media centered » teaching

Showing my age.

erniec — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:55:55 +0000

As the coffee brews this morning I’m already thinking about enjoying my birthday cake this evening. My father-in-law and his fiancee have come down from Delaware with arm loads of great food, drink, and print materials. Print materials? Yes, print materials. One of the many reasons I love these folks is for their fondness of magazines, newspapers, and books. I also splurged by resubscribing to the the New York Times Sunday edition (because they are running a cheap offer). Here is where I show my age. I don’t think the sensation of walking out into a frost covered morning and heaving that blue bag full of great reporting into my arms will ever be replaced by web-based news content. As I unfurl the paper from it’s bag the headlines greet me. I glance over the front page items in their entirety. Then I do the shuffle. I organize all of the sections into the order I will read them. Off I go into reading the variety of information covered in these sections, magazines, and of course the book review. Ah, the book review! Well I could continue to gush about the pleasures of the printed news but my concern is just that, that I am enthusiastic about it. Have you asked the children and young adults you work or interact with what they think of the print news?

My guess is you get blank looks. That newspaper on the periodicals stand looks as foreign to them as many of the other resources in the library. Soon, through a combination of economics, technology, and user demographics, that physical newspaper is going to disappear. After 100 years of print publication the Christian Science Monitor recently ceased daily print production and migrated most of their news reporting to the web. They are the first major national newspaper to make this move but they will not be the last. When we are teaching about the news and biases, opinion, editorials, we have to start teaching about the differences between news sites, such as http://www.csmonitor.com/, and personal blogs etc. Part of that teaching will involve how to navigate these sites, subscribe to RSS feeds, search archives, and more. Teaching the parts of a print newspaper may serve your students for a few more years but it doesn’t relate much to their personal preferences or the future realities of news reporting.

How about these topics? Do they show our age?

how to read a clock face
how to write in cursive
how to use 3×5 notecards

Can you think of other things that we teach mostly because they are relevant to us as adults?

What inspires you?

erniec — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:12:31 +0000

One of the assignments for my year-long doctoral seminar is to discuss something that is inspiring to us professionally. I would like to know what inspires you as an educator, librarian – anyone really . Why do you do what you do? How did you arrive where you are today? At one of our teacher workdays in August the question “why do you teach?” was raised. One of my colleagues offered that he “loves the kids”. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to explore this topic in more detail. I wanted to hear more from him, and other teachers, about what inspires them to teach. Here is the abridged assignment if you wish to respond -

Inspirational works/events

It’s always exciting to read an inspirational article or attend an inspirational presentation. It may help you develop or understand a research question, make you think about something you thought you understood in a new way, serve as the basis for a line of research, model a particular teaching method or approach, drive you to demonstrate that the author/speaker is wrong, or be an example of excellent research.

What article or event has inspired you this year? Something you heard at a recent conference or a lecture on campus, something you have read in another class, something you heard via a Web broadcast, an article that is giving you ideas for your future work, or…

Select an inspirational work or event (it could be an article, a book chapter, a web site, a lecture, a video, or a conference presentation). Why do you find this work or event inspirational, and how is it helping you or will help you with your work?

Are you boring?

erniec — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:37:29 +0000

In a recent post on his blog Ideas and Thoughts David Shareski ponders a question – can teachers be entertaining and informative? He created this quadrant as a visual. Where do you place yourself? How would your students rate your teaching style? Do you believe that learning can be enjoyable? Is your preferred mode of learning the same mode your students would chose? Should our teaching styles evolve and change over time or remain static?

I’ve attended lectures by people who where incredibly informed and totally boring (please don’t read from the article you have written- I can do that!). How can our schools be both engaging and informative? I’m convinced that inquiry-based learning is one way to accomplish this goal. Meaningful, authentic learning begins with the questions we invite students to create not the questions we give to them. For a straight forward look at the inquiry based model visit this site hosted by the University of Illinois – http://www.inquiry.uiuc.edu/us/inquiry_page.php. Learning shouldn’t be a bitter pill we force students to take – it should be an exciting experience.

Summer planning

erniec — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:55:38 +0000

Summer offers a welcome break, a time to reflect and plan for the coming school year. I am busy working on a new elective for 2007-2008 – Digital Media . My hope is that students will apply these skills to subject area projects. Could this open new doors for collaboration with teachers?