Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog

It's been bubbling under for a while, but it seems that the Second Life (SL) backlash may have begun.

The most recent symptom is How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life in Wired Magazine, which slams marketing dollars being wasted on a virtual world where you can never find what every advertiser wants - a crowd. There just aren't enough people actually there at anyone time, it argues, to be a useful medium.

But how's the reaction elsewhere? And what's the view of SL for learning?

Read the rest of this entry »

I am praying for rain today.  Really we need it, but it would be nice to have a reason to stay home!  I have a ton of stuff to do; that truly needs doing, but I try to take the kids to the pool everyday that is nice.  Even though I limit our pool excursions to 3 hours. . . it's draining.  This week we've gone every day but one.  I could truly use the break.  I could declare a "no-pool" day regardless of weather, but I don't know that it would be worth the grief.

As I may have mentioned, we homeschool.  In fact, we school year round.  It's easiest, I believe, for all of us.  We have a routine we are accustomed to.  This year, my older two were grumbling about not having summer break, so I worked in almost one full month without any school work.  Within 1/2 week, I was hearing the dreaded, "I'm bored".

Believe it or not, I am NOT a walking entertainment center.  (The General can woefully attest to this fact.    )

I despise hearing the "I'm bored" remark.  My general response to that remark is something along the lines of "Go clean your room, (or the bathroom, or. . .)".  So, by week two the "I'm bored" remarks had dissappeared.

Only to be replaced with, "There's nothing to do."  Strangely, I have a similar tactic for dealing with this comment.  (Obviously, I lack a good deal of creativity.)

Week three of our summer break found us in a wonderfully clean home, and the kids asking to start school again.

WIMPS!

Anyway, I'm running into a bit of a problem. 

See, not only was that month supposed to be the kids summer vacation, but it was to be my "scheduling" time.  I make all their school schedules.  Everything they do is meticulously scheduled out.  Should anyone ever call to review our homeschool (which they are supposed to do twice a year, but have yet to actually do), they would know exactly what we've done, and how long it took.  The idea is, they could also see what we are supposed to be doing next also.

Well, since our summer break was cut short, I only got 90% of Carter's schedule completed;  70% of Oneill's; and, well, I'm going week by week for Jackson and Tealc.

The week by week thing is truly stressing me out.  Knowing I've yet to complete an entire schedule 100% is stressing me out.  Knowing there are a total of 3 of them to be completed is STRESSING me out! 

Then there are the other things (i.e. "life") that keeping popping up and requiring my attention and time that are stressing me out and keeping me from other things that also require my time and attention. . .  It's a vicious cycle

So, you see, staying home today to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING would be really good for me.

Oh, but last night, my neighbor came over and fixed my door.  He laughed as he left saying that he should go work for Fort Knox.  No-one is going to be able to get in that back door!

Ahaa.....I just had what some call a light bulb moment after reading this post from Tammy over at Just Enough and Nothing More. I was thinking along these lines just yesterday as i was considering how to develop a discipline in an area without overdoing it and 'burning out'.

I'm good at this, which can be easily demonstrated by my short lived exercise campaign which started here and ended about 4 weeks later. I go so hard at it that I can't maintain the energy required. The motivation wanes and I stop.

The post mentioned talks about doing a little of something everyday to keep the engine idling so that you're already in the groove when inspiration/energy/passion strikes. This is a great lesson for me. In my tendency to go into something full bore, I run out of steam and rarely carry things through to a life habit or completed project.

I really don't want to do this with my kids. I like what Tammy says:

The “idling” activities are like that. “Just come outside and play. Just do any one of your workbooks you want to, any page, any number of problems. Just sit with me while I read this outloud for two pages. No requirement to finish. No requirement to do “good”. Just do. Idle.”

There's something to be said for having daily disciplines in place. Things that after a while become the thread of your life. The greater overall vision for my life will only be achieved by including these daily little things. For example, fit and healthy will only come about by a daily practise of a little exercise; Clean uncluttered simple home will only come about by a daily/regular habit of tidying up and getting rid of stuff we're not using. But rather than trying to completely revolutionise my life in a day, I should just daily do something small whether I feel like it or not, and just maybe one day the inspiration will strike to do something amazing, and I'll have the drive to get it done.

