Spotlight on Emerging Technology: Online Learning in k-12 Schools

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Week 8 Reflection 6714

I have always tried to implement technology whenever possible in my classroom. UDL and differentiated learning are not new concepts to me, but they are concepts that I feel I can always learn from and improve on. The idea that students need to learn from a variety of lessons and that every student needs to understand but feel comfortable with that variety is what I believe UDL is all about.


In this course, I came up with a plan to document what kind of learners I have in my classroom using three very different surveys and melding them into one. My survey lets me understand who my students are by identifying interests, learning style and by fitting them into a learning profile. I searched, found, and used a variety of websites to come up with my survey and am now confident it will give me the clearest picture of my classroom I have ever had.


Using that picture, I am going to develop an interactive learning contract this year, which my students will actually create, participate in and be assessed on. The key idea I took away from this course concerning DI is that unit plans should address every student and individual lessons should try to bring equity to the classroom. I am encouraged to try this interactive approach with varied instruction and use technology as the backbone of the learning contract. In time, I believe this lesson will allow students to own their education and go further than they thought they might because I had a clear idea of who they were before we ever started the process.

Reflection

After reflecting on my GAME plan for this course I have taken away an idea of process and reflection. I try and implement these two ideas into being a teacher every day, but sometimes one or both of these ideas can be skipped. It is yet another instruction tool that I will keep using in the future to remind myself that teaching is planned, practiced, and revised on a daily basis.

My colleagues in this course helped me find new ideas to add to my GAME plan next time. One of the ideas that I wanted to find out about was the use of portable mics and it was great to hear the advantages and disadvantages to using them. I think I will stick with a standard microphone for my lesson now because of what I heard in my discussion and what I found out in my own inquiry.

I also found out how much further I can take my lesson now that I have run it one time through. I found that it was a success with the students, but that they wanted even more from it. One of the things that they wanted the most was more ownership of the project and a faster turnover of the results, which in the future I will be able to do because of my new acquired knowledge of how to condense and regenerate sound bytes thanks in large part to the sharing that happened in my blog group. I will definitely be using this plan again and can’t wait to so how successful it is with all of my new modifications.

Getting to the Game Plan

Through every course I have taken the constant I have had reiterated to me is that we need to produce self sufficient learners. Students for life that can think critically and attack problems by being able to adapt and use the tools they have to accomplish a solution. It doesn’t matter which content that may be in, what is important is that critical thinkers are produced.

My plan going ahead is to have my students look at the NET-S and have a conversation about them. A couple of years ago I started putting our district standards and what we had done for the year on a whiteboard that I didn’t use because I had to many of them and thought it might as well have something on it. What I started realizing is that it drew students interest. I would get questions like “what is that?” or “What does that mean?” which led to a discussion of what I was expected to give to them and they were expected to learn as mandated by our district. In my opinion, ever since then, my students have had a clearer sense of what we are doing in class and what they need to do to get better at certain things. Having an entire list of what we have covered for the year also gives them a sense of ownership and pride. I no longer get students who say “I don’t have a clue what we learned this year” because it is visible to them every day and if they in fact didn’t learn it, they know it isn’t because they didn’t know where the class was going, or what we were trying to do as a class.

I use this long aside simply to demonstrate what I want to start doing with the NET-S throughout the year. Once students have a direction in technology, they will answer the how and why to get there. I am excited for the upcoming year to test it out.

Week 6

My new progress towards my NETS-T is to incorporate video with my trial lesson. Next year I think this would be great for my students. I would want my students to dress for their part (for extra credit) and really present the workings of a mock trial. I still want my students to blog about the trial but I think that using video will enhance my student’s ability to analyze what is going on.

I also would love for my students to have a mic attached to them so that they cannot miss speaking into the microphone. In order to do this, I will have to talk to the IT guy in our building. Another person I will need to use much more in the future to learn from is our drama and TV production people in the building. I contacted them late this year and the feedback and information they gave me was great. Getting in touch with them next year will help immensely.

