I'm going to touch on my 'Surprise Me' response to Ed about all of this technology we came across in our readings for the week. I love all of these technology ideas. The problem is I am still stuck on how to bring it to my classroom. It seems that most of the examples are for upper elementary and beyond. How do I get technology into my 1st grade classroom? I understand I could somehow link to another class in another state and Skype chat with this classroom and such. Unfortunately, I don't have any of the technology that would allow that in my classroom, and we aren't allowed to use any streaming programs. That's a huge block in that adventure. I just don't know where to look or begin with kiddos so young.
I really appreciated chapter 9 in Curriculum 21 and I liked all of the information about digital portfolios. It did make me sad about our own portfolios at our school. From the day I started I have always heard, "Nobody looks at these anyway. They just get handed to the student when they graduate." How awful is that? Even more awful now that I have read what portfolios can be. I think our district does them to say we do them, but we aren't really doing them because they aren't being used the way they were meant to be used. Can you follow that? Why aren't we scanning in this work in this day and age and making them digital like the book mentions? I am in the process of creating a website that has my own working digital portfolio on it. This way when I interview for new teaching positions at the end of this year (because I am moving to New Hampshire), I have this electronic portfolio that potential employers can visit before I even show up with my standard paper portfolio. Shouldn't we be doing the same for our students so that when they graduate they have their own digital portfolio completed to show to colleges? I'm sure many colleges will expect something like that by the time my students I have now graduate.
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I sometimes think about the "portfolio" we had to keep in school. Starting in K, we would spend hours working on a piece to go into our portfolio. Every quarter or so, we would spend another afternoon sorting through everything we'd put in there that year, then choose what should stay and what should go. Very time consuming, and no one really knew what it was for. I think I did get the blue folder (er, portfolio) when I graduated, but what was I supposed to do with that? It seemed like such a waste of time, year after year.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I think we did them just to be able to say that we did them. They weren't highlighting our achievements like they should have been. So many good ideas are out there, but how do we use them??