The Last Lecture

I know I'm blogging a lot tonight, but I have a lot on my mind and a lot to catch up on. Anyway I purchased Randy Pausch's book The Last Lecture a few days ago. I finally began reading it last night. It is an excellent book so far and I would recommend picking up a copy and reading it. Thank you Susan for bringing his last lecture up in you blog. Prior to that I had never heard about him. He has many good points for living life in his lecture which also continue into his book. Since I had heard about him and watched his lecture I had passed the information on to others that I thought would be interested. They have all come back to me with the response of "WOW! It is unbelievable how a guy that is dying has such a great outlook on life." After I am done with my copy of the book I have 4 or 5 people borrowing it to read for themselves. I just figured I would pass on the fact that his book is proving to be as good as his lecture.

Just on another thought, although Randy wrote his lecture for just three people he has impacted so many more lives. I am included in those who were impacted by this lecture. I am one to take life very seriously, part of which comes from my job. I have been an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) riding emergency calls at least 3 to 4 days a week for the last 5 years, since I was 16 years old. Sometimes after a tough day at work it hits me hard and and I take things very seriously. After watching Randy's lecture I began to give that very serious aspect of my life some thought. In the end I came to the conclusion that no matter what happens at work leave it at work, and go out and live life to the fullest. Don't over analyze situations, especially the ones you have no control over it is not worth wasting that very valuable time you have in life.

Excellent After School Program

The attached website is for an after school program that has really been effecting the students involved in the middle school I am doing my Junior Field Experience. Every time I turn around I hear students and teachers talking about how great the Goodworx Program is and how it is really helping students. 

So here is the website for the program.

http://www.goodworxfoundation.com/

Check it out and see what you think.

Flocabulary

After viewing the Flocabulary website I had very mixed feelings on it. Some part of me thought that maybe it could be a useful tool for influencing a few students that are really into music, but not really into what they are learning. On the other hand I felt as though it is not a great tool to use in the classroom because to me it is just not something that seems effective. Being that I have mixed feelings on this I would be willing to try it once or twice in the classroom as an introduction or a way to close out a unit. It could never hurt to try something new. What is the worst that can happen? It doesn't work and you try something else for next time.

Inspiring Someone When Least Expected

This post is inspired by an email I received from a friend of mine in response to an email I sent her. A while back I was speaking with a friend and we were talking about education and student. This conversation came up because some of the students in my junior field class are involved the mentoring, tutoring and life skills training after school program in which she is director of operations. Any way I wound up sending her an email that included a few links to different websites, one of which was my blog. After reading part of my blog and watching the attached video (the post about creativity) it inspired her to write an email to her boss informing him that she wants to change their program to inspire students to be more creative and become more motivated. She later sent me an email telling what happened after reading my blog and how I inspired her just by giving information and my thoughts. 

What I'm trying to say by telling you the story above is do not ever think that anything you are doing is meaningless because you never know when it could have an impact on someone else's life. This is something I will carry with me into the classroom. I never really thought that anything I wrote in this blog would have a great enough effect to provoke change in a program.

MyAccess

This is kind of a delayed response, but anyway here it goes. MyAccess is a program that was introduced to our class by Dr. Luongo. The best way to describe this program is that it's a program designed to give students instant feedback and a score for their writing. It also has many other features to help improve students' writing. These other features include word banks, a dictionary, and a thesaurus among other things. I really found MyAccess to be an extremely useful tool. I wished that I had this when I was a student. It definitely prepares students to be better writers. This is especially useful in the grades that are preparing for tests such as the HSPA, GEPA, or ESPA. I got into a discussion about this program with the teacher I am working with for my junior field experience. She informed me that the district had a trial version of the program but no one had any kind of training on how to use it. That is terrible, having such a wonderful program available, but not being able to use it. I showed her some of the basics to her questions but there were still things I didn't know. Dr. Luongo gave me information to pass on to my cooperating teacher to get the district trained. This is an excellent program and if given the chance as an educator learn it and use it. This should apply to any useful learning tool, don't let them go to waste.

Standardized Testing

After our discussion on standardized testing on Friday, I did some research and spoke with a teacher that I know did a large study on students and the GEPA. Unfortunately she is in the process of having her study published so I can not post it on here for everyone to read, but I'll sum it up for you. Through reading her study based on 500 eighth graders preparing to take last year's GEPA. The test is generally set up in a matter that makes students focus on the not so important things. This sets students up to fail. The test is also written for higher level students.

The setup of the reading section of the test was put into the study. This teacher had each of the 500 students read the same article, but half of the class was to answer the multiple choice first while the other half the group was to answer the open ended questions first. Then a month or so later she had that same group of students read the same article again. This time she had the groups switch what they did first. This was done multiple time with multiple different reading passages throughout the year. In 77% of the cases the students did better if they read the passage, completed the open ended questions, and answered the multiple choice questions last. It was later determined that this is the best strategy for taking the test because once a student writes the answers to the open ended question, even if they are short on time they could still guess on the multiple choice and possibly get a few right. This definitely beats doing the multiple choice first and running low on time causing the student to either leave and open ended question blank or to get and inadequate answer.

Granted this is just one study on the way students can take this portion of the test and every students is different, but the numbers and logic behind this study seem like they have discovered a good idea.

Keeping Creativity in Schools

I want everyone to watch this video. I was searching for ideas to blog about late last night when I came across this video. Ken Robinson is discussing the topic of whether or not schools kill students creativity. I agree with many of his points. The biggest thing that I take from this video is rather then writing off the student who can't sit still or pay attention as a failure, embrace those qualities and they will be more successful. Those students may only be bored because the what they are learning is just suppressing their creativity. As Mr. Robinson put it creativity is taking a chance at being wrong. Children do this all the time and are very creative, but over time that creativity is lost and the fear of being wrong takes its place. Just take a look at this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY