Tuesday 11/03

1. Yes, I am still a bear. The bear is considering having a ships porthole installed in current location of navel.

2. What did I learn this week? I found out that my new cell service does not work as well as it should have from Elk Camp. In past years, my nextel service was non-existent while my father-in-law/hunting partner had excellent service with verizon. This was one of the driving factors when I switched in September. This year neither his nor my cell phone worked consistently in the same location where his had worked just fine the last three years. He had to call home using the onstar on his truck. It is frustrating when you choose a technology only to find out that it will not do what it once did. I am sure there are contributing factors that could be explained to me by customer service, but none of these will change what happened.

I did not learn anything "in class" as I was not there. I was coaching one of the most exciting games I have had in a while. We were 2-6 going in and needed to win to get the play in game tonight for an oportunity to play on Saturday. Last year, Sultan beat us on a last second field goal. This year, we jumped out to a 21-7 lead, only to watch it vanish in the fourth quarter to a 22-21 deficit. We rallied with 2 minutes left to kick a 30 yard field goal to win the game. It was great to see our players fight through the frustrations and come out on top. Now we have to play tonight.

3. I have read and re-read "From dialogue to monologue and back: Middle spaces in computer-mediated learning" and pondered this with its relation to adolescent development. It seems that technology is viewed as this "rising tide, that will lift all boats" savior that will "engage" more students. What I question about this is did the technology in the setting described actually change the performance of the class as a whole or was the grading performance just as it normally would be? If you were to do the same assignment without the speakeasy or sensemaker tools, would the students have fared proportionately. I understand the use of the tools and what they were aiming for, but the question should be, "did it engage more students?" Would Jordan and Ann have delivered a similar report had the tools not been available to them? My hunch is that Connor and Tom would have delivered above average work either way. The technology is great if one is open to using it and one is able to correctly assimilate the information that becomes available from it. Did Jordan and Ann not understand how to use the tools effectively or were they choosing to "not use" the tools?

4. In the Tel's labs that we looked at a couple weeks ago, there was a dialogue to monologue and back pattern. I did like the way that it was set up as you went through the lab, offering catch up points for everyone involved instead of one group being finished with everything and other groups lagging behind. There will still be some of this, but it keeps everyone moving at the same speed. This is great for moderating classroom behavior but it might make things slow for students who are ahead of the game.

What I thought of adding to the activity described in the article by Enyedy and Hoadley was more options of using the concepts of thermal energy, insulation, specific heat, and heat flow by offering more than one way to use it. This activity was constricted by the it only being about a house in a desert. This concept alone may have driven students away from it by making most have to live in an environment that they may not have preferred. The physics concepts involved all behave the same way, but by giving students options of where to live they might take more ownership in it. How can these concepts be applied to the environment that I want to live in rather than everyone applying them to the same situation.

If the goal is to get as many students to understand these concepts then allowing them to study these concepts in regards to something that interests them will engage more of the students. If we need to find the best "desert house" then they all have to study desert houses whether they like it or not.