Coming into the Innovative Learning program I was unsure what to expect. Over the past nine months, the way that I approach preparing for my units and lessons has changed drastically. Goals that I had set for myself early in the year have been surpassed and so in looking forward I would like to continue to build off what I have gained to meet the needs of students in a more dynamic way. in practice I see this as becoming more fluent in the intersections of content, pedagogy and technology. The more that I have played with various apps, programs and various technologies, the more applications I have been able to utilize inside and outside of the classroom. Ultimately, I want to continue to play, explore and reflect.
The cohort model itself is a powerful tool. Getting the opportunity to work closely with cohort members last semester as we completed projects for 702 allowed us to get deeper into the minds of each other to see not only where we are headed with our graduate work but also what prior skills we have brought to the program. As we begin to build our websites, the support that I most need is feedback. It is easy to feel lost or pulled in many different directions when thinking about a product and I hope my peers can help me understand my work from the user perspective (which makes me think of all the work we did with our end user last semester and how big of a role that will play now). This feedback model can be pushed by being allowed opportunities to view each others sites while they are under construction. There are so many key features to the sites such as content, design and functionality. In order to create the best product we can, we must have other eyes on the project during the design phase.
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ED791, Sensemaking and Research design has really shaped the way that I have looked at my own practice as well as where I want to go with my Action Research. I came into the class ready to continue down the path of Project Based Learning which was the focus of my action research within ED790. As we went through our readings with Dervin and Clark and hearing the words of Obeng, my design thinking has shifted in a way that not only includes PBL design but also incorporates a technology component that will assist in accessibility which is a focus for our site.
As we have been pushed to think about creating a product, I kept coming back to what I find useful in educational resources. I want a resource that is concrete, yet leaves room for me to put my own spin on it. A PBL framework is valuable, but left too much gray area on what to do with it. Lately, I have gravitated towards Hyperdocs as a central way to organize content, scaffolds and provide students with a transparent view of what they are being asked to do/learn/engage with. I believe this technology leaves someone with enough of a framework that they can then adapt it to make it their own. As I spent time on the Hyperdocs page, the examples really helped me think through ways that I could use it with my students. This is the type of product I am hoping to create. While Hyperdocs have been done (there is a whole site from the creators) the way that I see them being used could integrate not only technology but various forms of pedagogy, including: flipping the classroom, independent and collaborative learning, self assessments and project-based learning. Gamification is something that I used mildly when teaching middle school. Kids dug the use of Class Dojo, as it made being on task fun and instantly rewarded. Class Dojo really helped cultivate a culture where collaboration and communication were honored, all within an easily managed phone and website app. In addition to Dojo, I would use an analog tracking system with stars (yes, those old school charts) that worked very well with my 6th graders who were enrolled in my math support class. As I have made the move to high school (and increased the use of technological fluency) this paper chart was transformed into a shared Google Spreadsheet that lists assignments that have been completed as well as those that are currently in progress (our gradebook could serve the same function but is bulky to for students to use).
As a math teacher, I have aways looked to games to increase fluency with foundational skills. Some sites that have been used over the years are Khan, Math180, Kakooma, Manga High, PBSkids and NCTM to name a few. Recently, I have been using games such as dominos, Yahtzee and various dice games with my small skills class to build in basic mental operation fluency at the high school level. When students start to see the "learning game" as just a game, learning becomes so integrated into the process. Noticing how students work with games that seem contrived in relation to those games that are authentic in their design makes a world of difference. Over the past month I have been experimenting with using DESMOS for their activities. This is new to me. Having used DESMOS for many years as a graphing app resource, I was delighted to see the build-out of their class activities. These activities are grounded in math and do not attempt to be "jazzed up" to allow students to try and relate. Our site has a major need for units that can be accessed independently, involves student choice, allows students to use new technologies and allows us as teachers to work with students one-on-one or in small breakout groups rather than lecture an entire class. Starting at the end of last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about web-based units that were big picture. The online programs our site has access to are not only difficult to maneuver but also extremely boring. Our students, most of which are reluctant learners would become frustrated with the online courses and simply not do them. The programs are very text heavy so literacy skills were a prerequisite to being able to access the content, which didn't fly for everyone. I knew that there has to be a better way to meet the needs of our students who might not be able to come to school everyday but still has the desire to keep pace and work towards graduation.
