Principles of Teaching and Learning & Me

     I found this article to be really interesting and several things jumped out at me.  First I will address the learner side of things and the particular points that jumped out at me.
     The first was point #2 How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.  I think this is a huge challenge in today's classroom. Kids today, I think, have shorter attention spans because of all the options available to them.  They have over 250 digital cable channels, MySpace, Facebook, millions of YouTube videos, downloadable content, online TV, streaming video and audio, MMORPGs, virtual battles with opponents half-way around the world.... and more.   I definitely think this affects how the learn, process and store information.  I imagine alot of their connections are more random connections than organized systems, especially for middle school children who are all about learning who they are and very social to boot.   This defiantly will have an impact on the classroom.
     I also found 4 and 5 about teaching the skills and then the students how to know when to use it challenging. I find perhaps to be the most challenging thing we do as teachers.  I especially think middle school is probably the hardest level because the kids are so social and all over the place.  Actually, looking back at the article now... pretty much all of them are so intertwined that I'm impressed the researcher was able to pull them apart and describe them so well.




     For the teaching piece, #4 (Effective teaching involves prioritizing the knowledge and skills we choose to focus on) is the one that strikes closest to home for me. I am teaching in a relatively new subject area for me and trying a lot of new things this year.   My school is trying making a big literacy push across the board.   I have been reading a lot of books and talking a lot with our school reading specialist.  My thing is how much to bite off this year... because I know I can't do it all and also struggling with the feeling like I should be doing more. 


    Additionally, my school is also making the switch to standards based grading (or really... shouldn't it be called assessment).  We all need to cover X amount of standards in each class in each grade.  This ties into the piece about having a universal set of expectations.  So while I think it's a great idea and I love it,  I'm still concerned about how it will all work.
  This is what I was thinking about after reading the article.  I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Enhancing Learning Materials Through Technology, Class 1

     Alrighty,  I'm really interested in this course now... not that I wasn't already.  But I am interested to see how a lot of the traditional paper items get translated to a digital format.  I know you can do KWL charts and venn diagrams on a computer but I'm more interested to learn about the impact those have vs. their paper counter parts.  
The only thing which will be more challenging for me this year is that my classroom doesn't have a smartboard, like 90% of the classrooms in the school.  Plus, as many of us already know, it's hard to get into the computer lab at times.
     I'm hoping to tie in what I learn in this class to my schools literacy push.  I think there is a lot of potential for taking what I have here and using in the classroom.  It should be a good class and I look forward to applying it as we learn applications.