What is Freedom?

"What is Freedom?"

I was asked the above question this morning. My first thought was, "You are in second grade.Your life is freedom!"

Then I asked, "Do you know what free means?"

"You mean doesn't cost anything?"

"No, the other free. Like you have choices."

"Oh! You mean like free time?"

Yeah, it's kind of like free time.

Course 1 Project

This is my course 1 final project as it stands now. I have already started the process, and I can see that finding information is a challenge for my students, so I just made a custom search engine for them.

It is an easy process. Simply go to google.com/cse and insert the webpages you want the students to search. The hard part for me was finding a place to put it. I decided on using our class Google account to take advantage of iGoogle until it is shut down in a few weeks.

One of the goals of this lesson is to have the students learn how to search better. As they are in first and second grades it is more of teaching them search for the first time so I want them to get started on the right foot. This is a different era from where I started with the Internet directories.

Anyway, this is just a draft, so all comments are welcome.

The Sort of Learning

One of the first activities I did with my students in our current unit, Light and Color, was to have them sort different objects. My idea was to have them be sorted by opaque, translucent, and transparent objects. As with any good sort, they came up with categories I did not even think of.

Tuning In through Sorting Objects

I love sorting activities just for that reason. I never know what will become of it.

The Changing Landscape

Have (and if so, how have) teaching and learning changed with the introduction of new tools?

Grigorovich M-5 aircraft (front view) by liftarn

Last summer I read the book The Wright Brothers: The Remarkable Story of the Aviation Pioneers who Changed the World. It is a great read and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a glimpse into the turn of the twentieth century.

The book tells the story of how the Wright Brothers started their career by starting a newspaper. At that time in the United States, there were independent printers on every block. Many of these were muckrakers and sensationalist publications.

Soon though, newspapers started to consolidate. Being a consumer became the norm.

I can see parallels between the early days of the newspapers, and the Internet as it stands now. Already we see up and coming sites being taken over by larger, more established sites.

Hotel Icon Has Internet In Room by Gerald_G

There are differences between that era long ago and what we are experiencing now. There is a lot of content being produced. People take pictures, tweak them, and post them. People post to forums and comment on blog posts and newspaper articles. While comments are not listed in the creating level, many ideas are created and shared in comment sections.

When will we start using new technology in new ways?

I am interested to see what direction the Internet will take. I think there will always be outlets for people's creativity. People will always blog, or post ideas in some way. More and more news outlets are allowing their readers to weigh in on conversations (which I think in many cases leads to a decrease in credibility).

Is the Internet heading towards more of a consumer culture, like in the twentieth century where people produce less and consume more? 

What are the major barriers to more people becoming producers? Governments? Corporations? Lawyers? 

Our own lack of imagination?

Maybe it will take more people being more connected to the right nodes in their networks to lead by example. And maybe it will simply take time for the landscape to evolve like the way Jeff Utecht says email evolved.

###

Blog posts that inspired ...

Lindy Buckley - Better Than Blutack

Crawford Heiz - Connectivism and the Production of Consumers

Jeff Utecht - How Can It  Be March?

A Simple Plan

I am one of the teacher advisers for the school's student council. Our student council has students in grades 5-6 up through high school. A few years ago we experimented with having students in the grade 3-4 class join, but that lasted one year.

FreeHand ROSES by aungkarns

Every year we sell roses to the entire school community. The ordering process starts with a [paper] letter sent home with a [paper] order form. The students and staff then bring back the order forms and they go into either of the teacher advisers' boxes. Then the orders need to be tallied, sorted, and the money collected needs to be checked.

This year the letter to be sent home was sent out late. We were not going to make the flower shop's ordering deadline so we needed to estimate what people might order by looking at last year's order.

I picked the flowers up from the flower shop the evening before we were to pass them out. We counted them the following day and it turned out that the number of flowers we ordered was short despite having a surplus for the last few years. We were to we needed to get to the flower shop in the middle of the school day to pick up more flowers.

When I got back I was very relieved and felt that it was all over. Then I started to hear about orders not being filled and filled incorrectly. I ended up adjusting orders by taking flowers from teachers to replace the colors that were missing. We were still short on flowers, but many teachers were not concerned with getting their full orders.

There are many things I could have done differently to ensure success: getting the letter out on time, helping the high school students get organized before counting, and making sure the orders were double-checked before being sent out to name a few.

I was still surprised the high school students were not able to do the counting and sorting on their own. So maybe what I could have done differently starts in my classroom. Maybe I should be exposing my students to more situational, multistage problems like this where they have to use skills like tallying, sorting, adding, checking, and estimating. 

The solution starts much earlier - all the way back to first grade.