Final Reflections - Workshop 8

According to Dr. June Main (2003) the question is, “How does technology change your teaching?” The emphasis needs to be focused on the transformation of teaching and learning. The focus is on researched, proven teaching strategies; technology is a tool.
It is only when teachers really plug into the ideas and strategies, try them in their classrooms and find that they work that it makes a difference. (Woodbridge, 2003, p.295)


• What teaching strategies used during this course compliment integration of technology?
This course would not be possible without technology. It is based from online work and allows teachers from all over the globe to share resources and ideas. The international school system must be founded on technology because of the diverse needs and backgrounds of students. Technology integration allows for a world of resources previously unavailable. It is fitting that this course would integrate technology in its methods and ideology.
• How do you personally define technology integration after completing this course?
Technology integration is the use of programming, devices, and digital resources as a tool for learning. Technology is a means to an end of understanding and communicating concepts in other subject areas. It deepens and colors instruction and allows for new lenses in which to understand our world of processes, of people, and of cultures.

Love to My Wiki - Workshop 7

I have written quite a bit about my classroom wiki site. I introduced it at the end of last year for one class’s use in a final group project. This year, I tried using it in all my classes. Yesterday, I proposed the idea as a school-wide effort, that all teachers should have websites. This class’s timing was a helpful tool in that two of my cohort members also worked on websites. I had their models to show the administration. I have already seen a huge number of affective outcomes from the use of the wiki. Students who are creatively and graphically inclined have been able to learn elements of basic graphic design, and to try their skills out on web page design. Others, who have technical skills, have learned how to post a video or pictures to a website. In fact, students figured out how to shrink the size of one video we created so it would upload to the page. They showed me how to do it. Through these technological tools, students achieved the bigger content goals of and English class – how to analyze and present text, how visual media is a powerful medium of communication, how to reflect on past work and to set goals for future work. I anticipate next year in new wiki experiments.

Multimedia Madness - Workshop 6

Multimedia presentations are excellent options for student assessment partially because they allow for such creativity. In a recent Powerpoint assignment I gave my students, they were required to include some sort of visual to show how they analyzed their assigned poem. I loved watching which kind of visual they selected, and then noting how they structured the presentations. One student designed the slides using the Powerpoint templates and played with the power of color symbolism. Another student flashed pictures in between certain lines of the poem so the meaning might be portrayed more powerfully. Through the use of this technology, student’s individual identities were highlighted. They had an element of choice and an artistic quality to their presentation. I love giving them this freedom because so many times they teach me how to interpret and how to feel lines of old text still at work today.
As Turkle (2004) suggests, how can teachers use technology to develop a spirit of “democracy, tolerance, diversity, and complexity of opinion”? I think that the first step is in giving students choice. They are not mere programs to memorize and regurgitate. They are creative beings designed to craft and invent and conceive. What great way to allow them to use these God-given abilities!
The greatest challenge comes then when these acts of creation are a bit strange, or they are unclear, or messy. When choices are given students may make the wrong choice, or at least an undesirable one. Other students may not know how to handle the outlier personality in the room with a bizarre presentation. With diversity and complexity in student production comes equally dense and compound issues in student interaction, in self-esteem questions etc. It is challenging to know how to encourage students to experiment, to try, but also to extend grace to each other in the process.

Workshop 5 Essential Questions

I first started considering essential questions this year when trying to realign my coursework with standards and benchmarks. I found that using the UBD essential question format was very helpful in the development of student critical thinking. I also can put these questions on student rubrics, and in self-assessment activities, so I can easily link our work in class on a day to day basis with the bigger picture. The Questioning Toolkit looks like a combination of these essential questions and the classic clustering diagram for teaching writing invention strategies. Most of the questions I use target larger problems or controversies in society. For example, in one class we are considering what it takes to be a good citizen? We will consider a number of different sources, plan seminars, and do research based off of this question. I think that problem-based essential questions are perfect for challenging critical thinking because students have to be involved in creation - they can't just spit back their teacher's words. By using questions, the teacher can prompt and scaffold for a good answer without giving one to directly memorize. I also think this kind of questioning is much more true to life than asking students to memorize facts. They may do well on a game show, but students need to be prepared for a future of using and applying facts, not just knowing them.

Though I might use a few of the groups of questions presented in the Questioning Toolkit as essential questions, but under the site's classification, probing questions and telling questions seem to be the most useful for technology in English. Probing questions could fit into research based technology, and telling questions can fit with multimedia, RSS feeds, and video. These questions can be helpful in showing students how to break a large project into steps.

