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After sitting through the "town hall" style panel discussion on what it means to be an "I Citizen" and how this fits into our classrooms I left with some interesting thoughts to ponder. While the panel was diverse, I was suprised there were no classroom teachers. Aren't these professionals the ones that will be initializing these new technology based ideas? While I liked the live skype with a high school classroom, their definition of an "I Citizen" was vastly different from the conversations going on with the panel. I was more interested in the TN classrooms communication with a freshman seminar. That being said, I can appreciate the panel member who had been involved in this program and would have enjoyed hearing more about this process. The second panel member who I would have liked to hear more from was Nick. He had some very interesting points that were backed up by personal experience. He was by far the most passionate panel member and I don't feel like he was given enough time to speak, nor were several of his points discussed after his turn was up. Grossman and JoAnn were by far the "stars" of the show, fielding the majority of questions but not really addressing what I thought the discussion was to be about. Yes use technology in the classrooms, but be careful to make sure you accomodate the BOE guidelines...yes we all know that! Budgets and policy were mentioned but they did not discuss how teachers are using technology or where they think it is going in the future.
Jordan made a good point that this "online communication" is a life or death issue after the school shootings. I agree that bullying is easier done online when a face is not attached to a comment. We do need to stop this by instilling a strong moral compass in our students and that needs to start at home. There needs to be a zero tolerance approach when it comes to negative school climates and we need to realize that school climate is created out of the school walls as well. It is created on facebook, through emails and other networking sites online.
Overall, I felt that the meeting, while well intentioned was scattered and lacked focus and equality surrounding the panalists responses.
Brianna, I hope you get some responses on this blog. You raise some good points and because I had to be tweeting out the event instead of sitting in the audience and taking it all in as a whole, I appreciate your vantage points. Yes, I would have liked to hear more from teachers' points of view. There were some teachers who tweeted in excellent questions, but there were also teachers in the audience at the event. I appreciated the couple of students in the second row who spoke up had courage to do so. I wish more students and teachers spoke up. However, again, I was stuck at the tweet table so could not get the feel for the whole presentation. If we run the panel next year, we will need to hear from more teachers like you, regarding focus and areas of interest. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
ReplyDeleteEven though I didn't attend the live "I Citizen" meeting, I did catch the end of the show on CSPAN.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I would have loved to see some teachers opinions. I would love to have seen the opinions of teachers and how they use technology in the class and the benefits of using it in the class.