Mrs. Raffetto’s Ruminations

Oh my goodness, I’ve been a naughty blogger. I can’t believe so much time has passed since my last blog. So many things have happened . . .

Graduate school – After a semester of student teaching, my Master’s thesis on visual literacy, and a last minute class on Autism Spectrum Disorders just so I could keep my financial aid, I graduated from the University of Mary Washington’s College of Graduate and Professional Studies with a Master of Arts in Education with a 4.0 and my license to teach grades 6-8 in Virginia with concentrations in History and English. Not only that, but because I will be applying for a California teaching license, I completed Stanford University’s CLAD/CTEL certificate program for teaching English Language Learners. Huzzah!

Cheer – Despite losing 1 this season for grades (my only guy), I finished the season with 19 and a first place championship with Spirit Unlimited. Despite some major drama the last week with two of my veteran cheerleaders, they were a really great bunch of kids who worked hard for me. I will miss them.

Family – As mentioned, we will be moving to California once school is out. We put o the move as long as we could so my oldest could graduate high school, which he did on June 13. Yes, my first born has graduated. Now the real challenge begins for all of us. With the economy as bad as it is, we haven’t been able to sell our house in Virginia. Add to that we haven’t been able to buy a house in California because most are short sales who do not look keenly on VA loans. Now interest rates are on the rise and that brings down the amount we can spend on a house. Thanks to the delightful economy, Bryon was not accepted to any universities because o cutbacks. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that he’ll at least be able to get into a community college. The economy has has hurt me because there are zero teaching jobs open to me. The thought of moving into this environment has me nervous but our family has been separated for too long (remember, my husband left for his new duty station in January ’08 and we stayed behind). Now he’s in Iraq, due back in the fall, and I need to move me and the boys and our 14 yr old dog across the country, find a house, set it up, and be a happy family by the time he gets back. Can I pull it of?

Wow, it’s been a while since I posted a blog. I’ve been a pretty busy girl so I thought I’d just post some random things about what I’ve been up to.

Movies – So far this summer I’ve seen Zohan, Get Smart, Hancock, and Wall-E. Zohan was a huge disappointment – great message about the need for Palestinians and Israelites to work together for a peaceful coexistence but dumb writing. I mean, I can generally deal with Adam Sandlar’s “fart humor,” but this was beyond dumb. I still like Sandlar, but I’ll never watch this movie again. Get Smart was much better. I remember my brother staying up late to watch the original way back when. I thoroughly love Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway so that helped. Storyline was a little predictable though. The addition of Bill Murray was just hysterical. I love that guy. Hancock was . . . interesting. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. Kind of a neat take on the superhero angle but . . . I don’t know. Something about it I just couldn’t put my finger on. Out of all, Wall-E has got everything beat – no question. Pixar is just unstoppable! An absolutely adorable movie and I loved every single minute of it, even the repetition of that annoying scene from Hello Dolly. It didn’t matter because Wall-E melted my heart.

Cheer – My team is up to 17 now but it will be interesting to see how many I keep as the season progresses. Cheer has such a stereotype and so many kids join thinking it will be just wearing cute uniforms and doing little chants. My world of cheer is nothing like that. It is a truly intense sport and not for the faint of heart. Our choreography starts Sunday so that’s when the real fun begins. Up until now, it has been just the basics. Now it’s time for hardcore.

School – One more week to go! I’m closing in on the craziest summer semester ever. I took FOUR classes and worked my butt off in all of them. I guess you could say that I am both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated - I want the A’s but I have to do it for myself.

Family – For the first time in my baby’s life, I will be away from my youngest for two weeks. He is visiting his grandparents and I am miserable. I just can’t stand having him away from me. Of course, he’s having a grand time but I’m still sad. My oldest is home but spends most of his free time with his girlfriend. The hubby is on the other side of the country so what’s a girl to do? Watch sad girly movies and study for her social studies Praxis. I watched Becoming Jane yesterday and bawled my eyes out. Lovely movie. <sigh>

Okay, now it’s time to get back to work on my final projects. That research paper is gonna kill me!

Web 2.0‘s chapter 9 talked about how in order for teachers to most effectively incorporate web 2.0 tools in their classrooms, schools would need to make some changes. Man, ain’t that the truth! Reading this book has made me realize all the great things we could do with our students using web 2.0 and that it is so much more than taking our kids on the Internet for research. But something that has always frustrated me when ever a great idea pops into my head is the lack of resources in the schools. For example, I know I want to have my students keep portfolios. Most recently, I fell in love with the idea of ePortfolios. But many of the teachers I know gave me a “good luck” look because they knew the schools don’t have enough computers to ensure that I will get them frequently enough so my kids can update their portfolios. And even though we can’t imagine any child who does not get online when they go home from school, the book confirmed that almost 40% of households in the U.S. still don’t have Internet access (Solomon & Schrum, 2007, p. 187).  So there is a good chance my great ideas will never come to full fruition because of the lack of resources in the school.

