Claire Howard: CURR 501 Blog!

My first year of teaching amidst COVID has been quite the eye opener. I entered the school year excited for new possibilities and brimming with beliefs about education ready to be put into action. All summer I had spent training with Teach for America to empower students and be the best educator I could be! But as the year began and the pandemic raged both within and outside of my seventh grade classroom, one by one the lofty ideas I had for myself and my students were changed. We the teachers moved from class to class acting as invaders to whatever organization was already established. Students were six feet apart, unable to do group work or see their friends in other pods ( Providence, Rhode Island stayed open the entire 2020-2021 school year, leading to a multitude of issues ). However, the curriculum was the center of every staff discussion. How will they get through all the material? How will we ever catch up? How will we keep up standardized test scores? To use the ideas ...

There is something so personal about Disney to me. I grew up in Irvine, CA just minutes away from Anaheim where Disneyland exists. I had a season pass growing up and went all the time. I had birthday parties at Disneyland, watched all the movies and TV made by Disney, LOVED the princesses as a little girl, and for goodness sakes I had my PROM there two years in a row! I remember going to Disneyland for my fifth birthday in a hot pink matching track suit with the princesses on the back (Belle, Cinderella, Snow White, and Ariel), determined to get every princess's signature that day. But, as an adult, I have been able to take a step back and realize that as much magic as Disney weaves, it can perpetuate stereotypes that are harmful to absorb as both a young person and an adult. Me at Disneyland for my fifth birthday! Reading Christensen reminded me of the issues that I have had with Disney in the past, mainly the absolutely unrealistic "Barbie" standards that princesses h...

Hello everyone!  Today I will be showing you how to effectively use the application edpuzzle in your classroom. During distance learning I found myself struggling to find asynchronous work that was relevant and engaging for students that was not just busywork or free work periods. I was introduced to edpuzzle at a staff meeting, and have been using it ever since!   Edpuzzle is a tool that allows you to assign students a video, or videos, to watch with embedded questions. As the video progresses, it stops at each question, and does not allow students to move on to the rest of the video until they provide and answer. You can check their progress in watching the video and see the percent of questions they got correct and incorrect in the edpuzzle application. Because it is a Google product, it can sync right up to your Google Classroom which makes grading a dream!   Watch this video to get a comprehensive understanding of what  edpuzzle is! HOW TO LOG IN : 1. G...

I chose to read a chapter that was in Part 3 of Rethinking Media and Popular Culture which focuses on "Texts, Toys, and Representation." The article I chose is called "Seventh Graders and Sexism" and is written by Lisa Espinosa. I originally chose to read this article because I too am a science teacher who teaches seventh graders! I found that many themes and interactions Espinosa had with her students to be reflective of experiences and conversations that I have had with my students as well. I left this article with a few new resources that she used in her classroom that I have added at the end of this blog post for your reference! Lisa Espinosa and her students. Lisa Espinosa is a daughter of Mexican immigrants who teaches in a primarily Mexican neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. She had a child at the age of 18, and by the time she graduated college eight years later, she had three more children and a keen interest and understanding of gender studies....

Especially following the discussions we have had in class, and all of the information I have learned this past week, I have a few ideas for the change project. The main two changes that I really want to bring to my classroom are this:   Create a safe environment where students learn connections between science and social justice issues. Could be specific to race, gender, class, etc. Create a classroom where parent involvement is heightened, and parents feel that they are aware of what is going on in their student's science class. Following these two changes, I see the opportunity to connect to my beliefs about what student learning entails. Obviously these beliefs are still being informed because I am a first year teacher, but I feel that these two align with the two project options above.   Students learn when they feel that their identities are acknowledged, seen, and heard in the classroom. Additionally … students learn when they sho...

Sugata Mitra's TED Talk titled "Build a School in the Cloud" began by giving a brief history of why education functions the way that it does today. He boiled it down to the Victorian British Empire's need to build identical people to work in the bureaucratic administrative machine who had good handwriting, be able to read, and be competent with multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. Skills that are still important today, but are also seen as compliments to the ability to navigate technology effectively. Essentially meaning that public education would produce identical people without creativity -- a process that is now both outdated and obsolete. Interestingly, Mitra states that this type of public education is not 'broken' as much rhetoric points out, but is just not useful as a system any more. This TED Talk makes me reexamine my role in the system of education as we know it. We all know that teaching to tests, planning to hit standards, or on...

After absorbing the two pieces, I can definitively say that I believe Wesch and Turkle to be allies in the discussion of new media and technology. Turkle's case rests on the idea that technology can isolate. In her TED Talk titled "Connected but alone?" Turkle discusses her research on young people, and touches on many conversations she has had with youths over the years. She realizes that technology creates a  Goldilocks Effect in people. It promotes a false sense of reality where you can always edit, delete, retouch, or clean up any presentation of yourself that are not perfect. It feeds into the idea of perfection, and therefore, facilitates a sense of control one must have over their own presentation of themselves at all times. This goes against the ability to converse with others and interact in social gatherings because those in person spaces take away the ability to control how you will be perceived. Turkle states that "those little devices [phones] are so psy...