Winter Break Update

It will be a couple of days before winter break starts, but I wanted to share a little project my physics classes have been working on. They have been trying to figure out the speeds, accelerations and forces involved in Mario Kart. They love the idea and after a little grumbling about why they have to take data and cannot just play, the students seem to really get into it.

Week #6 In CEDO 550

Well, another class down on the path to the MEIT. This week we examined the different legal issues surrounding the implementation of virtual schools. Act 222 of 2007 established boundaries about what virtual schools in Wisconsin could look like and how they could behave.  You can read the audit findings that were called for in the legislation here  It is some pretty interesting stuff.  Virtual education is a hot button issue and everyone is trying to control the game it seems.  As access becomes more and more common and technology infrastructure becomes cheaper and cheaper it would stand to reason that virtual education will only grow at an exponential rate. We need to be on our toes to make sure that the growth is not too fast and not too hindered by unnecessary restraints.  What ever happens I feel that I am a little bit more prepared due to this class and its focus on the "hows" of online education.

Week #5 in CEDO 550

This week we took a look at collaborative projects in an online environment. The online socialization provided by group work is always a plus since asynchronous methods of communication tend to be a little faceless and make people not be as civil as they might be. You can see a pretty neat chart summarizing my thoughts below:

We've been looking at the positives and negatives and it seems to me that online education has about a 50-50 rate of positives and negatives. This might help dispel anyone who is too pro regular education or online education. There is a fit for all students and it is great that we have options that can meet the students where they need to be.

Week #4 In CEDO 550

Well the 15 minute presentation went pretty well. It was fun to "take the reins" of an online environment and try out online teaching. We are still in the middle of the asynchronous discussions, but I am amazed at my classmates' level of understanding and ability to communicate. It is awesome being around such passionate educators.

New work this week centers around changing a lesson to make it more student centered.  I have always felt that my AP Physics classroom is very teacher centered because of the amount of content that we have to cover.  This project hopefully will help me move a little away from that and into a more student centered approach. We'll shift a lot of the lecturing to presentations done outside of school and spend more in class time on the important stuff: problem solving.  In order to make this shift I'm going to be using a great app called Show Me that allows you to make small presentations from an iPad. My school has just gotten a set of 15 iPads and I have been wanting to try them out in my classroom, so this seems like a great opportunity.  If you are curious about Show Me check it out here

Week #3 in CEDO 550

This week (well two actually) we took a look at synchronous versus asynchronous discussions and how we can better facilitate student achievement and engagement in both. To help us understand the differences each student in the class will be running a 15 minute synchronous discussion and a topic on our class website as our asynchronous discussion.  For my presentation I will be taking a look at issues of access and equity in the online classroom. The 15 minute presentation will mostly be based on the work of NACOL in their Issues Brief. You can read more about it here.

I am looking forward to see how this all goes.  It should be fun.

Speaking of fun. I got to go hunting for the first time with my father in law. I got really lucky and got a nice sized doe. We'll be eating well for a while, but the trip out plus thanksgiving family obligations has made me fall a little behind.  Here is to catching up!

Here is the deer!

Week #2 in CEDO 550

This week we looked at the differences in Synchronous and Asynchronous communication as it works in online education. We got a chance to see behind the curtain of Elluminate and run a couple of synchronous discussions on a few talking points.  This was useful to see what classroom skills translate into the world of online education and what does not.  I found that I rely on non verbal cues from my students to a great deal and need to consciously recognize that my students in an online setting will not be able to give this to me.  Instead I need to build upon the skills that are being talked about in this class to better serve my students in an online capacity.

Week #1 in CEDO 550

This week we took are first steps into being online educators.  We used Elluminate as a teacher rather than just as a student.  We read articles about some positives and negatives in online education. Lastly we took a look at a bunch of different examples of online modules for learning.  My big three were:

1. Hippocampus: this website has some great AP Physics content inside of it. (clicking the link sends you to Newton's 1st law of motion movie) I hope to use this for creating some supplemental material for my AP and honors students.

2.  Rocket Science 101: this website takes you through the parts of a rocket and what they are used for.  This will be great for my Science 9 students and their rocketry unit.

3. Crash Scene Investigation: this website gives you a CSI look at how to use physics to determine what happened in an accident.  This would be a fun side project for physics to try out.

Week #6 in CEDO 535

As a summary exercise we are supposed to make a SMART goal for how we will implement what we have learned in this class to our own classes. A SMART goal is an acronym for:

(credit for the above image goes to Prof. Loeffler at Cardinal Stritch University)

My SMART goal is to use Screenr to create a series of 30 AP problem solutions that the students will be able to work on and view.  In order to share the work load, I'm going to try to have students create the screencasts during their review time and then we will use each other's results to help practice for the test.  The screencasts can then be embedded into our Blackboard site for viewing, or I can put them up on my web page for the students after I have checked them for accuracy.  This should empower the students to review at their own pace as well as enable me to check for their understanding individually verbally.

Week #5 in CEDO

This week we finished up our google sites and worked on finding new web 2.0 tools. The tool I chose to look at was a flash game creation tool called classtools.net

This tool lets students make their own flash games for reviews or to make annotated pictures.  Here is one that I made in only 10 minutes:

Click here for larger version

This is a great tool and students will love it!  I hope to use it with my students soon as everyone loves to make and play games.

Screencast on Smartnotebook Use

Here is a useful Smart Notebook screencast to get you familiar with the digital whiteboard software.