I have decided to write out my plan for our 2007/2008 school year here as well as how we recently changed our home education style. (WARNING- This may be very long!)

We started out homeschooling using all CHC stuff and following their lesson plans pretty closely, except for math (we use Singapore Math). It worked well for the first year. The second year it worked well for a while, but I began to have to change a few things to better fit the needs of certain children. We after I had Sweet Pea, I felt dissatisfied with the way things were going in our home school.  The kids seemed to be languishing in work and taking forever to get short assignments done. So I talked to my dear friend KC who follows a more Charlotte Mason style. I picked her brain and looked at a lot of her stuff and it really clicked. We needed a different style. The endless workbooks and textbooks just weren't cutting it for us anymore. I was always having to get on to the kids, especially Ladybug, about taking so long on her assignments. I didn't like how our home school looked and felt day after day. I was frustrated and the kids were frustrated, so a change was definately in order. After seeing the Charlotte Mason style, I really felt like that was the way we should go. It was  definately hard to let go of the workbooks and textbooks but I finally had to just do it and put them all away unfinished. We started all this change with first changing what we call our approach to "home educating" rather than "home schooling". I don't want a school at home, I want to live our learning. We also got our feet wet with a unit study and we started doing narrations and copywork and reading, reading, reading (which the girls LOVED!). The end of this past school year was a step into the Charlotte Mason style (I am not doing her style exactly by any means but I am trying to follow it mostly) and this coming year I hope to do more. This year we will have a 6th grader, a 4th grader, a 2nd grader (woohoo! FHC year!), a beginning preschooler, and a sweet little baby to care for during it all. We are going to try to do as much together as we can and we will be doing some unit studies, but I will probably not always have one going. I will try to kind of outline how I hope to do things this year. I don't have all my plans done but I have a lot done (I am only planning formally for the first 9 weeks right now, but I have some ideas for later in the year jotted down). I am also trying to figure out a good schedule or something for the kids to be able to look at to get their own assignments. We are doing Reading Your Way Through History for our history study and some of our unit studies will go along with that (others will probably be science based) and I will also add activities to do when we are studying different time periods. We will also be making a timeline. All the activities we do for history will go into our history notebooks. We are also going to begin Catholic Mosaic at the beginning of Advent and we will be doing the Advent unit from there along with the Advent unit from Real Learning. We will be studying Latin with Prima Latina and listening to Lingua Angelica for song and prayer practice.  So here goes:

Ladybug (6th grade):

• Math (Singapore Math)
• Copywork
• Narration (she writes it 2 times a week, given orally 2x)
• History (Reading Your Way Through History)
• Religion (Faith and Life, Baltimore Catechism, Friendly Defenders cards, Breakthrough Bible Study, PACE, Mass Class from LPH, saint reading, Bible reading, Catholic Mosaic-when applicable)
• Poetry study
• Studied Dictation (1 or 2x a week)- The Harp & Laurel Wreath
• Novel Inquiries (for extended literature study)
• Unit Study (when applicable, which would cover copywork, etc)
• Nature Study or other informal science study
• Latin (Prima Latina- she will help me teach this because she has already done Latina Christiana I and part of II)

Jellybean (4th grade):

• Math (Singapore Math)
• Copywork
• Narration (given orally)
• Poetry Study
• History (Reading Your Way Through History)
• Religion (Faith and Life, Baltimore Catechism, Breakthrough Bible study, PACE, saint reading, Bible reading, Mass Class, and Catholic Mosaic-when applicable)
• Studied Dictation (1x a week)- The Harp & Laurel Wreath 
• Unit Study (when applicable)
• Nature Study, etc.
• Latin (Prima Latina)

Sugarbear (2nd grade):

• Math (Singapore Math)
• Copywork
• Narration (given orally)
• Religion- First Holy Communion prep (Faith and Life, Baltimore Catechism/My First Holy Communion, St. Patrick's Summer, saint reading, Bible reading, make a Mass book, and other reading, Catholic Mosaic-when applicable)
• History (RYWTH)- I will read some of the books out loud
• Poetry study
• Latin (Prima Latina)
• Unit Study (when applicable)
• Nature Study, etc.
• Reading practice (daily)

Boo-bear (preschool)

• work on learning ABC's better
• work on numbers and shapes
• Montessori-type activities
• practice writing
• lots of reading out loud to her

Whew! That sounds like a lot, but we won't be doing everything everyday and sometimes we will have more to do than in other times. We are going to be following the liturgical year more closely with Catholic Mosaic and making liturgical notebooks and I am really excited about that. The big girls are really excited about the history reading (I have had to hold them off of reading the books we have for it already LOL). We will be studying Ancient times and Egypt first so I will be adding in some activities from an Ancient Egypt unit study I found. I hope I got everything down here that I meant to put. So I guess that is The Plan. Happy home educating!

