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.