Week #4 in CED 535

This week in CED 535 we are working with podcasts, wikis and crowd-sourcing.  I have been a huge fan of screencasting for quite a while, but I have only done 2 or 3 podcasts for my students.  My biggest hurdle has been trying to get the files in a place that is accessible to my students both at school and at home.  Chapter 8 of our book has given me some avenues to check out since Youtube, iTunes, and multiple Youtube clones are all blocked by my school and I have been looking for a quality hosting environment. If anyone has any other ideas, please share!

I look forward to exploring wiki use in my classroom since it has been a couple of years since we had a big wiki push that left all the students dreading the use of the term "wiki". Hopefully with the knowledge that we have been getting from these courses I can set mine up in a way that does not make it extra busy work, rather useful and meaningful to my students.

My Flickr Stream For Lab Safety

Here is a Flickr Stream that has to do with lab safety.

Week #3 in CED 535

This week we took a look at RSS readers and how you can use them in education as well as how to use photo sharing websites.  I have been a fan of RSS feeds for a long time and use them to follow a number of personal websites, but I never thought about using them for class activities.  I use RSS to follow webcomics such as xkcd and it helps me not waste time checking the sites for updates when I know that the RSS will let me know when there is a new comic to view.  I also like to subscribe to the RSS feeds of fox news, cnn, msnbc and the BBC, since articles of political interest are usually written with completely different slants. By comparing these news tid-bits you can get a pretty accurate picture of what went on.

In education I'd love to use RSS for professional development and for possible homework updates for students.  Hopefully we'll look at RSS in depth in the future and its impact on education.

Week #2 in CED 535

This week we are taking a look at Wiki's in education.  I've found some great Physics Education Wiki's in my search for how we use wiki's in education.  My school got wiki crazy back two years ago and we did not implement them very well in the classroom.  It was really just an add on that we did not engage very much.  These websites do a much better job of using a wiki appropriately:

http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/ - A great resource for using the modeling method in physics education. It has a couple of neat thoughts about how to use wikis in a few of the posts.

http://www.slideshare.net/dannynic/blogs-and-wikis-in-science-teaching - This is not a wiki or blog, but it is a presentation of a lot of great ideas about how to implement a blog or wiki into a science classroom. There are a ton of links inside the presentation about current science teachers and their pages, blogs and wikis

http://teachingofscience.wordpress.com/ - This blog is a must for all of us in the course to take a look at.  The writer gives a lot of great ideas about how to use blogs and wikis in the classroom.  Most of the posts are very well written and contain a lot of great stuff.

http://mrmackenzie.co.uk/ - This is a very neat physics wiki from a British Physics Teacher that  has the same sense of humor in the classroom that I have.  The wiki is incredibly well laid out and has an outstanding use of video, weblinks and other resources for students.  While it is not a blog, it is a shinning example of how you can harness a lot of different media to get students to learn.

I was also able to get a twitter account going: http://twitter.com/JohnBWilkinson 

I don't know how I'll use it yet, but it might be a homework reminder tool or a professional development tool.

Lastly, here is a youtube video channel that I have been having some fun with after finding it on one of the blogs above:

CED 535 Week #1

New School Year, New Course!

We just started CED 535 this week and we will be talking about blogs, wikis, podcasts and a bunch of other tools that will harness the web for classroom use.  I'm pretty excited about what the course will have since this is something I have been trying to incorporate for years, but never really had the background or operational knowledge to do.  I'd like to get to the point where I could have a "flipped classroom" for my AP courses so that I can help the students more with problem solving and have less time that I have to lecture to my classroom.

My only worry about podcasting is trying to control the commenting.  I have had students in the past make fake Facebook and MySpace pages about me and they always start off innocent enough, but the commenting features quickly get out of hand.  I'd love to have some way to control this a little more while still giving students ownership of their own web presence.

Week #4 in CEDO 540 - Z Scores and Data Mining

This week we wrapped up our research project involving Facebook users and their Internet habits.  It was neat to do some data analysis on our survey.  You can check it out below:
https://docs.google.com/a/wolfmail.stritch.edu/document/d/1QLPxqDrAD-fiIPsR9UFQStQ2AsMF3woOFsERCY5wFeg/edit?hl=en_US

We also did some work with z-scores and talking about how you can use normal distributions to look at data.  It has been interesting to use statistics for meaningful comparisons of data.

Lastly, this week we did some predictions about what the future would look like in terms of technology.  We took a look at Bill Tancer's use of data and data mining techniques. If you are interested in this data and how scary it can be take a look at the You Tube video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDrMajs9aiU

CEDO Week #3

This week we have done a little more practice with mean, median and mode as well as standards of deviation. We are also dipping into other measures of variance such as z-scores.  This will all culminate with our group designing and implementing a survey in which we can do some statistical analysis.  It will be interesting to implement what we have learned in the class to look at some real data.   hopefully the data will show some kind of trend, but who knows.  That is the fun of statistical analysis

Week #2 In CEDO 540

This week we took a look at measures of central tendency a bit more in depth.  We used Excel to crunch some numbers and run some formulas to pull out the mean, median, mode and standard of deviation on a host of different data.  This was a lot better than running it all by hand and reminded me of labs I did back in college.  We also took a look at a lot of vocabulary that is tied to quantitative analysis.  The most interesting stuff I found was on "Sugging" and "Frugging" where someone pretends to be conducting market research, but is really just trying to figure out the best way to turn around and get you to buy something from them almost immediately. You can read more about the practice here and I suggest you do because it is both diabolically clever and evil at the same time.