Week 5

I learned that by cutting and pasting sound clips audacity works much better than when they do individually. I have also learned that my students love to blog about the trial. I think that next year when I tweak this lesson I will allow more time for class discussion in class. It seems like there is never enough time in the school year to get everything you want to done. Next year, my plan is to try and pick one student every class to highlight a blog they thought was either insightful or helped their understanding on the smart board. From there, I hope to have my class get into a discussion based on the student’s presentation.

I have learned that I really need to teach this lesson in along with a speech class or have a speech teacher come in and teach microphone etiquette. It was very surprising to me how many clips we had to redo because students did not know how to hold a mic or speak into it, and why would they?

These are all things I plan to address next year during our mock trials to make the lesson more time efficient and worthwhile for the students.

Week 3

I am almost finished with my technology GOAL. I have all of my student’s sound bites from the trial and now I am getting ready to post them to our website. The only thing that I have found to be a problem is that audacity has been very slow. I attribute this to the fact that I have ton of sound clips on one saved file. It seems to stream better when I cut and past the clips into one clip. I am wondering how many different recording programs are out there? I use audacity because I took it from one of the other classes we took and it is free but I would think there might be better programs that allow you to do more and it is my intention to look into it after the school year is done. Other than wondering about recording programs, my plan has worked to perfection so far. I have been able to do what I set out to do and I am now getting ready to watch my student’s blog about other class’s trials.
I have learned that my students are excited about this project and constantly ask me when the podcast will be up so they can blog about it. I also learned that whenever you incorporate audio into a lesson you need to plan to have at least a week for editing purposes. It has taken me more than a week this go around because it is new but in the future I think it will only take a week. Hopefully my student’s enthusiasm will spill over into their trial responses. We’ll see!

I think the only real modification that I need to have in this plan is the time allotment that I have given myself to complete it. Otherwise, it is working very well.

Week 2

Continuing the GAME plan (WEEK 2)

My GOAL this week is to Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility through a lesson that has been ongoing throughout this semester. In order to do this I needed a microphone, audacity, a Smartboard, our class website with a blog and a computer to facilitate our activity from.

Many of you have heard me talk about podcasting a mock trial of Romeo and Juliet. Now what I want to do is take the activity a step further and have students blog under the podcast as to who they thought won or lost. Their responses will have to be thoughtful and respectful. In taking this ACTION, I will allow my students the ability to learn my desired standard for the week which is to Promote Digital Citizenship and Responsibility.

I will MONITER my class’s posts throughout the week to ensure that they are engaging in appropriate dialogue with one another. I will also give rewards to those who report any abuse on our blog by giving students who find abuse extra credit.

My EVALUTION of this plan comes through the quality of responses students give to one another in their podcasting blogging assignment. This assignment is unique in that students need to have their own voices on our website. It brings a human element that is inescapable. It will also require students to engage in healthy discussions and criticisms of their work, and not themselves. By doing this, I hope students make the link between people on the other side of the screen and themselves.

Nets T

One GAME plan I have is to strengthen my ability to Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility. Since I have been a teacher this has been a major concern of mine. I want all of my students to understand how to use technology appropriately and take responsibility for the work that they create. Many times students forget that what they write is a direct reflection of them. Even in a controlled environment, such as our filtered school website, students feel there are no consequences for what they are saying online sometimes. I think with cyber bullying becoming more and more of an issue, my students need to know more than ever that what they say in the digital world has implications in the real world. I would greatly like to demonstrate this to my students and think that a virtual interview with those that have either been victimized by cyber bullying or those that have been caught cyber bullying might be the answers. I would love ides if anyone has some.

My next area of growth for my GAME plan is Digital Age Work and Learning. Demonstrating my fluency can be a challenge because I sometimes don’t have the tools at my disposal that I would like to have to learn more so that I can show my students more. This class is definitely a step in the right direction but some of the ideas we learn here, or technologies, will be outdated in a year so it is important to keep being informed and educated on how to use these new technologies. I have not even seen an Ipad in person yet. I think one way to strengthen my ability to model and have technology to model is to learn how to grant write. I can’t wait for money that is not going to come so it is my job, whether it is fair or not, to go get it for my classroom. Has anyone written a grant for technology before?

