On Questions and Experience

An excellent set of EDT 400 course meetings today. Outwardly the two course meetings seemed like night and day to me (in the sense of questions raised), but as a community the questions fielded today are important to all.

We discussed our course systems from basic to a bit more advanced. For those of you who arrived to our meeting today after spending time with the new systems brought up this week, I noticed a visible understanding of the basics and the path forward will most likely become easier. For those who had not looked at our schedule until arriving today, don’t worry. Once you’ve spent time with our course systems they will make sense and questions will and should be asked as we move on. Sometimes confusion can overwhelm. If this happens let me know and we can arrange the necessary times to meet and go over things. Remember that the root of this course is experience and connection. You are learning in new and I hope exciting ways. Question and experience at will.

Here are the essentials at this point:

Blog

The Course Blog: http://steelemaley.io/category/edt400 (Keep up to date with announcements)

Your Blog:http://yourtitle@wordpress.com (Place to write posts on readings and media pertinent to our course)

Netvibes

Course Netvibes:http://www.netvibes.com/edt400 (All blogs are listed here. Use this for commenting on others blogs each week and to explore course blogs)
Your Netvibes: http://www.netvibes.com/yourtitle (PUBLIC) (Add a few edublogs this week)

Twitter

http://twitter.com/
Thomas: http://twitter.com/steelemaley (find a few initial people to follow here)
Course “hashtag” #edt400 (enter into search bar on your twitter page or into the “Add Column (+)” section of Tweetdeck after sign-up)

Good luck on your blog posts and other experiences this week! Ask questions!

The trailers we used to think about learning prior to writing today are below (the first meeting of the day did not get to see these). They are for your information, though I would highly suggest both films to you for watching and writing about.

Is educational system failing in the US (charter schools and much more)

Waiting for Superman (2010)

What does the world look like in the 21st century? What connections are seen and unseen today? What do we need to know as educators to prepare our students for life in a connected world? Does Globalization have an effect on education?

Babel (2006)

2 Comments

Submit a Comment
  1. Wow! Both of those trailers looked very good. The first movie, Waiting for Superman, looks like it would be very hard to watch! Have you seen it?

  2. I just watched the movie trailers. Waiting for Superman is quite frightening really. While school at the basic level used to be so effective and important in terms of having any success in life, now the educational system is turning into a rigid, cold, uncaring pattern that no longer strives to help children learn how to learn. While I was fortunate enough to go to schools filled with teachers who went above and beyond to make sure any problems did not interfere with my learning, I can now see that there are so many children across the US who are nowhere near as lucky. The idea of a lottery standing in the way of a willing child's education and source of knowledge is disgusting. Everyday I am understanding more and more why the goals and purposes of courses like EDT 400 are so important. We must change soon, or else our future generations are doomed.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.