Final Project Narrative, Pecha Kucha, and Deliverable

 

Narrative

Pecha Kucha

The three deliverables I was focusing on in the beginning are

- Connecting with parents and students through the Remind App, which I already have set up and ready to go. 

- Class App, which is currently functional with a few aspects to be added once I have more information.

Google Slide of my Class App

Class App in presentation mode to use as app

- Interactive home newsletter.

    This is the part that I am currently still working on. My summer to do list is as follows

• research and decide on the delivery method, Google Sites?, Weebly? Google Slides?
• finish setting up calendar
• go through each unit and complete the following
• overview of unit
• vocabulary
• videos explaining material
• example problems
• practice problems

I am looking forward to finishing this last part this summer and implementing it this fall!

"Connected, but alone?"

 Prompt: How do you feel about the issues Turkle raises in her article and TED  Talk? Did the pandemic change the way you feel about yourself (personally and professionally) in relation to technology?

I started with Sherry Turkle's TED Talk "Connected, but alone?". She makes the argument that technology is taking us places we don't want to go and that the devices that we carry around with us "don't only change what we do, they change who we are"(2:42). I don't necessarily agree with this, but maybe that is because I am looking at it through the lens of current day instead of when this TED Talk came out 11 years ago. I don't think that it changes who were are as people just more about how we interact with the world.

A point that she made that I agreed with were that people are being together while not being together. They are physically in the same room but mentally in their technology. You can see this at school when kids are waiting to go in standing in a circle while all on their phones or when you watch a movie with friends and someone inevitably ends up on their phone.

I also agree that having your interactions online gives you control over certain aspects of the interaction. You can control how long the conversation is and your reaction because of the wait time being virtual allows.

I am glad I watched the TED Talk first because it was interesting to see how her point of view, though still connected, made a slight shift in understanding the importance of technology in our current world.

The second piece by Sherry Turkle was the article The Pandemic Made Us Strangers to Ourselves. The first quote that stuck out to me was "that our phones offered so many ways to connect but inhibited deep bonds of love and friendship". The first time I read that I found myself getting a little defensive, especially having met great friends (and even my husband) online. But then I wondered if she was talking about the role of technology in fostering those relationships online, or the barrier it could create between people when physically together and I think further in her article she makes the argument for both being true. She wrote about not being able to foster a relationship with people online "I couldn't make eye contact with my colleagues or students. The closest I could come was starting into the green light on the top of my laptop screen, which gives the other person the illusion that you are looking into their eyes." But then also talked about how people choose to go on their phones to act as barriers to not feel vulnerable and that "vulnerability is the first step towards intimacy".

I think that what it comes down to is that technology CAN change how you interact with the world, both good and bad. But I would also say that it does not change who you are as a person, we just need to use it in the right way.  I think that the pandemic allowed me to see technology as more of a tool to be used in order to achieve certain tasks; professionally - teaching using online platforms, personally - using apps to achieve certain tasks likes all of my lists in the notes app.  While technology was our main, and sometimes only form of communication during the pandemic, I have found I have already started relying less on technology to maintain personal relationships post COVID. Professionally, it opened my eyes to the need of more communication tools with both students and parents. This is something I am still working on.

"Seventeen, Self-Image, and Stereotypes"

Being a middle school teacher I find that a lot of my students struggle with self-image. Because of this,  I was drawn to the chapter called "Seventeen, Self-Image, and Stereotypes" in the textbook "Rethinking Popular Culture and Media".  
Not only was the information useful to bring to the classroom but the points served as a good reminder to myself too and echoed some of the ideas discussed during class.

This chapter is written by Bakari Chavanu, a former high school English teacher who also had a class in popular culture and media. It describes how he taught a unit on advertising and its effects on the students in the class.