Workshop #4: Midpoint Thoughts

I continue to be surprised by the elements that I didn’t learn in my undergraduate education. I don’t fault my university or professors in all cases; technology continues to spin and to develop, and every year should bring new insights under the ideal of the ‘lifelong learner’. Still, I wonder how I managed to avoid learning virtually anything about Excel. In this case, trusting a grading program to calculate standard deviation is comparable to students relying on calculator functions over mental math. The quicker way is preferred. More truly, rarely do I consider the mean, median, and mode unless I’m reflecting back to college stats class. There is a time and place for data analysis, even if my preference is to stay in my bubble of language. Our school will be visited next year for our bi-annual review. The committee will want to see data analysis, and currently I am choosing this area as one for procrastination. We also still have yet to assess the date from our fall all-school testing. We need to make it happen. But this number crunching area is not my strong suit.

The Excel reminder is one for me to realize my role as a manager in the school, not that I have to review the data myself, but I need to make sure it happens. Other tools that I can more readily use for development are in the areas of blogging, videoing, and website creation. The learning network is so important within the international school because of the many roles individuals play both in and out of their expertise. Often a question may arise and no one at the school can answer it effectively. So, we need to rely on the experience of other schools in similar places and/or situations. A globally reaching schools needs the global tools to make it effective.

Workshop 3

I am currently playing with the idea of using a form of podcasting to give feedback on student work. Traditionally, I have used a rubric and have made additional comments as necessary. My experiment is to read certain sections of student essays and to give verbal feedback. If this plan works, it can serve as a model to students on how to complete mature peer critiques. Some drawbacks to the experiment may include the need to give grades but not to give the grade over the podcast. To keep academic honesty and respect for my students, I will still need to complete some sort of written report. I hope to give the best feedback possible without creating too much extra work for me.
Another element for research is the Mac component of podcasting. I think that there is a way to attempt something similar on a PC. I don’t have a Mac, and will need something that works on both systems.
Podcasts can potentially be a great tool to support critical thinking and the art of discussion. My students are not masters at giving constructive feedback. They will either note that a piece is generally “good”, but they are unable to express why. Or they will comment on their feeling when reading, but do not have the descriptive ability to focus their comments on specific tasks and skills. I hope that podcasting recording element will help students to be more reflective and assertive in their work.

Taxonomy of Outcomes with Technology

In the cognitive realm, my hope is that my students will have a stronger knowledge and comprehension base through the use of technology than without it. This element of learning is the drill and practice method of grasping a new skill. I hope then to take this comprehension level into some sort of project-based work which will challenge students into synthesis and evaluation, even creation. Internet-based technology can connect students to a world of many applications and the opportunity for crafting new ideas. Twitter is a perfect example of a creation aimed at more effective, simplistic social networking that has turned into a global phenomenon. Technology literally puts the world at student's fingertips.

Affectively, students should be able to receive information well with the proper use of technology. With so much research-based plans for individual instruction and differentiation in the classroom, the teacher can now be multiple places at once through the use of a mouse. Students should have the desire to learn because of the many possible outcomes. Teachers have choices through the use of software, websites, and collaboration materials of many different types of outcomes. Students can do so much more with technology than without it.

Computers in Education Ponderings #1

Technology by itself does not improve student learning. Students learn well in environments where teacher and students work together to support meaningful learning, using computers effectively as one of many instructional tools to construct knowledge Jonassen, et al, 1999).

Technology development was on my list of professional goals for the year. Last school year I piloted a wiki site with my British Literature class. It worked well as a multimedia report forum and for classroom critiques, reflections etc. This year, I launched the wiki with my other classes. Like all new additions, sometimes I love what the wiki can do, and other times I look for revisions. The site has been great for international school education because of how mobile our classroom needs to be. When we had the H1N1 scare, continuing school over the internet and phone was a very real possibility. Thankfully our school was never shut down. The wiki was helpful when one student took an extended vacation in her home country. She was gone for over a month and needed to keep up to date with coursework. Yes! Load and post methods saved me troublesome emailing. The wiki has also had its downfalls because it means less creative work up in the school. Instead of making a poster, I assigned my students a glogster online scrapbook page. They enjoyed it, but we had nothing for hallway display. Later a parent claimed our school looked like a dentist’s office. In this area, I need to look into ways to print student work so they can continue to do it online but so they can also display it around the school.

Overall, I am always looking for new innovations and better ideas. My challenge is to keep a life outside of school and to avoid running too many experiments simultaneously.

I think technology is fun. But it also scares me. I hate the feeling of students staring at me after the bell has sounded, and I’m still trying to figure out which cord should connect to which place in the computer. I’m not totally ignorant of how to use technology tools, but my brain is not apt to play and figure until the system works. I need someone to show me. Still I am motivated by all the exciting things we can learn and create in the classroom. I love learning, and try to embrace it along with my students.

Sites for Perusal Running List:

http://writeboard.com/
http://www.diigo.com/

"I Wish I Could Be" Running List:

http://aliceproject.wordpress.com/
http://writeonproject.pbworks.com/Project-Timeline