Week #1 of CEDO 540

This is the first week of CEDO 540 and I'm pretty excited.  CEDO 540 is all about Statistics and I have not had a math class in years so it feels good to be back talking about new STEM stuff.  We've been right in the beginning of the talk about statistics and how to use them so it has been fun to watch a couple of early 90's videos outlining the various ways that stats can be used.  If you feel like a fun blast from the past and learning about statistics at the same time check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YsiVJFSwGo

Week #5 in CEdO530

This week we looked at how to grade multimedia projects.  This has been something that I have always had trouble with.  On one hand I have a checklist of what the students need to accomplish and if they complete those tasks they get full credit.  On the other hand I have always felt like some students who do the bare minimum are getting the same grade as students who really go above and beyond.  It has been very helpful to examine rubrics so that I can better create my grading criteria so that my grades can reflect this stratification of effort in my students.

Tomorrow I will be finishing my Pecha Kucha as over the past few days I have been doing "principle photography" with the help of a few coworkers.  I will be interested to see how it turns out and to see if my 1950's PSA feel comes through.

Week #4 in CEDO 530 - Prezi & Pecha Kucha

This week (two actually) in CEDO 530 we looked at a multitude of new tools and wrapped up our books Presentation Zen and Digitales

In the books they dealt with tying everything together to actually give the talk or tell the story.  I thought it was neat that after the previous 3 weeks of prep work we were in the "get out there and do it" stage.  Both books have excellent tips for content creation and I look forward to applying it all to my classes.

One of the new tools that we used for content creation was Prezi (http://prezi.com/).  This slick power point alternative has an easy to use interface and a very short learning curve.  I can see it as a great alternative to text heavy power points as it makes the words dance and move on the screen in a very interesting way.  You can check out my Prezi below:

How to choose a great picture on Prezi

We are also investigating Pecha Kucha on a topic of our choice.  I am killing two birds with one stone and putting together a beginning of the year presentation for the technology committee at my school. It might turn out campy and fun or it might turn out to be a mess.  We'll see how it turns out, but I really like the constraints as it gives me a great framework to create my presentation.

Week #3 in CEDO 530

Since the power went out last night I was not able to post. Luckily I wrote this in Word and now I can just copy, paste!

With a pretty awesome thunderstorm raging on in the background I’ll need to be brief incase the power goes out, but this week in CEDO 530 we took a look at multiple ways of planning for and executing presentations.  Were as the book Presentation Zen started off being a little philosophical in the beginning, now we are totally into the nuts and bolts section of the text.  There is an absolute ton of great tips in chapter 6 that give you a very quick introduction to the many different facets of design.  This turning from philosophy to practice has made the book endlessly more enjoyable and practical. 

In DigiTales we are looking at the different steps needed to make a proper digital story.  The checklist seems very good and I look forward to using it with my students when they create digital stories or projects.  To help facilitate quick creation of digital stories we also investigated the website animoto.  Animoto is a great website that instantaneously creates very professional slide shows using only the music you upload and the pictures that you provide.  This seems to be a great system for displaying a series of pictures if you do not have an artistic vision that you want complete control over.

The last tool we explored this week was Pecha Kucha, a method of presenting 20 power point slides in 20 seconds each.  It is structured in a way to maximize the presenter’s effectiveness and minimize the death by power point that happens quite frequently in meetings.  It will be fun to try this out in coming weeks.

CEDO 530 Week #2

This week in CEDO 530 we are looking at presentations and how they are planned and how they can go awry.  We looked at Voice Thread a lot this week and you can see two small examples of my trying it out below:






Voice Threads seem to have a lot of use when commenting on presentations or pictures.  Our group had a fun time with playing with the software.

Also this week we needed to tie projects that we were doing or wanted to do to state and national standards.  You can see my project list below and also take a look at what standards I'm trying to hit. You can even see a description of the House Project that I ran last night and the Cardboard Boat Regatta I'm running tomorrow.


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eRFdd-YRaNtkA2__J1kvcF3d943-YZC55zOAqcouWNo/edit?hl=en&authkey=CPPDm-kL

It was interesting how many different sets of standards my group members and I came up with to use in this project.  It makes me realize that while a large majority of the content of the standards is the same, we have a long way to go before we have one set of standards that everyone in the country uses exclusively.

Well, that is about it.  I'm off to 6 Flags for the annual "Physics Day" field trip.  I love being a teacher.

Starting CEDO 530: Digital Story Telling

This week we started up Digital Story Telling.  It seems like it will be a very useful class in that we are not just making iMovies and WMA files, but we are examining what makes a great story and how do we best convey that story to others.  I am very excited that we are examining "Death by Powerpoint" (the destruction of a presentation by the use of poor visual aides) and "Slideuments" (Over informative Powerpoints / Handouts) as I have been wanting to revamp some of my AP Physics presentations as they are too much information thrown at the students all at once.

To help us on our quest for perfection in presentation we have the books Presentation Zen and Digitales.  I have used the Digitales website (http://www.digitales.us/) with great success in the past and I hope that the book will be just as useful as the website.  Presentation Zen excites me as I love the idea of simplifying and streamlining activities I do to make them more effective and less time consuming

Overall I hope to learn about the ways we can make our jobs easier and more effective when we are presenting information to students.

