Comparison of the 7th Standard of the Professional Standards for Michigan Teachers and the objectives of the course

After comparing the 7th Standard of the Professional Standards for Michigan Teacher with the objectives for EDU 590 I was very excited to find that this course is facilitating all 7 of the technology operations and concepts. This section of EDU 590 illustrates how we as teachers can use the Michigan Standards as a guide to design our lessons.

Every objective has some part of the standard woven into it. The web-based presentation which encompasses the class objectives 1-4, is very much aligned with the Michigan Standards d-g. It is encouraging that one, well thought out lesson can combine so many of the Standards. It can be overwhelming for a new teacher to look at the Michigan Standards and know that you are responsible to cover all of them in the course of a year; especially when you are teaching at a private school where the curriculum has not been aligned to the standards but you are still responsible for covering all of the standards.

The same holds true with the course objectives 5-10. The end-of course paper meets the state standards a-c and several of the other standards as well. Doing an in-depth study of our districts technology plan and curriculum, evaluating software and websites, and then writing a paper on our findings is a great way to drive home these standards and have them make a lasting impression on us.

I thought the on-line survey at the beginning of the course was a great indicator that the course objectives and the state objectives would be aligned. Before the class even got started we were already exposed to Standard 7f – facilitating a variety of effective assessment and evaluation strategies! I am confident that I will walk away from this course well on my way to a more in-depth knowledge of the “technological tools, operations, and concepts needed to enhance student learning”(7th Standard, Professional Standards for Michigan Teachers).

Michigan Uses On-Line Learning to Reach At-Risk Students

Cyber high schools are a wonderful way to reach students that can’t make high school work in the traditional setting. Removing at-risk students from the distractions that are making it impossible for them to learn can only have positive results. I do hope that eventually the program will be offered to students BEFORE they have reached the point of dropping-out. I visited the website, http://www.westwood.k12.mi.us/buildingwebs/cyberhighschool/com_research.html and found some very interesting statistics. The statistic I found most intriguing was that 61% of the students that attend the Westwood cyber high school continue on to college. This is quite impressive when you compare it to the national average for high school graduates attending college. In Oct 2009 it was 70.1% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm).
I feel that any initiative that involves keeping kids in school is worthwhile. However, I do have a couple of comments about information in the article. First, changing the age that a student is able to drop-out of high school to 18 is long overdue. I never quite understood why a troubled child at the age of 16 was allowed to make such a devastating decision! Secondly, I was a little shocked at the amount of money that is being allocated just to generate and distribute the dropout prevention reports - $11.5 million. Can this money be put to use generating programs in our schools that will help to prevent students from dropping out? It just seems like a lot of money but I guess I don’t understand all that is involved….
The cyber high school takes the constructivist approach to learning and seems to be having great success. Could MDE possibly get grants to fund the training of teachers in the bottom 5% of struggling schools to teach using this approach? I graduated from college five years ago and learned that this approach to learning is most effective because you reach many different learning modalities. This was not the focus of education many years ago and it is possible that training teachers in this manner could help with the drop-out rate as well.

Joe's Non-Netbook

If you are a teacher that doesn’t think that integrating technology into our classrooms is necessary, you need to watch the YouTube Video Joe’s Non-Netbook. Although the video is [I hope] for fun, it makes it very clear that times have changed dramatically since many of us were in elementary, middle, or high school. Some of today’s students are using a computer or playing a video game from the time they get home from school until they go to bed and have been doing so since they were three or four years of age. It is conceivable that within the next 10 years textbooks in many schools in this nation will be replaced with eReaders or on-line textbooks. Even my parents (in their mid-60’s) have Nook’s and no longer are purchasing DTB’s (dead-tree books-my dad’s new lingo). If DTB’s are obsolete to my parents can you imagine the role that technology is playing in the lives of our students from pre-school on?? It is vital that schools and teachers get on the technology train and get comfortable because this age of technology is not going way. New technology is being introduced everyday and some of us are still wary about sending email! We can’t ignore the fact that our students are used to having information at the touch of a button and become bored very easily when being taught in a “traditional” way. Many educators are apprehensive when it comes to change and feel that the traditional ways of teaching have worked for decades so why should they have to change their teaching methods. The answer is simple – kids today are not the same as kids from decades ago and we should not expect them to learn the same. If we are to educate our students to be tomorrows movers and shakers, we have to first move and shake ourselves!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkhpmEZWuRQ to view Joe's Non-Netbook Video

Academic Integrity

The very first detention that I gave in my teaching career dealt with academic integrity. A fourth grade student of mine was changing answers on her reading test as we were checking it. The following year I issued a detention for the same type of cheating, however, it was on a spelling test. Why would 9-year old children take such a risk to get a good grade? I can only guess that these students are receiving pressure by peers and/or parents to get all A’s. Academic integrity is something that should be addressed with students beginning in early elementary school. Of course we would not use the words “academic integrity” with a first grade student, however, we can certainly use words such as “cheating” and “copying” and model these behaviors so that a 6 year old can understand that these behaviors are not acceptable. As children progress the examples and methods used by students to copy others work get more complex and should be addressed at every grade level.
Every student has access to the internet and has a limitless number of sources to choose from when working on an assignment. From copying text from a website to actually employing someone to do the work for him/her, the temptation is there. It is virtually impossible for schools to have software to detect all plagiarized work because of the thousands of sources that the work could have been copied from. An example of this is the results of submitting my plagiarism essay to Safe Assign. I plagiarized 90% of the text in my essay entitled “Plagiarism”, the Safe Assign program only found 63% of the plagiarized passages. It is equally impossible for schools to know when a student has had an outside source do the work for him/her. What must happen is that schools must drill the concept of academic integrity into students from the get go and teach students how to cite work that has been taken directly from a source. Schools should also make their academic integrity policy known to students, as well as, parents.
There are many ways that teachers can help students be successful when doing research so that they are not tempted to plagiarize. For example, when my fourth grade students are given a research assignment I stress that work must not be copied from sources without giving the source credit; a discussion on what plagiarism is follows. Then I break the assignment up into several steps. Students must get approval on one step before they can move on to the next step. After brainstorming and selecting a topic, students must create an outline and record information that they find on the outline, being sure not to write sentences but concepts. I model this very important step for the students prior to beginning the research. I have found that this cuts down on them copying sentences from resource materials.
Plagiarism and other forms of cheating cannot be eliminated; however, the number of students that have academic integrity can certainly be increased. By discussing the importance of academic integrity early, giving students the tools to be successful in their research and stressing the importance of giving others credit through proper citations, academic integrity will be on the rise.

Hello, Cohort! My name is Jennifer Piechocki and I am a 4th Grade teacher at St. Pius School in Southgate, Michigan. I am really excited to get this program started and look forward to working with all of you the next two years!