My Philosophy on Education

Students are people first. It is almost impossible to be a person in our society and not be in contact with some form of technology. As members of the Net Gen, my students are most likely going to be constantly exposed to all forms of technology. According to Oblinger and Oblinger, children under six, on average watch two hours of screen media, half have used a computer, and twenty-seven percent of them spend more than an hour online each day (Oblinger, Chap 1). The thing to remember is that not all students will have the same access. Oblinger and Oblinger also point out that ethnicity, socio-economic status, even parental education can cause varying degrees of access to certain forms of technology (Oblinger, Chap 1).

My job as an educator will first be to assess how much time my students spend interacting with technology, which technologies, and the competency in those technologies. Every class will be different and therefore the needs will be different. By having a grasp on their familiarity, I will be able to provide technology instruction that will help refine basic skills as well as higher level applications.

Also by assessing my students from the beginning I can better use technology to suit their individual learning styles. The Net Gen has already been categorized as portraying certain learning styles such as attentional deployment, fast response times, inductive discovery, and visual-spatial skills (Oblinger, Chap 1). Technology offers such an array of medias that can help better present the same information in a multitude of ways. This makes my instruction more student and learning centered.

Often times, technology is used in the class room to teach minor tasks like making a power point or a graph. It is essential to teach students these skills, but that is only a starting point. It is somewhat silly to focus entire lessons around building something in Microsoft Excel. While that is an important trade to know, that should not be the point of the lesson. In two, five, or ten years, that software will become obsolete when it is replaced by another, newer version or model. My students will not have a teacher standing over them to instruct them on which button does what. I want to use technology as a way to answer questions, any question. I want to provide my students with a strong sense of questioning and answering skills. “Questions enable the next generations to make changes in society, to invent new and better ways of doing things” according to Jamie McKenzie. By instilling these qualities, they will be able to transcend ever-changing technologies to elevated applications of those technologies.

I think the biggest feature I want to infuse into my students would be how technology can be used to change the world around them. Thanks to the diversity of technology, the Net Gen has been exposed to so much difference that surrounds us in the world (Oblinger, Chap 1). Technology has made them more connected to one another with the use of email, chats, texting, and the like (Oblinger, Chap 1). I want to challenge my students to think and reflect about how they can use these tools to make not only their school work better, but also their lives. How can they work together for a greater good? These are ideals shared by the Net Gen; hopefulness, change, and optimism (Oblinger, Chap1). These are amazing attributes to be able to work with as a teacher, and I hope to develop them to their fullest.

Works Cited.

Oblinger, Diana and Oblinger, James. Educating the Net Generation. Educase. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/Resources/EducatingtheNetGeneration/Introduction/6059

McKenzie, Jamie. Questioning as Technology. Educational Technology Journal. Vol 12, Issue 8. Aprill 2003. Retrieved from

K-12 News from Detroit

This article hit me hard. Detroit is going through so much with the collapse of the car industry and so many awful sports teams. There is not a lot of good energy going into the area at all. The article discussed the possibilities of 23 Detroit Public Schools being closed after the 2008-2009 school year. This would displace 7, 500 students and potentially lay off over 600 teachers. All this comes at the hands of a $305 million deficit in DPS finances. There is also talk of another 30 schools being shut down at the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year. That is roughly 50 schools in two years.


This massive of an interruption to the school system has major implications, especially for the students. The article highlights some feelings held by students who like their school and do not want to switch. This could have repercussions on the learning environment of the individual students. It is hard enough being a new student. Can you imagine having 7,500 new students? That has implications on the whole class environment as well.


I guess this hit me hard because it drives home the point, once again, that money dictates everything. Obviously there are students to fill the spots at schools being closed. There just is not enough money to provide that kind of education to each student. We want small class sizes and individualized instruction but that costs money. This is a pressure that will not go away anytime soon and I am sure it is going to get worse before it gets better.

Read more here

Here is the link to the webquest I reviewed.

Teaching about slavery can be a very tricky thing. Most teachers I had simply browsed over it like they would any other mundane subject. Slavery is anything but mundane though. I loved the ideas that this webquest presented. Essentially, different groups would take the role as either the north or south and create a publication. All of the groups also had to do research on current slavery issues. This part seemed extremely important to me because connected what we read in history books to what happens in our world. So many times when we talk about slavery in American classrooms, students do not realize that slavery did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation.

I felt the weakest part of this activity was the introduction and conclusion. While slavery is not the easiest thing to get kids excited about, this webquest makes no real attempt to get them interested in this very interesting topic. The conclusion basically outlined what they did and asked them to think about what they could do to end world wide slavery. So it made the effort to push them on to new thinking but could have done so much more with it.

The resources were mediocre. One risk of working with the internet is that it is an ever-changing source. A few the pages were not available anymore. There were plenty of available sources that did seem to pull from different domains; .com, .edu, and .org. Most of the sources did not allow the student to search at all and the students were taken right to the content. The students were asked to complete a timeline and the link was a timeline. The only thing students learn from this is how to copy and paraphrase. No video or sound was used but the internet was necessary to research current issues in slavery.

With just a few tweaks, this could become a very powerful and eye-opening webquest.

Going into this economic downturn with job loss swirling all around us, I feared not. I figured that with a teaching license I would be safe. We are always going to have public schools that need teachers! So this article about teach job loss was a rude awakening for me. It is even more discomforting that most of these job cuts are based on seniority. So I could succeed all the way into my first year of teaching and then be removed simply because I was last guy in.

I completely understand why it would be so hard to move over to a merit based system right now or even in the future. Everyone has got different definitions as to what makes a strong and effective teacher. On top of that problem there is also the idea of who will assess all the teachers when budget cuts rear their ugly head. When will we find time, resources, and the energy to grade on merit? AJ Duffy put it nicely when saying that seniority might just be easier because then their “hands are tied.”

Another topic in this article that began to grind my gears while reading this was Teach for America. I read an article a little while ago discussing how increased numbers of college aged people were going into Teach for America. While I think the whole thing is a great noble concept, it is beginning to become a problem. With our economy being the way it is, many non-education graduates are seeking out programs like Teach for America because the job market in their field is not very strong. They then turn and flood out our own teaching job market. So professionals that have no background in education get to stay on before the ones that do. Sounds pretty backwards to me?

To read more... check the article out on EdWeek.org http://www.edweek.org/ew/news/2009/02/17/22purge.h28.html

learning assesment in the middle

My results, in my bloggly opinion, show me that I have been in school for a long time. When I was younger, tests like these probably would have put me more on the extreme ends. I am a very visual, active, insightful, and “big picture” learner. The tests that I just took indicate me to be pretty mild in most areas. The Jung Typology tests rate me as moderate in almost every category. The process of school and education has seemed to help me acclimate to varying forms of instruction and learning.

The results from the Learning Style Index site show me as being more intuitive and visual. I think these characteristics make it easier for me to learn new methods involving technology. I learn by looking at things and exploring them. I might benefit from a quick tutorial of the program but I will benefit from time to browse through it myself.
The Steinberg Wagner test categorized me as low middle to high middle on almost every style. The only strong rating I had pertained to my global learning tendencies. I think this is very important to understanding new technology. I am not going to understand the in and outs of a program unless I understand the program as a whole. If I understand what the program is doing and why it is important then the other minor details will fall into place as well.

-Kilnitzki