Week #6 CEDO 525 - Final Thoughts

This week we finished CEDO 525.  Over all I was very happy with how the class turned out.  I thought that the focus on the applications in the classroom was just what I needed to learn about.  Even though technology initiatives are kind of stalled at the moment at work, I still have a few things like learning management systems, electronic grading and web design that i want to implement in my classroom.  CEDO 525 was great to help me toward these goals.

As part of the final project we had to change a lesson that we do into one that utilizes technology more effectively.  I changed around a bunch of things that I do in my AP Physics class when we study electricity.  I used Blackboard and a host of other technologies to better give the students feedback on their learning.  You can view the presentation below:

Week #5 in CEDO 525

Lesson Evaluation

This week we started to wrap up our work in CEDO 525 by applying the instructional strategies and technology integration into our classrooms.  Our first task was to evaluate a current lesson available on the web.  I chose the website Amusement Park Physics (http://www.learner.org/interactives/parkphysics/) due to my AP class’ impending trip to Six Flags Great America.  Over all the unit is solid and I will try to roll it into what I already do with my students.  You can see my full report on it in the Google doc below:

https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcDkhRV6ULzJZGdjcGc0cnBfMGZwYjVuZmMz&hl=en&authkey=CIq__OwC

We also finished up our book Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works.  The final three chapters were Identifying Similarities and Differences, Homework and Practice, and Generating and Testing Hypotheses.

Identifying Similarities and Differences

When students learn something new they try to connect that something new to what they already know. For some students this connection is easy, for others it is very difficult and they end up learning small packets of information that have no application or reason for existing outside of a very small set of circumstances.  A teacher can make great strides in retention of knowledge and student achievement just by recognizing that what their students learn must be connect to what they already know.  My identifying the similarities between topics the students have studied a teacher can make great gains in their students’ achievement.  Technology can be used to organize these similarities as well a point out crucial differences.  I really liked the book’s use of data collection tools such as Vernier digital probes to better get students to visualize the similarities and differences in motion.  I do this in my own classroom and it really helps students understand the directionality of motion.

Homework and Practice

Homework is a dirty word to a lot of students.  Some of them see it as busy work and if homework is not properly handled it very much is.  The authors state that homework should be varied, have a feedback component and be age appropriate. All of these seem like very logical, but I am amazed at how often teachers (myself included) seem to forget these simple tenants.  There is nothing that seems to frustrate a student more than having spent time on a homework assignment only to have the teacher not engage the task that the student completed.  Last year I started teaching AP Physics.  Due to the massive amount of information required by the course my students were given a reading assignment each night to prepare them for the next day’s lesson.  They almost never did the assignment and our lessons would have to start from scratch each day.  I did not have time to implement reading quizzes, but I did try daily warm up questions to some success.  This year I was given access to a learning management system called Blackboard.  Now the students have a self graded reading quiz nightly that provides them with the feedback to know that they have done the reading and understand the basics of the material.  I love that the system engages the students while they are reading and I can program in what ever questions I want.  The quizzes can be taken as many times as the student wishes and I can make the quiz take only 5 minutes so that it is not a burden to my students or to me.  The system has made a big impact on my day to day teaching of the material.

Generating and Testing Hypothesis

As a science teacher generating and testing hypotheses are my bread and butter.  It came pretty naturally to me when the authors said that students should have the opportunity to test out their own explanations for what is going on around them.  I really liked their use of spreadsheets for students to investigate how changing a variable affects something that they observe.  In a science classroom all of this seems pretty cut and dry about how to implement, but I was impressed that the authors went on to show how web simulations could bring history alive.  It was neat to see that these ideas are not science specific.

Week #4 in CEDO525

It’s a Wild Ride

This week we were asked to view an interdisciplinary unit titled: It’s a Wild Ride available at http://educate.intel.com/en/WildRide.  The unit is very similar to one I do with my freshmen except that the scope is much larger in the Intel lesson.  I really like the cross disciplinary aspects of the project that get students to use language and researching skills when they are studying roller coasters and the laws of motion.  I also thought that the introduction of the unit by having the teachers do a skit was brilliant.  What a great way to get the students excited to study a topic.  Also, the inclusion of a trip to an amusement park is a great end of the year cap to their studies in middle school.  The project looks like a lot of fun.

In my own classroom we study forces and energy in much the same way, but my students do not build a hypothetical roller coaster, they build a marble coaster that uses paper shapes on a plastic scaffold that students can decorate and label much easier than some of the kinex and pipe insulation that are present in the pictures of the lesson.  The lesson also only takes about 18 class days from start to finish instead of the 30 outlined by the project.  There are advantages to each, but the scope and scale of the Intel project puts it a step above my classroom unit.

 

An example of one of my student's paper roller coaster and force diagrams

TED Talk: institutions vs. Collaboration

This week we watched a TED talk by Clay Shirky about the difference between collaboration and institutions when it comes to sharing and organizing data.  Mr. Shirky detailed the issues with forming professional groups to solve problems, gather information or create new technology.  He claims that through centralization we loose a lot of contributions from the fringe.  Only by making your system truly collaborative can you gain all of the contributions from every member of a group so that you do not loose a good idea.  I agree that ideas can come from anywhere, but there is a certain thing that institutions do that purely collaborative groups can not and that is to compensate their workers. Purely collaborative models such as flicker, wikipedia and del.ico.us do create vast amounts of information that is catalogued very quickly, the work that is done by the members of these sites is not for profit and as such is amateur at best and self destructive at worst.  The policing of these sites are left up to the users and depends upon people valuing their digital personas in order to keep people in line.  In contrast an institution has multiple “carrots and sticks” to keep their employees or members in line and working toward the common goal.  Since we are a society that requires money to live I feel it is disingenuous to not mention this in a talk about institutions vs. collaborative groups.

