lesson that would be useful to the students and engaging, but for now, kept them in their seats. She came up with the idea to run Jeopardy like game using MSP questions.  I helped her today with some of the planning. We decided on how many categories there would be, point values of the questions, that the students would be in groups of two, and what the students can win with their points. There will be two adults in the classroom, the science teacher and myself. I will continue this post tomorrow with a debrief on the lesson.

The lesson went okay. It seems to me that the science teacher and I differ a little on how to best manage the behavior in the classroom, and I don’t think we did a good job of making clear to each other the difference in our expectations beforehand. It was also challenging, because since it is her class I felt like I was holding back a lot and not intervening to help her when she seemed to be struggling or making what I thought, was the wrong management decision.

Overall, the behavior of the students was improved and they were very excited about the prospect of earning back being in the science lab or having extra recess. I do think that most of the students were engaged, but there was still an undercurrent of the disrespectful behavior that she is struggling with. After class we had a short debrief together and though we agreed that it went pretty well and we agreed on some changes we could make for next time; it is seems we have a little different perception of the behavior. It is possible I have higher expectations than her, but I also know that having those higher expectations is the only way to get these kids to behave how you expect or want. This is something that we will have to work on.

Weekly Reflection 5: Team Building

This past week in school two days were dedicated to an all school activity (first thru eighth grade) called Color War. The idea of this activity is to promote team building among students as well as leadership skills in the middle school, particularly the eighth grade.

We have been doing this activity for several years; in fact, I participated in Color War when I was a student at the school! Since I have been teaching at the school there has been different formats that the activity took and different amount of time that has been dedicated to it.

At the beginning of the week last week, I felt pretty negative towards the Color War. Mostly because I felt like we have so much learning to do and it just did not seem a worthwhile use of time. Part of the way the students are able to demonstrate leadership is that the eighth graders pretty much plan the entire event. There are several activities throughout the day that have been the same year after year, but the students plan how to break out the Color War and how to organize the days. Teachers are assigned to each team to help monitor and provide supervision, but we barely did anything! It was amazing to watch the Middle school kids really take on the leadership. The younger student began looking to them instead of the teachers, when they had to leave the room for anything even to use the restroom.

Although I still wish I had more teaching time, it definitely taught the students strong team building and leadership skills and reminded me that there are other important skills we must impart on our children other than academics.

Technology: Pros and Cons, still undecided, but learning to embrace it.

I have been reading the two assigned books for this class on an iPad. I have read other books on my iPad and I have read a couple of books on my computer as well. I don’t really like it. I realize there are some advantages to it; you can carry a lot of books without much weight, or the iPad takes up less storage space in your house (I have books everywhere in my house). I love the feel of holding a book and flipping through pages. I did get used to reading on the electronic devices, but I like going back to books. For textbooks I find the iPad even more challenging because even though I have found how you can bookmark pages, I like to write notes and highlight as I read as well (I know how to do this using my computer, but I have not figured it out on the iPad). In addition, I like to quickly flip through pages after I read reviewing what I marked and it is not the same experience to scroll through the pages on the iPad. I also like to see how many pages I have left in a chapter and it is again, harder to just flip through to see what there is left to read. That being said, I am sitting here, surrounded my cell phone, iPad and computer. I like technology and I do think many of my apprehensions will wane as time goes on, I am not so sure that my opinion on reading on the devises will though… I think about inventions over the past century and a half and how people must have felt when cars, TV, or microwaves were invented, and I can’t imagine life without them. This is how students of our generation feel about the internet and devices that literally put the world into their hands with the push of a few buttons. It is our job as educators then to put some of our personal feelings aside and look at the bigger picture; where will this technology be when we release our student to the world? We need to prepare them as best as possible and in this day in age, that means incorporating technology into our teaching.

In the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr talks about how our brain works in relation to outside stimuli. It describes some of the history in learning how our brain learns and how our neural pathways work. He talks about how our brains have plasticity so they can be rewired (on a side note: I found all of this information incredibly interesting and would like to look into some more of the research experiments he referenced).

One example he gives of how this works is technology.  He has found that he has more difficulty reading lengthy articles or getting lost in a book. He feels like he can’t concentrate for as long and he seems to blame it on the internet. Because the Internet is a quick way to get information and perform tasks that used to take much more time, he does not need to concentrate for as long on tasks. So he has rewired his brain in a way that makes it more difficult for him to concentrate long term on reading actual books or articles. Although he seems to think this is an affliction that many people suffer from, and it may be, I don’t feel that way. I can get lost in a good book. I may have more difficulty concentrating on articles or books that don’t hold as much interest to me, but I don’t feel that is because of the internet, I think it has always been that way for me; if a book holds less interest, it is more difficult to keep my mind on it. It is possible that although I did not grow up with quite as much technology that is available now, I have been around it in more of my younger years than him. Maybe I don’t see the problem as much because I am more used to technology? Maybe this means that our students don’t have this problem at all? Or maybe I am the outlier and he is the norm? Although Carr is an avid user of technology, he seems skeptical of the negative impact it may be having on our brains, and seems, thus far, uncertain of a conclusion on how he feels. On the other hand, Marc Prensky who wrote the Brain Gain: Technology and the Quest for Digital Wisdom, has embraced technology.

Prensky writes, “But whether you are personally for or against modern digital technology (or have, as most of us do, a view somewhere in between), today’s technology is changing your mind- and all of our minds- for the better”. He thinks that technology is making us smarter, in a way that technology is an extension of our brain; he calls us “technology-enhanced humans”.

A piece of being able to embrace technology is about attitude. We need to have a positive attitude to utilize all of the benefits of technology. I appreciate how even though Prensky embraces technology, he recognizes that it can be good or bad depending on how it is used. He notes how there is a difference from an immediate gain that we get from technology from the wisdom, which can take longer to recognize because it is about how we choose to use our new technologies.

It seems to me when thinking about the past; almost all new technology that has been introduced has in some way, made our lives, as humans, easier. Have there been or are there drawbacks? Yes, but ultimately it has been for our bettering. Trying to keep this in mind helps with keeping in line with Prenskys opinion on how a positive attitude towards technology is important to embracing it and to gaining digital wisdom.

Carr, N. G. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: W.W. Norton. (Kindle)

Prensky, M. (2012). Brain gain: Technology and the quest for digital wisdom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (Kindle)