The class is now in our hands

After class this week I was driving home and thought about what we had discussed in class and how it is going to affect my learning. I'm not sure that letting us go completely will be too beneficial but I'm open to anything and willing to take the risk. As long as we all work together and provide each other with feedback and guidelines, creating our own learning enviornment may be very successful. In education today, teachers and students studying to be teachers are being beaten over the head with new ideas of constructivist learning, student centered curriculum and how learning should be in the student's hands. In my opinion, this type of classroom environment could be very effective to a certain extent. The teacher still needs to play a very active role and help guide the students in their learning. It would do no good for a teacher to say "alright kids, what do we want to learn today?" When the kids respond, the teacher needs to then do something with that subject and give the students opportunities to work with it and learn.

This being a college course, Dr. Z can let us go a bit more because we are more than likely intrinsically motivated and will actively participate. In an elementary school setting, the teacher can not just let the students go and expect results. There needs to be a happy medium of letting the students explore while also providing them with the new information that they are to learn. So it depends on the age and individuals in the class whether or not this type of classroom could work.

We also talked in class about all of the different social networks out there and this made me think about the amount of time it would take to go out to each site and log in. Nobody has the time to do that on a daily basis. At this point, Dr. Z reassured us and informed us about RSS feeds and that you could set it up so that all of your social network sites could be checked in one place. This gave me a little more hope but still did not convince me that I needed to participate in all of them. Many of the sites seem to offer the same benefits and in my opinion it would be best to just choose one or a few and participate in those. It may be helpful to collaborate with different individuals on different sites and use them for that reason. Throughout this week I will be doing research and thinking about how best to create our learning environment. Hopefully by next week, we have all done some thinking and will have a better idea of how to structure the course.