Cooperative Learning

In chapter 7 of Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works the authors have many different suggestions when it comes to forming groups and giving them collaborative tasks to accomplish.  The authors outline that groups should be of mixed ability, small in size and be frequently used.  All of these suggestions are spot on when it comes to implementing cooperative learning in a classroom.  If groups are put together in a way that groups all the high achieving students together and all of the low achieving groups together then of course the high achievers will get a good grade and the low achievers will get a poor one.  If groups are too large (more than 4 students in my opinion) then some students will coast on the contributions of their classmates.  If groups are done infrequently then you will have to spend a large amount of class time acquainting students with their roles and responsibilities inside of a group.  The up side to all of this is that when done properly collaborative learning can foster a sense of community and decentralize the learning so that students can help each other learn and achieve.

Reinforcing Effort

In chapter 8 of Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works the authors have outlined numerous ways that technology can be used to reinforce student effort.  Aside from the obvious emails home and awards certificates produced in Mircosoft Word the text cites several unique ideas about how to motivate students. I really enjoyed the use of spread sheets for students to chart and evaluate their progress in a task.  This idea combines the students’ need to have constant feedback on their performance with a visual reminder about how they are doing.  The system is self-directed so that teachers do not have to spend extra time daily evaluating students and students themselves will enjoy seeing their “score” rise daily as they labor on a project or unit. I like how much the system parallels a “Gamer Score” that students can compare with each other and use as a motivation to do more in class.  I’m going to evaluate how to implement this in my AP class to further push my students in some electronic assignments that we do.

Week #3 in CEDO 525

The Use of Advance Organizers…

This week we read an article by D. Ausubel titled “The Use of Advance Organizers in the Learning and Retention of Meaningful Verbal Material”.  Although the article was from 1960, it still had a lot of good points buried in its verbose presentation.  Students will always retain information better when they have a framework under which to attach that new knowledge to pre-existing knowledge.  The article goes on to advocate the use of organizers, such as concept maps, to get students to attach the new material you are presenting to them to the prior knowledge they already have.  Students can make remarkable gains when they have the proper tools in front of them to synthesize the information you present into their own knowledge

Maps Alive!

Also this week we watched a podcast from the Temple City Unified School District entitled “Maps Alive!”.  The amount of polish put into the first pod cast was impressive and the two high lighted concept maps, flow maps and “Write from the Beginning”, were useful.  The podcast gave an overview of the use of each type of map and then proceeded to show multiple examples being used in the elementary schools of the Temple City Unified School District.  It was useful to see how these teachers modified the standard flow map for their own uses in Science and English.  I am considering implementing a modified flow map for our study of electricity production for my Science 9 students and with the examples shown in the podcast I feel pretty confident that my students would benefit from the use of the organizer.

Compare and Contrast 3 Online Tools

	MindMeister	Webspiration	exploratree
Url:	www.mindmeister.com	www.mywebspiration.com	www.exploratree.org.uk
Cost	3 maps free or $59/yr	30 days free or $39/yr	Free (in Beta)
Use	Creation of text based concept maps	Creation of graphics based concept maps	Creation of many different types of concept maps
Strengths	*Very quick to create maps * Can hide/show subtopics via a “+/-“ button * works across multiple platforms such as smart phones and ipads	* Has lots of built in graphics to use with the program *Click and drag interface is easy to create concept maps	* Drag and drop interface is very intuitive. * Easy to send and share concept maps
Weaknesses	* Importation of graphics is difficult * Runs on an old javascript that crashed frequently on my laptop	* Loading time for each tool was rather slow * saving multiple maps was a pain as was trying to share out a specific map	* Templates available were rather static and resisted changes made * No offline storage method available
Final Verdict	Skip it.  Not worth the money or the time to produce simple maps	Use it if you’ve got the money to pay for a full subscription and have a familiarity with Inspiration	Use it by all means.  It is free and easy to use.  Students will pick it up quickly and will enjoy using it.

Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers

I think that students should have a clear understanding about what is expected from them in a classroom.  To that end I think that these expectations can come through clearly to a student by the teacher’s use of cues and questions.  The way a teacher asks a question will frequently give students a lot of context about how it should be answered.  By the careful and thoughtful crafting of cues and questions a teacher can give their class a lot a leeway into making their own constructions about what is expected from the class.  In doing so a teacher allows their students a greater stake in their own learning.

Nonlinguistic Representation

As a visual learner myself I can not under state the importance of giving students visuals to accompany their learning.  I have found visuals, be it videos, graphic organizers or demonstrations, all have a positive impact on student learning in my classroom.  Students frequently can recall demonstrations I have performed much easier than just facts I have recited in class.  To this end I try to incorporate as much visual material into my lectures and class work as possible.  I also try to give students the flexibility to complete projects using as many visual tools as possible to help students use visual tools in their learning on their own.

Summarizing and Note taking

 Note taking is one of the hardest skills for my students to master.  They pretty much just fall in to two categories:  the ones who take too many notes and the ones who take too few.  Not many students have mastered the art of taking concise accurate notes.  I like to give my students partially completed notes and have them fill them out during the lecture or presentation.  This seems to stream line the process and make it a little more blatant as to what is important and what is not important.  Unfortunately, this does not prepare students for college or for times when they have to create their own meaning from a body of information.  I constantly struggle with what is the right amount of supports in my classroom for the taking of notes and summarizing of information.

