A Christmas Miracle!

Thanks, Sean, Faye, Perri and the gods. It's finally here! Hardly worth waiting for but it's here.

CVS is My New BFF

Every once in a while it really hits home how powerful technology is. And how omnipresent. A few weeks ago I bought some hair color product or other at CVS (don't think I'm giving any secrets away here). Today in the mail I got a free sample of shampoo and conditioner from CVS. Not just any shampoo and conditioner though. That would be unremarkable and above suspicion. No, these samples were specifically for brunettes! Man, those little bar codes coupled with that little key chain frequent buyer card tell the world, or in this case CVS and anyone they care to share the information with, a lot about us. Not too sure how I feel about that. The cash register tells some computer, the computer stores a profile of your buying habits and voila! free sample tailored to my needs. It's amazing and a bit disconcerting. While I'm pretty sure no actual human was involved in this exchange of information other than some computer programmers, still, my hair coloring habits are on record somewhere. Hope the fact that I'm kind of fickle about my hair color doesn't blow a fuse somewhere.

Not sure how I feel about all this. Who doesn't love a free sample in the mail? But do I really want CVS keeping track of my personal needs? It's convenient of course but I think I prefer to be a little mysterious about the more intimate details of my life. Not that there are many. But they're mine. And anyway CVS is the least of it. Yikes! how much information do we give out over the internet and how secure is it, really? I'm not much of a privacy freak but do I want CVS and Land's End and Target and Amazon anticipating my needs before the actual humans in my life do? It's weird. 

Technology. It really is powerful. Maybe Waldbaum's will send me a steak!      

It Has A Name!

Picture this...a penny dropping, a light bulb going on, me smacking my forehead in the "I coulda had a V8" fashion. Now I get it! It's constructivist learning/teaching. That's what we've been up to all these weeks. It's the big picture. It's what we're doing in TEAM and what, ideally, we will bring to our classrooms. It's different.

I've been going bleary-eyed reading about constructivism this week but I can't stop. That's me being obsessive again. Constructivism is the new StumbleUpon. Just one more article and then I'll go to bed. The links that were in the weekly calendar, ironically (?) under the heading "guided instruction",  were a great place to start and I find myself returning to them for clear definitions and thumbnail descriptions. Skimmed through some things in Google Scholar and iTunes U. iTunes U has a pretty good podcast called Learning Theory which has one episode on constructivist theory. Quite honestly I've been avoiding the LIU library for the same reason that I'll never get a doctorate. I can't bear reading scholarly papers. Frankly, I'd rather have root canal than wade through all those abstracts searching for something that isn't a snoozefest.  My apologies to everyone who has labored for years over a dissertation. I'm sure there are some riveting ones out there. I promise to check into the library at some point.

But I digress. Back to constructivism. Isn't this why we became teachers in the first place? It's the "teach a man to fish" idea. I don't want to tell kids a bunch of stuff. I want to teach them how to learn. No, wait, I want to teach them to love learning. I want to honor their natural curiousity, to guide them in constructing their own learning. It's so much more fun. For me. And, I'm guessing, for them.

Well, I have tons I want to say about this constructivist model. Like a religious convert, I've seen the light! But it's at the end of a tunnel right now so I have some more thinking to do. Stay tuned.       

Election Night

Some old college friends from Chicago sent me these photos the day after the election. Talk about digital storytelling! Hope the link works. 

Shift Happens 2008

This is an update on the Shift Happens video that has been around for a while. It's well worth your four minutes if you haven't seen it yet. Gets you thinking about the future of those people who share our classrooms. They'll need their whole new minds for a whole new world!  

Has It Really Been a Whole Semester?!?!

Hard to believe the first semester of TEAM is winding down. What an incredible experience it has been so far. Until Bette mentioned that some people had asked about grades and evaluations I don't think I was actually conscious of the fact that we were in a class, a Masters program even. I guess on some level that reality was there but on a day to day basis it was something very different. 

One of the reasons (the main one, really) that I joined TEAM was because of the colleagues I knew who had participated in previous cohorts. It was not their amazing facility with things technological, though that was certainly impressive. It was their comfort level with the "new". I wanted that and I wanted to be able to share that with my students. I wanted to challenge myself with something that really made me uncomfortable. My own education was the very definition of "old school" and I think we tend to teach in the way we were taught. That's comfortable. Clearly, though that is unfair to the students of today, the 21st century learners with whom we share our classrooms.

Well, it worked! I'm uncomfortable every day and I love it. I stumble through Marratech, mini-p's, Garageband, Delicious, Jing, Animoto, blogs, googledocs and on and on. I'm learning to jump in with both feet and to borrow a phrase "just do it". I have AHA! moments and ARRRRGH! moments but I've enjoyed them all. I'm learning to reach out for help and that may be the best lesson of all. It's good for teachers to be reminded what it's like to be clueless sometimes. Can you say empathy?

Then there's time management...my downfall. I don't know how people who are in the process of raising families do it. My hat is REALLY off to you. My goal for next semester is to learn how to budget time for all the things in my life including TEAM. I have (and always have had) a tendency to procrastinate. While I do work on TEAM projects every day I have a penchant for wandering and not producing. I think I need a twelve step program for StumbleUpon, for instance. I enjoy writing but I do it in my head and leave the actual blogging undone for too long. Right now that mini-saga/recording/images project is hanging out there wagging its finger at me. One problem is that I feel like I have to finish things in one sitting. I'm going to try to learn to take baby steps. 

Goodness this started as a blog about what the TEAM experience has been like for me (not like your grandmother's class) and has turned into a ramble. Enough about me. What has TEAM been for you so far?