As a middle school teacher, when I reflect on Connectivism and education I agree with much of what George Siemens has to say.\u00a0 In his TedxNYED talk on March 3rd, 2010, Siemens said that the purpose of education is to prepare individuals to be contributing and interactive parts of society.\u00a0 Having only completed my undergraduate degree in special education 4 short years ago, this fits with my personal philosophy of education. I believe that it is my job as a teacher to guide my students to the wealth of information available in a structured way so that they are able to access the information, draw their own conclusions, and that they spread those ideas to their peers.\u00a0 The hope is that they are interacting in a way that builds on their previous learning and causes them to create new thoughts and ideas.\u00a0\u00a0
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Siemens describes teaching as \u201cinformation interrogation systems overlayed with social connectivity.\u201d\u00a0 Middle school students are by nature social beings. To fight this natural tendency will only lead to rebellion from the students and a loss of personal connection with them too resulting in a lack of learning.\u00a0 The goal is to guide their natural desire to connect with the gathering and sharing of intellectual information or garnering their interest enough in the content that they want to seek out more information and share it with their peers.\u00a0\u00a0
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One of the challenges that I find in trying to actively teach with Connectivism in mind is the vast amounts of inaccurate information available to my students. Trying to teach my students how to discern between facts and false information can be very difficult. Also, the struggle of finding ways to present the information so that they are invested enough to dig deeper on their own and then excited enough about what they learn to want to share it.
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Ultimately, I believe, like Siemens, that my job and goal is to help prepare my students to become positive contributing society members.\u00a0 Personally, I am still constantly learning and stretching myself, trying to better understand the new digital culture that my students live in so that I can better help them navigate towards true Connectivism.\u00a0 It is an ongoing process. As Siemens says, it is more about the vessel than the actual knowledge. So, I try to worry less about how little I currently know about today\u2019s technology but strive to dig deeper to understand it all in a better way.\u00a0 Hopefully, my own journey in Connectivism will lead to success for my students.\u00a0\u00a0
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As a middle school teacher, when I reflect on Connectivism and education I agree with much of what George Siemens has to say.\u00a0 In his TedxNYED talk on March 3rd, 2010, Siemens said that the purpose of education is to prepare individuals to be contributing and interactive parts of society.\u00a0 Having only completed my undergraduate … Continue reading “A Reflection on Connectivism and Middle School Education”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1377","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joannadunlap.com\/5665fall19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joannadunlap.com\/5665fall19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joannadunlap.com\/5665fall19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joannadunlap.com\/5665fall19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joannadunlap.com\/5665fall19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/joannadunlap.com\/5665fall19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1379,"href":"https:\/\/joannadunlap.com\/5665fall19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1377\/revisions\/1379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joannadunlap.com\/5665fall19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}