The main purpose of this blog is to fill my Educ 504 Teaching with Technology requirement. However, I have been interested in the idea of blogging ever since my Dad told me I should start one about two years ago. This class has finally "jump-started" my blogging career. (Sorry Dad!)


Monday, July 16, 2012

Second Class, Second Task

When you were growing up, did your parents ever give you advice based on their past experiences? Of course you have! (Honestly, who hasn’t offered up some kind of advice where they get to talk about themselves?) And when your parents thought you were listening intently and taking their well-earned words to heart… you weren’t, were you? Of course not! They are older, and they don’t know about everything that’s going on in your life, at that very moment. So why should you care?

Well, surprise, surprise – they were right, weren’t they? (Even now I bet you can hear, “I told you so,” in your mother’s voice.) Hopefully by now you understand the reason I have included my general anecdote on advice…

For one reason or another, the role of the librarian has been highly overlooked in the past, even though they are highly knowledgeable in various areas of expertise. Specifically, resources. Julie was our librarian, and she was amazing. She gave us multiple “student friendly” websites and applications we were able to incorporate into our lesson plan. Without her input I highly doubt we would have been able to find these “funds of knowledge” (from the Moll & Gonzalez reading for Educ 402), or it would have taken a very long time to find them. Based on her past experiences, such as co-teaching with subject-specific educators and teaching for many years on her own, she successfully facilitated our cohesive lesson plan. We even made a wiki for anyone to view our amazingness.

Wiki Page

Maybe it’s because we are older, or maybe we are just that awesome, but we really enjoyed any and all input from our assigned librarian. Her advice on the process of creating effective lesson plans and the technological resources available, was much better than reading it in a book. Unlike our course readings/texts, we were actually able to “talk to the text” directly with the “author” of a singular personal example, affording us a better comprehension through the creation of a collaborative lesson.

I felt like I was in the Scarlett students’ shoes, being offered an “educational opportunity,” (from the Alexander article in Educ 695), where I wouldn’t have been able to find such an opportunity to interact with such a wealth of knowledge on my own.

(P.S. it was cool to make a podcast.)

4 comments:

  1. Meesh, I almost started out my own post with, "Mother knows best." "Because I said so." Etc. I love that you actually did it. It really does come down to that, on a fundamental level. Connecting us to the position of our students is really effective, I think.

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  2. Again, your writing style is very engaging. I think it's interesting how you focused on the role of the librarian and how you could relate that to your life experiences regarding taking advice from your mother. How did the librarian help you develop your ideas from your own, personal lesson plan on the soda ban? And how did she facilitate your group in consolidating all the different lesson plan ideas into a single, coherent lesson plan? And in the end, what did you guys come up with? How do you think the collaborated plan compares to your own plan? One thing I found from this experience was that the lesson we developed as a group went into much greater depth and achieved more learning goals than the lesson I came up with on my own. I think there is a lot of value in collaborating on lessons with a group, and I agree with you that librarians may be tremendous resources as we develop our lessons.

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  3. You are so thorough. I think it's really cool that you incorporate readings from our other classes into your blogs. It really gives them a cohesive feeling. I too really appreciated the advice the librarians were able to give us. Even thought the woman who was helping my group wasn't actually a foreign language specialist, she was still very knowledgable about teaching practices and gave us a lot of outside resources we could use to help further our lesson plans. I think the difference between us paying attention to our parents advice versus the librarians' is that we are actually asking for theirs. We're paying for it. I ask my parents for advice now, but I can tell I didn't when I was young, and even now I don't always listen.

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  4. Why is it I equate librarians with mothers too? Weird right? The pop culture stereotype of librarians consists of prim and proper disciplinarians but, from what I've seen this summer, they're pretty hip and sophisticated. Whodathunk? Just goes to show that you can't believe everything you see in the movies. The shushing schoolmarm no longer applies in 21st century library science. Our librarian was invaluable as well. It was to be expected since none of us had ever written a lesson plan before. Being the tech-monkey that I am, I can see collaborating with the librarian at school. I think it's their job to stay current on not only books, periodicals, and magazines, but also technology. Sounds like a good match to me.

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