EDCI 5825 Reading Week 6

Blog/Reading Questions:
What is your reaction to the 10 Big Shifts in Education? Which shift(s) will be easier and harder for your to integrate in your future teaching/classroom? Please explain.

Each of the 10 Big Shift are major components in enhancing public education in our world for today's youth. Each big shift contributes to making student learning more dynamic and changes strict, direct instruction into a world of exploration and possibilities. Richardson used the text to refer to teachers as having to see themselves as "connectors" not only of content (Richardson, 154, 2010). These shifts in education are allowing teachers to be learners with students, and for students to be in more control over their own learning. The first trend, open content, as well as the 3 trend, allows having more of the content be collaborative which will be easier for me to integrate into my future classroom. Science curriculum can really be enhanced by all the research opportunities on the web. Having open content beyond a textbook definitely enhances the students learning opportunities. It will be easy to have the students collaborate group work through google docs, or collaborate with students from around the world (Richardson, 148, 2010). I really like this trend because I believe collaboration is a great skill to have as a young adult going into a working world where collaboration is a key aspect of succeeding with your work and with others. This skill can be used in any subject and will always be useful in the future. One shift that may be hard to incorporate into my future classroom is big shift 6: Readers are not longer just readers. This shift will be more difficult because many students have been using the Internet for years before high school. With the society we live in, kids are taught that what they hear from adults is normally truth. Having our students refocus that mindset to be skeptical might be more harder then I perceive. If students are doing research on experiments, and a experiment is shown to be "correct" they might not dive deeper to understand if it makes since, since it's been published. Therefore incorporating Internet Workshops like MAPping would be very useful in this sense.