Transliteracy is a term that is fairly new to me, but something I have been working towards this current year. During this shift my goal is to create a product that allows students to access information and content in non traditional-ways and the ideas of being transliterate and tech flexible emerge. Picking the brains of students yields so much information. Often times I ask where they got their information from and often times the response is a video (through various platforms). Why haven't I created more videos in the past as a learning tool? Using Google Classroom as a base platform to present content allows the information and tasks to be accessed digitally, from anywhere. That is step one. But how do we put students in charge of their own learning? Transparency has been a word I have tossed around with staff lately. I want students to be able to envision the end product, to know what we are asking them to do, be able to personalize it and know why we are asking them to do it. A jump off point for our students was the idea of digital portfolios. Since we have been credit-based for the last couple of years (no grades are given) we need a way for students to show off their learning in other ways than just a number attached to their GPA. The prototype of a digital portfolio was born and what better resource to use than one that we has Cohort 14 are being asked to use, Weebly. Some concerns I have moving forward with this unit design is:
Tech tools are dope! Exploring new tools to create videos, lessons, assessments is exciting. I feel as if somebody unlocked a drawer filled with a lot of cool stuff and the more you play with one item, the more you want to play with others. I only wish my students approached the tools with this kind of attitude. I get it though, learning a new app, website or tool is different and if you are not in the right state of mind, different can be frustrating, irritating and annoying. The more tools that are weaved in and out of our lessons, the more students gain confidence and the more their skills with being tech flexible (transliteracy) emerge.
In the flipped classroom lesson, I knew I wanted students to preview content for our lesson on solving equations with fractions using Fraction Busters (yes, it is semi-algorithmic but a VERY useful tool nonetheless). Also, instead of completing a large problem set of fraction-containing equations, giving an opportunity for students to go deep with one equation allows students to write about each step and really start to break down why Fraction Busters works. The process went down like this. I first created a digital whiteboard video using AWWAPP (free) but after reading Jon Bergmann's writing in Flipped Classroom 101, I knew I had to do something more than just have students watch a video of me solving/explaining the use of Fraction Busters. EdPuzzle provided the technology for questions to be inserted during the video which I believe will keep the viewers engaged and focused on the specific aspects of the video that are important. As students came into class, the information from the video was then put into question form within our daily Padlet writing. This gave me a quick understanding of how students were thinking about multiplying whole numbers by fractions (yes, high schoolers need reminders of this) and the process of using Fraction Busters. The application portion of the skill came in the form of a task card created using Google Docs (hyperdoc) that ended in students creating a digital poster to post to our class Padlet as we concluded with a digital gallery walk to look at each others work. This process worked well, mostly. There is definitely (in my experience) a push against using videos to understand. Quite a few students still wanted to be guided directly through the process. When this situation arose, I gave my spiel, it went something like this, "The great thing about the video, created by yours truly allows you to have the flexibility to pause and think, go back to understand or skip it all together if you already understand. I wouldn't want to bore you with explaining something you already understand". Most students get his reasoning and will give the video another shot. If the students still have questions, I probe for specific questions on the process rather than just reexplaining what was in the video. Side track. Our upcoming unit involves having students create a digital portfolio using Weebly (much like we are doing in the Touro program) and we plan on using blogging as a means of getting students to write and critically think about relevant issues surrounding their community and selves. While scanning Start a Reading Revolution: Flip your Classroom with Blogs, I couldn't agree more with Brian Sztabnik about allowing students to write in their own voice to gain, as well as show understanding. I really have high hopes for this end of the year unit and like always I will blog about it when it happens. I don't know if I have ever thought so hard about how others make sense of information. Though, my last 10 years have been spent planning for exactly this. Listening to Punya Mishra talk about the landscape of education is both exciting and terrifying. I believe the root of terror is the unknown or the breaking up of what was comfortable. Wearing pants when you are that person who wears shorts 24/7, terrifying. Equally terrifying, creating a digital task card when your comfort zone has been the printed word. While these situations might be hyperbolized, altering what you have done previously is not an easy feat. In the math class, altering the mainly direct instruction approach years ago led me into a more facilitator type role rather than the acting oracle of the classroom. As my context has changed so has my ideas on technology, content and pedagogy. Talking with students about how they engage and how they best learn can lead to some pretty powerful discoveries. Seeing students show one another how to access information, whether it be digitally or not is flat out heart-warming. This context shift is discovering that information is no longer a commodity and being able to assist students in being independent learners is more important (to me) than any content standard. Mishra's image of the drop of water out of the faucet compared to the fire hose in terms of how information is shot at you is so accurate.
