Research Paper Recap Questions 1. How did your findings influence your thinking about the bigger challenge? The inconclusive results from the limited data I collected, (the kids expressed no big preference for either tech or non-tech in the few outdoor activities we did), make me now just want to explore different ways we might use handheld devices in outdoor activities and see how we can integrate that into the classroom curriculum. A challenge is getting the kids access to the kinds of outdoor apps that are out there. The bigger challenge is breaking the mold and getting the kids outdoors more often. It's nice to be able to say "it's for my masters". Can I keep up the outdoor learning when the program is over? We shall see and a lot depends on how this experiment works out. 2. What do I know now? Kids highly rate outdoor activities. Parents want their kids to be outdoors in safe environments. Being indoors and on screens too much is bad for their health. Given the challenges that face our planet, schools are not focused on outdoor and environmental education enough. Well, that's my opinion. 3. What do we still need to know? I need to know more outdoor and environmental integrated curriculum/projects/strategies to try with my students. For example, I want to expand our garden project and integrate tech into it in innovative ways that I don't know yet. Dervin Article: When I started this article and found it to be very dense, I first tried to search up the authors Jack D. Glazier and Ronald R. Powell to get some context. I managed to find out that they were involved in libraries and information management as it relates to libraries. I think. So this gave me an idea of where they were coming from. Then I looked up Brenda Dervin on Wikipedia to see, hopefully in a nutshell, what she does. There's a cute drawing there of a stick figure "bridging the gap". This orientated me a bit more because I saw the same drawing when thumbing through the article before reading it. I thought the article would have something to do with project based learning and the cycles of inquiry we are engaged in as we explore our driving question. Because we had discussed this in class on the 22nd, I felt I knew what professor Curtis was aiming at in assigning the reading. Then I started reading and immediately got lost. Suddenly it did not seem to have anything to do with PBL. I re-read every paragraph. After three paragraphs, I decided to start taking notes. I used to do this in college while studying literature. It helps me make sense while I read. It also helps me find my way much like Hansel and Grettle when they leave bread crumbs in the forest. I can reread my notes before I do a second reading of the article to see what made sense to me and guide me. The ideas actually reminded me a lot of what we used to talk about in literature theory classes in college where a big post modern question was about the nature of meaning. The discussion of assumptions and discontinuity especially reminded me of those post modern arguments from college days. As I read I realized that this background experience in studying literature was from where I was coming while trying to make sense of what Dervin was saying. This made me "miss the mark" on a couple of takeaways I got from the first reading. I'm hoping that on my second reading, now that I know where the article is going, this won't happen again. I think that there are a lot of things in this article that I may never fully understand because I do not have the background knowledge that the people do who study this field. I'll try to include some photos of my notes because they best demonstrate how I tried to make sense of this reading as I went along.
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AuthorJeremy Smith teaches third grade at Calistoga Elementary School. Archives
July 2020
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