In this blog entry I am to respond to the question: How does what we are studying affect how you are teaching - what did we cover this week and how does it impact you? Short answer is that it won't affect my teaching as I am not yet teaching (enough of this excuse, yes?). What we did this week was look at Google Sites, review a video on creativity (and how schools appear to be killing it), conduct an analysis of available learning software evaluation tools (followed by conducting our own evaluation of a relevant learning aid using the chosen tool) as well as a reading assignment.
The Google Sites activity has been fun although the product isn't yet looking all that interesting or user-friendly. I'm sure that future tweeks will be needed to make it useful and informative. I can definitely see how this function of Google could be beneficial to teacher, students and parents. This could also assist in finding "authentic audiences" for reviewing and commenting on students' work.
I liked the video on today's schooling affecting students creativity. Although, not actually being a teacher, I'm not sure how I would feel about that being dropped at my feet. With budget cuts and other limitations, it's easy to imagine how hard it is to recognize and foster one child's imagination and creativity when those very things are prevention you from conducting the normal lesson for the other 25 students!
We will be discussing the evaluation tools later on today, so I don't have too much to say about that aspect of our homework assignments at this time. Most of the checklists that I looked at seemed fairly easy to use. I look forward to conducting an evaluation on some online physics learning programs to see the tool in action.
Will, does your work have any particular software evaluation tools that you are required to use or would you just use one that we looked at in class??
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