SJS Teacher

What do you think of Friedman’s 10 flatteners?
I think there is truth in what he is saying and that the U.S. needs to rethink its position in terms of global perspectives if it still wants to be relevant.
What are the implications in education? How will the flattening affect education? Students? Teachers – the teaching career?
I think as teachers and educators we should be preparing our students for a world that is getting flatter and flatter everyday. We need to beef up those skills that we are losing to the new market economies. We should emphasize math and science as those are, according to Friedman, being chosen as careers by fewer and fewer Americans.
Among the 10 flatteners, what are the 3 flatteners you have experienced/sense happening around you/seen in action? Please elaborate.
#10: The Steroids – Who among us does not have or use a mobile phone (or two), iPods, PDAs, etc.?
#2: Netscape – Because of this, the ease at which information could be retrieved was made “flat” by allowing it to be accessible by anyone with a connection to the Internet.
#5: Outsourcing – The United States has subcontracted the most labor-intensive part of production and gave it to countries where labor is cheap. Actually, we don’t have to look far to experience outsourcing. Companies do this all the time to save money. We have businesses who outsource their maintenance services, payroll services, and the like because it saves them money in the long run.

Like I said in the voicethread: “Web 2.0 is something that makes learning truly STUDENT-centered, rather than TEACHER-centered. For me, anything that enables us to do this (we can call it Web x.y, it doesn’t really matter) should be an essential tool in the classroom. Thanks for setting up this class for us, Rolly!”

To be quite honest, I got late into the social networking game. I did not even become a member of one of the most famous, Facebook, until the beginning of this year. I guess I have a lot to learn about social networking.

As I browse around Classroom 2.0, I noticed that there are quite of few of my fellow high school science teachers out there — and their discussions and exchanges are something that I can benefit from. There was even a teacher who was also a graduate student asking for other teachers to answer some survey questionnaires for her thesis. I wish I knew about this when I was doing my thesis.

I think social networking such as Classroom 2.0 has a place in our educational system. What used to take plane rides so teachers can go to workshops so they can meet fellow teachers so they can exchange information and ideas now takes just the click of a mouse to happen. Welcome to the 21st century!

One of the more interesting things I found in my reader was this news that UC San Diego sent acceptance email to wrong list. As a high school teacher, I am aware that this is the time our seniors are biting their nails waiting for letters of acceptance (hopefully) from the colleges of their choice. I wonder what kind of email (and what apology letter) that university will send to those students…

Googledocs is something that I have been using for the past 3-4 years. We use it to edit professional documents (graduate school papers, WASC reports) and I have found it to be a really useful tool to use in a collaborative setting. One thing that googledocs could be of use the science classroom is to make group-made science fair reports. More often than not, the making of science fair reports is left to one of the members of a group, with little to no input from the others. With googledocs, everyone can contribute to its creation and can have a stake on the quality of the finished product.

YouTube is very familiar to me as it is one of the most popular web2.0 resource (at least for me). I have been an avid user since day 1 of its inception, finding videos in science to show in class. I even used it to show my guitar class of last year some popular songs and how to play them. What I haven’t done is upload some videos of mine to share. I actually wanted to upload some of the videos my Conceptual Physics class did some years ago but I thought that I needed the permission of the students’ parents before I could post them. I might need to find out about legal repercussions of this. I know our students’ parents signed a “press-release” thing but I am not sure if that extends to publications on the Internet.

I have known about podcasting for quite some time now and I know a couple of teachers from school who use it quite extensively. I think I can make use of podcasting quite well in my professional/personal development. I have already added a couple of interesting RSS-ready podcasts to my reader such as the NASA and Scientific American poscasts. I am not sure though how I can use it in the science classroom. Of course my students themselves could subscribe to podcasts but I need to see them actively make podcasts and not just passive receivers of them. I need to research for more possibilities for this.

Done!

Done!

As outlined in Thing 16, I took the tour of LibraryThing without joining as a member. I also tried looking for a couple of books by putting the title and author. It gave me the link to the names of the members who owned a copy of the book I was searching for. Again, although more used as a social networking, LibraryThing allows users to share interests and join discussions about their favorite books and stuff.

I see a lot of possibilities for LibraryThing with the BookClub in our school. The students in this organization could meet fellow students with similar book interests and have a “CafeYA”-ish online gathering on the Internet!