Final Blog Subject -Synthesis of Course

Please reflect on what you learned in the course as a whole and how it relates to your work as a future teacher of your discipline.

Since this is such a big topic, I'll stick with the questions given in the prompt.

How will you integrate critical literacy instruction in your discipline? 
I think that critical literacy is important in any area.  It is especially important in using online texts.   A great example of this was the Martin Luther King Jr activity we did in class that had us look at the martinlutherking.org website.  I can see this being important in my discipline because I'm planning on having students do research projects on different technologies.  A good activity that I thought of is putting them in groups and having them do research on an HHO generator and determining whether or not they really work.  After they have made their decisions have a lesson on critical literacy and reliability of sources and let them reevaluate their decision.

How will you choose and teach vocabulary words? 
In class we went over many different strategies on how to teach vocabulary words.  It is also important to only choose relevant vocabulary words for students to learn.  Technology education is full of words that are new to students and they need to learn these words to be able to communicate effectively.  Teaching vocabulary was never something that I really thought of before I took this class.  I just always assumed that the students would pick up on the important ones or get them from the PowerPoint.  

How will you structure opportunities for students to use oral language?
I think that one of the best ways for students to use oral language is through small group work.  I plan on having students do a lot of group work in my classes when they work on different projects.  The groups will be rearranged regularly to give all of the students the opportunity to work with different people in the class.  Using oral language is an essential skill in group work.  I also like the idea of having students do research on a topic and have them present their topic to the class.  For example, in one lesson plan I wrote for another class on sensors I had an assignment where the students would choose a sensor from a list (there are many different kinds of sensors) and find out what the sensor senses/what it's used for and how it works.  The students would then teach the class about their sensor as a part of the assignment.  This gives the student the opportunity to learn more in-depth about a particular topic and to practice their oral language skills.  

How will you support your students in writing and reading texts in your discipline?
As I explained in my self selected project reading and writing skills are severely lacking in the fields of engineering and technology.  I plan on having my students keep and engineering notebook in class that they have to write in every day. They will receive a writing prompt and will take the first few minutes of class to write.  Earlier I stated that I am planning on having students do different types of research and I think that I will have each class create a text on a topic related to the course where they have to do some research.  This will help with their higher level writing skills and their reading skills. 

How will you support academically, linguistically, and culturally diverse learners?
I plan on differentiating in my classroom.  A great way to differentiate in a technology class is in the products that students are required to produce.  I would like to be able to give students options on the final product will be-whether it is a model, a paper, video or another result that is fitting to the assignment.  I would also like to give them options in the topic.  I personally would have done a lot better in school if I could have always chosen a project or topic that interested me and not just the teacher.  

How will you integrate digital technologies? 
This is an easy one. Do I really need to go into a too much detail?  Some of my classes will probably be entirely about this, communications classes.

What kinds of texts will you make available to your students?  
I've heard of having a class library and I really like the idea.  I plan on using a lot of material from the text set we did in class.  It might also be a good idea to get a hold of the text sets that students in science, math and agriculture created and include some of those things in my classroom library.  I remember in a physics class I had the teacher always had a stack of popular science, popular mechanics and national geographic magazines that we could read if we finished our work and that was a great idea that I want to incorporate in my class too.

Connecting Home and Shcool Experiences

I was missing one blog assignment, so here it is.