This is in my mind as I prototype. Can I create a product that can combine all these other tools into a non-formulaic approach to growing independent learners while engaging them in standards-based content? What I am struggling with the idea that this is not new. A quick search leads to many sites devoted to digital portfolios (some of them are pretty cool). Will the end user get a kick out of this as much as I get a kick out of thinking about it? Are students going to want to access these sites independently? Will these digital portfolios actually be used post high school? Will employers care to see a student created website the highlights their accomplishments? Will students value the design process, not just the end product? These questions circle my mind as I design and think and put a plan into action. Exciting and terrifying at the same time. As we are getting near the end of our 3rd PBL unit at Helensview, the instructional design of our final unit, unit 4 is taking shape. Being paired up with the Science teacher, we have decided to create a space for students to create their own Weebly sites in much the same manner that we as Cohort 14 are being asked to do. The goal is to have students work through a series of tasks that will lead to the beginning of their personal digital portfolios. Instead of breaking down each day into a lesson, we are creating a task list (Rubric focused) of what needs to be included within each Weebly site. Students can choose to work on any aspect of their digital portfolio on any of the 8 given days that the unit will run or complete parts off-site. As support, we will create a series of YouTube videos, screencasts and hyperdocs that will allow the students to take charge of their own learning. Of course, we will be available each class as supports for more focused questions.
Aesthetic has been a huge driving force behind my instructional design in the past and after reading about the Sociocultural subcontext within the SITE model, it gets me thinking about the motivation of the learner. What are the motivating factors for the learners to create digital portfolios? Tying this into Dervin, how will learners gap bridge if they do not see a use for the skill on the other end? As students at my site move towards graduation, the prospect of jobs and continuing education looms heavy. Students are motivated to be done with their high school journey (most anyway) and being able to include this digital portfolio as a graduation requirement would definitely provide the motivation needed to complete it. But that is not enough. I want the students to see this as a useful tool for their post high school choices. In this regard, I must design the experience to make it meaningful for the students and not just another checklist on their ride towards a diploma. Integrating personal voice, choice and showcases allows the students to make it theirs and allow the viewer to get a glimpse into who they are as a person, as student and a community member. The selection of tasks within the Weebly will really be the key to a meaningful output and as my co-teacher and I work to design the unit, this needs to be at the front of our mind. As my action research gets flushed out, I want to thank Dervin, Sir Ken Robinson, Baggio, Clark, Pebble-In-The-Pond and the SITE model for pushing me to think beyond learning objectives and state standards and leading me into the realm of end-user, repeatability, usefulness and accessibility. These readings have really helped shape a pile of random wants and thoughts into a somewhat cohesive ball of what I want for my classroom and end product. Google Forms. How can you not like a piece of technology that reduces waste (paper) and time (self grading)? Over the years I have gone through cycles of using Google Forms. It is almost as it comes into fashion and then can quickly fade out. Last weeks session invigorated me to use it again, as I have been relying on Quizizz as my short assessment tool as of late. Trying to input exponents proved difficult until I installed the add-on EquitIO (formely g(math)) that created a math editor option for each question. Success! After giving the Google Form today, I was able to learn about the strengths of my students from the previous weeks learnings. In comparison to Quizizz, I saw that Forms allowed more time for thoughtful responses and turned it into more of a show what you know rather than a competition. With Quizizz I have really been trying to stress the "slow down" mantra and have spent time debriefing the average time per question in hopes of getting more accurate responses. Google Forms did just this. In the future, I know when I would need to use Quizizz and Google Forms because they both play a specific purpose in my classroom.
Besides acting as a quick assessment tool, Google Forms can help get feedback through surveys, which is how I have used them for my Action Research. When completing the study which included the effect of a PBL unit on students comprehension, I wanted to gather authentic student input about how they felt when working through the unit, mainly within collaborative groupings. Google Forms allowed me to create a short pre and post survey that involved how students approached and felt about working in collaborative groups. Several questions were multiple choice, but having the option to have students own words in short answer form is what made the survey that much more real. Moving forward with Forms, I would be interested in having students create and administer a Form in situations that involve student input or some kind of democratic process within the school or classroom. Additionally, it might be cool to have groups create/administer their own forms to other groups to test each others knowledge and possibly turn it into a "Can you stump another group" situation. I feel like I cannot address the importance of my driving question or capstone and who it is meant for without first answering the question, What is Alt Ed Anyway?
