Three heads are better than one!

My online class, Nature of Schools, started this past Monday, June 29. I always like to get a jump on the material because something always seems to happen when I keep things for the last minute, so I wanted to make sure I got a lot of it done. The material was pretty interesting and I commented on most of it in my first blog post for this course. Now that we have had our first group meeting though, I feel even better about it. Our group consists of three women and we have decided to call ourselves the Angels of Change since the course is all about teachers as the "change agents" of society.


One of the first things we did as a group was decide on what we felt were the three most significant changes affecting education that have occurred during the past 50 years. We decided on technology, government involvement, and medicine. Here is a summary of what we came up with:





Our group assignment this week was to create a powerpoint presentation on one of the four factors affecting the nature of schools and we were assigned to look at the social influences. Our group was ready with so much input for the presentation and we all worked really well together! Having a good group in a class makes everything much less stressful. I will try to post the powerpoint when it is completely finished. It will probably go on my website. Take a look!


Once we were done with our powerpoint, we discussed some other issues that affected education. We talked about the issues of religious tolerance and how students should be taught about the various religions in order to reduce stereotypes. We talked about the devaluing of education in terms of parents taking their children out of school for vacations and such which makes children think that school isn't important. We talked about how teachers have so much more responsibilities other than just teaching and yet the salaries have not increased to accommodate this. We also discussed the impact of standardized tests and how teaching to the test has almost become the norm and No Child Left Behind has put so much stock into these tests that teachers jobs and school funding depend on them. I think those were the major topics we discussed.

This course is shaping up to be pretty interesting and it is complementing my other course, Collaboration with Teachers and Parents, very well. I will continue to post updates as these 5 weeks continue!