Students are walking advertisements and consumers of media. "They will have seen 350,000 television commercials by the age of 17" (p 22). They are more influenced by popular culture/media than the articles, books, and textbooks we often use to teach them in our classrooms.  Media literacy is important and a great way for students/people to becoming critically literate and critical consumers.  Companies do not want people to think critically about their advertisement in fear of losing consumers of their product.  These ads are obviously still working though or they wouldn't be spending the money they do on making them.

To start the unit he had students made satirical skits using the resource "What's Wrong with Advertising?" which is a fantastic list of things that advertising does in order to convey certain values or ideas that push a narrowed point of view often aligned with S.C.W.A.A.M.P. from earlier in our class. You can see this resource on page 25 of "Rethinking Popular Culture and Media". These values and ideas often perpetuate stereotypes and negatively impact peoples self-image.

Students critiqued commercials by dissecting how they were constructed, analyzed the messages they conveyed, and explored techniques companies use when creating their commercials to help sell their products, similar to the lesson shared with our class on Friday by Brittany Ahnrud.  Students also used magazines to look at advertisements and found it often challenging to differentiate them from the articles themselves.

While many students were reluctant to admit that advertising effects them and their decisions as consumers, "This assignment led one student to do a class reading from her journal about her statistical analysis, which showed that Seventeen lacked the racial diversity found in Vibe, another popular teen magazine." (p 27). Even if the lesson only reaches a few, it is successful. 

Pear Deck Tutorial

 I chose to play around with the digital tool Pear Deck.  I have seen a couple of coworkers use this in their classroom but never really explored it myself. It is a platform that helps make digital lessons interactive. It integrates with Google Classroom and allows you to modify lessons you may already have in Google Slides. Already having some lessons created in Google Slides I thought this tool would be a good one to explore.

Pear Deck Tutorial

Teacher vs. Learning Facilitator

 In Sugata Mitra's TED Talk, "Build a School in the Cloud" he starts by talking about how 300 years ago the British Empire "created a global computer made up of people". A bureaucratic administrative machine in which all people were the "parts" and needed to be identical. They only needed to be able to have good handwriting, be able to read, and must be able to do the four basic math operations in their head.  Schools were designed to create these people and unfortunately this same system is still around today except this is not what is needed for the jobs that are currently in our community or the jobs in our future.

Sugata Mitra started an experiment to find out what children would learn by providing technology with zero instruction. "A group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West. I'd seen it happen over and over and over again." (7:14). Left completely alone, students went from a score of 0 to a score of 30.  Using an approach called "method of the grandmother" in which someone looked over the students shoulder and asked questions or said comments such as "when I was your age, I could have never done that", students reached a score of 50, which matched those of students being taught by a certified teacher.

He expresses that encouragement seems to be the key in kids learning any content, even topics that are deemed to be for those 10 years older than them.  One thing that he said that really stood out to me was "It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen" (16:12).  It helped reinforce my thoughts that teachers need to not focus on teaching students WHAT to think but HOW to think. Being a learning facilitator would be more beneficial than that of a "traditional teacher" (one that just lectures and then gives classwork and tests). What I am struggling with though is finding a way to become more of a facilitator when we have a society so ingrained in the traditional school way of thinking, students who lack the intrinsic motivation, and a current system that does not grant teachers the ability to stray from the curriculum given in fear of losing their jobs for "not meeting contractual obligations".

Sugata Mitra's wish to build a school in the clouds "to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world tap into their wonder and their ability to work together" (19:21) connects with Ken Robinsons 3 principles that he says is crucial for the human mind to flourish; "diversity (as a strength to embrace) vs conformity, curiosity (as the engine of achievement) vs compliance, and creativity (to allow flexibility and thinking outside the box) vs standardization.

The teaching profession is far from perfect but for now, I will keep educating myself and making small changes in my classroom to create a better environment to help foster curiosity and creativity for my students. 

