Day 4 - Morning

What do you do well when connecting with your students? Do you have any concerns about connecting with your students?

I do have concerns about connectiong with students. Frankly, I think most teachers and school systems are out of touch. But regardless of what I think - I know that it's hard to do and easy to misjudge your connection with students. For example, my Taiwanese grade school students would tell me during the Introduction / "getting to know you" part of the class that they play videogames. I thought, wow, I play videogames too. PacMan and supermario... We didn't really connect because they were playing completely different games and I didn't take the time to play with them or try the games on my own. I overestimated my connection.

I think the first question means - What do you do when you get that connection? What happens well when you establish a good connection? If the students feel like you care, they will care too if they are connected / engaged.

Community is all about connection. During this workshop, I've talked about community, which is a group of connections. When thinking of an example of a good teaching / learning connections, I think of Augmon. He and I talked about cars, interestingly enough, to begin. He was showing me his favorite car, a famous Nissan called Skyline. I showed him the Wikipedia entry for the car. Then, once the workshop began, I asked him about the project and we worked through some problems together. This was building the connection or bridging the connection from non-instruction related to something instructional. I realized the connection when his teacher came over and tapped me on the shoulder saying Augmon wanted to show me something he had created in Virtuoso. Then the next day he was completely engrossed in his work - like the screen had his eyes in a tractor beam. Now he comes over from time to time to show me what he has done.

He knows I care about it, so he cares about it too. I think it's cool, so he thinks it's cool too.... hmmm... is that right? Maybe it just opens the door or allows him to think it's cool as well. Anyway, he is more likely to spend 'time on task' with something that others think is cool.

I think there something about connectionism, the George Siemens (sp?) model. In this workshop, Augmon and I are part of a group and the interaction is reacting and changing everything we do.

... okay enough.