My Take on Educational Blogging

What is Educational Blogging? Educational Blogging is typically done by teachers and is a way for them to share their thoughts and ideas coming from their experience in the classroom. Many of the educational blogs that I have read tend to serve as kind of a debrief on what has been going on in that teacher's classroom that past week or so and what they have learned from it, struggled with, or what it has caused them to have to think about. Another form of educational blogging that I have seen involves teachers also setting up student blogs connected to their own so that the blog as a whole serves as a way for parents to keep up with what their students are doing in class as well as what is going on with the teacher. Blogging is a great way for students and teachers alike to be able to share their unique ideas and perspectives on a worldwide platform and to receive feedback from others who share their experiences or may have new perspectives on the content. 

A woman sitting with her legs crossed, typing on her laptop

This blog that I started was as a part of my Education Technology 486 class at the University of Tennessee and throughout this project, we were challenged to choose three topics related to education that interested us to blog about. In a class of 20+, this project left us with a lot of blog posts between us all which served as a great starting point for us to start exploring the world of Educational Blogging from the comfort of our own peers' blogs. One thing that I learned from reading my peers' blogs is just how much we are able to communicate about ourselves and our perspectives just from the design of the blog. I loved looking at different people's blogs and just seeing the stark contrast in designs, and as I read through their posts, I could really see how what age and subject they were planning on teaching was so clearly reflected in the style of their blog which further backed the information that I was reading in the posts. A great example of these design choices can be seen on Aleea's blog, with a pre-K focus, vs Haille's blog, with a geography focus. These stylistic differences also made me think about how people perceive my blog, and how the design that I choose shapes the lens that they read my posts through. Another thing that I learned is how these blogs can serve a such a sense of validation to a lot of the things that we all feel and sometimes feel alone in feeling. I really enjoyed reading Madison's Blog post on Poverty in the classroom and reading about how important intentionality is when dealing with students in adverse situations. The last thing that I learned was how powerful sharing your own experience can be in the blogging world. It can be really easy to read blog posts and just feel like information is being laid out in front of you with no connector but in all three of the blogs that I linked above, Aleea, Haille, and Madison included a personal story of how the topic that they were writing on connected to their lives and it made the content feel so much more real and applicable to my teaching journey

    For myself, I learned a lot more through this blogging assignment than I thought I was going to. To be quite frank, I was not excited about this assignment at all because writing is not typically something that I have enjoyed. I found it hard to find topics that interested me and I was dreading having to meet the word count when I felt that I really didn't have anything meaningful to say. I was surprised however how much I did have to say when the topics came naturally to me instead of feeling forced. I even ended up writing another blog post on the digital story that I made because I was excited to share my thoughts and perspectives. This project also really inspired me to think back to all of the writing assignments that I hated as a kid and think about how my perspective might have changed if it was presented more as a reflection or blog post (which may be an idea that I'm going to steal for my future classroom). Overall, I'm really glad that I started this educational blog and while I'm not promising to keep up with it for the long haul, I do think that I might have a few more posts left in me as I continue to learn more about the world of education.

My first digital story

Here you will find my very first digital story which I created as part of my EdTech 486 (Educational Technology) class during my junior spring at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. This project challenged us to explore Tennessee state educational standards and choose one to create a digital story about. 

If you're not sure exactly what a digital story is click here to learn more about them and how they are used in education, or just think about BrainPop videos or even Crash Course style videos if you're 7familiar with those titles. The standard that I chose was TN 4.MD.C.7, which states that students will be able to,

"Recognize angle measure as additive. When an angle is decomposed into non-overlapping parts, the angle measure of the whole is the sum of the parts. Solve addition and subtraction problems to find unknown angles on a diagram in real-world and mathematical problems (e.g., by using an equation with a symbol for the unknown angle measure)."

In my digital story, you will see that we review this standard by following "Mary" through a real-world problem where the blueprint for her new slide is missing an angle measurement which she must find. I put this digital story together through a set of royalty-free images that I found on the website Pixabay as well as images that I created myself using Canva (a site that I recommend all creative people become familiar with!). After gathering my images and finalizing my storyline and script I was able to use the free video editing software that was included on my computer (Microsoft images) to create the video and overlay the background music and voice-over. When you watch my video, you will also see that I have included captions, which were a requirement of the project. This as well as image descriptions for each frame of the video were important in ensuring that the content that we created was accessible for students of all ability levels.

