He kept forgetting when he had a music lesson; like many schools, my students leave their core classes on a rotational basis, so as to not miss the same class all the time. This meant that he needed his instrument on different days, which he inevitably forgot.
10 comments:
This article was great. I didn't learn any new organizational skills, but I really appreciate teachers learning to the needs. I think that it is so important to familiarize yourself with the people you work with and try to understand their world. For a teacher and student, the teachers that teach to the students world are the most successful. For this teacher to find a way to help a student that was actually successful and integrated something he understood, technology. I think that sometimes technology is used just to integrate technology, when really it is more simple to not use technology to have the same objective met. In this case it was used well. I think that applying this idea to bigger professional projects is a good idea, not just the use of google calendar. Sometimes I worry how attached to my google calendar I am, because should it vanish, my life would fall apart. I do use it more as just a logging calendar and not for the reminders, so it is just replacing paper and pencil.
This is a relatively obvious article, but still a useful one. As a 21st century student myself, I often find myself marveling at the ease of getting things done and wonder about how certain things were done in a time before computers. Especially in production management classes which are often centered around spreadsheets and documents that are computer generated and rely on formulas built into programs, it's interesting to think of how difficult these tasks would have been before with just pencils and rulers. The first topic of the article, integrating technology, starts to deal with this, but doesn't really go in depth into all the options at our fingertips, instead opting just to saw how cool computers are, which aren't super efficient. I'm not necessarily sure a due date range is also a good tool to think of specifically for students, as a range of dates aren't as efficient as a single date that is a hard, fast deadline. Interdependence is an interesting idea regardless of technology and something that everyone would do well to heed. Overall, there are ups and downs to technology, and knowing how to wield it to your advantage is key to succeeding in any field. Let's just hope the computers don't rise up or anything.
I completely agree with Annie, I didn't learn any new skills but it makes me really happy to know that there are people in the world who understand what it's like to not be organized. I went to a very small magnet middle school who's focus was on students doing work that they were interested in on their own time, obviously within the parameters of a public school curriculum. We were allowed to choose what work we did in some instances, and we were given time during the day to work on homework, but we were also given a lot of work. The idea was that if you presented students with a time management challenge, they would use the class time to get ahead or talk to a teacher and in turn start developing time management skills. There were instances that 12 year old me felt like those few hours during the week were a waste of my time (I had soccer and theater and a social life, ugh) and I didn't understand it then but it was the jump start for my ability, and the ability of most CMU students, to stay organized and on top of their tasks, and it's because we were independent. We were also all given our own "school laptops" that we used during school all the time, so basically I am thinking those weirdos in NJ that started a school with 40 kids were a lot smarter than I gave them credit for. I think that it's important to teach kids how to manage their own time and be accountable for their own decisions at an early age, it helped me and I'm glad more children are learning in the same way.
I don’t think I would survive without the organization and scheduling apps I am able to harness. Notes, keeps my thoughts and ideas organized, MyHomework makes sure I always know what and when stuff is due, WunderList keeps my other to-dos lined up and my calendar (combination if ICal and Google Calendar makes sure I know when and where I have to be somewhere. I am getting better at remembering when and where to put all the different things I have to do so I can keep myself organized because what is the point of an extremely organized system if you just throw everything on the floor. I think it is important to know how to organize yourself without bells and whistles that come with technology, but I also think it is important to use what you have so I always use as much organizing technology as possible because it works. If the internet crashes forever then I will need to do some thinking but for now, we have the technology and we should all be using everything we can.
I never thought that the use of google calendar would be used for middle schoolers. I have barely just started using google calendar and to think that kids half my age are using it, probably better than me, for their everyday life is amazing. Part of me feels that it might be too soon for them to use it because you don’t want them getting attached to that method because sometimes google calendar may not be available. People need to depend on their own memory and organization to move through life. If we keep depending on technology sooner or later it will take over our lives and then “control” us. I mean even in today’s society we are dependent on cell phones and being able to connect with people all the time. And it is helpful in emergencies and being far away from family but then we loose the connection we have with others when glue our faces to our phone screens. So is google calendar the best for middle school kids learning how to balance a new schedule or is it too much at an early age?
At the high school I went to, we all got school issued MacBooks. We had these from a state grant, and they were to be treated as our "textbooks." The laptops came in handy for our classwork, but they were also great distractions. Our school made it so that majority of our work was on our computers - readings, writing, watching videos, etc. I found that the more time we spent on our laptops, the more opportunities there were to be distracted. Eventually the IT department of the school had to create a filter for our server so that we could not access certain websites - facebook, etc. To me, my laptop was a distraction more than it was an asset to my learning. This article presents technology as an asset to learning. It presents it as an asset to organization. I wonder if my school had instilled tech organization practices like google calendar alerts, etc, if I would have viewed my laptop more so as an asset.
I appreciated the authors position on middle schoolers. They had a lot of respect for students, something I've found very rare up until I came to CMU. The fact that she recognized that collected papers are usually not done as soon as they are collected and some times sit forever. The fact that she appreciated that students balance a multitude of projects not just school. Using technology to make her students lives easier is devotion that is hard to come by. Its not just integrating technology in the classroom that is important, it teachers like her who actually go the extra mile to integrate thats important.
While reading this article, I started thinking about how, as far as I can remember, time management and organization isn’t really taught in school, or at least I never formally learned it in school, other than one discussion about writing assignments in our planners. Students get in trouble for forgetting things, but are never taught how to organize their time and keep track of everything they have to do. I really like that Chandler is thinking about what these students actually need and trying to come up with a system that helps them. Things like the rolling deadlines give them the opportunity to look at their schedules and figure out when it makes sense to do their work. Also, by using technology in ways to help her students manage their time, Chandler is teaching them to use those same tools on their own as they get older. I hope the types of methods Chandler is using become more common among elementary and middle school teachers.
I think it's great that this teacher is willing to include technology in the classroom like this. However I hope that they continue to allow other methods, including pencil and paper methods, to be used. Often times in middle and high school, the teacher can get stuck with their way of organization and make students use it, regardless of if it works for them. I have seen teachers get mad because the student is using their own system in conjunction with or in addition to the teachers system. Though we do need to learn and try other people's organizational systems to see it they work for us, its unproductive for both the teachers and students, for students to use systems that don’t work for them. I think that teachers need to be open to students organizational strategy, especially if they don’t correspond with the teachers views. Who knows, the next student that needs an organizational strategy might need one that a student came up with rather than the teacher.
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