The fact that the technology and engineering discipline is so broad makes it easy for me to connect it to home experiences.  I attribute a lot of these experiences to my dad.  My dad isn't an engineer, so the areas that I connected with most were the traditional shop type areas.  I remember hearing things and seeing things on TV about repairmen and mechanics, but I thought that nobody actually took their car to a mechanic-at least not as often as people did on TV, kind of like the mailman doesn't really come walking down the sidewalk and put your mail in the mailbox (where I grew up we didn't have sidewalks and we had to go to the post office to get our mail).   If one of our cars was having problems or need an oil change my dad would fix it.  If the washer broke my dad would fix it.  If we needed a dog pen or a shed my dad would build it.  I thought that all dads knew how to fix stuff and make things.  I would often tag along with my dad and be the one who handed him things, he would also explain what he was doing, and as a result at a young age I knew the difference between a wrench, a pair of pliers, vise grips, and channel locks. 
When I was in cub scouts we had the greatly anticipated pinewood derby.  If you did the pinewood derby usually one of two things happened: 1)Dad would take the car to the shop and lock you out and design the sleekest, most aerodynamic, low-profile vehicle known to man. Then he would polish the axles, put the weight in the right places and add the top secret lubricant.  If you were lucky you got to sand it a little and carry it to the weighing table at the race.  Or the other scenario was 2) your car would sit in the box under a pile of dirty clothes in your room until the day before the race and you would frantically look for it and not find it, give up looking beg your mother to go pick up another one because it's the most important day of your life, and when she finally gets home with the new one you've already found the one that was lost and have pounded the wheels in with a rock and colored it with crayons-done.  Luckily I didn't fall into either of these categories.  My dad took this and turned it into a learning experience.  He asked what I wanted it to look like and helped me sketch it out on the block of wood, then he took me to his work and showed me how to use the band saw.  After showing me how to make a cut and giving me a safety tip (don't cut your finger off or your mom will kick my ass), he gave me a chair to stand on and turned little 8-year-old me loose.  After cutting it out he gave me a lesson on friction and taught me about getting the burrs off heads of the nails used for the axles and smoothing out the shafts and wheels.  After hours of sanding I learned about primer and paint.  Once that was complete and I thought my fingers were going to fall off from sanding so much, he told me that we wanted to be as close to the maximum weight as possible so then I got to use a drill to put holes in the bottom so we could glue pennies inside to make it heavier.  Then we were off to the post office with the car, wheels, axles and about $3.78 in pennies to weigh it on their scale.  Race day came and I got 2nd place- not too bad.  The next year I chose a more difficult design and ended up winning first place.  My third year my little brother was old enough to be is scouts so my dad took us to his work and told me to start working on my car while he helped my brother.  That year I pretty much did the whole thing myself and won first place again. 

My '83 Scamp GT still at my parents house waiting for me

 

When I was 17 I was sharing a car with my older sister that my parents bought for us.  It was a white 1980 Cadillac El Dorado with an Oldsmobile 350 engine that was about a mile and a half long.  My sister was going to go to college and my parents said that she would get the car, so if I wanted to drive I had to buy my own car. After searching the classifieds for months I saw something I could afford, the ad said: 1983 Plymouth truck $495. We went to look at it and it was perfect (not to mention sexy too.  It turns out that it was a 1983 Plymouth Scamp GT of which only 1380 were made ).  The next day at school I borrowed a friend's car and went to the bank during lunch, took $500 savings and picked it up that night.  Now, if you go out and buy a $500 car you can't slap a temporary registration on it and send a 17 year old off to drive all over the place the next day.  Now that I had my very own car that I had paid for I was really interested in helping out my dad work on it and not just being the tool holder.  I was thinking one day about how the transmission worked, particularly how the gears would mesh when shifting (it was a stick shift) and was stuck so I pulled out the Haynes repair manual as started looking through it.  My dad walked in the room and asked what I was doing.  I asked him "how does a transmission work?"  "why is yours broke?" he asked "no" I said, "I just want to know how it works."  When I said that his eyes lit up and he got a big smile on his face and he grabbed another book off the shelf and sat down next to me and started going on about RPMs and synchros.
My dad taught me a lot of things that are useful in my discipline and one of the most important things that he taught me about it was that I could do it, what ever "it" was.  This gave me the confidence that I needed to be comfortable with different tools and equipment, and the confidence that I could figure things out.  I learned that there isn't magic behind complex things, just science and design, which are at the heart of engineering and technology (OK, he did tell me that automatic transmissions operate on black magic).  I think that these things are important for student to have now-confidence and encouragement.  While I was at Mount Logan Middle School doing clinical work the kids were using the band saw to cut out CO2 cars and a lot of them were afraid so they would give their block of wood to their friend and tell them to go cut it out.  When I saw this I would tell the friend to go give the block back and have them come cut it out.  It's very dangerous to be afraid of the equipment, but it is important to "respect" it by knowing that it would win in a fight.  So I would assure the kids that there was nothing to be afraid of and they wouldn't get hurt if they obeyed all of the safety rules.  After cutting out the cars almost all of them said "Hey, this is fun!" and every single one of them admitted it wasn't scary afterwards.

So, those are some things that I learned from home that apply to school stuff.

E-bike: Frank v2.2

This post has nothing to do with education.

