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.