The Teacher's Role as an Educator

Dr. Kurt Hochenauer posts a blog called OkieFunk. In his posting titled, "Kern’s Deceitful Bill Makes It Through Committee," I was inspired to consider what I believed to be the teacher's role as an educator. The bottom line for me turned out to be that teachers should be "guides to the gathering and dissemination of knowledge--not the dictators of it." Does this picture of a teacher fit what you think and believe? Or how does your idea of a teacher differ?

So, you've heard one of the important roles that I think teachers fulfill. Do you have others? Please share them.

Blogs for Education

Blogs are making their way into classrooms as a means of educating and communicating with today's schoolage generation. One blog site offers free blogs to educators. I took a look at some of the blog links they have and found some useful information. Have you ever used a blog in a class you've taken that isn't an online class? If so, how did the teacher work it into the class? Was it useful? Did you like using it? What did you think of it in general?

Here's the blog link for the free one for educators: http://www.21publish.com/.

Streaming Knowledge to You

Everytime I go online and research something, in fact, just about anything, I come across something new. The technology growth and change never cease to amaze me. I've been aware of streaming media for awhile now, but I'm really starting to see its use in education and industry. For example, at Francis Tuttle I've been working with an instructor who had our audio/visual professional convert nearly 100 VHS tapes to streaming media so that his students could have online access to them. As I can't give you a link to view any of them because it would violate copyright laws (and you'd have to have a login ID and password anyway), I'm including a link to a business I found that is using streaming media to promote their company. It's kind of interesting to watch it, but what impresses me the most is how clean it is.

Here's the link, but either before or after you take a look about it, please share with me what you see as the benefits or drawbacks of using streaming media to educate today's youth and adults. Do you think it's more just another way to push something down our throats (like advertisements) or do you see real value in it in at least some ways? If you have children, do they like to watch streaming media on the Internet? Do you watch news casts and such that are done in streaming media format?

http://www.modevity.com/commercial/console.html