Week Six Discussion Response EDUC 7718 (Paskov)

1.   Conversation, discussion, presentation.    What are they and how do they appear in your professional life?    If you were to diagram the power relationships in each of them,  what would the diagrams look like?     Which are technology-enhanced and which technology impeded?   Is there anything about the current status and role of these in your present professional situation that you would like to change?

In my professional life, conversation, discussion, and presentation appear every day.

As teachers, I think that these three items are crucial to our profession in order to continue the day to day process of teaching.  Without conversation among students, colleagues and parents we would be unable to complete our lessons.  Without daily discussions, the students would be left confused and without presentation, they would be left to teach themselves.  Therefore, we need these items to continue on our daily lives as educators.

Conversation:

In my school we have ninth grade teams.  I am a part of one of them.  Each week I meet with the other ninth grade math teachers to converse about the curriculum and where we all are in the subject matter.  We are currently formulating pre and post tests to collect data for our students so that we can pinpoint the weak areas that we can try to overcome in the upcoming years.  

We are taking are previously made district made Common Formative Assessments (CFA’s) and pulling out the most important topics.  From these topics we are formulating multiple choice questions for the students to answer.  From these pre and post tests, we hope that students will increase their scores by  at least two questions.  We have created a Google Doc to collect this data across the curriculum for all of the teachers so that we can visualize the difference in scores amongst all of the subjects.  This is a nice way to offer conversation as well as discussion of why the students are not performing as well as they should.

Discussion:

Being on the ninth grade team gives me team meeting time each day.  We use this time to discuss plans for struggling students or students with behavior issues.  We meet with parents, students, guidance counselors, and administrators to help get these students on the right track for their ninth grade year.  

As we discuss students we access their grades and attendance issues on a large screen projector and analyze them as a team.  This then gives us an idea as a “team” of teacher where the student are struggling and how we can approach their weaknesses.   I think that this particular part is technology enhanced.  Without the technology of PowerSchool, we would not be able to view the students’ schedules and grades.  Technology gives us the upper hand and lets us be one step ahead of the students so that we can bring them in and speak to them before their troubles worsen.

Presentation:

There are many different times where teachers present to other teachers using the new technologies that have been given to our school.

As I read through Turkle’s readings I realized that many of us are falling in to this category of always being online.  I am completely guilty of one of those teachers that attends a faculty meeting or team meeting and has me cell phone on my side checking emails and text messgaes throughout the majority of the meeting.  As Turkle stated, “Parents say they are more stressed than ever as they try to keep up with email and messages.  They always feel behind.” (Turkle, page 164)  I often feel the same way.  I teach five classes right in a row since my conference period falls in the morning period.  Sometimes administration or other teachers get upset with me because I did not respond to an email in an efficient and timely manner.  I try to get back to my colleagues as quickly as I can but I am certainly pressed for time as I am constantly teaching and do not have time to check email all of the time. Some  teachers have their school email sent directly to their mobile devices, but that is an option that I have decided to not choose at this time.

Checking phone messages is a whole other topic.  In our school, we do not have phones in our classrooms so we are to share phones with the other 100 teachers in the school.  There are about five phones that we can use amongst the faculty.  This leads to late responses and upset parents.

2.  Feedback.    Please describe what sort of feedback you want from me.   I am trying to challenge your thinking with the comment feature running throughout the text, but that forces you into Google docs.-- a limitation, ----while the global comments features in the other formats don’t seem detailed enough to me.   Maybe it’s my age: I am missing the private conversations before after and during  face to face classes.  What are your thoughts and suggestions?

I really enjoy getting feedback from you in the form of Google Docs.  I think perhaps this is the reason I continue to use Google Docs.  You are very descriptive with your feedback and your grading.  Your feedback is timely and well organized.  You do not simply use the rubric as a guide, you actually complete it as a chart.  This is helpful for me to see where I went wrong and what I could fix.

It is interesting to find out that as we struggle with using different mediums in our coursework, you are struggling with different mediums as you leave us feedback.  I personally think that the choice of using Google Docs really works well as a place for leaving comments and you can then attach the rubric.  However, if we branch into different mediums, leaving a comment becomes very detailed and can not be left at each point.  It is a possibility to continue to provide the feedback rubric in a Google Doc even though we may be using different mediums?

My choice of medium

This week I have chosen to post my response on my blog.  I wrote my response in Google 

Docs first so that I could make sure everything was in proper placement.  Google Docs is 

something that I have grown accustomed to, but I wanted to try to use a different medium as 

suggested for this week’s response. I will be interested to see how feedback is left in this format.