Week #2 in CEDO 525

Feedback that Fits

This week we were to read and respond to Susan M. Brookhart’s Feedback That Fits article that is available here at: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec07/vol65/num04/Feedback-That-Fits.aspx.  The article seemed to echo a lot of the ideas that I have about what constitutes effective feedback. 

I am a firm believer that feedback serves two roles: to let the students know what they did wrong and to motivate students to do better.  Brookhart agrees in the article stating that there are both “cognitive and motivational factors” to giving successful feedback.  Many students retreat from learning something that is difficult because they are afraid of getting the answer wrong.  We need to make sure that students are comfortable answering any question that may come up in the classroom.  We need to have the reward of a right answer completely outweigh the fear of getting an answer wrong.  I think that feedback can go a long way to creating this type of atmosphere in the classroom.

Students need to be congratulated on not only correctness of thought, but also on originality and creativity.  This will encourage students to share their thought patterns and how they dissect information as it comes to them.  By giving feedback that this type of meta cognition is as praise worthy as the giving of a correct answer should go a long way to create a classroom culture that is both warm and information rich.

Resources I Have Access to for Providing Feedback

We were given a couple of feedback tools this week to take a look at and evaluate. 

For the first evaluation I chose Rubistar (available at http://rubistar.4teachers.org/) .  This online rubric creation website I have used in the past with mixed results.  I find that the first time I am implementing a project my rubric is never quite as ironed out as much as I’d like. I invariably assign too many points to trivial matters and then not enough on content.  Typically I rework the rubric for the next year and try again.  My reworked rubrics are usually too narrow and do not provide me with the flexibility I want in grading work to go up against its peers.  I’ll eventually get into a pattern that will allow me to utilize rubrics effectively and that is where Rubistar really shines.  It has a very slick interface that helps you design your own rubrics that can build off of what other teachers at the site have used.  This helps eliminate some of the first year jitters that I described.  Also, once you have a quality rubric you can share it with other teachers around the world.  This seems to be a quality tool for rubric creation.

For the second evaluation I chose Quia (available at http://www.quia.com/). This website is actually a portal to several different websites each with their own set of tools for the educator to provide quality feedback.  Quia books is an online textbook repository that contains multimedia and game aspects built into the text.  I spent some time playing with an inorganic textbook that had a flash card simulator and an online word search component.  The cost for the book was a modest $12.95 and it was comparable to other texts I have used on the subject matter.  Quia web has a ton of java based games for students to use when studying topics.  Most of the games (hangman, flashcards, matching, ect.) are built upon terms and definitions.  Again it is a paid site, but it does not seem to have the over all level of polish that the Quia Books section has.  Fortunately I does allow you to create your own games and quizzes.  This looks great, but at a cost of $49/person it seems to be a little steep for what is essentially a quiz creation / vocab practice website.  You can get html coding websites like http://classtools.net/ and http://www.internetraining.com/Templates/CKQuiz/index.html that will allow you to build these html games and quizzes into your existing teacher webpage without having to fork over the extra cash to create these interactive items.  The last item in the Quia web service was the IXL math website for PreK-8 students.  It has a series of web based math applets that change the numbers every time you use them.  I did not spend much time here because I use a similar product at school.

For the last two years my school has given me access to Blackboard to use with my students as a way of increasing interactivity in the classroom and during homework assignments.  I have used the website extensively to create calculated formula homework problems that change every time the attempts the problem.  I have seen a lot of gains in my AP Physics students’ mathematical reasoning skills since the students have instant feedback on whether a problem is right or wrong one they input an answer.  This coding and question making took an exceedingly long period of time and now they are shutting down the website on me (^%$! Budget cuts), but it gave my students some great tools to use while it lasted.

Compare and Contrast Available Student Response Technology Tools

In addition to Blackboard and the quiz making websites above I have access to 12 Senteos in my district.  Senteos are little student response clickers that can receive numerical, true/false and multiple choice responses from students when they are paired with a SMART board and a host of other add on equipment.  They are clunky and tend to wig out in my basement classroom, but they are great for getting prolonged feedback from students about a lecture or other activity.  I prefer to use http://www.polleverywhere.com/ when I can get away with not following our school’s cell phone policy since it has less setup time and more of a fun buy in for the students to use.

We also have access to email for extended feedback and we are piloting a paperless grading system that involves submitting pdfs to a special networked drive that has write only permissions in it for the students.  So far the paperless grading has been a hit with students liking the amount of feedback that I can type onto a lab report (versus hand writing) as well as the speed that electronic grading provides me.  This means that the students get back their labs quicker and while the information is still fresh in their minds.  The pilot program is still going strong and should have all the bugs worked out of it in the next few months.  Then all of the teachers will have better access to grade student work electronically.

Reflection on Setting Objectives

Chapter 1 in Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works is all about setting objectives so that you have a clear goal in mind when you craft your lessons.  The text outlines how to get started using Rubistar and goes into a little about how to implement standards based objectives.  Honestly this chapter could be a book on its own.  The objectives of a unit or an assignment are almost as important as the learning activity itself.  Clear objectives help craft and hone what you are trying to get students to learn so that a teacher’s classroom time is less about “baby-sitting” and more learning.  Objectives are always hard to nail down, but we should try our best to create these before we begin teaching so that we have direction and purpose to our daily lessons.

