Wow, this week’s class was a lot of information! For this reflection, I will be going over a bit about what we learned in class, as well as my thoughts on the movie we were to watch, “Most Likely to Succeed”.
First of all, the topic for our class on Monday was all about open education resources, or OER’s for short. An open education resource is a place where an educator can go to collect resources for a lesson that have an open-copyright license that allows one to freely use and distribute them. This topic was pretty overwhelming for me, as it was a lot of information thrown at me at once. However once I started to understand what an OER actually was, all of the information began to click. I was then able to understand the reason for having OER’s, as well as a lot of great sources for different types of OER’s. It is important for an educator to have one or many OER’s, as there are various different types of them. For example, if you are wanting to incorporate an image into a worksheet or lesson, a great OER to use is “Unsplash”, or if you wanted to find math flashcards or writing prompts, “Curriki” has many resources for various school subjects. Having all these resources and information already makes me feel more confident in my ability to lesson plan and do so in a copyright safe way.
Now, on to the movie. This movie (Most Likely to Succeed) was super interesting to me. I wasn’t sure what to expect when it first started playing, but by the end of the film, I felt more inspired as a future educator. At High Tech High, things are done very differently than your typical high school. Rather than standardized testing, students are assessed on their ability to lead on a project, or how effectively they collaborate with a team. It really got me thinking about how education has been the same for 100+ years. Students are taught from a very young age that passing a test is how you succeed in school. Especially in higher grade levels, the pressure to do well on a test is immense. If you don’t get a good grade, your odds of going to post-secondary education are slim. It makes me wonder, why is our education system this way? Why are students assessed on their ability to remember material, rather than their ability to work together to accomplish learning? In minor ways, education is always changing and adapting as time goes on. This makes me hopeful that in the future, we will be able to work towards a more effective way of student grading. Rather than teaching students how to memorize and repeat facts, maybe we should be teaching them how to actually succeed in life.