Sunday, December 19, 2010

Why I decided to Change my Career path in Corporate Education to Teaching in Secondary School District:

I decided to change my career from corporate education to teaching at a local school district for one simple reason; providing excellent education to youth of today. In reading posted discussion, I have learned in this class EDLD 5366 from my cohorts who are already fulfilling their requirements as teachers. Teachers provide a lifelong impact on the student lives they touch. In his book A Theory of Fun, professional game designer Ralph Koster argues that mastery is what makes games fun, that the act of learning and being rewarded for learning can be extremely interesting, if done in the right way. The key to educational excellence is rethinking a new role for excellent that teachers can embrace in the classroom and extends beyond it into leadership activities. Among current policy initiatives such as, No Child Left Behind,are attempts to integrate stronger teacher roles into guidelines for incentive plans and to use teachers' strengths in the decision making process at local and district levels. With the increasing complexity of instructional tasks, teachers are demonstrating their potential as collaborative researchers. Technology in and of itself will not create more engaged students or better students. However, well-chosen technology resources infused into classroom instruction can create more engaged and better students. There are forces converging to support emerging teachers' roles as leaders. Good teaching and the teaching of the future will make school life vital to our youth. Therefore, I'm beginning my journey into education that features creative thinking and research to help educate students. I believe this is important if we really hope to facilitate change. Most of us like to think that the benefits of technology will help transform education, but we absolutely cannot assume that a trend in the consumer, media, or business world will necessarily translate to a trend in the education world. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of researching how video gaming can be used as a learning tool for students. Video games on the other hand, do not separate assessment from learning assessment and feedback is contagious (Big Thinkers, 2008). This is why the structure of future thinking is so important to the field of education. We have to be able to approach our administrators, districts, and policy makers with visions of the future supported by research and thoughtful consideration of trends.

References

Byrne, Richard. 2009 “The Effect of Web 2.0 on Teaching and Learning.” Teacher Liberian 37, No. 2: 50-53

Koster, Ralph. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Paraglyph, 2004

Big Thinkers: James Paul Gee on Grading with Games. The George Lucas Educational Foundation, 2008. http://www.edutopia.org/james-gee-games-learning-video (accessed March 22, 2010)

Saturday, December 4, 2010

The Stairway To Learning

This week, I had a unique opportunity to create a learning technique using Stykz.  Stykz is online interactive software that allows the user to create different styles of stick figures to showcase an animation learning tool to students through QuickTime media player.  In reading my colleagues and other educator’s blog, I discovered that majority of educators already use an interactive media guide for their students while teaching in the classroom in addition to other multimedia learning tools.  In just learning the animation side of Stykz, I also found that you can add alphabet and number gadgets to your design table along with the stick figures.  These interactive tools act as an agent to attract the attention of the instructor and student.  More importantly, an educator’s goal is to find tools that young learners can use to create multimedia communications.