Comments on: NECC[1] = Monday

By: Kevin Mark

Kevin Mark — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:28:07 +0000

if not power point, you could have used open office or s5 or other open source tools. I’d love to see teachers use the same style as some FLOSS presentations — humor, detail, engagement. As for the same material, what would the result be with wikibooks, of making an open licensed text book where the material is meant to be honed to a stable form?

By: erin

erin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:57:57 +0000

classroom management=how you as a teacher fight the fires of apathy, disrespect, and anarchy in order to maintain a classroom where learning just might take place.

K-12 this is super important, and a super difficult thing to do well.

The problems are: kids are human. unpredictable individuals, sometimes with no manners or conscience in common. Sometimes with goals in common = pull the teacher off track so we can just hang out because this is school and school is the oppressive enemy to us all (the premise is a total lie mostly, but believed by students inside “the system”)

Even as an art teacher (the class kids really enjoy?? and don’t mind coming to?? and get excited to go make messes in??) I’ve had trouble in PRIVATE schools with middle school classes working as teams to distract me from the teaching and art making that I’d prepared for them.

“I mean, c’mon guys! This is fun! Why are you pulling out all of your flattery and rabbit trail questions on me? We only have 45minutes to make fun messes and clean them up again before the bell and you would rather have the satisfaction of effectively distracting me from conducting class than the opportunity to get messy?”

Maintaining order (not chaos) and interest (genuine curiosity) and engagement (real doing and thinking) are the magical powers of a good teacher– it requires a lot of love, preventative measures, and constant vigilance. Especially if you don’t want to resort to death looks, punishment, and trips to the principal.

In faculty meetings, when staff are asked what aspect of their job they feel they need help with (what kind of speaker should the school invite to inservice trainings next year?) — it’s classroom management. Because they want to maintain peace without marshall law, and that’s an art.

And without order and trust in a classroom, you can’t use paint brushes let alone technology.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:07:15 +0000

Noooo!!! PowerPoint is the devil. I hated the classes that used PowerPoint in graduate school, and they are the ones that I had the least guilt about skipping. The slides never change, and teachers end up using the same sets of slides year in and year out without any thought to whether it could be done better. Additionally, my impression is that all teachers eventually migrate all information to the slides and eventually just end up reading from them almost verbatim.

*breathe*

Okay, there are exceptions. Mark Chang at Olin does PowerPoint really well. He has slides displayed from his tablet with minimal information. During class, he will fill in the rest by writing on the slide with the marker on his tablet, save the slides at the end of class, and post the results. You get a lot more out of the class by working out the stuff during classtime, but if you do have to miss or couldn’t keep up in your notes, you do have the slides to fall back on.