New Literacy

The most striking revelation that I will take away from this course is the fact that we are actually teaching our teachers that web literacy matters. This course reminded me that even though not all teachers in my building think of the internet as a viable source of information, teachers all over the country do as well as the academic institutions that produce those teachers. The question posed to us was “…about the teaching of new literacy skills to your students…” but to me, it is the fact that we will all know that teaching students how to be internet literate is what is important when we leave this course. Slowly, teachers are being held accountable for the web 2.0 world and beyond that our students will have to function in.

The fact that I had a chance to write a lesson plan which taught web literacy in my content is invaluable to me as a teacher. Even if I use parts of the unit plan, I will have it to take from. Teaching students to start with inquiry and then to check the validity of web sources is an experience that I use and will continue to use in my English classroom. Having my students synthesize their information and use multimedia forums to express what they have done is something that I will continue to build on in my classroom because it not only models new literacy techniques students may need but also allows students freedom to go further in their projects.

My professional goal is a lofty one, but one that I believe may be expected of teachers in the future, and it is to create a filtering system specific to a project. Schools have filters as do computer and internet companies but how powerful would a filtering system that allowed teachers to create the perimeters be? I have set this goal because of the discussions I have had with my classmates about the frustrations of filtering programs we currently use that do not allow students to search viable information. I believe creating a prototype and submitting it to the school board would have to happen long before an educator could implement it in the classroom, but I do think it will happen and this course made me think of how valuable it would be. I think the more our education and new literacy’s evolve, the more apt districts will have to be to trust their teachers and allow them to take more responsibility for their students and their studies on the web.

Reflection

It is hard to say that my beliefs have been modified in this class because to me they have either been validated or reawakened. The work of Skinner, Piaget and Garner are not new to any educators that have their undergraduate degrees in the last 20 years, but they are definitely ideas that, with expanding studies, add to our understanding of how to educate children. Allowing students to control their learning by experience has been a pillar of my learning theory since I first entered education, but it is also a theory that is very difficult to practice one hundred percent of the time in my classroom. Technological limitations, time restraints, testing requirements, etc. bog down my ability to do what I know benefits students the most. Knowing that increasing studies are lending further support for this practice rejuvenated my sense of purpose in students centered classrooms.
Voice thread and smart board interaction amongst students are the two tools that have enhanced my ability to use technology in the classroom. Allowing the creation of voice threads, combined with blogs afterwards, is a terrific way to create a sense of student centered learning. Allowing students to demonstrate those voice threads and allow their classmates to interact with them on a communal smartboard is yet another tool that will enhance my students learning.
When I look to the future I am always perplexed, because it is ever changing. I know the technological problems and advantages I had when I first entered education have drastically changed and will continue to change. They change with legislation, the economy, and the abundance of technology. I am supposed to make two long term goals for the future here, but I think my goals keep evolving with every course I take from Walden. The constant long term goals I have created from this, and all my courses thus far, are to be adaptable in and out of the classroom and to always ensure my students get the very best education I can give them. That education is one with student centered learning and as much technology as I can expose them to without it being instructional.

Connectivism and Social Learning in Practice

Every year I involve cooperative learning in my classroom because it works. Every year I have students that I have never had asking if they get to do what last year’s class did. My use of cooperative learning comes from a learning contract which allows students to form groups or work individually and present their allotted number of assignments together or alone. Every assignment has its own personal rubric for each individual student to insure they are doing just as much work as their peers working alone, but I have noticed in every class that I have ever taught using this project that students would rather learn together and learn from each other than not. The assignments are varied, but their enthusiasm to work together is not. I know that we were supposed to use a virtual example of classrooms using social learning theory strategies, but I have seen firsthand, through my assignments popularity, that students do indeed enjoy learning socially whether in a group, through technology, or an expert they choose.

