EDUC 6713 Reflection

The GAME plan I chose to pursue during my current course (EDUC 6713) is focused on achieving Indicator 2c of the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS●T). The goal of this standard is to “customize and personalize learning activities to address students’ diverse learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources.” As a result of this plan I have been able to identify the individual needs of many of my students but, as mentioned in Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer’s (2009) book Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use, I will need to discover and monitor the needs of many of my students throughout the year. By observing my students’ weekly posts on their blog, I have already been able to make the appropriate adjustments to their individual learning goals and modify my instruction for them. As we continue to make these adjustments my students will certainly benefit from a more individualized approach to learning.

As this GAME plan continues to take shape, I plan to seek out more helpful technology to make my students feel more comfortable and be successful in my class. Some things that I have already integrated are the use of advanced features in word-processing software. Instead of just giving each of my students the same document to record their answers to inquiry activities, I have been able to create customized answer spaces as well as highlight and underline key information, as necessary. The editing features of Microsoft Word have also allowed me to provide useful and easy-to-understand feedback for my students. Something I plan to do in the future with Microsoft Word is to create toggle keys to pair with sounds in order to accommodate certain students (Cennamo et al., 2009). I also plan to continue seeking out new technologies to help support and engage all of my students.

While the use of advanced features of technology will help to individualize my instruction, the use of problem-based learning (PBL) will certainly make our lessons more engaging. In Ertmer and Simons’ (2006) article titled Jumping the PBL Implementation Hurdle: Supporting the Efforts of K-12 Teachers, the goals of PBL are “1) to promote deep understanding of subject matter content while 2) simultaneously developing students’ higher-order thinking.” In the past, many of my lessons have not done this and I believe that integrating PBL will provide a platform to make these improvements. To make it happen, I plan to pursue my other GAME plan, mentioned in a previous post, and identify authentic problems in our community. To solve these problems, I will do my best to determine the content standards that we can thread into them and make learning more meaningful to my students.

During this course we have learned about some great uses of technology, including social networking and digital storytelling. My students are already familiar with these tools as we have used Schoology as a platform for accessing assignments and discussions, as well as sharing with their classmates and providing feedback to each other. At the same time, they are building their digital citizenship skills to help them be successful when social networking in their personal lives. Through online collaboration and demonstrating their understanding with digital stories and other products, my students will certainly gain a much deeper understanding of science than ever before.

Sources:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Ertmer, P., & Simons, K. (2006). Jumping the PBL implementation hurdle: Supporting the efforts of K–12 teachers. The Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 1(1), 40–54. Retrieved fromhttp://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=ijpbl.

This Post Will Self-Destruct in Five Seconds

A couple of weeks ago, I was one of a handful of teachers to receive a tour of our local Alcoa plant. The purpose of our visit was to simulate a tour that some of our students will receive later this month and to provide feedback to the Alcoa employees to help make improvements. During the tour, a couple of issues arose that I believe we could easily eliminate. I also believe that we could anchor the visit with a problem-based scenario to help offer the most engaging experience to our students.

As I sat in the minivan cruising through the plant with three Alcoa employees, I did my best to offer some educational humor while also being productive. I began to think about how the students, who will be taking the tour, would be picked up from school to get to Alcoa. With the movie “Old School” coming to mind, I offered the idea of flying around town in a van and throwing the kids in the back. I am pretty sure I managed to get a laugh out of them.

The more I thought about it, something similar to “Mission Impossible” seemed a bit more realistic and could really hook the students into the event. Imagine this; once all of the students are in the van outside of their school, a video will begin to play that will introduce a problem-situation which will already be occurring at the Alcoa plant. As they complete their ten-minute drive, the students will be briefed on the situation and their mission will begin. Upon a successful completion of the mission, the students will participate in a company meeting in a board room at Alcoa. To demonstrate their learning, the students will be assigned roles to play in the meeting, such as an EPA official.

The plan proposed by Alcoa employees was to begin the tour at Alcoa by giving a brief introduction to all of the students with a slideshow presentation, then send them out to the three different sites to begin the rotation. If we can brief the students on their drive to the plant or, possibly, in a video-conference involving all of the students, teachers, and Alcoa employees prior to their visit, then we could maximize the quality of the time that the students spend at the Alcoa plant. We could even spend a great deal of time up front communicating between Alcoa and our schools, to better prepare our students and help build relationships prior to the visit. One main issue identified in our teacher tour was how to increase the quality of interaction between the students and Alcoa employees. I believe that some communication up-front along with smaller groups during the visit will offer more quality time during the visit and will help eliminate this issue completely.

