C4T #2

The Thinking Stick by Jeff Utecht

        The first comment I left on Jeff Utecht's blog was on his post A Year in the Highschool.  This post described his whole year as a teacher in Thailand.  Straight off the bat, I found it interesting that he would teach in Thailand so I checked out his bio.  He has been an international educator in the Middle East and Asia for the past 9 years.  He seems to be a very inspiring guy and I asked him in my first comment how he got into a teaching position that allowed him to go internationally.  (Still no response yet though.)  His post described his successes and failures of the past school year as well as his future goals.  One interesting success he included was Pecha-Kucha Presentations that he had all his students make.  These were a new way to present things (rather than the boring slides with the audience taking notes).  The students were required to read a book, in this case it was To Kill a Mockingbird, and then select a differing topic in which to tie the book and topic together into a story.  They then presented this to the class.  This would certainly require more thinking on the children's part because they could not copy information directly from the internet.  They had to research it.
        The second comment I left on Jeff Utecht's blog was on his post Secondary Principals Support Mobile Learning.  This post gave some interesting statistics.

"Yet as mobile and social technologies become ubiquitous, attempts to block them are increasingly ineffective. For example, in schools that prohibit cell phones, 54% of students still report sending texts during the school day (Lenhart, 2010)."

Mr. Utecht used statistics such as this to give evidence to the opinion that technology should be used completely in the classroom since it is already being used by students secretly.  One person had commented on this post before me with a very good argument.  The person explained how this was not a good statistic to use because school should be about learning, not socializing (which is what the cellphones were being used for).  However,  I think the issue is not that cellphones should or should not be used.  In my comment I explained how we should really be concerned at what this statistic implies.  It means that students are not fully engaged in the classroom.  They are bored so they resort to texting (even if it is against the rules).  This is a problem with the style of teaching.  If the teaching could be more innovative, the kids would not even pull out their cellphones to text because they would be completely interested in what was being taught not what the troublemaker John did in Mrs. Smith's classroom during homeroom.