Philosophy of Education

Learning happens when 2 people work together.... the teacher and the student. Both people have to work together.... it takes two..... just like dancing. And just like dancing, education requires a leader and a follower. The leader is the teacher who invites, guides, and demonstrates the moves (new material). The follower is the students who accepts, trusts, and engages. Then this happens- Magic happens and students learn. For my full philosophy in video form, please click here.

Energy Project Evaluation

Final Energy Project thoughts:

My findings were a good representation of someone living in a small community (like a college) but what about more average people. What about people who travel in larger circles? Or what about people who spend more money on their cars? This project needs replicated to fit the lifestyles of more people. I think if more people tried this experiment (possibly with larger radius), we'd get a better understanding of the average person and their expense on commuting. I think the average person would have to bike a larger radius.... but hey.... isn't that a good thing anyway. Thanks for taking time to read, the following are self-evaluations of my presentation and my video.

Presentation: 88 out of 100
Good things:
-Content interesting and well organized
-Conclusions offered viewers options
-Data was defined and gathered well
Needs improvement:
-Too many variables
-When vehicle is needed to transport more
people or objects than only the driver
-What effect will ice have on both driving
and biking?

Video: 88 out of 100
Good things:
-Delivery and tone was comfortable
-Hand motions added
-transitional phrases helped
Needs improvement
- read off of Power Point too often
-speed was fast
-intonation was not varied

Energy Project

I live in a small town and driving is expensive so I did an experiment to calculate how much time and money I'd save by riding my bike everywhere in a 2 mile radius. The full presentation and results can be found by clicking here.

About my experiment:
I have an inexpensive car, drive very little, have cheap insurance, and work on my own car. I also pedal fast and the price of gas was based upon a rate of $4.39 per gallon.

My findings

I traveled an average of 50 miles per week and 23% of my miles were outside of a 2 mile radius. This means that I can use my bike for most of my transportation. (I base my final figures on my lifestyle and a complete and detailed power point presentation math can be found by clicking here.

My calculations:

• my car costs about $2700 per year to operate.
• Riding my bike costs me about $350 per year.
• The time spent commuting on a bike and in a car is almost equal.
• Biking is more economical and equals a savings of about $8.50 per hour.

For raw data and figures, click here. You can watch me give this presentation by clicking here.

2 Mile Biking Radius: Energy Project

With the energy crisis we know that rising fuel costs make it more expensive to own a car and we must look for alternate ways to save energy. Think BIKE…. Congress did. Congress just passes an economic bail-out plan which includes employers receiving a $20/month tax credit for every employee who commutes to work. (Estimate what you spend on commuting fuel HERE. Estimate the total amount you are spending to drive per mile HERE)

For this project I will investigate for one week the benefits and costs of riding bike instead of driving a car for any distance within two miles of my house. I live in Sitka Alaska where the weather is rainy and I know that riding a bike means ride in poor conditions and therefore my analysis will include two dependant factors: time and money.
For this analysis I will assume 3 things

• time - it takes more time to prepare, travel, clean-up when using a bike
• money- it takes more money to operate a vehicle
• exercise- 20 minutes of exercise 3X's a week improves health

I will spend one week traveling by car tabulating total time and total distance traveled.
I will spend the next week biking and tabulating total time and total distance covered.
I will publish my results in my next blog entry.

Anthro-Technology Report

My assignment was to figure out the technology culture at Sitka High School. My approach:

• Research school documents: I found every piece of literature that the school and district published regarding technology and computers.
  
• Researched on web. I knew that SHS had MAT students in the past and I read their reports "anthrotech" reports. I based interview questions and my list of interviewees off of that report. I also asked the school secretary, librarian, and my mentor teacher who I could talk to about technology.

I learned a lot.

• I learned that teachers are increasingly using technology in the classroom because technology makes life better
• Lack of training and the lack of stream-lined hardware/software make it difficult to fully utilize available resources.
  
• Students are increasing turning to technology for recreation, for communication, and for socialization.
  
• Teachers can be bridge builders connecting people as technology stratifies generations and socio-economic groups.
• Teachers must know and use available tools of technology in order to prepare today’s students for the unknown future.

You can see details in The Full Report

Article Review: “Tools for the Mind” by Mary Burns

Aaron Routon: aaronrouton@hotmail.com: 9/01/08

“Tools for the Mind” by Mary Burns

Overview of Article.
The lull in enthusiasm for using technology in the classroom could be linked to the ineffective use of technological tools. Technology has the capability of helping students develop high-level thinking skills but educators are utilizing technology for students only as a low-level “show and tell” aid.

Current education trends fixate on the visual display aspect of technology and as a result students primarily use technology as a way to research or present their work. The higher level thinking skills of synthesis and evaluation are not needed in this process.