(I wrote this a month ago and forgot to post it!)

So many people have asked us if we are "done with school yet?" From the cashiers at the grocery stores to friends and family who know we homeschool, everyone asks with eager anticipation for the children if summer has yet begun! My children and I have, for the most part, returned these questions with quizzical stares.

I do understand the reasoning behind this question. It wasn't so long ago that I experienced Spring Fever year after year -- looking longingly out of classroom windows and wishing I could be swimming or even just sitting somewhere comfortable chatting with my gal pals! When asked about summer break for our family, I have found myself tongue-tied, uncertain as how to explain to everyone that my children have yet to experience Spring Fever.

Then I came across this wonderful little post at First Things. Sally Thomas attempts to answer the question "What do you do all day?" by explaining a bit about their holistic view of learning. I thought Thomas' description may help some people understand how different learning at home can be from going to school to learn. In other words, our little home school is not something that we really need a vacation from -- we aren't beating the children over their heads with giant text books all summer, simply learning and living as we go!

Today in the car, E4 and I played our first game of I Spy. We had each taken a few turns and guessed each others. It was E4's turn. She was saying the sound of the beginning of her word rather than the name of the letter so I took the opportunity to match the sounds to the letters. For example she'd say "something beginning with sss" so I would say" "Thats the letter S, something beginning with S. The sound is sss"

"I spy with my little eye, something beginning with fffff" she said.

I guessed a number of things like, fast cars, funny faces and so on. Finally I said "Fingers!"

E4 replied "No Mum, that's uncorrect. There are lots of big ones around and it's something for when you want to take a picture of something"

"Ahhhh" I said "Photos!"

It's end of term in Home Ed land, which basically means an end to the parading up and down of the village high street for the summer.

We pick up some reading books in Middle Town and amazingly only take one wrong turn. I would like to say that it was the result of brilliant navigation, but probably owes more to the fact that there was only three turnings to take.

Last week I presented at a PD for history teachers on how to integrate technology into history learning. Great diversity of teachers from primary, secondary as well as state, Catholic and private. They recorded their own podcast - listen here!

A big issue for the secondary teachers was access to technology - computer labs always booked etc. I think that computer labs will be less and less needed, except for ICT-specific subjects. It's very rare that whole classes need to be on computers simultaneously, except for word processing, which is a pretty lame way to integrate ICT. I think that the way forward lies in having smaller amounts of accessible technology ie. pods of computers in or between classrooms, and in having a variety of activities, some of which require ICT. 

Yesterday was a fairly eventful day. Blog-wise, things were hopping. I shouldn't have been suprised by this since anytime one gets mentioned by Meredith Farkas on Information Wants To Be Free, visits tend to skyrocket. I picked up some new readers, got some interesting and supportive comments and found some new educational blogs that are worth reading. Non-blog-wise, I felt the beginnings of a much needed attitude adjustment. I was quite humbled to have played any part in Meredith's decision to pursue one of her dreams. Once I got over my amazement, I was so gratified to see some excitement over the possibilities in distance LIS education. There is so much room for improvement, and Meredith's interest in getting involved makes me believe that it just might be possible. Seriously, this definitely helped to renew some interest in my own education - some badly needed interest.

I need to continue my quest to get the voices of distance students (and all students who take classes online) heard at SCSU. I will pursue this - regardless of the response from the dean. This is important. I will try to renew my interest in my education - to care about what I am studying. I will make it through - and I will be okay!

Like everyone else, we've been impressed by the sudden growth of Facebook. Rachel spotted some useful resources in Facebook for language learners:
Sussex University Language Society
Language Exchange
We're experimenting with a LLC FB presence. More news soon.