Wednesday, September 30, 2009
EDU 590
Another thought about technology came to me today as I sat down with a group of teachers from our middle school. We met to discuss what they were seeing in the middle school regarding skill/content strengths and weaknesses. Our goal was to pinpoint some of the areas in the elementary curriculum that they are finding students still struggle with a year later. Things that maybe we need to spend more time on or use alternative methods of teaching for. I found this meeting (a sit down, face-to-face) so incredibly helpful and enlightening. This was the first time we had met like this and one of the reasons that we had never done it before was because we plug all of our data into a program called Pearson. Anyone else use it? This program compiles data regarding tests and other types of student achievement and offers a "big picture" view of all the data entered. And I will admit it does provide some good data. HOWEVER, I think using these types of technology programs has an extremely unfortunate side effect if it is the reasonong behind less face to face data gathering like the meeting I had today. Technology shouldn't replace teachers' professional opinion it should simply be another beneficial resource.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
At Coopersville all content areas meet on one of our PD days at the beging of the school year. I meet with the Indusrial Arts department in the High School once month, the Band, Choir, and Art departments also meet once a month. All other deparments meet a couple times a year. The nice thing about Coopersville is that all the buildings are located on one campus, so this makes it easy for all areas to meet.
ReplyDeleteIn Holt we meet every Wednesday for PD. We (k-6)begin at the regular time and students are dismissed 2 hours early. (7-12) begins 2 hours later. Most of the days it is for Building work, however, there are days built in for content areas as well. We just started using Pearson. I have to admit - I find it a bit cumbersome and not that user friendly to use. It seems like the "idea" of Pearson id good, but again it seems that training is key to using and integrating technology.
ReplyDeleteWe meet once a month with our departments in our building. We meet once a year maybe with the whole district, but then it is not necessarily to work on curriculum. It would be nice to communicate with each other more often. We are now trying professional learning teams. Three of us chose technology and how it can benefit students with their reading and writing. I think this class will be helpful for our group. At least I hope it is!
ReplyDelete