The other main issue we identified in the teacher tour was transportation. The plant is unfriendly to tour groups, so the less driving we have to do will help with this. When the students reach Alcoa, we will help resolve the transportation issue by taking them directly to their problem-site. We could further resolve this issue by restructuring the activities at the problem-sites. The original tour has the students rotating among the three different sites, each of which require about a five-minute drive and time for transitions. If we could have each group of students visit only one of the sites, this would allow them to spend more time with an expert from Alcoa and gain a deeper understanding from their experience. Of course, they will be required to share their learning with a student from each of the other groups and learn from them, as well, in order to help solve the problem and create a great presentation.

Regardless of how the student tour is structured, it will be a great event! Alcoa has some amazing features in their plant and some really great people to show them to us. However, if we want to offer our students an experience they will never forget, then taking a problem-based approach will be a great choice. By preparing up front, building relationships with experts, maximizing their depth of knowledge, collaborating with peers, and presenting their learning to an authentic audience, this event could be the beginning of a future full of great opportunities for our local children.

GAME Plans

For this post, I will be developing a GAME plan for my professional growth project which focuses on two indicators from the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS T).

Indicator 1b. Engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources

Goal: To help my students become more self-directed in pursuing online inquiry projects that will help solve problems in our community.

Actions:

1. Perform my own online inquiry project to discover problems in our community. My wondering will be What are the major problems in the city of Boonville, Indiana?
2. If there is insufficient information online or to supplement my findings, I will interview community members to gain more information about local problems.
3. Once I have a clear understanding of the major issues in our community, I will complete an online inquiry project to identify potential solutions to our problems.
4. From there, I must learn about strategies to help my students discover our local problems, on their own, and become motivated to solve them in our class projects.
5. During student projects, promote interaction with community members through class visits, field trips and, of course, online communication tools.
6. Promote a sense of accomplishment as my students present their findings, using digital media, to all interested parties in our community.

Monitor: I plan to complete my research (action steps 1 to 4) prior to the end of our first quarter. Then I will be able to implement my strategies in my classes (action steps 5 and 6). To determine the success of my actions, I will keep a record of the number of students pursuing inquiry projects about problems in our community.

Evaluate: The level of success will be identified with a rubric that measures each student’s impact on the community. Ideas for improvement will be explored and new GAME plans may be developed.



Indicator 2c. Customize and personalize learning activities to address students’ diverse learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources

Goal: For each of my students to feel comfortable and successful when using technology in my class.

Action Plan:

1. Take an inventory of my students’ learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources.
2. Place each student on a team with peers that have similar learning styles and working strategies.
3. Each team should also have students with a variety of abilities. For instance, one student who is highly proficient with technology, one who is proficient, and one who is a beginner.
4. Complete an inquiry project to discover new technologies and more advanced tools of current technologies. My wondering will be What technologies can support the diverse needs of my students? A subquestion will be How can I use our current technologies to better meet the needs of each student?
5. Integrate these new technologies and advanced features of current technologies.
6. Have each student reflect on their experiences with these tools by completing a post about each technology to their personal blog.

Monitor: Formative assessments throughout student projects will measure student abilities with technology. Student comfort levels and interest in using these technologies will also be surveyed. Student blog posts will serve as evidence for student comfort and success.

Evaluate: This plan will not be successful unless all of my students are passing my class and are comfortable with technology. Success will be determined by the growth shown in formative assessments and in their blog posts.

It's About Learning, Not Teaching

Nearly everyone in this world has felt what it was like to be a student out in the rows, sitting quietly and letting the teacher talk. The practice of lecture is, many times, automatically associated with teaching. In the video “Technology: Instructional Tool vs. Learning Tool,” Dr. Michael Orey stated that “one of the worst instructional approaches I think you can do is the lecture approach.” The widespread use of lecture in the classroom represents the need for a major shift in thinking about education. As a teacher in the 21^st Century, this shift is not about how well I teach, rather, it is about how well my students learn.

For years, I have felt that most schools focus on educating the masses while their focus should be on educating each and every student. I have learned that bringing students to school by the busload does have its benefits. The socializing that occurs can set students up to be successful communicators. However, the sea of students that swarm our schools each day cause many problems that get in the way of learning. My personal belief is that discipline should not even be necessary in a school. A well-designed school should have a daily flow of knowledge that is so rich and engaging that all students are eager to learn.

