The World is Yours

Thomas L. Friedman, in an article titled, It’s P.Q. and C.Q. as Much as I.Q. (2013), says that we live in a hyperconnected world. It will require more individual initiative in order to adapt to this new world. He says that people will need more P.Q. (passion quotient) and C.Q. (curiosity quotient) to leverage all the new digital tools in order to succeed. For the culminating assignment for CEP 812 we were asked to create something to analyze how we as educators use the P.Q. and C.Q. that Friedman states are important in the hyperconnected world.

How do I use technologies in ways that demonstrate my passion and curiosity?

I love studying the world. The world is 4.5 billion years old resulting in a lot of history to learn; therefore, I enjoy watch the History Channel and recently really enjoyed the Story of All of Us program about world history. At the same time, the world is constantly changing. I follow news outlets on Twitter and read news articles from BBC and CNN to keep up to date about the constant global changes. Also, I have been studying and working on my Masters of Arts in Education Technology in order to broaden my technology scope. I am glad I am able to explore the plentiful education technology resources available to educators.

Another major way I demonstrate my passion and curiosity for the world is through my involvement in People to People: Student Ambassadors. Throughout the school year, I help prepare students in my county to travel abroad with myself and other local teachers for two weeks during the summer. The two week program is a wonderful “technology tool” that provides first hand learning experiences for the students. The students are able to understand and appreciate other cultures. I love the People to People program because I am able to bridge my passion for traveling with my curiosity to learn more about world history; all while helping to inspire new minds to become global citizens.

How do I use technologies to inspire passion and curiosity in my students?

The goal of my 9^th Grade World Geography Class is that every student in my class becomes a global citizen. I use technologies to inspire my students to be passionate and curious about the world around them. Once a week, I have my students watch CNN Student News in the classroom to keep up on events in Syria and Ukraine amongst other relative issues. Each unit we also use technology to zoom into famous world monuments in GoogleMaps. Google also has GoogleDrive which is a great sharing and collaboration technology educational tool. In our last unit about Russia, my student used GoogleDrive to respond to questions after watching the Sochi Olympic Opening Ceremony.

 

 

The world is yours, what are you passionate and curious about?

References:

Friedman, T. L. (2013, January 29). It’s p.q. and c.q. as much as i.q. The new york times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/opinion/friedman-its-pq-and-cq-as-much-as-iq.html

Provines, M. (2014, January 23). Globe Painting [Photograph].

Provines, M. (2014, March 5). Self Technologies Word Cloud. Retrieved from 
http://www.tagxedo.com/

Provines, M. (2014, March 5). Student Technologies Word Cloud. Retrieved from 
http://www.tagxedo.com/

 

 

Reimaging Teaching

Teachers work extremely hard all day long solving student’s problems and answering questions. There are several big education problems that need collaboration of Minds. The New Media Consortium identified five major education problems. Thomas Bieri, Megan Hess, Brittany Schroeder and I worked collaboratively on how to re-image teaching in a modern world. Here is our blendspace presentation.

Technology Integration at OHS

This week’s CEP 812 assignment was to survey our colleagues and to investigate the technology integration at our own individual schools. The survey questions were centered around how my colleagues currently use technology, how can we improve or change technology integration practices at OHS and what professional development would be helpful? My data analysis and infographic give more details into my survey’s findings.

Information Overload

As a history teacher, I teach about how the printing press changed mass media forever, so this assignment allowed me to reflect about how I use mass media in my life. Recently, I watched the History Channel’s Mankind: The Story of All of Us and it mentioned the printing press as well as how the invention of the camera changed mass media in the 20^th century. The camera was used in the Congo to take pictures of the horrific conditions and exploitation of the natives during the rubber trade.

For the first time; mankind could capture images of our world, reproduce, and share them. The invention of photography and the means to get them in front of people; held more power than their inventors dreamed. Photos don’t blink and they don’t go away. The photos of the Congo helped to stop the deadly rubber trade. Mass media was a new power in a modern world (History Channel, 2012). Now more than 100 years after the camera was invented, we see hundreds of images a day through the internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. There is an excess of mass media and images in our modern world but it is important to self reflect on how we manage and use the information?