This the bike I built.  Just got it put back together with new battery boxes. Currently has about 670 miles on it.
Let me know what you think.

Affective Dimensions of Reading

I have never really had trouble reading.  Ever since I learned how to read I would read the back of the cereal box when I was eating breakfast, and I remember one time just after learning how to read I was reading the ingredients list thinking to myself, “I can read anything!” I was pretty excited.  Another childhood reading experience was when I was in the second grade, we were divided into three or four reading groups and each group was given a color.  There was a red group, a blue group and one or two others I can’t remember.  The teacher never told us but we all figured out pretty quickly that the blue group was the good readers, the red group was the not so good readers, and the other(s) were in the middle. I was in the blue group. 

After the initial excitement of being able to read wore off I slowly stopped reading books that weren’t assigned for school.  I usually didn’t enjoy school assigned readings very much, my worst reading experience was when I had to read The Great Gatsby.  At the time I thought it was the stupidest thing ever written – my sister (who has an English degree) says that I didn’t like it because I didn’t understand it, but I think that I wouldn’t like it even if I did understand it.

Now I still don’t read books very often, but I do a lot of reading for school.  Whenever I sign out of my email on MSN or Yahoo I scroll through the articles and read the ones that I find interesting, so it’s not like I never read or am anti-reading.

I never had much pull from anyone outside of school encouraging me to read or not to read until I got married.  One of my wife’s favorite things to do is read so we have bookshelves and boxes full of books everywhere.  She is always telling me that I need to read more, but it’s not that I don’t like to read- there’s just plenty of other things that I would rather do.  Plus with all those books in the house I still don’t have much of a selection because almost all of them are in Chinese.

I think that there are few people who really hate to read, I think that most students wouldn’t mind reading if what they’re reading is really interesting to them-although I could be completely wrong.  One of the benefits of being in Technology education is that almost everything that kids care about now has something to do with technology.  I think it’s a great idea to have a classroom library with a wide variety of texts for students to have access to.  Another way that I could encourage them to read is to let them know that if they find anything they’re interested in that has to do with technology, like a news story or an internet article, they are welcome to bring it up in class for discussion.

I don’t know exactly how I could build self-perception in reading in my students.  Some students in class may struggle with reading traditional texts, but may be able to interpret a more technology related one like reading a wiring diagram or house plan.  Giving these students responsibility in helping others in the class might improve their confidence in reading different texts.

I still read cereal boxes when I have breakfast.

Discipline-Specific Writing and Assessment

I don't know if we're supposed to go in any certain order on these blog posts-I haven't before, but I guess I'll start on this one.

In this post I'm talking about discipline-specific writing and assessment.  This will be a little harder for me because I didn't actually take many courses in my discipline in secondary education, so I can't draw on a lot of personal experience.  I'll start by going over the classes I did take.  In middle school (or jr. high- I don't know what the difference is, if any) I took the shop class that everyone was required to take and I didn't get much out of it.  The curriculum consisted of a bunch of projects that we did at our own pace, each was supposed to teach us a different principle.  We would start by picking a folder and going to the corresponding station.  I remember that most of the stuff was missing for most of the projects and I didn't get much out of it- the best one was one on the expansion of metals where we had different metal rods held in place with a gauge on top then each rod was heated and we could compare how much each metal would expand.  Each project had a couple confusing questions at the end we had to answer (maybe they were confusing because most of the stuff was gone so you couldn't really complete the project).  This kind of ruined shop for me.  another time in middle school I took another shop class and it was mainly woodworking, which isn't my favorite, but what made it worse was that I fractured both of my wrists so I had a cast on each hand/arm and I was pretty well useless and just watched other kids do most of the main project for me.  I don't remember any writing in this class.  In high school I decided not to take any shop classes because of previous experiences, and I was busy with AP classes like chemistry, physics and calculus.  I did take multimedia design and production classes as well as a class called computer commercial art.  I enjoyed these classes and learned many skills and became proficient in quite a few programs, especially Photoshop (as I side note: I do wedding announcements for cheap, so if you or some one you know is getting married let me know).  We didn't really do any writing in these classes that I can remember, just created things on the computer.  That's pretty much it for the classes I took in my content area.

