Help Educate Kids in Guatemala

El Hato School (Escuela El Hato) is a public school located in an 100% indiginous village. Although it is a public school most students are unable to afford the cost of attending. Earth Lodge is an organization accepting monetary donations to provide school supplies and food for these students. Please read Earth Lodge's blog to find more information on how you can help these kids at El Hato.

Your donations will help to provide:
- school supplies at the beginning of the school year and through out the year as donations are received
- a weekly supply of vegtables to supliment the students' diet

Thank you for taking the time to read this and your consideration of donating is greatly appreciated by this educator.

New week...

Monday: This week will I will give my first set of final exams: first to my shelter class and then to my TOEFL class. My shelter class exam will be a simple test of basic grammar, but with a short essay response to add a little something more to the exam. My TOEFL test will have students reading an academic passage and answering questions; responding in an essay to a question; and responding by speaking to a different question. These are all things that they will have to do on the actual TOEFL test and it's what we've been practicing for the last five weeks.

Thursday Night: I started this post on Monday morning and never got a chance to finish it. My exams on Wednesday went well. I began grading part of the test and they appear to have done just fine. One section of my exam was a speaking section - this is where I truly learned how well my students might do on their actual TOEFL exam. What they had to do was prepare notes in response to a question and then give a oral response to the question. I graded it on a scale of 1 to 5: I had no 1s and no 2s, a couple of 3s, mostly 4s, and about five 5s. I was pretty happy with the results, but some of my students still have a lot of work to do before they try to take the TOEFL exam. This is where I think my class website might help some of them out. On my website I have included my e-mail address so students can ask me questions and I have also listed useful websites for them to use for preparation. I hope that some of my students try to contact me in the future with questions or concerns about the TOEFL Test. It would mean a lot to me if I could help them in some way.

Next week is my final week with my other classes. With Quinto Secretariado I will be watching an English movie. With Cuarto Secretariado I will be practicing their spelling skills in preparation for their final exam. During the rest of my time at school I will be working on finishing my grading for Quinto Ciencias and for my other classes as well.

Well, I'll try to write again later this weekend or next week. Perhaps I'll be able to put up more of my activities/lesson plans.

Be careful about who is attacking teachers...

Please read:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/28-11

Or a few exerts:

"Test-based teacher evaluation systems have the potential to seriously damage the teaching profession. The National Academy of Sciences found 20 to 30 percent error rates in “value-added” ratings systems based on their own dubious premises. Teachers in the bottom group one year were often in the top group the next and vice versa. The same teachers measured by two different standardized tests produced completely inconsistent results. The basic assumptions of these testing systems are at odds with the way real schools actually work. Bending school practices to accommodate them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes to the willingness of teachers to serve high-needs populations and the collaborative professional culture that good schools depend on for success."

"It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. It took campaigns against child labor, crusades for public taxation, struggles against fear and discrimination directed at immigrants, historic movements for civil rights against legally sanctioned separate and unequal schooling, movements for equal rights and educational access for women, and in more recent decades sustained drives for the rights of special education students, gay and lesbian students, bilingual students, and Native American students. These campaigns are all unfinished and the gains they’ve made are uneven and fragile. But they have made public schools one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose.

But the system’s Achilles’ heel continues to be acute racial and class inequality, which in fact is the Achilles’ heel of the whole society."

We need to be careful about those who call for educational reform. Many are out for profit through privatization of schools, but we must stand up for equal access and equitable resources for all of our children. Free and fair access to public education should be the cornerstone of our society.

What frustrates me most when reading this article is that if we truly valued our kids future and their education then our country would have no debate over education reform. It would end at, "every student, every teacher, every school, will have the full support of every person in the country." If we truly wanted a healthy, successful country our schools should be funded well beyond their needs and our teachers shouldn't have to worry about being judged on merit based systems based on standardized testing that doesn't properly judge students achievement.

None-the-less, what can be taken out of this is that the US education system is at a crucial point...as I'm sure has been said many times before. What will come of this latest move for reform? Increased class sizes to increase market efficiency? If so you can count me out. I'll start my own school here in Guatemala with small class sizes and strong teacher to student connection. Because anyone whose taken an upper-level college class with 10 other students knows the value of small class sizes.

Peace,
LP

Environmental Health Video

Our video today is on a health education class which is creating videos on environmental health issues. Students are required to research an environmental issue and create a video presenting an argument regarding the issue. Students must focus on how to reach young people with their message. Technology used in this lesson include iMovie or another movie/video editor, digital cameras, and internet.

One strength of this lesson is the connection students are able to make to their lives through the choice of environmental issues. The teacher strongly encourages students to choose topics they care about a lot because of the length of the assignment. Another strength of this lesson is that the students are producing and editing their work with minimal teacher supervision.

