C4T #3

Bill Genereux's blog TechIntersect

I was assigned to Bill Genereux's blog and read one of his post titled "Taking Risk While Teaching." He starts off with examples of myths about how to achieve success in the classroom. They are basically about how teachers need to instill fear into students in order to be able to command a classroom. He then goes on to tell about his experience of how he has taught two different classes in which he did not have all the answers. One of those classes is a video game programing class in which he challenges the students and himself by having them do things that they don't have the answers to. They must do research and find the answers and they also are all working together to create a video game project. When a teacher takes risks with learning in the classroom, it makes the experience fun and memorable as apposed to having the teacher just spit out knowledge and have the students soak it up like sponges to then spit back out again. Something Dr. Strange calls "burp back education." My comment on Mr. Genereux's post answered some of his question at the end of his post. He wanted to know if anyone else took risk when teaching and if they always have everything polished. I can somewhat relate because I teach horseback riding lesson and there are so many things that I learn from my students. There are also things we find the answer to together which creates a great learning opportunity.

The blog post I read this week was posted on October 9th. His most recent post was just a house keeping post about pumpkins carved by his kids but he did use the computer to make the cutouts for them to carve from. The post I read is titled "Information Workers In Industrial Environments." In this post he started off talking about one of his students who is a single mother, works and is going to school to get a better education. He finds it amazing that she can balance her time like that. He then goes on to talk about how he is working on sunday morning without even realizing it and begins to talk about how it is okay to do work at home but not to do any personal work at work.Genereux states, "Organizations don’t reflect the reality that is the blending of work and play, home and career in our digital world. We still often have assigned break times. We expect that only work-related things will be done on work machines, and save the home-related things for home." In my comment I expressed how I also thought that some personal matters could be attended to at work as long as work matters were still being properly taken care of. I compared it to having computers in the classroom. How do we know that students are not playing games instead of doing their assignments? It's the final product that counts because their work will reflect how hard they worked.