Before starting this project, I was honestly quite skeptical of how I was going to be able to turn a math standard into a digital story and was unsure if digital stories would end up being a helpful resource to have in my arsenal of teaching tools but now at the end of my project, I am so glad that I was able to work through all of the steps of putting this together because it gave me a whole new perspective on how technology can be used to enhance students learning. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a super tech-y person. If I can do it in person or with pen and paper, I will always choose that option but during the Covid-19 pandemic, this was not always an option, and being in a completely virtual world really made me question if I was in a classroom right now, if I would be able to adapt to the position. If you're familiar with the SAMR model of technology integration, I know know that this hesitation is because I viewed technology as a substitution or augmentation rather than a tool to modify and redefine education. Once I got into creating this lesson, I really began to understand how helpful a format like this could be for students who like to learn independently, students who have a hard time focusing for long periods of time, or even just to serve as a quick reminder for students on a concept.

Charter Schools and Voucher Programs

 Charter Schools have been around for many years but just in the past few decades have really become a topic of conversation with their connection to voucher programs as a possible solution to educational inequities. Charter schools are privately run schools that receive funding from the public, meaning that while they receive similar funding to public schools, they are not run by any school district and do not follow the same curriculum, standards, etc.. Charter schools began popping up in the 1980s but did not become popular in the United States until the mid-2000s after receiving endorsements from President George Bush under the No Child Left Behind program. The idea behind charter schools was to give parents more choice in their student's education as the curriculum is often more tailored to the students, teachers are given much more freedom in their educational decisions, and parents do not have to worry about being in a specific school zone to attend. School Vouchers go hand in hand with this idea of offering parents more choice in their children's education and are typically implemented together with charter schools in areas that adopt the system. The goal of these programs overall is to 

A teacher assists  elementary students with
coding app on their computers at a charter
school in California

Voucher programs work by taking the money that each school is allotted per child from funding from property taxes and rather than giving this money directly to the school, it gives that money to parents in the form of vouchers which they are able to take to any educational institution of their choice (public, private, charter, Montessori, etc). The thought behind this system is that if parents do not think that their child is receiving a quality education at the public school they are at, they should be able to send their kids to a school that is able to provide an adequate education. By this process, inadequate schools will simply have students leave and will shut down while high-performing schools will receive more funding and thrive as more students chose them.

While on the surface, this system seems like it would be beneficial in holding schools accountable and making sure that everyone has access to a good education, there are many factors that make this system heavily biased and many examples of how these biases have made these systems a failure time and time again. Some of these issues are outlined below.

• Not all students have access to educational institutions due to a lack of transportation
• This system benefits families who have access to reliable transportation

• Vouchers may not cover the cost of charter schools or private schools near the student
• This system benefits families who are able to afford to cover the remaining costs

• Charter schools have the ability to implement selective admission processes meaning that they can choose which students to admit while public schools are forced to accept all students
• Lower performing students and minority students are often highly underrepresented in Charter schools

Because of these inequities, students who have access and means to use the voucher system are able to move their kids into better schools while those who are not, are forced to stay in the school which now has a lack of funding from the voucher students leaving which furthers the deficit in the school, creating a worse educational situation for the students left behind who are not able to leave. While I think that the idea of charter schools is fantastic because I believe that teachers should have a lot more say in the education that they provide, I don't think that this system is fair and it does not improve public education which should be a goal of the US government rather than simply promoting charter schools which have less regulation and have not been proven to increase test scores or student achievement over public schools. Countries like Chile and Sweeden have adopted a fully charter school program with vouchers and both countries have seen remarkable increases in the disparity between classes as well as lowered PISA scores. Chile has taken steps to reverse this damage and make the voucher system more equitable for its residents (recognizing that it costs more money to educate students from lower socioeconomic status and changing the voucher amounts accordingly) but it serves as a powerful lesson that this system must be carefully considered from all angles before it is widely adopted in any situation.

TN House Bill 2670

 Earlier this month, the Tennessee state legislature introduced house bill 2670 for consideration. TN HB2670 prohibits public higher education institutions from taking certain actions regarding divisive topics as well as requiring these institutions to collect and publish data from their students and employees on whether they feel comfortable being able to discuss a wide range of topics openly on their campus. This bill is one of many that are being discussed around the country surrounding the hot topic issue of Critical Race Theory, or CRT. The importance and controversy of these bills fall within the topics that a stated to be divisive, and therefore prohibited, many of which revolve around power structures that are present within our society in regards to race, sex, class, and other aspects of personal identity. Many people fear that without these bills, students will be made to feel guilty about the innate privilege or oppression that certain groups have been labeled within our culture while others fear that these bills aim to quiet the very discussions that break down these power structures and that the outrage that these proposed bills create further proves the need for these types of conversations rather than legislature that limits them.