Another great point the book made is how schools absolutely need to consult with the teachers before purchasing new software programs. I can’t tell you how mnay times I’ve been in a school and seen the software the distrct has bought just lying on a shelf unopened! The book touched on this a quoted a teacher as saying the software just didn’t fit her students (Solomon & Schurm, 2007, p. 182).  That is exactly what I was told.  This sort of thing goes right back to what David Tyack and Larry Cuban said in their book, Tinkering Toward Utopia (1995), a reform of public education must start within the schools, mainly with the teachers, to produce a reform that works.  A full integration of web 2.0 into our classrooms is a necessary and vital reform that will never work unless the teachers come on board and the schools look to them to make the changes.

How great would it be if our students didn’t have to carry all those textbooks or if the schools didn’t have to spend all that money on them! And how wonderful would it be if teachers and students could access the school’s shared drive from home so those that did have Internet could continue to work on things at home! And how fabulous would it be if the federal government would pass one of those laws it so loves to make that would help get high speed Internet into those rural areas just like it did for the telephone! Web 2.0 is changing the world everyday and public education cannot drop the ball on our students.  With the dynamic web, we will never catch up if we don’t make it happen now.

Taking 4 summer classes can really bog me down. But in an interesting twist, 3 reading asssignments all interconnected for me today in a way I don’t think my teachers intended.

Chapter 6 of Web 2.0 focused on principals being the leaders ofr more technology use in their schools. The auhotrs suggested using blogs to communicate with parents and teachers because blogs, unlike web pages, are interactive and allow a conversation to happen. Excellent idea. I’ve already been sold to its use as a teacher. Also discussed was the use of more open source for software and operating systems on school computers. They are free and the mostly costly investment is time. Though time is precious, it is the one thing we can give to overcome continual budget cuts. But for either blogs or open source to become commonplace in the schools, the school leaders must buy into it and advocate it with their staff. Teachers can individually effectively use web 2.0 tools in their classroom, but the real benefits come when the principals believe in their use and integrate it throughout the whole school.

In an article for eSchool News, Robert Brumfield wrote of a new Virginia law which went into effect on July 1. Bascially, Virginia has ordered new mandates for schools to cover Internet safety in schools in a more comprehensive manner. The schools’ leaders, superintendents and principals, must go beyond the standard acceptable-use policies and integrate into their currciulum instruction on being safe on the Internet. Interesting except that every school I have ever been in in Virginia already teaches Internet safety at the beginning of the shcool year. What this article left me wondering is that are Virginia officials calling for more days spent on Internet safety or just that they do it?

The pulling-it-all-together moment came when I read the end of the article. Parry Aftab, a leading Internet safety expert had this to say,

“All schools already want to deal with these issues of internet security,” said Aftab. “I don’t think legislators should be telling educators what to do. I think educators know what to do when it comes to education…I think it would have been a better move to come up with an online resource for such a program,” she explained, “and if you’re going to mandate it, then you definitely need to fund it.”

Now this comes back to the book I just finished reading, Tinkering Toward Utopia, by David Tyack and Larry Cuban. State and Federal leaders can mandate all they want with their laws; but real change only happens when it starts inside the schools. And so if effective integration of web 2.0 tools into a school is going to happen, principals need to take lead on that. It all comes full circle.

References:

Brumfield, R. (2008). New VA law: tech web safety. eSchool News. Retrieved July 3, 2008, from http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=36946&page=1.

Solomon, G. & Schrum, L. (2007). Web 2.0. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

Tyack, D. & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering Toward Utopia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

I am scheduled to do my student teaching in the fall. I’ve contacted my mentor already to find out what kinds of things we will be doing and one of the books we’ll be reading is The Outsiders. I hadn’t read that in years so I Googled it and ran across this site http://bionicteaching.com/?p=130. It is a blog by a teacher who posted her plan to help her kids understand the 60s vocabulary in the book. Her thought was to have the kids do a vocab blog. Other teachers responded to her idea and some even posted other ideas that they use to, including wikis. I’ve already been emailing my mentor these great ideas hoping she will allow me some freedom to incorporate some of these great tools into her lesson plans!

So I am on a little vacation with the kids and we are visiting NYC and Philly. They are very quick trips but they are also things I very much wanted to do before we move back to the west coast (June ’09). Anyway, today it was the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The Statue was amazing and I sort of teared up as the boat passed the Statue and headed to Ellis Island. I could feel why she had become such a symbol of hopes and dreams. But what I found surprisingly fun and got me so pumped up was the Immigration Station. It wasn’t only that I adore old buildings and architecture, but the exhibits – whoa! It was just filled with primary documents such as photographs, diary entries, birth and death certificates, luggage! They had some of the written responses to the immigrants’ ”intelligence” tests. Then there was this room filled with all different types of graphs and maps. I came up with a slew of ideas on how to have my (God-willing) students make these graphs to make the charts 3-D, interactive, and so much more eye-catching and easy to remember. But that wasn’t the best part.