Educators should push students to develop these skills. There are technological tools which can help this process (spreadsheets, databases, and GIS programs), but educators need to focus more on content and developing critical thinking skills. Teachers need to use technology to improve content knowledge, curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Reference Points:

• 1.) Today educators have a narrow focus on technology at the expense of the more important pillars of learning—cognition, instruction, assessment, and curriculum.

• 2.) In all the excitement about new ways of teaching with technology, educators may have neglected to pose the most fundamental question: Are students really learning?

• 3.) Education has an over-reliance on conceptually easy kinds of software—lower-order applications that, although engaging, focus on simple cognitive tasks.

• 4.) Technology alone cannot move students to higher. My own experience in classrooms indicates that students generally use lower-order applications that offer few opportunities for problem solving, analysis, and evaluation.

• 5.) PowerPoint does not lead students to delve deeply into the writing process or wrestle with complex and conflicting conceptual information.

• 6.) Internet use is intellectually passive. Students generally use the Internet as an electronic textbook, often without questioning, validating, or evaluating the information they find.

• 7.) Teachers must learn to use other tools to help engage students but higher-order tools, for the most part, are not as user-friendly or visually appealing.

• 8.) Teach critical thinking first and technology later. The technology community needs to focus on the role of computers as learning tools.

• 9.) Teachers need to use technology to focus on content knowledge, curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

• 10.) Spreadsheets, databases and Geographic information systems (GIS), are useful tools in helping students develop high-level thinking skills in using technology.

Reflection:
I think this is very accurate. I think we as educators fixate on the ability of technology to aid in presentation. Presentation of material is just part of the learning process. We need to again focus on developing those critical thinking skills.

In the classroom, we need to continue to help kids develop these skills and not focus so much on the presentation (which can come easier to students than to teachers). This is far more difficult for students and teachers and teachers need to be given tools to teach these things.

Teachers need to be trained how to use these new tools. These tools are often more difficult to use but they need to be utilized in teaching content. Computers have a great potential to be a learning aid and we need to utilize them as much as is appropriate in helping student develop higher-level thinking skills.

Article Review: “The Educator's Guide to the Read/Write Web” by Will Richardson

Aaron Routon: aaronrouton@hotmail.com: 8/23/08

“The Educator's Guide to the Read/Write Web” by Will Richardson



Article Overview:
This article was written in two parts- part one describes some tools on the internet that schools can use to enhance learning, and part two describes how those tools can be used in today’s changing classroom. Developing technology is changing how students interact with what is written, requiring readers to become judges of information

Part one of the article describes the following: Weblogs or blogs, wiki, furls, and podcasts. All of these are internet tools where people can publish and post information. Blogs are sights anyone can post any information. Wikis are a collaboration of information by many anonyms authors. Furls are programs which collect information customized to a specific user. Podcasts are published sound bites people can record. All of these tools make it easier for anyone to put information on the internet.

The second part of the article describes how classroom teachers’ role needs to shift from content expert to knowledge guide. The author sites that students can now use the internet to interact with people who have more expertise than the classroom teacher. Teachers role now should be two fold: help guide the search for information, and to help students learn what is appropriate.



Reference Points:

• 1. To be literate in the age of the Read/Write Web means to skillfully manage the flood of information now available.

• 2. Now that anyone with an Internet connection can publish and disseminate content with no editorial review process, consumers of Web content need to be editors as well as readers. We need to help students make a judgment about its authenticity and relevance of sources. We must teach students how to actively question and evaluate published information instead of passively accepting it as legitimate.

• 3. Students need to understand the many ways in which they can appropriately share ideas and creations online and teachers need to model how to communicate with experts and how to publish their own work

• 4. Schools have traditionally demanded that students work independently and produce content mainly for their teacher. We should encourage such collaboration and outreach. Current tools have increased our ability to collaborate with others and also expanded audiences. Also school work does no longer needs to be discarded following the school year…. It could be posted for others to see.

• 5. Schools need to think through the potential privacy and safety implications that go along with widespread publishing of student-created content.

• 6. Teachers must also show students how to deal with inappropriate content that they may come across during their Web travels.

Reflection:
This article means that teachers will need to adapt. There are many tools to aid in teaching content and many resources students now have access to. We should utilize these resources and help students learn how to utilize these new tools.

The changing technology is changing how our students view information. Now students question everything. When I was in school something was true because it was written in “The World Book” encyclopedia. Now Wikipedia takes over and students question the authentency of everything written. Now students are skeptics and are not what things are really facts. This can be good, but we will need to help direct students to some things which are concrete. Most students operate well in concrete terms and so much subjectivism could be very confusing and emphasizes our roles as mentors.

I think the two ideas that I will use most from this article are the ideas of blogging and creating our own classroom text book.

