Brooke's Blog

My kids

Chase (2 years 9 months), Milo (1 year 4 months) and Lincoln (3 months)
As you can tell, my children are very young, very close together. Yes, we are busy, and yes, we are DONE! This is why I’m finding it hard to find the time to work on this, so forgive me if I fall behind!

Now, I’ll add a link.
My job consists mainly (right now, anyway) of working with aligning career tech standards to academic standards. This webpage has been my savior It allows me to pull up state alignments and use them as I see fit (validation mostly at this point). I don’t know if it would be considered an “educational website”, but it certainly helps me with my job!

Well, I’m off to add stuff to my blogroll! Happy reading

OK, so I got all the stuff done, and I DID have some frustration… mostly with the picture. I kept having to redo it because it was too big, then because I wanted to change the caption, then I decided to hide some *hem hem* bits, then I realized the caption didn’t show up… Though in reality it was not difficult.

As for the link, when I originally posted, the entire end of my sentence became the link! I was able to move the closer piece later.

One thing I learned is that I HAVE to look at this in HTML to make changes. I am very fortunate that I’m familiar with basic HTML from some other chat boards/sites I frequent. My experience allows me to know what to look for to fix the mistakes.

Edited to add: I updated my original post “hello world” to actually explain who I am and what I do… I should have done that in the first place! Thanks Miriam!

All of these blogs are so different! They all address different students, different classrooms, different ages, and yet they all are sharing their thoughts with the class.

I looked at the Kinderkids’ Classroom first. This one is run mostly by the teacher, who blogs about the classroom, and I notice now that each student has their own blogs on the side. Now, keep in mind, these are kindergarteners. I looked through the blogs for the kids and found that they were pictures– so cute! What a great way to have a small child express themself! It introduces children to the technology while allowing parents to follow along with what their children are doing. I can only hope that my children’s teachers will do that (I have 3 small children who are not yet in school). I also see that there are comments, probably from parents mostly, but also a counter and map to show the students that people from all over the world are looking at their art!

The other one I focused on was Risley Roarer’s Blog. That one was started by a class in the third grade, and it looks like they are now in the 6th grade and some still blog there! They are clearly a close-knit group. While poking around in there I found a single entry from a student on blogging– the student said she loves to blog, and then added “But guess what? They have just blocked my classes blogs! Can you believe it? Well I do! I thought that it was just so cruel! Well I hope they put it back on because, I LOVE TO BLOG!” I think this is the best way to get students to learn to read and write, and they really enjoy it!

When people think you’re dying, they really listen. Instead of just… waiting for their turn to speak. — Fight Club

Some students sit quietly in class trying to make it through the entire day without having to talk. They don’t want to be the center of attention. Others thrive on the attention– they have to be heard and be right.

Blogging (especially anonymous blogging) puts everyone on equal footing. Students don’t hear that familiar voice from the front versus the quiet one from the back, they see the words, free of emotion. Often those words are not what would have come out in a classroom, the discussion has a completely different flow, and more people take part.

I’ve been a part of online communities that allow anonymity. You start as a nobody, an equal. Your voice is as loud as everyone elses, your text analyzed the same as anyone else. You create your own personality, and that personality can be completely different from the one you show IRL. There is no fear of criticism, somehow criticism in print is more constructive and objective. And it allows the students time to think. It has been proven that teachers who wait a few seconds before calling on a student will have greater participation from more students, and yet most still tend to call on the first person who raised their hand. That’s not the case with blogging. Everyone gets a say, no matter how long it takes them to say it!

I know I’m on the younger end of the teaching staff, but my first reaction to the article was simply “why couldn’t I have had that in school?”

That’s incredible.

I am not technology illiterate. In fact, I just used dictionary.com to check the spelling of illiterate! That being said, students in the class are leaps and bounds ahead. They love the technology, they think in a thousand directions at once, and asking them to focus on a single type of math problem, and repeat over and over, just doesn’t work.

I guess this brings a question to mind, and that is “How can I use technology to teach students the basic skills? How do I teach students to add fractions with technology?” While I feel that group work is useful and very real, our students still need to know how to add 1/8 + 5/16 . Every student needs to know that. So now my wheels are spinning. I get how you can have students blog for projects, and do wikis for extended lessons, but I’ll have to think even harder about the simpler tasks.

I’m getting better with technology. I use facebook and myspace, I have “tech friends” who know my whole life but I’ve never met IRL (in real life). I’m working on a digital auction right now, to benefit one of these “tech friends” who just lost her husband in Afganistan.

Technology has compacted our world. I laughed at the “text from another country” bit in the video, but realized some of my “tech friends” live abroad, so I could have done that!

So I guess the moral of the story is this: I’m excited to learn more!

Edited to add…

OK, so really, about me–

My name is Brooke Segaar. I am the Math Teacher Consultant at the Career Tech center. My role right now is curriculum alignment and integration, basically getting the paperwork in order so that our school can recommend that students receive math credit (4th math) from appropriate CTE classes. It’s frustrating because the reality is, those classes already have a ton of math in them that the students use every day– I’m just getting it all down on paper in a way that makes sense to outsiders looking in. Once that’s done I will go back to team-teaching the math content and working with teachers, the parts of the job that I truly love.

If you haven’t had a chance to see what we’re doing over here, come on over! We love to have visitors, and you don’t really understand what happens here until you’ve been here, it’s a whole other world!