Podcasts...a New Way of Sparking Discussion

 The 1619 Project, Episode 4: How the Bad Blood Started is a podcast focusing on the racial health disparities plaguing the United States since the end of slavery. This podcast is a mixed set up of a dialogue and storytelling. It captures the listener first with someone sharing their story of how the lack adequate health care SEVERELY negatively affected a very close family member.

Once this story is shared this speaker then goes on to have a conversation/tell a story with another individual about the history of the health disparities focusing around one woman's journey of becoming a doctor and helping her community. They use archived recordings and background music to help evoke emotion from the listener.

Being an eighth grade math teacher I struggle to find a way in which I would be able to use this form of media to help me teach my curriculum though I have seen a podcast being utilized by the English teacher on my team. For this particular unit the students were listening to the Serial Podcast that focused around the murder of a high-school senior, Hae Min Lee, and the arrest of Adnan Syed for the crime.  For the lesson they had to become investigators themselves, take a stance on whether or not Syed was guilty, and back it up with evidence from the podcast. The level of engagement in this unit was ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE. Conversations that started in her class spille
d over into the hallways and my class after, so much so that I decided to listen to the podcast to stop the fighting help facilitate the sometimes heated discussions when it was obvious they weren't able to focus on anything else. Students were going home and listening to the episodes before they were assigned and writing letters to people involved to share their thoughts (all outside of assignments).  Years after, former students still emailed her when more information came out about the case. This past school year the excitement around the assignment kinda fizzled because of additional information that came out but she is actively looking for another podcast.

I think that podcasts can be a great educational tool to get students interested, engaged, and thinking critically/problem solving. I am still unsure how I would use it in my math class but I think creating an SEL lesson with my advisory would be a good place to start.

"Drinking the Disney Kool-aid?"

 What is your relationship to Disney culture? How does Christensen validate or challenge your views?

As a female child born in 1990 I would imagine it to be an almost impossible task not to have Disney influence any part of my childhood.  In talking with my parents, my mom specifically remembers paying $50 for The Little Mermaid right before I was born because of The Disney Vault.

I remember dressing up for halloween as a princess and almost breaking an ankle on those awful plastic heels with the clear jelly strap over the top of your foot. (Currently looking for a picture of me in said halloween costume and I will update if I find it but a picture of the shoes like those I'm referring to below for now)

While the Disney brand specific merchandise didn't come out until after I was out of my princess phase, Disney does still make appearances in my life even now as an adult and I am sure will continue to as my kids grow.

- having a subscription to Disney+

- watching Marvel movies in theaters

- dressing up as characters for halloween at school (Inside Out, Halloween 2019)

While I have known of "the secret education" of Disney for awhile, it admittedly stopped at very surface level issues like "women needing a man to save them".  Christensen does push my thinking on how deep and widespread these varying stereotypes truly are and I can see a connection to S.C.H.W.A.A.P where Christensen says " and often the world depicts the domination of one sex, one race, one class, or one country over a weaker counterpart" (p175). Men are the "saviors", white people are the main characters, the rich "save" the poor, etc. 

The terrifying truth is that it isn't just Disney pushing a certain narrative but all for-profit companies. Every single person is a consumer and the marketing departments in all companies will do anything to keep getting business or "save face" to not let things affect their bottom line.

I do agree with Christensen that we need to look at our world with a critical lens and question the motive behind certain media. (Which connects to a point that Mike Wesch was making where true learning isn't about the content that can be "dumped" in students' brains but the questions we leave with). All of the information we gather and retain affect how we interact with the world around us and understanding the motives behind the sources of the information help us identify biases from the source or maybe even unknown biases we may have.  A quote that really stuck out to me was that of one Christensen's students that said "True death equals a generation living by rules and attitudes they never questioned and producing more children who do the same" (178). It's not enough just to identify the biases. Other than educating our children about these biases and teaching them how to think critically, what can we do in order to make real change? Is there any way to stop media from including biases or is this always going to be a continuous loop of being a critical consumer just with different hidden messages?

I don't know, more questions with no answers for now.