After reading another report on testing models and international education programming in last week's New York Times, I am convinced that we live in interesting times indeed.
Over the past 11 months, we have had the unique opportunity to study educational design theory through a media rich portal while the following is being debated and discussed in national and international forums:
1. The lack of creative aptitude and problem solving skills in today's school children
2. The effectiveness of No Child Left Behind
3. The sky-rocketing cost of higher education
4. The value of testing
5. How to teach meaning over fact in an age of Google
6. The validity of Wikipedia
7. The wiring of the entire world via the internet
8. Video in education
9. Online education
10. The crash of our financial markets and changing workplace needs
11. Unions vs merit pay
12. For-profit education and "career colleges"
13. Technology in the classroom: ie iPads or books
14. The notion of DIY-U and untethered / piecemeal higher education opportunities
15. MI and BBL
16…
The list goes on and on.
Yet, what continues to inspire and encourage me in this age of confusion and challenge (felt on behalf of my students who are seeking future employment and myself on how to empower them with appropriate skills and worldviews), is that we have been able to observe the international educational and social debates through the FSO portal supported by the expertise of committed educators. I believe that this is no small asset.
This past year has shown me what is possible in order to leverage today's modern communication tools within learning environments. And, what has been most apparent is that rarely did this experience ever appear to involve technology simply for technology's sake. Personally, I have really appreciated the balance between varying activities while an online student here at Full Sail. In nearly equal measure, our coursework from month to month has involved discussion, media development, research, reading, and a host of other "traditional" educational exercises.
Often, when the debate of educational (or political) change enters the public sphere, sentiments seem to sway dramatically towards one or another diametrically opposed position. While our program was certainly technology intensive, the deployment of modern tools was often used in order to simply facilitate a somewhat traditional or common classroom discussion or lecture.
I really feel encouraged by the wide swath of tools and resources that we've discussed and used. This week alone, our class has collectively shared over 50 video links that could be brought into the classroom. Or beamed to our students' laptops, iPhones, or iPads.
Yet still remaining is the challenge of finding the break in the day (or school year) to affectively implement these tools into the classroom. It seems that every morning I'm working through a giant jigsaw puzzle in my mind investigating a hundred different scenarios while trying to decide which link should be used in which class for which subject for…
Without question, my Action Research Project has been an invaluable opportunity. While reviewing my classroom activities student surveys, I've learned to see a much more immediate and true perspective of how affective my classroom is on any given day. As such, I'm learning to react at the "speed of observation" per the needs and expectations of my students in this complex world.
Returning to the classroom (albeit a new classroom) has been exhilarating. While the summer break is always needed in June, and I get ancy by mid-July, sometimes I wish we had another 2 months off to work this video into that curricula and this discussion blog into that course.
Or maybe, just maybe, mirroring every other individual journey in the game of life, we get a little further and a little better as time allows and patience is one of the best medicines for these "interesting" times.
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