The Tennessee General Assembly
meeting to discuss a bill

These bills have been brought up in a few of my classes such as Educational Psychology and CSE 300 specifically because of the implications of this bill and how they could possibly affect these classes. In my Educational Psychology class we have discussed countless cases of the either under or over-representation of specific groups in just about every diagnosis and to ignore that there are specific aspects of society that play into why these inequalities in representation exist would be a complete disservice to our students. Take the fact that black students far out represent white students who are diagnosed with aggressive personality disorders and that ADHD diagnoses are far more likely to be received for boys than girls, and that boys are more likely to receive accommodations for this diagnosis than girls in the same grade. The discussion of this bill has especially affected my CSE 300 class because the topic of the class is to address inequalities in our society caused by race, sex, nationality, gender, etc. (basically this bills worst nightmare) 

When I first read through this bill, I'll be honest I was kind of confused on where the issue was because it was never stated that certain divisive topics couldn't be discussed in class but from what I can tell, the issue lies in the part of the bill that states that employees and students cannot be penalized/rewarded for their refusal to support, believe, endorse, embrace, confess, act upon, or otherwise assent to one or more divisive concepts. From my own experience in a college classroom, I can definitely see a situation arising where a teacher is discussing a topic that a student doesn't agree with and the student arguing that the teachers "endorsement" of a topic was the reason that they have received certain treatment in the classroom which creates a total fear system for educators who don't want to get caught up in the "cancel culture" that tends to follow these situations. Overall, through reading through some of these bills and talking about them, I've been able to take away from it that while it lays out the topics that should be avoided and gives some type of legal allowance for people who would like to challenge the inclusion of topics in a lesson, etc., overall the bill is decently vague and it's hard to tell exactly what constitutes discussion of these topics which is another reason that these bills have received so much backlash. 

Taking the first "Divisive Concept" listed in the bill for example, "One race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex", clearly (hopefully) no teacher is going to stand up in front of their class and express this particular view but this bill puts into question how a teacher would lead a discussion about the Women's rights movement of the '60s and '70s and whether it would be appropriate to talk about the oppression of women that led to the need for this movement. The same thing goes for the Civil Rights movement and so many other important histories that not only defined our culture when they happened but still leave a lasting impact today. To allow these bills to shut down these conversations is to ignore the effects of these events and systems that are still in place today to allow the continued comfort of the oppressor to decide what is appropriate conversation and how the oppressed may feel. If these oppressive systems were not in place, there would be no uncomfortable conversations about them because there would be no evidence of the systems, there would be no one to complain about the effects of the systems, there would be no one affected by the systems who would have a reason to stand up against them. Our students are affected by these issues, our communities and societies are affected by these issues, and without the ability to educate others about the history and the steps that can be taken to counteract these issues no one benefits except the people who were already benefiting off of the system.

Standardized Testing

Standardized testing has become one of the most "hot topic" issues in the discussion of modern education. Defined as any test that is administered and scored in a consistent or "standard" manner, standardized testing has become synonymous with the large-scale, quantitative state-wide testing that most of us have become accustomed to (and most likely came to dread if we're being honest). While Standardized testing started as a way of quickly assessing students' knowledge and progress through a curriculum, it has transformed into a highly pressurized way of defining student achievement in order to be compared with other students, schools, districts, states, and even countries as a whole. Standardized testing can provide valuable information about what students do or do not know and whether they are meeting state educational standards when implemented in moderation, but at what level do standardized tests stop measuring student's understanding of content, and begin to simply measure a student's ability to take a test.

Three students are seen sitting at their desks
 actively engaged in marking their paper

 For me personally, standardized testing was all about the competition of grades and getting my tests turned in as fast as possible rather than really showing a mastery of the content. I really thrived under the high pressure situations that testing in my school created, and that many students have come to associate with testing anxiety, and the concept of just being able to put down the answer and move on without having to put in much thought was what I was good at. I learned very quickly how to use the standardized format of the test to my advantage and to hone in on certain skills such as speed reading, that would put me ahead of others on the test rather than focusing on studying the actual content. I honestly hated taking tests with formats other than multiple choice / true/false because I became very used to the crutch that standardized testing allows if you know how to work the test. I once had a test-prep teacher tell me that there were two ways to pass the end of year tests, either study the content and actually know what's going on, or to get good at beating the test and while he wished we had time to cover all the content, it was just easier to teach us to beat the test. 

I think that overall, standardized testing can be a very powerful and informative tool for many different areas, but not in the way that it is used now. I think with how much it is used in schools today, there is no room for students to really gain a deep understanding of the content because there is so much content that is required to be "learned" for the test that student's are forced to make the distinction between information that they believe will be on the test and therefore must be memorized and all other irrelevant information that they don't have the time to truly learn. It becomes a constant state of cram and dump in order to make room for new information that might be on the next test.