A Kline's Reflective Practice

The book this week read about the five Net Smart Literacies -   attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration and network smarts. Attention focused on how to be mindful when using technology, especially the internet. Crap detection, focused on how to consume news or information online with acritical eye. Participation and collaboration discussed how we can both participate online and how the internet can be a great tool for supporting collaboration. Finally, network smarts discussed how online networks have structures, and how we as consumers need to be aware how these structures can help to develop stronger connections among people. The part of this book that gave me the most ideas for lessons I might do in my own classroom was the first section on attention. I really like how Rheingold outlined how with diligent work we can create habits that help us pay more attention to how and when we’re using the internet. I think a lot of my students could benefit from practi...

In reading the comments from last week’s blog it really seemed to affirm that using a survey might be a great tool to use to figure out what my student’s media usage is really like. Moving forward I think I will try and create a google form to use with my classes to see what their usage is like. Once I have that I think it will help to give me better insight on what my next steps might be in helping my students become better consumers of information.

This week we read the Information Diet by Clay A. Johnson a book all about how we consume information and things we can do to build healthier habits and get away from our over-consuming ways. In this book Johnson splits his ideas into three parts, first he outlines the problem (that too many of us only consume information that support our own views), then he goes into ways in which we as individuals can fix this, and finally he extends these outward and talks about the scalability of these issues. I learned the most from this book in reading the ideas that Johnson outlined in the second part where he thoroughly discusses what we can do to consume information in a healthier way. A lot of this information I was already vaguely aware of because as a social studies teacher I think a very important part of my job is teaching students how to be good consumers of information. There were several sections that really articulated some of the ideas I try and share with my students, for exa...

This week we participated in a group activity where we had to create our own in-camera-edited video that took some of the principles we’ve been learning and shared them with our other classmates. A big part of this assignment was the design process. We had to fully brainstorm our ideas and plan out all of our shots before we went and filmed our videos. This gave all of us a great feel for what it means for students to be designers. Throughout the project we were reminded regularly that “its about the process” by Dawn. This really helped me focus on the idea that process is more important than product (especially when our video didn’t turn out that great at the end).  I actually used some of the things I learned from this class in my practice that following week. We have been working on a PBL where students are asked to design their own civilization. I changed up my plan for their product creation day and made them complete a planning document before they started work on th...

We spent this week looking more into affordance analysis and how to design lessons and effectively consider technologies that you may want to use in your teaching. What really brought these ideas home for me was the activity we did during class where we were given a specific technology to explore. My partner and I looked at google cardboard viewers. These are a technology that I’m familiar with and one that I have used before in my own classroom. While exploring and designing with my partner I was getting frustrated with the assignment that Dawn gave us. I couldn’t quite get the cardboard viewers to fit in with the learning goals that I had set. I was able to stretch the assignment and was able to eventually figure out  a way to finish filling out the design document but It took awhile for me to fit in the technology to what I was doing.  I think this exercise did an excellent job of illustrating why designers need to remember the means principle. Good learning designs ref...

The Victorian Internet was a really intriguing way to approach the idea of “new” technology while it can help us do something in a different way, the process of adopting and integrating the technology into society can be very similar across time. With the telegraph we were able to see how it’s adoption compared to the internet/computers etc… and how these generalizations about technology aren’t all that different from the way new technologies are embraced today.       With my own practice, this book really reminded me that it can be really exciting to try and embrace new technology in the classroom but the foundation of teaching should come from lesson design rather than excitement over something flashy and new to use. In reading several of the stories it made me aware of how much is misunderstood about new technologies and how it takes time to fully understand their potential (or ineffectiveness). In addition I think that learning about various design princi...