Issues & Trends

Issue: CIPA/COPPA

The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) are laws that impact how the internet can be used in educational institutions.  CIPA requires institutions receiving federal funding to have internet filters in place, intending to reduce children's exposure to pornographic content.  Considering the average age boys are first exposed to pornography is 11 years old, it seems like a very significant law.  With this law however come issues of censorship - is it a violation of rights to censor material?  And how is this law best enforced?  Even more, what about the opportunity to use sites often blocked to teach critical thinking skills to discern truly obscene/pornographic from valuable content? Sometimes useful sites are blocked for reasons that are less than great.

COPPA  basically limits the collection of information on internet users under 13 and requires certain privacy measures be taken for those users and describes under what circumstances parental consent must be obtained.  It limits/sets guidelines for obtaining or collecting personal information about those under 13, so companies can't just be getting information from kids without their parents' awareness.  Currently, schools or districts are able to decide which sites require parent permission and which sites the school/faculty permission is sufficient.

An internesting site with games teaching about internet safety is Web Wise Kids.  I think this would be a very engaging way to teach students about internet safety, covering issues of sexuality as well as privacy.

Trend: Virtual Schooling

Online classes and schools (there are 27 online schools in the US) are becoming more common/prevalent.  They offer the chance for students to take courses that aren't otherwise offered in their area.  A danger of this trend is that sometimes online learning can be a "sit and get" model, where students don't contribute or create much.  In addition to offering access to otherwise unavailable courses, online education offers a lot of autonomy to students and creates a way for at-risk students to achieve higher than they would at a regular school available to them.

I'm interested in this concept as a learner but not so much as a teacher.  I don't know if I would like not getting face-to-face contact with my students. Although I suppose that's what video conferencing is for. As a learner I think it would be really exciting to have access to courses I wouldn't otherwise have access to.  Throughout college, I've often said I could get my college education on Google haha.

I'm not sure how well it would work for science classes.  The content knowledge obtained would be the same, but the limit would be access to lab materials and equipment.  That's something you can't get in an online course.  Learning scientific techniques/methods would also be very limited, as you can't be present with a student and watch her titrate and make sure she's doing it correctly - and she would never have access to a buret to do a titration in the first place if the class was entirely online. So I guess I'm skeptical of its effectiveness for science courses, particularly in terms of practical skills (labs).

Resources

PBS Learning Media:
URL: https://wgvu.pbslearningmedia.org/
I first heard about this portal in my Teacher Assisting seminar last semester. An educator came in and talked about it and walked us through how to set up an account with it.  In my final project, I could use it to find tech resources that go with whatever topic I want to do.

New Vaccines Workshop:
http://www.centreofthecell.org/wp-content/uploads/New_Vaccines.pdf
I found this lesson plan on Centre of the Cell's twitter. This could give me an idea of what topic to plan a lesson on.  I especially life this one because it's about relevant current issues.
NGSS: HSLS1-2

Natural Selection Lesson Plans:
http://www.ngsslifescience.com/science.php?/biology/lessonplans/C394/
I found this list of lesson plans by searching "secondary education science natural selection lesson" to see if I could find any good lesson plans for natural selection, and so I did!  These would also be great for giving me a place to start/something to modify for a lesson instead of starting from scratch.
NGSS: HSLS4-2, HSLS4-4

Are you right-brained or left-brained?

Just Google "right-brained left brained quiz" and you'll get 10 different sites  on the first page that offer a quiz to help you determine whether you use the right or left hemisphere of your brain more, in the same way that the majority of us are either right or left handed.  If you are artistic, creative, think in abstract concepts, and messy, you will be told you are right-brained.  If you are good at math and/or science, analyzing things, and are clean and organized, you will be told you are left-brained.

A popular visual representation of
the right/left brained hypothesis.

 But do humans really develop to use one half of their brain more often than the other?  Do our students preferentially use one side of their brain more than the other, and are physiologically disposed to be more creative or more analytical?  Should we account for and accommodate these unalterable differences in our lesson plans?

Neural research would say not! Upon analyzing MRI scans of brains at rest, Nielson et. al. (2013) found that while certain functions are localized to the right or left hemisphere, individuals did not show an overall increased activity in either the right or left hemisphere. They also found that there were no gender differences in neural activity.  Despite this, Dekker et. al. (2012), who surveyed 242 primary and secondary teachers from the UK and the Netherlands, found that more than 80% of the teachers believed that hemispheric dominance could explain differences between learners.  

The myth originated from studies of patients who had their corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, cut, as John Geake (2008) discusses in his overview of various neuromyths that persist in the field of education.  When cut, the two hemispheres showed to perform different functions.  However, these patients were examples of abnormal functioning, whose hemispheres could not communicate like the average human's do.  Glossing over this detail, the public developed the myth that one can be right brained or left brained.    

There is some degree of truth in the myth, though.  Research has established that, in right-handed people at least, the right hemisphere dominates at tasks requiring visual and spatial cognition, while the left hemisphere dominates in speech (Kim et. al., 1991).  Interestingly, this is often switched in left-handed individuals.  This pattern of hemispheric specialization contributes to and helps perpetuate the myth of right/left brained dominance. Our students are still not right or left brain dominant, and this categorization does not need to be used as a factor in instructional design and should not have any legitimacy as a factor in educational decisions.       


References

Dekker, S., Lee, N. C., Howard-Jones, P., & Jolles, J. (2012). Neuromyths in education: Prevalence and predictors of misconceptions among teachers. Front. Psychol. 3(429).