Many teachers are convinced that the tried-and-true methods of teaching are the best thing since they and sliced bread were invented long ago. The truth is that it may have worked for many generations of people. However, the continuous progression of human intelligence and the benefits of technology have created new generations of people who will accept only the best efforts to help them learn. With endless resources on the internet and the engaging possibilities of web 2.0, today’s teachers can capitalize on the available technology to help engage their students. Not only has technology helped with learning, but it can also help teachers stay organized more easily and analyze data to help drive instruction. The possibilities are endless and technology is beginning to take on a whole new shape in education.

Throughout this course, I have built a long list of technology tools to use in class. An immediate change that I plan to make is to get these tools into the hands of my students. Two tools that I plan to integrate very soon are spreadsheets and VoiceThread. There are a variety of uses for spreadsheets and one way I plan to use them is to help reinforce student effort by having students gather data and create graphs to show the relationship between their effort and achievement in my class. VoiceThread will also prove very useful by providing an engaging platform for class discussions and cooperative learning activities.

One long-term change that I plan to make in my classroom is to become more of a facilitator than a teacher. Instead of trying to be the main source of information in my classroom, I plan to help my students become more literate with regards to digital media and information. Many of my current students are either incapable or unwilling to seek out answers and information without being prompted. By helping my students realize their potential to learn, they will be able to use our available technology to take control of their learning and become more independent thinkers. In order to do this, I must also build a strong technology platform to support my students’ endeavors. This will require me to write grants to acquire a class set of computers, cameras, headphones and microphones, and a variety of other tools to create a classroom full of possibilities.

As my personal theory of learning continues to progress, my students will begin to see the benefits. I have already begun to implement many engaging activities that I have learned about in this graduate program. I plan to continue trying new things and helping my students build their knowledge and skills by keeping them involved. As we continue to grow together, my classroom will eventually become a place where education is a top priority and all of my students are eager to learn.

Social Class

To be successful in life, it is inevitable that you will have to make connections with other people. Even if most of your work is done individually you must still work with others to make a difference in the world. I believe the same holds true for learning. While many people can learn well on their own, it is the connections they make with others that can really help their learning take shape. This week at Walden we explored social learning theories (SLT’s). SLT’s are old news when it comes to education, however, with advances in technology there are many exciting learning experiences that teachers can offer. The book Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works, offers a variety of technology applications to support cooperative learning activities. As noted in this book, technology can facilitate collaboration, provide structure for group tasks, and allow group members to communicate anytime, anywhere.

To provide structure for group tasks, teachers can create an online learning community by using online course management systems (CMS). These systems can give classes a base camp where students can go to view and share resources and host discussions. An example of a free CMS is Moodle (http://moodle.org). If your class does not offer such a system, groups can take it upon themselves to get organized. Using a shared bookmarking site, such as del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us.), group members can post and categorize anything from the web and store it in one convenient location. This way, students do not have to remember the links to websites or where they have saved pictures and other files. In order to stay on schedule, groups can also create a shared calendar and make updates to their project as they progress. If teachers can access these calendars, they will also be able to monitor the group’s progress. Members of Yahoo and Google have access to their free calendars.

To engage students in cooperative learning activities, technology provides many opportunities to implement social constructionism. Videos, websites, and PowerPoint presentations are just a few of the artifacts that students can work together to create. However, constructionism is not the only strategy to keep students engaged. Web-enabled multiplayer simulation games offer a great way to engage students. With students completing virtual tasks that simulate real-world scenarios, their team must work together to be successful. WebQuests are inquiry-based activities that offer students the flexibility of online learning to work together on a project. San Diego State University hosts the original WebQuest site (http://webquest.org), offering education about WebQuests as well as allowing teachers to find examples or create their own.

The most unique aspect of online collaboration is the fact that students can collaborate with other students outside of their class. This could include other students in their own school or even in another country. Websites such as ePALS (www.epals.com/) have developed an online community for students around the world. Equally impressive is that students can collaborate with real experts from the field in which they are studying. There are many organizations that students may contact directly to ask questions. Some websites, like AllExperts (www.allexperts.com), are devoted to linking users with experts. Probably the coolest collaboration tool that I have seen is the JASON Project (www.jasonproject.org). This project allows students to participate in live expeditions from around the world. So the next time your class is studying volcanoes, why not let them visit a real volcano as researchers open their expedition to the online community?


To wrap up our exploration of social learning, I created my first VoiceThread. The link to this VoiceThread is below. Please feel free to have a look at it but direct any comments to my blog instead of the VoiceThread. I will be using it this week in class but still look forward to your feedback. I am confident that VoiceThread will offer my students a great way to collaborate, so let's have a look and see. 


