PLN 6

Dear Mr. Will Richardson,

I read your article “And What do You Mean By Learning” and I never thought of learning this way but you said that learning is on the child not the teacher. Students need to have a greater desire to learn because if they do not how will they be taught anything. It is like your daughter and how she perseveres through her own problems like the high jump. I also believed that you had some very interesting thoughts about nobody knows how to define learning but that you do think SAT is not supposed to be in the definition. I am a high school student in a class that to be honest has a lot of slackers, and it is not because they are not intelligent but more that they do not apply themselves in learning. That need to practice learning and like you said nobody knows how to practice learning but many students will keep trying to learn and that is what our school needs.

PLN 5

Dear Will Richardson,

I read your article “Have Schools Reached Their Limits” and it surprised me that you think we could personalize learning so much that it would help every student with he or shes every needs. I agree with part of what you are saying that we need to help the students more so they can do good in school and have a right to “learn.” The part I am disagreeing with is getting most of the big stake tests abolished because I feel as if there was nothing that would make or break their grade they would not try as hard. In my eyes the test is a part of school that will always be needed because it is the motivator that helps students better understand the knowledge of the content they are studying because they have to memorize some of the facts. I am a student myself and as much as I do not like tests I do learn from them and my mistake from them. The other part of your article that I half agree with is the on line learning to make communities. I think that is a great idea in itself but the part I disagree with is not going to a physical learning space because if students are at home I believe they will slack off. I believe we do need to update the learning system but also keep some of the old ways because if it is not broken then why fix it?

PLN 4

Dear Will Richardson,
I read “The “New” Normal” your article and I agree with what you are saying about how education systems in the United States needs to change its education system to a system personalized for the student. Right now in school our education system is standardized and it is not helping every student to their best potential. Political figures feel that if we just teach the student how to beat the test we will learn what we need to, but I know that it will never work. Richardson says that we need to personalize education and I agree if we meet the needs of every child then our country would do much better in education, because it is not always the grade that matters. In the your article you talk about how our education system has nothing to build itself up from and it does not, because we are still teaching standardized like in the good old days. But how will we reform our education to fit every student’s needs it is a big task that has to be done?

PLN 3

Dear Mr. Karl Fisch,
I read your article “The CSAP is Dead. Long Live (err, TCAP)” about the transition between CSAP and the new test being put in place on 2014. In your article it states that nobody will know if the test will show our children’s traits that parents want them to have. I am agreeing with what Mr. Fisch and Will Richardson are saying about nobody knows what this test will teach our students or if will teach them anything. Education these days needs a test that will truly show what students need help to improve on or the United States is going to fall farther back in education. People want to know how this test will show students best qualities and what they need to improve on and I am wondering how the test can do this? I have been taking CSAPs for as long as I can remember and I don’t see how they can change this new test the TCAP to help learn from the material. Hopefully I am wrong though and they can change how it works so it is a personalized test. Will this test help the students instead of just a school trying to be the best? But nobody knows. Students, parents, and teachers will just have to see if this test helps out the education of students in a positive way.

PLN 2

Dear David Warlick,

I agree with your article “Are We Wasting Children” because schools can’t kill off their own students.I do believe that this nightmare of yours is not just a frightening and scary thing that may be happening in schools. I believe it is going to foreshadow that schools are going to soon be throwing out children that are not able to keep up with the standards that the schools have. Right now few students have dropped out that I know of but if teachers do not encourage their students and help them like in a bad dream then the schools will be losing students very quickly. The schools will be killing off an already dying breed the student. So I believe that the schools need to encourage students to work hard and help them when they really need it. Even if the student is not as intelligent as his or her peers they should not be murdered for a small defect, because everyone deserves a chance. Along with that point if a student is thinking about dropping out then the school should have a serious discussion with the student to discuss the options and see how this will affect his or life. A horrifying nightmare you encountered and it hopefully has showed how to prevent the murdering of more students.

PLN 1

I read Mr. Fisch's “The Learning Studio” which talked about how students have taken a different approach in college to learning medicine. Instead of being lectured by a teacher for an hour students prepare themselves before class and then rate themselves on how they understand the content. They then break up into teams and work on a patients problems in the learning studio. This way of teaching has greatly helped students learn, work as a team, and increase their grades in the class. If this is how colleges teach then how come our kindergarten through the twelfth grade don't teach like that. If we started teaching like that now in our own schools students could possibly learn more and develop needed communication skills. I think learning studios should be put in schools all over the country.

PLN 23

In Clay Shirky’s How Will Cognitive Surplus Change the World? He talks about people will be able to contribute their unspent time to help and build a better and safer world for the coming generations. Ushahidi is one of the technological advancements that Shirky supports because he it helps people around the world and anyone is able to contribute to it. Ushahidi helped Haiti in the recovery from the earthquake and the controversial election of Kenya. Everyone who contributes will be helping the cause. This matters to me because if there is 3 trillion hours of unspent time a year then I would like to try and contribute some of it to helping others even if it is online. This matters to education because maybe someday students could use it to communicate with students in other countries to learn what they are studying and how things are done there. They could also communicate and have a world wide school system. Cognitive surplus matters to the world because if people need help around the world and people contribute a small amount of their time to potentially save another’s life is always good. I believe cognitive surplus is leading us in a good direction to helping the world.