Heart Rate Monitor Video

Today's video was about a class that used heart rate monitors to create graphs. The class first exercised for a few minutes (all at the same rate of activity) and then measured their heart rate. To create a comparison, the students allowed the heart rates to return to a resting rate and then measured their heart rate. The students also compiled their data together to create a comparison of girls' vs. boys' heart rates.

I think this lesson was good because the students had a personal connection to the data they were using for their graphs. This is much more useful that having them compare the heart rates of fictional characters from a text book. I also liked that this lesson connected at least two different types of learn intelligences - first, it used kinesthetic learning and then it used mathematical spatial learning.

Technology at College level vs. Technology at K-12 level

Video number one: Technology at College level

Video number two: Technology at K-12 level

Today we watched two videos which both examined how technology is used in education - the first video looked at the college level and the second video looked at Kindergarten through 12th grade.

Both videos have students giving statistical information on how technology impacts their educational experiences. Both videos represent the disconnect between students' capabilities with technology and their actual experience with technology in the classroom. Teachers are not utilizing technology to engage students. It could be argued that the methodologies and pedagogies of these teachers, although traditional, are successful and the use of additional or new technology is unnecessary. In my opinion, students need to have quality experiences with technology that demonstrates the educational capabilities of the internet and other technologies.

5/25/10

Today we watched a video on the impact of the internet on communication. This video demonstrated the complexities of html code writing and the possibilities for future communication.

The video offers an interesting argument about the current state of social interaction through the internet by making a few different statements about the "Machine." It says that the "Machine uses us" and that "We are the Machine." This implies that the internet juggernaut is both a controlling force (i.e. the infinite amount of information that is stored, transfered, viewed, copied, or created on the internet) and that we humans still can exert control over what we put into the system.

Microsoft Image Composer

Here is the link to the video for this observation: http://www.intime.uni.edu/video/045vahs/8/

In this video students are working with Microsoft Image Composer to create collages for different aspects of their school.

One of the strengths of this lesson is that the teacher models the activity for the students by demonstrating both past work and manipulates pictures for the class to observe in real-time. Another strength of this lesson is that students are interacting with their school community by creating collages of their fellow students.

This lesson is quite strong and it is difficult to determine what its weaknesses are. One thing that would make this lesson better is if there was a camera available for every student. If every student had a camera available to them each student could create a collage from their own pictures.

Missouri's Seasons Video

Here is the link for the video I watched for this observation: http://www.intime.uni.edu/video/031moue/8/default.htm

The objective of this lesson is for students to earn about the weather and climate of Missouri. This objective was met by having students listen to Vivaldi's "Four Season" and respond by listing words that describe each season.

The strengths of this lesson were: the use of technology to connect the students to different regions of their locality and the use of multiple intelligences for learning material (music, numerical, intrapersonal).

One weakness of this lesson was that the teacher did the internet research for the students. At first I thought this was because there weren't enough computers available for all the students, but it appears that the students were able to work on computers in pairs to create spreadsheets. I think the teacher could have had these students work in pairs to do both the research and the spreadsheets.

The students use technology by researching the temperatures of five cities in Missouri during the different seasons by using the internet. The students then used Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to calculate the average temperature for each of the cities during each of the seasons.

Video ---- 5-19-10

Here is the link to the video I used for this observation: http://www.intime.uni.edu/video/036iahs/5/default.htm

Hungerford's lesson has students working with a computer program that simulates the management of a department store. The students observe how price shifts affect supply and demand; they also use a website creator to develop a corporate website for their business to report on profits and sales. I think the strengths of this lesson are the real world applications of this software - many companies use similar products to plan their sales; also students see examples of how price changes can affect their lives through products they might buy. One weakness of this lesson is that the teacher doesn't build off student examples very well. For example, one student gave an example of her place of employment and how they lacked a sufficient number of clams to meet the demand. In stead of responding to this student's example the teacher continued to ask questions about products the students might buy.

One thing I would add to this lesson plan would would be to have students visit a local business and do one of two things: first, interview the owner and ask them questions about why and when they change prices; second, they could record prices of products they buy over the course of one or two weeks - noting any changes in price by creating a graph.

Technology in the Classroom

Here is a link to the video I watched for this observation: http://www.intime.uni.edu/video/016moms/8/

Today in our class we observed technology being used in a classroom by watching a video of students creating a news program for their school. The students are sixth graders from a middle school of third through sixth grade.

The most authentic thing about this experience was that the students were creating the news broadcast themselves with very little involvement by teachers. The students were responsible for organizing the interviews, gathering information about weather or birthdays, they created the PowerPoint displays, videotaped the broadcast, and edited the video. This experience is a demonstration of student-centered learning in which students create knowledge

Specific technologies used by the students include: PowerPoint Presentation, digital photography, digital video, video editing software, Microsoft Word Processing, and Internet research.