Reflection on Providing Feedback

Chapter 2 in Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works deals with successful strategies to provide students with feedback for their work.  It outlines how to use comment tools in Word as well as classroom response systems and a host of other technologies to better communicate with students what is correct and what needs to be corrected in their work.  I find that some types of technology help foster good feedback, while others actively work against it.  For example I really like the instant feedback that my Blackboard website gives to my students when they take multiple choice quizzes, do calculated problems and submit homework assignments.  The instant feed back that they get frequently promotes a dialogue between students about how to solve the problems they got wrong.  Waiting a week to get back your test or assignment and the students’ though processes are not as fresh in their minds.  As a result they are much less interested in the correct answers because we have moved on with the content.  Like wise the decreased grading time that students have to wait for due to my electronic commenting on students’ lab reports helps them grow as scientists much faster than slower, more traditional methods. 

Unfortunately it has not been all positive with using technology to promote feedback in my classroom.  Some students took to removing the comments that I had placed in Word and resubmitted their lab reports.  They then insisted that I had incorrectly graded their papers and asked me for a re-grade.  I did and found that their errors had been corrected.  Had I not had the original lab reports saved the students could have tricked me into getting more points on their assignments.  Even worse than this is the issue of plagiarism and cheating that can go on in electronic assignments.  The ease of “copy / paste” frequently lulls my students into a sense that the easy path of cheating is better than actually learning from the process of the assignment.

Reflection on Providing Recognition

Chapter 3 in Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works contains information about providing recognition to students.  The text shows ways of creating online certificates and creating multimedia files that praise a student’s work.  I have a couple of ways that I praise my students when they do exceptionally well in my classroom.  On tests and quizzes I use dollar store stickers when the test is 100%.  My high school seniors go crazy for them as they always want to show off to one another.  Another thing I do other than the stickers is to give a hand shake each student who has improved when passing out papers or tests.  It is more personal than the 100% stickers and recognizes that physics is not an easy thing to get an A in.  Lastly I like to email parents about turn arounds in work completion or test scores for a student.  The email seems to be a good way to go as I have quite a few students who come in with a print out of my email that their parent gave them.  The praise means more to the student when it comes from their parent than just a “good job” from me.

An Analysis of a Meta-analysis

This week we were asked to read a professional article named A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Teaching and Learning with Technology on Students  by Waxman, Lin and Michko. You can get a pdf copy of the article here

The article was a statistical analysis of 42 different studies done on the impact of technology in the classroom.  In all instances the studies cited had a positive impact on student learning.  This lead the authors to state that technology usage had a "small, positive, significant" impact on learning and the classroom in general. 

As a science teacher I am always a little leery of social science reports.  By virtue of me being in this class I am biased towards the positive impact of technology in the classroom.  I would like to say that my technology use in the classroom makes me a more effective teacher and my students' use of tech makes them more engaged.  That all being said, the collation methods the authors used in this article admit that much of the data being used was shoe-horned to make it an apples to apples comparison.  The authors state that they use a series of formulas that they used to back calculate much of the data they needed to order the data effectively.  I would love to see the inner workings of this statistical analysis at play.

Aside from my nit picking of the statistics, I thought the article was a very useful piece.  There is a lot of data out there and it was good to see some of it coming together in a very usable fashion. The part that I found the most interesting was the assertion that small group use of technology had more positive student impact than having students use technology on a one to one basis.  This has taken me aback a little.  On one hand student engagement increases for most students during group work projects instead of one on one, but there are always those students who hog the computer from their classmates.  Also, I find that group work decreases in engagement the second there are more than three students in a group.  It would be interesting to see what group dynamics are helped and which are hurt by the inclusion of technology into the classroom.

Start of CEDO 525 - Principles of Teaching and Learning

Tonight we started CEDO 525 and our first reading assignment was to read the Principles of Teaching and Learning website. You can access it right here

The website was split up into 2 different sections, one dealing with learning principles and another that dealt with teaching principles.  Here is a paraphrasing of what the sections talked about.

I. Learning Principles
1. Students prior knowledge will impact their learning
2.  Organization impacts learning
3. Student Motivation guides learning
4. Scaffolding is important
5. Feedback and Goal Setting is important
6. Emotions can hinder or enhance learning
7.  Metacognition and autonomy are the keys to students becoming self-directed learners

II. Teaching Principles
1. Lessons must be crafted to fit your specific students
2. There are 3 major components of instruction: Learning Objectives, Assessments & Instructional Activities
3.  Be explicit in your expectations
4. Prioritize knowledge and skills for your students
5. Know your content weaknesses
6.  Know your role as a teacher
7. Reflect, Refine and Revamp your lessons each year

This article was a fairly interesting one.  I have been modifying ASU's modeling program from my physics classes and I am happy to say that it matches up fairly well with the learning principles.  The program tries to deal with preconceptions in science by showing students events and having the students try to explain them through designing lab experiments. Now there is a lot of different scaffolding that has to occur and the students are resistant to the program at first, but it has given me some great gains in academic progress.

Week #2 - Annotated Bibliographies, Website Reviews and More..