This week’s assignment made me look at how I manage the media that I surround myself with in my own information diet. I use twitter to gain fast quick information from a multitude of different news outlets ranging from celebrities, Olympic athletes, global newspapers, authors, and my peers. This week, in order to broaden my informational scope, I chose to follow three new twitter handles that are outside of my comfort zone. I am now following Lumosity in order to use the web for good purposes by strengthening my brain. In addition, I am now following FlippedLearning and FlippedClasss because flipping the classroom is something I want to try but I am also nervous to do because it is something new and outside my realm of teaching. There seems to be many benefits from flipping my classroom as a result I would like to research and gain more information so that I would be comfortable flipping my classroom in the near future.

Majority of my 9^th grade students have a smartphone in their pockets, ready to be scroll through their own twitter feeds. However, I became extremely worried about my students’ mass media consumption this week when I took them to the library and they could not find the publisher, city of publication or date of publication in a book. Nicholas Carr description of the technology revolution reminds me of my students’ excessive technology behaviors. Technologies drive us to crave an information diet of quick, easy and immediately forgettable facts, and that we cannot learn to self-regulate in a tech rich environment (Carr, 2011). I agree with Carr that my students’ constant use of technology has only penetrated their desire to use more technology.

How can I judge my students when I am reading my twitter and googling for answers too? I validate my informational technology actions that I have been to college; I had to go to the library to research topics to find static information. I feel I can distinguish trivial and important information unlike my students. I need to prepare my students and create real world assignments so they too can understand the value of research and information. My students and I need to meet somewhere in the middle by using technology to gain good important information through authentic meaningful assignments.

References:

History Channel (Producer). (2012). Mankind: The Story of All of Us [Television series]. A&E Home Video.

The Economist. (Nicholas Carr). (2011). Flash of Genius:Dark Side of the Information Revolution [Video webcast]. Retrieved from http://fora.tv/2011/06/07/Flash_of_Genius_Dark_Side_of_the_Information_Revolution_

2014. Twitter, Wikimedia Commons. [image online] Available at:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Twitter_icon.png [Accessed: 16 February 2014].

CEP 812 Week 4 Special Education Technology

For this week’s CEP 812 assignment, we needed to pick a special learning need we wanted to learn more about. I choose anxiety disorders because I have 2 students who suffer from anxiety disorders. I wanted to learn more about anxiety in order to better meet their needs. After researching anxiety disorders I have decided to use the Breathe2Relax app to support and help my students calm down while breathing during a break. My school has won a grant to have a classroom set of tablets for next school year. I am going to use the Breathe2Relax app on the classroom tablets. Here is a demonstration of the Breathe2Relax app that helps students take deep breathes to calm down.  Here is my full research. 

Photo References:

2011. The Keep Calm-o-Matic, Grant. [image online] Available at: http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/keep-calm-and-take-deep-breaths/ [Accessed: 13 February 2014].

 

2012. TeenLife, Cousineau. [image online] Available at: http://blog.teenlife.com/2012/12/stressed-out-take-a-deep-breathe/ [Accessed: 13 February 2014].

CEP 812 Week 2

This week for CEP 812 we were assigned to read several chapters of James Paul Gee’s book The Anti-Education Era. The book is about how our mind, culture and current education approach fail to make us smarter. Why are people stupid? What limitations prevent us from solving big, complex problems smartly?

My response  looks at the problem of time and patience in our modern day, instant-gratification world. People do not take the time to un-freeze problems and prior solutions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo References:

“Patience is a form of wisdom” by Motivational Quotes about is licensed under CC

“The Anti-Education Era” by Amazon.com is licensed under CC

 

CEP 812 Week 1

For our first week of CEP 812 we learned about different teaching problems. I learned how to make my first ever Screencast to show my answer to the ill-structured problem: how to have my students write better reflections by using GoogleDrive.

http://www.screencast.com/t/DyOFY2I2dB68

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