Team Calendars

Trying a new website calendar called TeamUp.com. The goal is for my students in the field to let me know when they’re in their classrooms so I can visit more students at once.  Here’s hoping this new technology works.  It’s a free account, so nothing lost if it fails–just perhaps my sanity.

Event input

Event input

Google Calendar, fwiw, failed miserably.  I tried creating calendars for folks to share and they could input events that I couldn’t see, or I could see them, but then they disappeared.  To much hassle.

We got there first!

Many teacher colleagues/friends and research colleague/friends and I have worked on this idea that digital technologies, while cool, are not the end-all be-all that they are made out to be.

Imagine my surprise when I see this Edutopia article about how cool post-its are.  We totally got there first!

With eternal thanks to all the amazing classroom teachers who have let me sit in their classrooms watching, and pick their brains afterwards.  Post-its are amazing technologies.

Good conversation

Had a great conversation in class this evening.  Focused on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, chapter 2, the banking model.

What amazed me, though, is how tied up my students’ conceptions of education–life even–are with business metaphors.  In considering how best to get everyone doing Freire, one student kept focusing on how inefficient the educational system was– how hard to get a good idea to spread.  Another discussed how the service industry model–with students as customers–can serve students needs.  They were sincere and were using these metaphors to articulate ideas they thought would help make education better.

Education isn’t efficient, ever.  And if it is, it probably isn’t any good.  The inefficiencies are often where that pesky learning stuff takes place.  And customers are always right, get what they want, and should be happy.  Many of the most formative educational experiences I’ve had involved being wrong, not getting what I wanted, and being not at all happy.  But instead of being scarring, the difficulty phases were possible because of the relationships I had with my teachers.

Relationships and communication.  That’s what Freire posits and what I’ve seen work.  And that is not easily translatable into a business metaphor (though I’m sure folks have tried).