Futuring

Grading student video projects posses difficulties because of because of encouraging artistic license but the following areas will be assessed:
• A thorough display of conceptual competence
• Supporting details presented
• Presentation is engaging and enhances viewers understanding

"School Train"
+ meets each 3 requirements but the presentation
- a little distracting (depending upon intended audience).
*** Over all- very good

"Hannah- Fox Becomes a Better Person"
+Person meets all three requirements
+and is easy to follow for the viewers.
+dress, music, artwork, and intro
- First picture of fox.
*** Over all- excellent.

There are many possible impact of technology speculated in the short narrative “epic2015.” The piece suggests that in the future Google and Amazon will combine to become the news mogul which personalizes the news for every subscriber. Following that in the year 2015 people will use their mobile media devices to broadcast themselves across the internet airwaves. Such speculations would have big impact on the classroom.

• Personalized news means that students would not be hearing the same news…. There would be more information, but the information would be based on preference, and there fore all students would not receive the same “news.”
• Personal broadcasts means students would increasingly open their lives on the internet where face to face interaction would decrease and postings would increase.
• Student lives would also be more available to strangers. Either security for these “pod-casts” will increase or students open their lives up to anyone who wants to look.
• Social impact of postings decreases accountability. Students can present themselves however they want
• More convenient. Like the cell phone- these broadcast will make life more convenient and create more free time. Planning may be less tedious too.

“Sabrina’s Journey” can be a model for something that I do with my students because it is a piece of self- disclosure. I work in language arts and these pieces are valuable. Creating a piece like this demonstrates:
• Theme
• Supporting evidence
• Writer’s voice
• Value of person

Article Review: "Listen to the Natives"

Aaron Routon: aaronrouton@hotmail.com: 8/21/08

“Listen to the Natives” by Marc Prensky

Overview of article.

In “Listen to the Natives” Marc Prensky suggests that schools need to adapt current teaching strategies to be more inclusive of technology. He states that students today are different today than in the past largely due to the influence of technology. His belief is that if teachers do not adapt, education will be ineffective.

Prenksy advises that teachers must be engaging in order to be relevant to students. The article focuses on impact of technology on students and on how students will learn best. Prensky suggests strategies that incorporate the internet and cell phones in classroom communication.

The author focuses on teaching becoming more individualized and self-guided by the students. He states “we also need to select our teachers for their empathy and guidance abilities rather than exclusively for their subject-matter knowledge.” Prensky believes teachers roles should shift from being directors of information to being learning partners with students.

Reference Points:

1. Students today are “digital natives” having been raised with modern technology where many adults were not “born into technology” and had to learn it later in life. The idea is that technology for students today is second nature and that parents and teachers find it more difficult
2. Prensky believes that teachers need to engage students with things they relate to in order for learning to be optimal
3. The idea of “gameplay” where learning is fun in hopes to keep students motivated to learn.
4. Teachers should stray from “herding” and attempt more one-on-one personalized instruction OR self selected learning groups where students can connect with any person world wide to be a partner in group learning.
5. The use of cell phone technology in the classroom should bee locked at as an asset rather than a liability.
6. Educators need to teach students to be programmers or their learning and work with available technology to accomplish goals.
7. The goal of education should be to teach students to filter knowledge and maximize the features and connectivity of their tools.
8. Unless schools conform to using technology, they will become archaic, outdated, and irrelevant to students.

Reflection:

I find that student engagement is a fine line for education to walk. I want students to be engaged, but I feel it would be a disservice to students if education fell into the entertainment trap. School should prepare students for life and by feeding into the entertainment model, I fear that students will lose interest and motivation once something becomes hard work or boring. Most people will need money someday and they will do it by working a job that might be hard or boring.

I also feel that the author ignored economic stratification brought on by such attempts to education. What happens if a student doesn’t have a computer at home, or a cell phone, or an MP3 player. It seams that this article ignores those students who do not have the financial resources to keep current.

I do like the possibilities that this article brought up- teaching can be very interactive and self guided on many levels. Students will benefit and be motivated to learn when they have more choices- this mirrors learning later in life. Cell phones and the internet make larger learning communities possible and gives many more opportunities. I do believe that teachers should use these things as tools but also instill in students a good work ethic and should guide students in positive social skills. As educators we want to teach life skills. Technology is a skill that people will need to survive, but education should also be well rounded.

A little about me....

Hello, my name is Aaron Routon. I grew up in Kansas, Oregon, and now live in Sitka. I enjoy people and being outside. This year I am enrolled in masters of arts in teaching program at the University of Alaska Southeast. I will be teaching freshman English and history at Sitka High School. I will also be coaching for the cross country team, the MEHS wrestling team, and the SHS track team. I hope I will be able to play in the snow this year and become more involved with my church. Here is my blog: