What is this site about?
The main purpose of this site is to be a professional blog. This website serves as a depository of professional reflections, a place where Garth and myself offer a glimpse into our classrooms. Use our ideas, reflect upon your own experiences, and communicate your ideas with us. Professional development should not be bound by building, district, or country. Our goal is to use our experiences with technology and curriculum to help other teachers create the classroom of tomorrow, for the learners of tomorrow.
Our Vision
First and foremost, as teachers, our task is not to fill students with facts through a series of wrote memorization and regurgitation over the course of twelve years. It is not our place to present historical fact, mathematical equations or grammatical regulations, ignoring human endeavor and irregularity to meet a standard or conform to a multiple-choice test. Teachers have an obligation to create students of integrity, who will enter the adult world as free thinkers. Our students should leave our classroom better people, willing and able to create real change in the world. Students must be taught how history effects the present. Life does not occur in a vacuum, yet too often textbooks and teachers categorize and isolate their lesson, ignoring everything outside the classroom. Concrete thinking skills must be honed, and then used to develop abstract thinking skills. Students must be allowed the freedom to construct knowledge, apply what they have learned to the world around them, and then disseminate that knowledge in a manor congruent with the digital paradigm in which they live.
Collaboration, technology and personal reflection must be combined with new methodology and standards-driven curriculum to create a problem-based inquiry-learning environment. Our job is to create thinkers, leaders and problem solvers. As educators, our responsibility to stay ahead of the digital natives who enter our classrooms. Students must develop critical thinking, learning, and study skills that take them beyond the classroom. Creating a new learning environment will produce more intelligent people. More intelligent people can stimulate industry and innovation, drive the economy, and change the world. Only through hard work and risk-taking are such goals possible. The ends justify the means; but to accomplish such goals one must concentrate on the journey, not the destination.
-Mike and Garth
Collaboration, technology and personal reflection must be combined with new methodology and standards-driven curriculum to create a problem-based inquiry-learning environment. Our job is to create thinkers, leaders and problem solvers. As educators, our responsibility to stay ahead of the digital natives who enter our classrooms. Students must develop critical thinking, learning, and study skills that take them beyond the classroom. Creating a new learning environment will produce more intelligent people. More intelligent people can stimulate industry and innovation, drive the economy, and change the world. Only through hard work and risk-taking are such goals possible. The ends justify the means; but to accomplish such goals one must concentrate on the journey, not the destination.
-Mike and Garth