For the majority of my teaching life I spent my day to day in a traditionally modeled urban school. Just like almost any other school I encountered typical class sizes (26-32), fairly consistent attendance (90%), students who did well and those that struggled. Our student body was comprised of an array of students form different cultural, economic and social backgrounds that on occasion would intermingle with those not homogenous to themselves. On a day to day basis, systems had been put in place at the site and classroom level that allowed the majority of students to learn and engage with the content. It was a school. The type of school you think about when asked to think of a school. Grades, fights, Back to School nights, open houses, after-school HW help, sports teams, etc. Honestly, looking back over a year and half ago when applying to an Alternative High School position I didn't really think about what it would entail. I figured that I had taught in a few tough schools in Oakland, my management was solid as was my content, how much different could an alternative setting be? Almost two years in I still struggle. I am still constantly questioning what I do, searching for different strategies and trying to problem solve with the question, "How could this better" in the back of my mind. So what is Alt ed? This list is not unique to an alt ed setting (or at least shouldn't be). To me, alt ed is:
With this in mind, my driving question's end user is the students, as they will be the ones that potentially will benefit from this research and design model. However, my end user is also my peers, our sites/districts administration and every other Portland area school district that we service. At our site, attendance is a major issue. Most of our students attend 50% of the time. Planning content that builds on itself is tough. Last year I created individual units that students could work through independently and pick up where they left off. This was fairly successful but still approached math through a traditional lens (that most likely didn't work the first time around). What I am trying to do with my current driving question is create a template for unit design that incorporates a PBL framework and works for students that are at school or not. Basically, I want to take online learning, PBL design and the integration of content areas and smoosh them together. I do not want math to be taught in isolation but rather integrated into relevant unit experiences. We already have a good start on this. I have planned with the Humanities and Sciences to build some pretty cool units that do just this. What is missing is the accessibility aspect and high school rigor. Right now our content is meeting students where they are. The hope is that in the future, by offering other modes of accessibility we can fold more students into the success zone rather than only the students who are frequent attenders and really push skill levels into that "prepared for college" category all the while creating residue from meaningful units that connect in multiple ways. Social media can be such a blessing. It has allowed individuals to create and be involved in collaborative discourse, share ideas and grow Personal Learning Networks (PLN). Of course with benefits of this extreme interconnectedness follows the pitfalls. Showing yourself in a bad light, over sharing personal information, talking negatively about someone else and using social media to partake in non law-abiding actions are just a few actions that can easily label you in a negative manner. This falls in line with what Gwyneth Jones mentions in her article 6 Ways to Avoid Those Social Media Pitfalls, "As educators, I passionately believe we should use social media to push the positive, celebrate student successes, share resources with our colleagues, and connect with parents and the community." How then do we push the positives aspects of social media while curbing the negative?
Unfortunately, merely telling students about the pitfalls of social media does not always guarantee avoidance. Counter to what Jones discussed in her article, I do believe that connecting with students via social media (I do create a separate account just for this purpose) is not only an effective way to communicate and build rapport but also lets the student know that you are part of their targeted audience. Say for instance I was crafting an email to a close friend of mine and had to cc my supervisor, the email might look differently than if it was just to my friend. I know this because I am well versed in code-switching but these are the skills that we want to instill into our youth. Our students will make mistakes with how they use social media, that is a fact, but having someone there to point out the mistake and help them grow from it leads to learning and understanding. In regards to having been witness to an inappropriate use of social mediaI, this is a surprisingly (or not so surprising) common occurrence. Often times the plan of action is talking with the student privately to make them aware of the action. We have several staff at my site that connect with students using social media so reinforcement from adult to adult helps hold the student accountable. At times we have had to take further action involving law enforcement but this is a rare occurrence. Patrick Larkin in What Do You Do When You See Inappropriate Social Media Posts? brought up some valuable guidelines in dealing with such comments or posts. It is these type of conversations we as a staff seek to have with our students. In our view, these negative posts and comments lend themselves to teachable moments rather than punitive. |
AuthorHello, I'm Joe. Welcome to writings about my thought process throughout the journey of Touro's Innovative Learning Graduate Program. Archives
July 2018
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