Line Graphs and Linear Equations VoiceThread:
http://voicethread.com/share/2920905/

Under Construction

Teaching science for the past four years has been very enjoyable. I loved discussing the different topics in class and helping my students work together to build their own understanding of them. With interesting concepts for students to learn, science seems to lend itself naturally to building a constructive learning environment. Now that I am teaching math, my students do not seem to have the same drive to learn that my students in science class had. Therefore, I must offer lessons that help my students gain interest in math and work hard to construct their own understanding of it.

This week in my graduate course, we explored several learning strategies to help develop a constructivist classroom. Of course, one of these strategies was to incorporate constructionism, which is where students create an artifact to give them direction throughout the lesson and eventually reveal their learning. Other strategies were to develop project-based and problem-based learning environments where students are actively involved in identifying projects to tackle and problems to solve. A learning environment with a blend of these strategies is ideal so that students can complete tasks that allow them to use their strengths as well as tasks that challenge them to make accommodations in their mind in order to be successful. The common theme is that the students are always actively learning by asking questions, developing and testing hypotheses, and seeking the help of their classmates, teachers, and other valuable resources to complete their work. This exemplifies a constructive learning environment in that the students are in charge of learning and the teacher serves as a facilitator. The result is that students gain a much deeper understanding and are able to retrieve information from their long-term memory much more efficiently.

The efficiency of technology plays an important role in developing a constructive learning environment. From interactive games to spreadsheets and data collection tools, technology allows students to learn more about the content of a class and less on doing busy work to set up a project or experiment. As the scientific method suggests, students should be able to identify a problem and work through the necessary steps to solve it. The same method will apply to my math students as they work to solve a problem, create an artifact, or complete a project. As long as they follow the necessary steps, in the end, they will gain a deep understanding of anything they put their mind to.

Don't Forget How to Remember

This week in class we learned about how the human brain processes information as well as some learning strategies that support this knowledge. In the video titled “Cognitive Learning Theories,” Dr. Michael Orey begins by explaining that information enters our brains through sensory registers. This information is immediately sent to our short-term memory which, to process effectively, must not exceed between five and nine pieces of information at a time. If you process this information more deeply through rehearsal or other methods, then it becomes stored in our long-term memory. The types of information that are stored in our long-term memory include facts and information (declarative), how to do things (procedural), and very powerful memories that deal with events in our life (episodic).

Dr. Orey continues by discussing how to enhance the efficiency of our long-term memory by triggering as many senses as possible when processing information. Since our long-term memory is a network of information, activating our prior knowledge and connecting ideas to others can help us improve our retrieval of memories. When someone forgets something, it does not mean that they have lost it forever. It simply means that this person cannot remember the necessary connections to retrieve that information.

The learning strategies we explored this week can significantly help our students improve their memory. These include the use of elaboration, experiential learning, Palvio’s dual coding hypothesis, and concept maps. According to Dr. Orey, elaboration is the “primary mechanism for storing information in long-term memory.” This requires students to make as many connections as possible to their prior knowledge and experiences. By doing this, students will be better able to retrieve this information when they need it. When students reflect on their experiences, they are exemplifying the process of experiential learning. Through these reflections, students are able to analyze new information and connect it to their personal experiences. One way to enhance these connections is by introducing new information in the form of visuals.  The dual coding hypothesis states that information is stored as images and text. The main idea here is that images, when linked to information and our senses, can provide very strong connections to help our memory. Not only can the use of images support our memory, but organizing information into concept maps can support our memory throughout the learning process. Concept maps serve as a way to visually demonstrate how different pieces of information are connected. This allows the learner to store information as neatly organized images and be able to make connections much more easily. Teachers can use concept maps when introducing new information, reinforcing it, and allowing students to demonstrate an understanding of it. They are a very effective tool that I plan to use consistently in my classroom.

With all of this knowledge about memory, teachers can be much more strategic when designing learning experiences. To make the learning process more efficient and engaging, teachers can integrate technology to help students synthesize information and support their memory. After reading this week’s chapters from the book Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works, I now have many tools to make this happen. In order to help students prepare for each lesson, I plan to cue them in on what they are going to be learning. To guide them their learning experiences, I plan to use questions that will not only provide their learning with purpose, but will also spark their interest. To fully prepare my students, using advance organizers will help them make better sense of poorly organized information. While they are engaged in their lessons, they will use a variety of technology applications to help remember important information. Summarizing and note taking also offers a lot of opportunities for students to engage in these applications. With technology engaging my students, using cognitive tools to help strengthen their understanding, and making connections to support their memory, they will begin to develop into fully skilled students who are actively engaged in their own education.