On the Way to School

Lately, I've been contemplating how physical geography has been eclipsed by human geography. It seems we can't go anywhere anymore that is natural. There's always a power line or something in the way. (I guess I've gone through a lot of travel photos in the last few years.) I've been trying to figure out how I would represent this in art. So, I include it when I doodle. I drew a tree, but put electrical cables from a power line in front of it and had a bird sitting on the cable instead of the tree.
Anyway, I feel this picture brings out the beauty of a landscape no longer characterized by physical geography, but now by human geography.

Also, (more in hopes of having a reason to post it here than anything) I was thinking of this picture in the context of education and ICT in education specifically. I think as teachers, especially with ICT, we often act as trains. We simply bring the students to where we want them to be. I feel our purpose should be more to light the tracks. To show them what the goal is and how to get there and most importantly that the tracks keep going beyond the classroom station.

An Experiment

In my first degree I used a laptop for my notes. I even struggled through calculus and higher level physics and all the keyboard-unfriendly symbols. I had Microsoft Onenote, which saved automatically, and had a much looser format. You could click anywhere and begin typing and it would be a separate, manipulable block of text. It even had an easy draw feature, plus a search feature so you could find whatever you wanted without having to remember exactly where you made. Oh, and an awesome folder/notebook structure that let you easily get to any of your notes.
The one drawback was easy distraction while in boring, easy, uninteresting classes. I became a bejeweled expert.
I now have Onenote again and am going to start taking notes with it in my Ed classes. While none of them are uninteresting, the potential for distraction still remains. Let's see if I've grown out of it, or if it's a constant for me.

ICT in action

I am now two weeks into student teaching and have been able to put some theory into practice. I have worries about a technology gap and a disconnect between the computer lab and the classroom. Every child does not have equal access to technology and I feel trekking a class to the lab is not an integration of technology into the classroom; however, I have been very lucky in my placement.
My school has about 50 netbooks that can be reserved and used in classrooms. They aren't always available and the network and servers sometimes have issues, but they enable teachers to fully integrate technology and the internet into the classroom.
I've helped develop and teach a grade 9 vocabulary unit and have used wordle as a tool to display students' growing proficiency with root words, suffixes and prefixes. Classes use them to research essay topics. Don't want to type up a book review? Get a netbook and make a collage or powerpoint to summarize.
I've been able to model responsible image searching on google and have the entire class follow along step-by-step on their netbooks and then search on their own. I'm going to use the same process to give an introductory movie editing lesson in Movie Maker this week.
It's awesome. I can do anything I want due to the total integration of this technology into the classroom. I've started a character study that is also a technological translation project. One of my classes is reading Macbeth. The students chose a main character and have to pay close attention to the character throughout the play, for the end goal is to create a facebook profile for your character that actually matches your character's character. The students have to understand and extract information from the traditional literary form and translate it into a digital literary form. It is a long term project and I wouldn't have had the confidence to attempt it if I didn't have a completely integrated classroom.