State Budget Cuts for Higher Education

The governor of PA Tom Corbett plans to cut the budget for higher education in Pennsylvania. He plans to cut 30% of the 3 of 4 state-related universities budget, and cut 20% of the 14 colleges in the state system. Here are the proposal outlines. At Pittsburgh university, tuition would go up around 4,000 more dollars next year, so it won't be as much here at Edinboro but last year budget cuts were taken from education and now it my happen again this year? What about next year? How about in 2014? Tuition will go up so high that all the college mine as well turn into private ran colleges. Corbett also talked about how he doesn't want people to get educated in PA and then get jobs out of state. He wants people to get educated in Pennsylvania but to also "give back" to PA and work here. How can people that may not be in a situation where they don't have much money get an education with tuition going up and up every year? Even teacher salaries and jobs are in jeopardy with this proposal. Enough about this part of the article though. The other part of the article talked about things on the other side of the Deleware Rive, New Jersey. The governor there, Gov. Christie, is raising the funding for higher education and other school systems in the state. Now my question is if he can raise the funding by a couple millions of dollars how come PA cannot raise it too? Isn't there other places we can reduce the budget in than education? I'm not fully educated on this topic as a whole but to me this all seems very unfair for our state to do this. America is always complaining about how we don't match those people in Japan, China, Finland, and other countries in math and science, but how are we going to be able to when the costs for education keeps going up. Now i'm not sure if it is going up in many other states but I believe that myself and other people really need to start getting involved and fight back because this is our education. When we leave college we will be in such debt that we will probably be 70 by the time we pay off our college loans. I hope this doesn't past or else PA students will really be hurting from it.

NEA members standing up

Twitter

I personally love Twitter. I've had one for about a year. I didn't use it much in the early stages but over the summer i started to really get into it.It is completely different from Facebook, and in my opinion that's a good thing. I like how you can retweet things and with the click of the button. You can go back and see what you retweeted a month or a year ago. That is where it can be beneficial for a teacher like me to use. When I go through my twitter feed I can see who is tweeting what, and now that I follow quite a few educators i can retweet what they say and go back and look at it when I have more time. I can apply techniques or the activities that some of them are tweeting into my classroom. Also there are many educator or educator pages that people can follow that will give you many ideas for classroom activities, and lessons.

PowerPoint presentation

We had to create a PowerPoint on a standard for a lesson plan in a class we would be teaching after college. I chose to create it on 1st grade math a parking cars technique. It really helped me learn more about PowerPoint and gave me ideas of how i could use it in my classroom once I have one. The best thing is that it we learned how to make it interactive which is very beneficial when it comes to younger kids. This way they are able to go up to the smart board or work with other people communicating ideas and possible solutions. There were many benefits to this activity.

 I learned how to hyperlink from one slide to another. With this concept I had two answers to a math question, one right the other wrong obviously, and asked the students which one to pick. Whatever answer they picked it would take them to a slide where the right answer was shown to them and how to do the equation and get the right answer. After they saw that then I put an action button, telling them to click on it once they were done taking them to the next slide. I never knew how to do that before, but now I do.

With the hyperlink and the action button being new things I learned and really took away from this it was an area I struggled in obviously because it was new, but also really starting the whole thing was difficult. When it comes to creative things like this I tend to sit and start at the computer for a long time before getting an idea. I guess i'm just not very creative? I eventually started to think of some ideas and it all worked out. It took awhile though. I thought the assignment wasn't explained very thoroughly, but it allowed us to struggle and figure things out for ourselves and I do like this about this class and I liked it with this assingment. We aren't told how to do things exactly. We are given something, maybe given a few instructions, then we go out and do whatever it is we need to do.

Chapter 1 response blog

In chapter one of our book we read about the power of PLN’s or personal networks. The chapter discussed how technology is changing the way we learn things outside of a standard classroom and how students or educators can learn from other educators across the globe on the internet or other offline resources. It also discussed how teaching styles need to be changed in order to meet the children’s needs of learning about the positive outcomes of PLN’S. Doing this will expose students to the dangers of the World Wide Web or other offline resources, but us educators need to guide them into the right direction to be able use these PLN’s as useful, knowledgeable, tools. I looked at this text and found many things to be interesting, but I want to focus on the negative outcomes that all of this could bring about. That brings me to my first problem with this. I believe that giving the students freedom in the classroom to use the internet can create more problems than it being beneficial for students. If the students have laptops or tablets and the class is supposed to do an assignment or research a topic, I wonder how many people would actually do that thoroughly rather than being on Twitter or Facebook or etc. They discussed this problem in a section in the chapter how the memory is affected by having multiple tabs open and switching back and forth while trying to complete and assignment. I understand the benefits though, and they this could be a big step for schools around the U.S. or even the world but it will take a lot of time and effort for it to be successful.

            The second issue I have with this chapter is how they failed to bring up the negative health results that we have seen due to advances in technology. If we teach the students about all of these cool things about the internet and how to research this and that it seems to me as if they will spend even more time in front of the computer rather than exercising. I don’t think many of the things that will be done in most of the classrooms will be active exercises, but in most schools today they aren't active either. What I am saying is that when the students go home from school where they have spent all day learning about the powers of the internet, I believe they will want to spend more time of the internet to learn more about it. I’m not saying every student will do this, but I believe many will.

            Lastly, if educators can be accessible online then what is the point of me going to school to spend all this money and competing online with other educators all around the world? Teaching is already a competitive field and then a class from Erie, Pennsylvania is able to connect with a teacher somewhere in South Africa teaching biology, it seems it will get even more competitive than what it is now and that scares me. I know they said that there will still be schools because teachers need to teach the students about the positive and negative things from the internet but I am going to school to teach first graders about math, handwriting, and more, not about the benefits of the internet so they can connect with a teacher a couple states over or half way across the globe to learn about something I’m qualified to teach. It seems unfair to me and makes me really question if being a teacher is worth all the time and money. I know that there are a lot of steps that need to be taken before things will start to change, but we have seen how fast technology has jumped in the past half century, so it will be sooner than later I believe.