Tinkering...

http://edubeacon.com/?p=157

I absolutely loved this video! I agree with every word of John Seely Brown.
As human beings, we need people to know how to behave in our "human world", what is acceptable and what is not. To learn a language, we need to be surrounded by people in order to know how it works, to hear it and express our thoughts. We need interaction with people to learn anything.
So, what can we do better in schools today? I guess, a very big step towards bringing our students to success is implementing cooperative learning activities. Students learn from each other and they share their knowledge with their classmates. We need to create activities that are meaningful to them, that they can easily relate to. We need to foster their imagination and let them create, work with their imagination, play with knowledge, experiment.
Mr. Brown called it an "architectural studio". Students' work is made public, then it is criticized by peers and a "master". He mentioned something important at the end. He said that the identity is constructed on how students participated in the project, what they have done and how it was received by other members of peer-based learning community.

Computer class management

During my last practicum, I had a chance to observe a class given by my cooperating teacher in a computer lab. To my greatest surprise, it was not that big of a nightmare! The students knew what they were doing, no one was off task. They did have a lot of questions on how to find sources in English, but they were cool with the rest. This experience reassured me about bringing my future students to a computer lab.

I guess the most important things while in a lab are to be prepared (to get familiar with the program, anticipate the worst, have a plan B, etc), to stay calm and to ask students' help when needed (just because sometimes our students are more comfortable with computers than we are AND to make our students feel important). These are my initial rules.

One sure thing is that absence of lab experience should not be an obstacle for teachers to bring their students to a lab. We take risks, make lots of mistakes and learn.

Opensource Software

Before reading this article: http://www.computerlanguage.com/2020.pdf, I had no idea what "Opensource" meant. It is software that is open to everyone. Anyone can go and use it, and contribute when he feels like it. People are working voluntarily and are doing good for society.

In order to better understand what it is, I googled it! While reading on it, a question popped up "What is the difference between opensource software and free software?" I google it again and found a great line by Richard Stallman (I also googled him and according to Wikipedia he is "an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer; founder of the Free Software Foundation"), who says the following: "free software is free as in speech, not as in beer." So, as I understand the word "free" in this term means both "zero cost" and "freedom". I still have lots to figure out and google... Oh, by the way, google is built on open source...

For my Computer Applications class, I used KompoZer to create my web folio, Blogger to blog and phpBB3 to communicate with my future colleagues. All this software is amazing and free of charge! I am impressed! Way to go!