The classes I took didn't include much writing. In the first shop class our grade was based solely on the number of projects we completed, the second was the way the project looked-if the stool was crooked then we got a lower grade.  In the multimedia and commercial art classes we did different projects that had to contain certain elements such as a 3D model that incorporated a hand drawn/painted piece.  These were more enjoyable because unlike the other classes that would be included in my content area there were loose guidelines that we had to follow to show that we understood what we had been going over, but we could do it any way we wanted.  These types of projects also let us learn more by trying new things instead of following a set of written plans and getting the exact same thing as everyone else.

As a teacher I like the idea of letting students choose their own projects.  Letting them choose helps them become more interested so they learn more.  I also am planning on having them include more writing than I did. I think it would be good for them to do research on the topics of their choice and prepare a presentation on it to give to the class.  I also think that follow-up is important; I would include this by having them write about what they did and what they learned and what they would do differently next time.  This helps them reflect and understand better.

Digital Literacy

Post for SCED 4200.
The topic of digital literacy is an important one in my discipline.  In fact, our national standards are called the Standards for Technological Literacy (STL).  The goal of technology education classes is to help students become more technologically literate-this includes, but is not limited to digital literacy.  I would say that overall I am fairly digitally literate.  I use the internet daily, usually for school related work, but also frequently for personal use.  I am also able to build repair, and troubleshoot computers, setup TVs and audio systems and setup home networks.  I find that I am able to pick up on most computer programs with relative ease.

There are some technologies that I am not as familiar with, for example my phone has no internet access- I've never used a smart phone or Ipad simply because I would rather be paying for more important things like food, rent and tuition.  I am confident though that I would pick up these things quickly. Two other popular technologies that I don't use are texting and facebook.  An occasional text message would be convenient for me, but not worth an extra $20 per month; and I don't see the point of having an entire conversation through text messaging when a phone call would suffice, I really don't have that much to say anyways.  I don't have a facebook account mainly because I don't really have anything that I need to share with everyone.   I think the idea of reconnecting with people you have lost contact with is great, but it doesn't seem that facebook really used for that any more.  Even dentists and grocery stores have facebook and twitter accounts - Why would I want to be friends with Smith's food and drug or want to know what my friend ate for breakfast and how many hours are literally wasted daily on facebook and twitter?


Most of the online texts that I read are instructions for class assignments or things that I am researching for a class.  When I'm using online texts for personal reasons I am usually checking emails (many of which are also school related) or reading news articles.  Other times I'm just looking for information out of curiosity of for a personal project, for example recently I was researching specs on different electric motors.  When teaching I'm planning on having my students do research online to find answers to questions that they might have.  I think it is important to teach students to find information rather than just telling them-it's a good skill to have.  one digital technology that I am really impressed with is Google Docs.  I think that it's a great tool for collaborative work and when I have my students do groups projects I would like to require them to use Google Docs and have them share it with me so they can collaborate and I can monitor their progress.  Using Google Docs could even be a lesson in class.

Language, Literacy, and Learning in the Content Areas Intro.

I originally created this blog for my INST 4015 class, now I will be using it for SCED 4200.  Older posts were to fulfill requirements for INST 4015.

Introduction:
I am currently a student at Utah State University studying Engineering and Technology Education (ETE).  I plan on teaching pre-engineering and technology courses in high school.  I don't enjoy doing introductions and telling people all about myself, so I will stick with the suggested list of things to include in the assignment description.  I don't see myself as having many interesting hobbies or interests, but I have always liked learning how things work and building and fixing things.  I am in the process of building my second fully-electric bike.

I started out studying Physics in college and was thinking about teaching, but after spending some time in quantum mechanics during a sophomore level class I decided that what I wasn't interested in abstract theoretical things that I couldn't see.  I preferred to stick to Newtonian basics.  After little thought and consideration I transferred to mechanical engineering.  I could combine my interests in building and designing things with physics.  After suffering through numerous calculus classes, statics and dynamics I decided that engineering wasn't exactly what I thought it would be.  I was in the engineering program long enough to make some interesting observations.  Many mechanical engineers are great at math, but are severely lacking common sense and experience.  I started working in manufacturing when I was 15 years old and have seen many instances where an engineer designed something without using experience or common sense.  This is what I want to change as a pre-engineering teacher.

I think that this entry has dragged on long enough and has sufficiently introduced myself and my reasons for wanting to teach in my content area.