EDLD+5364+Week+5

=**My Impressions from Week Five of EDLD 5364**=

After I watched the videos and read the reading assignments for this week, I have a sense of excitement about the future of education. Simultaneously, I have a great feeling of impatience. Changing the giant albatross that is public education will take a very, very long time. Some of the ideas we have seen in this course are not new, yet they are not yet pervasive in the education system. As one of the videos put it, we, as educational technology specialists need to be the advocates for change. Many times in education we attend training sessions, workshops, and the like with great excitement over new ideas...then we go back to our individual campuses and become bogged down in regular tasks, our colleagues did not attend the same session and therefore do not share the excitement, they may have other priorities in their lives at the time, there is a lack of time or money, or any host of excuses for the change not to happen. We must drive this process. I have had this experience at my own campus. I bring up an idea and everyone loves it, then they go back to "business as usual" but I do not allow this to take place. When I see it not happening, I bring it up again and then it moves up a notch on the priority scale. Then processes are usually put into place to make sure the new initiative is implimented. This is what we must do to bring about the much-needed changes in the public education system if we are to produce students who will be competitive in the world in which they are destined to live.

We have seen the concept of games as teachers elsewhere in our studies both in this course and in other courses for this degree program. I am, and always have been, a strong advocate of learning through play and through actual experiences. I vividly remember a parent asking me (circa 1992), "Why doesn't my child have a spelling book?" My reply was, "We require the students to do all of their writing on a word processor. It has a spell-checker built in but the student must use it and the option to autocorrect the words they've misspelled is not available - they must type it in correctly. Don't you agree that if you have to retype a word enough times that you'll learn to spell it accurately as opposed to memorizing a list of unrelated words for a weekly test?" This same idea holds true in my own life. Much of the post-college work I have done over the years has required self-study of software and hardware that I have needed in order to accomplish professional tasks (music composition, arranging, note-setting, recording, etc.). I learned to do these things out of necessity and, as a result, they have become second nature to me. This was a direct result, as we have also seen in this course 1) of the material being relevant to my immediate needs and 2) trial and error learning (failure leads to deeper understanding) and 3) cooperative learning - asking other professionals who have experience. I see this as the future of education and...it's about time!