Assimilation vs Accommodation

Pictures are worth a thousand words

Behaviorism in Practice

Last Words

Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society is a course from Walden University, which offers its students a chance to understand and implement Web 2.0 tools into their classrooms. The course asked students to investigate how to use blogs, wikis, and podcasts in our classroom. While I have used and was aware of all three of these technologies it was not until this class that I now feel very comfortable using wikis and my own podcasts in the classroom. I use blogs on a weekly basis in my classroom and also understood how to use other’s podcasts on my class website, but now I can create my own and can create a wiki for story writing ideas in my classroom.

The course has reiterated my districts mantra “We are a district of learners for learners.” When a teacher understands that self discovery is far more lasting and beneficial for a student than secondary knowledge they have finally found out what true education can be. Web 2.0 tools allow students to become the experts and receive far more perspective than they would ever get in a text book or lecture. They interact with information and the teacher becomes a guide rather than simply a lecturer. Teachers must also recognize that in order to stay in tune with the 21st century they must constantly learn themselves. In this respect, teachers must use web 2.0 tools themselves in order to continue learning for them. Guiding students to become life long learners by example is a powerful skill that will be left on them long after they leave our classrooms.

Educators must constantly monitor the technological landscape because it is constantly in flux. We truly need to take classes every year and research constantly in order to stay remotely close to all the innovation that can be used in our classrooms.

My two goals for the upcoming year is to podcast an entire class activity and have the class blog about what they hear and to have a class wiki for writing in my literature strategies class. Both of these goals require computers, which are not always available and computer literate students, also not always available. How can I overcome theses obstacles? I plan on either finding computers or writing grants for computers. I plan on lobbying in my school and in grade school for typing and computer classes to be a requirement and not just an elective and if it is not take time after school to help my students become computer literate. I am preparing future generations and when you prepare one for the future you need to use tools and information as closely related to the future as you can.

Podcast

http://www.podcastmachine.com/podcasts/1485/episodes/6914

Review of the partnership of 21st century skills website

This website has a wealth of information for anyone for anyone in a community. It allows many people outside the realm of education to come and join educators, policy-makers and business people to help close the gap on 21st century innovation and its ability to supplement education.
Ken Kay, the head of the website, explained to those visiting the site that core subjects are very important to the 21st century. I do not know if this was surprising as much as it was refreshing. Him saying that cores need to be a part of technology is exactly what we as educators should be trying to stress to our students all the time. Students will never live in a world where they are only required to know one discipline. Some might say that engineers do not need to know how to write but if they truly believe this the must not think that engineers need to fill out a resume. If life does not allow students to put their learning into separate compartments then we should not prepare them for their future that way either.

Route 21 makes me a little wary of the site. Granted, no one has to buy any materials from the link, nor do they have to even look at it, but whenever interests become mixed with monetary gain I become skeptical of whether those interest are self serving, which I am sure they are in many cases, or for the greater good of the community. It is great to see a learning community made up of so many different types of people and groups, but again, I am always critical when for profit groups are involved with education.
All that being said; I think this is a great resource for the community in general and should help close the gap between technology and its use in education. I am excited to follow this site and can’t wait to discuss it with my students and the parents of those students.

The communication power of blogging in the classroom

One of the first blogs that I ever had my class do was a reading blog. In our school, students are required to read so many books per semester. Knowing that most students do not talk to one another about what they read I created a blog that I allowed them to use after their class work was done. The results amazed me! I had students recommending books, discussing books they had read, and asking others for suggestions. By the end of the first week there were 110 comments. I saw students who would never speak with each other in school discussing books and scenes they liked as though they were old friends. It helped them find common ground in class and I started noticing that once they had blogged about it they felt more comfortable talking about it in class and in the halls. The two years I have used this blog was for 7th and 8th graders and I will continue to use it in the future. Perhaps the most impressive thing to me was, using the blog wasn’t for a grade, it was a resource and boy did they use it.

Technology in the classroom

It is my hope that teachers embrace technology in their classrooms and share what has worked well and what has not. Currently, my class has blogging assignments, Smartboard privileges, and a C.O.W. I encourage my students to use technology and remind them that very few of them, if any, will not use it in the future. I hope to use podcasting much more in this next year.

Please share any kind of technology you have used successfully or unsuccessfully in the classroom.