I was trying so hard to take pictures of the graphs and charts to recreate them in the classroom, but couldn’t make it work too well. So I asked at information on how I could get my hands on the nuts and bolt of doing such a thing and was given the name of the curator to call after the holiday to talk more about it. I was also given the name of the web master who sometimes posts actual photos of immigrants on the Park Service website so I can get my hands on those. But what I loved most is that they let me put my name on a list and they are going to send me a Teacher Treasure box filled with all kinds of things I could use in a lesson on immigration. How cool is that?! I know I am going to be sitting by my mailbox. I am so itching to get my hands on that. Yipee!

I recently worked as a para in a school which tried to put an emphasis on the incorporation of more technology into the curriculum. I say tried because their methods of achieving this goal involved a series of professional development days for faculty.  And as Fullan and Stiegelbauer pointed out in Web 2.0 (Solomon & Schrum, 2007), “Nothing has promised somuch and has been so frustratingly wasteful as the thousands of workshops and conferences that led to no significant change in practice when the teachers returned to their classrooms” (1991, p. 315). I was frustrated by the teachers who sat in class and learned how to create interaqctive polls, movies, and podcasts but then never had the students work with any of it. Argh! I am excited as a preservice teacher to learn of all the creative ways to use web 2.0 tools in my classroom and it is irksome to watch teachers in the field now just brush it off. I want to get in some where and shake things up!

I think the point brought up in the article, “The New Literacy Crisis: Immigrant Teaching Natives in the Digital Age” (Coffman et. al, 2007), that teachers need not shy away from technology just because the students may know more than them when it comes to usage is a valid point.  Prensky’s labeling of students as the “digital natives” and teachers as the “digital immigrants” is the absolute truth.  Teach educate students on a variety of content every day and expect those students to embrace the knowledge.  Then when they shut their classroom doors they conveniently leave technology at the doorstep is hypocritical.  As Coffman et. al stated, “The new reality is that our role as a teacher incorporates both teacher and learner.” 

So teachers, I challenge you – create a classroom blog, turn a class research project into a wikibook, and make students expand their usage of web 2.0 tools into lean mean critical thinking machines!

Coffman,T. et. al. (2003). The new literacy crisis: immigrant teaching natives in the digital age. VSTE Journal, 21, p. 110.

Can I just repeat how much I love this book, Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools (Solomon & Schrum, 2007)?! (I think I say that every time I read a chapter.)

Though much of what I read in chapter 4 seemed to be a repeat of the past couple of chapters – use blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc. to enhance learning and motivate students, the authors always manage to give a variety of authentic examples of teachers who are using these tools.  More than anything, I appreciate being told where I can go for things such as podcasts on Williamsburg or Ancient Greece. Having resources such as that at my fingers tips is invaluable. Doing a Google search for these kinds of ideas just would not work the same. Solomon and Schrum not only give me the resources, but informative examples of how teachers used them.  What makes me love them even more is their plethora of History resources. They do an excellent job of providing links and examples for other disciplines, but History seems to have a few extra. ;o)

In chapter 4, the authors also talked about a school in Lemon Grove, CA that has not only integrated technology into the curriculum, but have gone the extra mile to get the students connected at home. They even have a computer to student ratio of 1:2!! Super cool for me if I can get a job there (I’m moving to San Diego next summer!).

The Lemon Grove school description led me to thinking about digital literacies in other schools. It is one thing for me to teach students how to be informationally literate in today’s digital world, but I only have them for one year. For our students to truly obtain digital literacy, it must be a district-wide effort. All teachers, in all schools, should be utilizing Web 2.0 tools with the support of the principals and school boards. Then, not only could we be sure that our students would continue to build their digital literacies after they leave our classroom, but they would be learning in the early grades and continue through graduation. How much more prepared would our students be if they had 13 years of practice as opposed to only one? And if the whole district is on board, then they could provide continual training for teachers so they can keep up-to-date with all the latest technology. Now that’s the kind of school I not only want to teach in, but to have my own children attend.

So anybody who knows me knows I absolutely love Disney princesses. (In fact, I am one)

So anyway, I was searching for videos for my wiki project and came across one with all the princesses. When I opened it, I discovered they had all the voices, for the most recent princesses, come together and record a new song. I just had to share because it’s absolutely beautiful. And if you are a fan like me, you can recognize each of them and the phrases they each sing relates back to their movie. Love it!

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

So I’m still doing research for this big project in ITEC and I came cross this website:

http://www.bcps.org/offices/lis/

Not only does it have a great graphic for information literacy process model, but it also has links at the top of the lage which can take you to different lesson ideas for elementary, middle, and high school.

Then I found this other site that has a video on it for a school I would love to work at. It uses all kinds of information literacy learning models and is progessivism at his finest. I think they even say in the video that John Dewey would be proud.

 Check them both out!!