This week in CEDO520 we looked at internet learning resources and how to evaluate their usefulness. This was something that i wish I had more time to explore. There is a lot of my time that is spent trying to update old curriculum using technology and if I was better at determining the value of a source I could avoid that inevitable moment when I realize that all of the time and effort I put into the lesson was pretty much wasted due to the selection of a sub standard resource. Luckily one of our assignments was to create an evaluation tool. I really like mine since it comes out with a score to make side by side compairisons of tools easier and more fruitful. You can check it out here

Starting CEDO520

This week we start up a new course called Internet Learning Resources.  In this first week we are learning to evaluate websites and the information contained inside them for relevancy and accuracy.  We were supposed to create a website evaluation form to check a website for un-due bias.  Here is what I came up with.  It has a little bit of a bias in it (I value scientific studies above academic ones), but overall it gets the students to think about where the information is coming from and what they must do to prevent getting duped by people who throw numbers around.

What I Learned from CEDO515

CEDO 515 was a class in which we took a look at a lot of stuff that I thought I knew all about: word processors, spreadsheets, presentations and calendars.  It was a fun to see how much I could learn about all of these things as well as quite a few barriers to technology implementation.  The high lights for me:

• Group work: Mike and Chris you guys are awesome.  You've both got great ideas and have unique experiences that you are willing to share.  It might have been hard to get together some times, but you guys were great group members.
• The graphics assignment: GoAnimate - my students love the program and have made several animated shorts with it.  It is a great program and I'm glad to have been exposed to it during this course.
• Talking about proper tech usage - We cannot just throw tech at students and expect magic to happen.  This class was heavy into not only the hows of tech usage, but also why we need to implement tech in order to keep relevant to our students and our world.

 All in all it was a very successful class. Thanks to Louis and all of the other people that made this such a rousing success!

TED Talks, Google Sites and Technology Learning Plans

This week we looked at brining all of the productivity tools that we have used in the class together into a Google Site.  Google Sites seem perfect for students to create their own web pages, but my school would be pretty uneasy about students maintaing a web presence for school that was not hosted and controlled by the school itself.  I'm going to investigate some of the security features and permissions and see if my students can't use this as an electronic portfolio for some of our physics projects / labs.  If you want to see my own Google site you can click here

We also looked at Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk about the importance of creativity in education. It was an interesting talk (as all TED talks are) that really railed on our current "academic producing" education.  I liked that the focus seemed to be in creating more avenues for education, but it was quite pie in the sky. The vision of education would require such a major overhaul that a single person could never direct the whole revision.  You can check out the TED talk here

The last thing for this week was to create a technology learning plan.  The plan involves producing goals and then creating measurable progress to gauge completion of the task.  I have about a hundred things that I'd like to accomplish so I need to focus down to about 3 measurable goals.  I'll post what I choose next week.

On a side note I just have to write about the online textbook I have been using for all of the class readings.  I've been using Course Smart.  It was only about $30 to rent the book for 180 days instead of about $60 to buy the print version.  It has a lot of note taking features and has been a positive experience.  It is a good sign for electronic textbooks.  You can check out the website here

InTime Video and Tech Integration

This week we are looking at Edutopia, Google Calendars and InTime Videos.  All of these resources are useful in their own way.

Edutopia seems to be a fairly user friendly site that has TONs of quality videos and projects for students.  You can check it out for yourself at http://www.edutopia.org/ I found two great physics articles / videos:

http://www.edutopia.org/motorcycle-physics is a great article on how to incorporate motorcycles into the discussion of physics. Kids always get a kick out of the fact that I ride a motorcycle to school and this article gives some ideas on how to incorporate that hook into a discussion about physics

http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-science-little-shop-physics has tons of ideas about how to have a physics outreach program.  In previous years I have done this, but I have never been the lead in creating the presentations.  This article has a lot of great ideas about what you can use to make these outreach presentations more engaging.

InTime Video (http://www.intime.uni.edu) has some videos created by users complete with lesson plans and activities.  This seems to be an immensely powerful site that can help generate ideas for teachers about how to improve their teaching of various subject matter.  For class I chose a video on Newton's 2nd Law complete with lesson plans and activities.  You can view the page at http://www.intime.uni.edu/video/012iahs/0/ It mirrors what I do in class pretty closely, but the instructor has a different way of presenting the start of the lesson that made me sit up and take notice.  His presentation uses a little humor to start the students talking.  This seems to be a great hook for the start of the lesson.

Spreadsheets and Problem Based Learning Over the Holidays

This "week" (actually we get 3 weeks to accomplish these tasks) we investigated spreadsheets and how they could be implemented in education.  Thankfully I have had some familiarity with Google Docs' Spreadsheet program as we keep our science supply inventory in the program to make it accessible to everyone in the department.  We needed to create a self scaling recipe in the program and then share it to the class. In a fairly prophetic joke my father in law gave me a Star Wars cookbook for Christmas.  I chose to use the book's titular "Wookie Cookies" as my recipe.  You can get a copy of the cookbook at Wookie Cookies

We are also getting into very deep concepts in our readings.  This week's chapters centered on supporting student creativity and problem solving.  These two things are either at the forefront of an engaging science classroom or never mentioned in the typical stuffy science classroom.  A very tough conversation needs to be had about wether we increase the amount of problem solving that happens in the classroom and decrease the overall amount of content, or if we go for breath rather than depth.  As we go toward more and more accountability in our curriculum via standardized tests and other easily measurable objectives I fear that there will be less incentive for teachers to try truly innovative teaching methods involving Problem Based Learning.  Eventually we will come to a compromise as to what needs to be taught if not how it should be taught.

The last thing that I'd like to write is about something cheerful.  I really liked the Magic Square assignment that we had to complete this week.  I think it could be implemented as a warmup for my students for those days when we have to work with data and see patterns. 

 Here is a picture of the Magic Square.  Try it out if you haven't already.