attending a conference

This week I "attended" a conference for K-12 educators. Entirely Online. It was a new experience, and in a lot of ways, more informative and better in the long run for me. I got to pick and choose the content that was relevant. I liked that concept. The conference officially closes this week, but the content stays up for a while. I learned about it from the RSS feed of Generation Yes! blog.

k12onlineconference.org is the site. check it out.

book/project idea

I have had the idea in the back of my mind for roughly a year now to come up with a kind of a memoir/self help manual for first year teachers, based on my experiences in my first year. I think it would be beneficial for those coming into school districts locally and perhaps nationally, to get a new taste of what a first year can be life, if done wrong. would anyone out there be willing to critique my work as I create? anyone interested just leave a comment.

learning vs. teaching redux

this quote goes back to a weeks-past discussion about learning and teaching, but I ran across an interesting quote from homeschooling/unschooling proponent John Holt this evening looking for info on my end of the semester project

"The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners"

I was out of town for most of the week/weekend: when 88 year old grandma writes you a personal letter and the last two lines are "come see me. i miss you", you go. I'm trying to nail down my last project, I think something easily adapted to a regular classroom. I suppose I'll have to look at the syllabus for more particulars before I proceed. I'm working on the last major project for my other class. hopefully they'll both tie in together when all is said and done.

Not sure what to post about

I got a little off track this week-my aggregator decided not to update properly so I got out of the loop a little bit. I think the general discussion around the place was the potential extra credit assignment, I will be participating, but not yet. I had a wedding to be in this weekend which precluded me from much of what little time I would have had to do anything like that. I am apprehensive about starting this MUD. I took Gaming and Sim last fall and hated every single second of my MUD experience, so I am not to keen on having to start it up again, but I need the points. I am still unsure as to what my end of the term project will be, but I suppose I will try and lump all the personal projects I've got going with my special needs kids and get a grade for it. I'm working on a grant proposal for my research class that should tie into it as well. It will all come together in the end, I'm just not sure what it'll be about just yet.

Learning v. Teaching

Learners and teachers are the same, essentially, just modify your own perspective. The Greek word for teacher and learner is the same, after all. Or so I've been told. Learners have a need for more information, or a skill, that they percieve that only the teacher can provide (Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglass, probably Ralph Waldo Emerson would disagree, based on their educational progression, but I digress). On an individual basis, A learner has a goal in mind. A teacher is sought to help the learner reach that goal. Mass public schooling essentially works in reverse. The goal there is not for the learner to learn what he wants, but to be shaped into something the society at large percieves that it needs to maintain cohesion. Learning is a process that is determined by the needs of the individual. Learners are people engaging in that process. Teachers are there to provide the requisite skills or information that a learner believes neccessary to reach a goal for themselves.

ZPD

I'd heard of Vygotsky before, but I'd never really thought of him as the genesis behind the concept of "scaffolding." Maybe my instructors weren't clear, or maybe they were and I just wasn't paying much attention. I suppose his concept, connecting your knowledge with something outside yourself that you do not neccessarily know makes sense. I think the bridge analogy works better than the scaffold. When I think scaffold, I think upward. I suppose the direction of the knowledge connection doesn't neccessarily matter, its a mental picture kind of a thing. Vygotsky generates a picture of one guy reaching a book off of a shelf into someone elses hands to me, a horizontal motion. Scaffolding is a stacking off stuff ontop of something else that already was there. There may not exactly be anything to neccessarily build upon, depending on the learner.

role of a teacher

I would have to say that there is not one definable role for a teacher. Obviously, the traditional prussian school public school model is the one who imparts knowledge into the empty cup of a student. Today's teacher has to adapt to many changes within a given day, and must accomplish many things, while appealing to many different requirements, many of which may not actually have to do with the delivery of educational content. We are required to wear many hats, in a school, but to me, anyone can be a teacher. Anyone who imparts knowledge, in any way, in any situation, is a teacher. As long as learning takes place and both parties are enriched through the process, you are a teacher.