EDLD+5364+Week+4+Reflection

Week four of Teaching with Technology continued with informative videos, readings and discussion. Much of the video and reading material was about cooperative learning and assessment. Teachers who have been in the classroom for many years (as have I) frequently have difficulty letting go of the traditional model of teaching. I love the scenarios and examples of students with their heads together at a computer, highly engaged in an assignment, and the reality based exciting projects and problem-solving which assess students' knowledge of a particular subject. I certainly visualize the ideal classroom as being just like those. But when these ideas are presented as part of the larger framework of an ideal educational system, it is far too easy to tune them out as being overly idealistic.

Seymour Papert, in the Edutopia video, //Project-Based Learning: An Overview//, says that we must give up the idea of curriculum if we are to transform education. Rose and Meyer suggest that students should have choices, even in assessment: ..."in a digital environment, there is no reason why Kamla couldn't select a passage about sports for her reading comprehension assessment and Jamal, a passage about submarines, as long as both passages are of comparable difficulty." To a great degree, I agree with this. However, we don't teach in Edutopia, nor do we live and work in a Utopia. TAKS, and other standardized high-stakes tests are not going away in the immediate future. Nor, or jobs where we occasionally have to do something we don't particularly like. Our goal has to be to educate students, even when they don't like the subject matter. Project based and cooperative learning are great ways to do that. But we also must see that curriculum goals (which are tested) are met; and, we must teach students to transfer what they have learned in their project-based cooperative learning groups onto a scantron in a testing environment. That is our real world - whether we like it or not.

Edutopia.org (nd). Project-Based Learning: An Overview. Retrieved on March 16, 2011 from http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning-overview- video.

Rose, D., & Meyer, A. (2002). //Teaching every student in the digital age: Universal design for learning//. Chapter 7, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervisor and Curriculum Development. Retrieved from The Center of Applied Special Technology web site on March 16, 2011, from http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/chapter7_1.cfm.