Geake, J. (2008). Neuromythologies in education. Educational Research, 50(2), 123-133.

Kim, S. G., Ashe, J., Hendrich, K., & Georgopoulos, A. P. (1991). Cortex: Hemispheric Asymmetry and Handedness. J. Biol, Chem, 266, 23453.

Nielsen, J. A., Zielinski, B. A., Ferguson, M. A., Lainhart, J. E., & Anderson, J. S. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. PloS one, 8(8), e71275.

Blogs in the Classroom

When thinking about the place of a blog in my future classroom, I think of how convenient it would be to have somewhere online for students to have access to the requirements or rubrics of various assignments.  I've seen a lot of students that struggle to remember to write things down and so forget to do assignments.  However, students are generally used to checking online sites like Facebook daily, and so it seems like a way to seamlessly graft school assignments into routines and habits they already have.  Additionally, I think a blog offers a format for more self-expression rather than just writing a paper.  Blogs are more casual than a paper, and there's encouragement to put more of one's personality and opinion into it.  It also provides a platform for an ongoing conversation/discussion about a topic with the option to comment on posts.  That's not really an option with papers - it's not very easy for students to "comment" on classmates' papers unless it's a google doc.  I think blogs would be great for encouraging students to help each other think more deeply about a concept, and even more to explore positions on and the complexities of controversial issues in science.  It could even be used to help brainstorm ideas for solutions to various environmental issues - that would be extremely interesting.      

Learner Analysis: Steve Urkel

Steve Urkel from the ABC show Family Matters is the classic nerd.  He's extremely intelligent and is constantly inventing new things.  His vocabulary and manner of speaking are far beyond his age.  He is also extremely clumsy and very often responsible for breaking things.

His family is middle/upper-middle class, as his parents are both extremely intelligent and his father is a doctor.  However, his home life does not appear to be very happy, as his parents are depicted as very openly disliking him.  It is also suggested that his parents even neglect him, as they do not feed him every day.

Steve, being very intelligent, is very good at school and therefore tends to treat and view his teachers as peers.  He speaks several languages fluently including Japanese and Korean. He excels in science and is very passionate about it.  He does not distract others from school - at least, not out of a desire to avoid schoolwork himself, but perhaps unintentionally by his awkward and conspicuous social interactions and clumsiness.  He is very engaged in school.

He is very clearly interested in science and technology, as he invents new technology frequently.  Steve is probably more college-ready than most high-school seniors, intellectually.  However, he may still struggle socially in college.  Here, you can see his intellectual vocabulary and social skills at play at school:

While he is interested in science, his affections are also largely dominated by his neighbor, Laura Winslow whom he is "in love with."  The majority of his storyline and motivation in the show is about trying to win Laura over.  He spends a huge amount of time devising and enacting plans to win her affection, and is repeatedly rejected by her.  

If I had him in my classroom, I would want to give him more challenging assignments to really stretch his learning and to further foster his skills, especially seeing as my classroom would be a science (biology or chemistry) and this is the subject Steve seems most proficient at.  I could probably give him a teacher's assistant role and have him help in preparing labs and making solutions and helping his classmates.

I would love to incorporate his interests into assignments for him, and to expose him to new developments in science and technology.  I could really push him far, probably to the college level.  I could easily see him just tearing through peer-reviewed journal articles.  It would be so fun to have him as a student, because of his passion and interest about science! It would also be difficult because I have no doubt he would often know more than me.

About Me

Hi all!

My name is Michelle Ziegelbaur and I am working toward a Secondary teaching certification for biology and chemistry. I am particularly passionate about teaching evolution well and dispelling common misconceptions about it.  

The antelope named Lyle that
 my family takes care of.

I spent many years of my childhood living in West/Central Africa. My parents and youngest brother currently live in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, where my parents work at a school called Rain Forest International School (where my other brother and I both graduated from). Last summer I spent a couple months with them there where I was able to teach an 8th grade science unit and spend time with my family for the first time in 2 years.  

Jumping off the bridge in South Africa.

I absolutely love travelling to new countries, hiking, and practicing my photography.  Some fun things I've done: climbed the highest mountain in West Africa, hiked in the Lake District in the UK, and bungee jumped off Bloukrans Bridge in South Africa.  Most recently, I spent spring break in Mexico snorkeling with sea turtles and exploring a couple cenotes!

I have two bearded dragons I call my "lizzard children," named Kaladin and Jasnah after characters in my favorite novel series by Brandon Sanderson, The Stormlight Archives (all of his novels are excellent; the Mistborn series in particular if you are looking for some books to get into).  I also have a lot of plants.

Another one of my interests is music. I spend a lot of my free time seeking out new songs and I have a PLETHORA of suggestions of songs by little-known bands, usually folk or folk rock. I also play guitar, and have a couple of friends I occasionally get together with and jam with.  I love doing covers, like this one of Down in the Valley by The Head and the Heart:

So there's a little bit about me!

*Edit:
I forgot to mention what my experience is with technology in the classroom!
During my teacher assisting last semester, I was also taking the class Chemistry in Secondary Ed, which introduced me to a site called PhET. This site has a lot of fun simulations of chemistry concepts! I love these and used one in a lesson I taught the chemistry students in my placement.  I was also introduced to Kahoot when I shadowed my student teaching cooperating teacher and used that as a review game for the unit I taught the biology students.  That's about the extent of my experience with planning technology use in the classroom.  For various classes, I've used Twitter and Weebly, but that's about it. I'm very excited to be exposed to new ideas of ways to incorporate various technology into lesson plans!