Mrs. Bobbie Proffitt - FRIT 7234 - IF&IL

Wiggins’s (2014) blog presents an authentic representation of what is happening in schools today. I teach interrelated special education students in a small group setting, and I find myself guilty of probably helping out my students more than I should. Although I do catch myself helping when the students should be working on their own, I feel like the students’ attitudes are also partially to blame. I have seen it more this year than ever before. The students at our school seemed to have become so entitled. They feel like, if they cannot solve a problem, we should be at their beck and call to answer it for them. Sometimes, we play into this mindset, which encourages it. I also feel that a student’s home life contributes to this mindset. For example, if a child’s parents do everything for them, then they expect the same treatment when they get to school. It seems sometimes that this generation has not had to struggle as much through figuring out problems for themselves – especially wit...

Google has definitely saved my life countless times. It’s a go-to website for me and is now logged into my brain as a verb. When I was growing up, we used to play trivia games wherever we went. When we came across a question that we did not know the answer to, we were forced to just think hard about it until we came up with the answer, or we let it bug us until we found out. Now, the second someone doesn’t know the answer, they grab their smart phone or the nearest computer and look it up. Of course, I also find myself googling the answers to questions that I have; with so much information available from so many sources, it is very easy to find exactly what I am looking for with a few keystrokes on my touch screen. Although I like the fact that we have access to almost all information at the tip of our fingers, I kind of miss the old days of bonding together as a family as we tried to figure out the answers. As a teacher, I have noticed that the world of technology has not only help...

          Synthesizing the information presented in these four sources reveals the true depth that lies in information overload. Gordon Price’s (2010) video concerning the amount of readily available digital information provides a nice introduction to the concept, posing hypothetical questions to get viewers thinking about analyzing information to get the most from it and teaching students to do the same. This information comes from a multitude of sources, as Bryan Alexander (2013) notes in his piece. He uses Jane Hart’s flow chart of “information curation” (Alexander, 2013), listing the steps that he takes to consume, analyze, and re-share information. Alexander’s work doesn’t seem like its intention was to be repurposed in the field of education, as he uses a fair amount of jargon that many students may not find easily comprehensible – ad hoc and RSS aren’t exactly terms that my students would find engaging. This terminology as well as Alexander’s (2013) di...