Dr. Bobbe Baggio presents a very strong case for the use of effective graphics to promote learning through the visual perceptions She provides many usable and practical tips. A piece of knowledge about brain function that I had heard before that Baggio reiterates is the fact that the brain experiences cognitive overload. Too much is too much = the brain shuts out or dumps excess information. Either it ignores the over stimulation and the information never makes it into short term memory, or the brain puts unused information into cold storage, which makes it the most difficult to retrieve. Visual information, or graphic design inputs, can be just as overwhelming to the eye, and therefore the brain, as a page full of words. As I was perusing various twitter feeds, I ran across an infographic that connects Baggio’s information to Clark’s ideas to some of the digital technology with which Cohort 12 is experimenting to my still vague notion of where I want to take my Driving Question for the next phase. Indulge me while I work it out! https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDPvi0BXUAAIMsk.jpg Baggio is saying that roughly 80% of the population learns visually. The infographic suggests we need to move beyond that to maximize retention. So add an additional audio layer from our cohort’s experimenting with various screencasting tools that allow for sound overlays. This moves us up to 50% retention. Put those same tools in the hands of the students themselves, and they are saying and doing themselves. Say and Do = 90% retention. Enter Clark’s advice on technical training. A key idea on effective lesson design is to know your desired performance outcome. This is a specific task that the student will be able to do; it is a VERB followed by a MEASURABLE TASK. Say and do. Clark also advises that within the structured lesson design there is supporting information provided with information displays and also a key lesson task that consists of practice exercises. It is also referred to as remember and apply. My previous driving question was to explore the impact of free, voluntary reading (pleasure reading) on reading proficiency in middle school students. The results of my action research showed me that increasing pleasure reading time as a single factor was not as effective as it should have been. One hypothesis as to why my results varied so drastically from the results I found in my literature reviews is that my population has specific qualities and needs. Using the SITE model helps understand these learners. My student population is about 65% special needs or at-risk. Many of them face significant obstacles to reading proficiency. Some have never mastered learning to read, yet they are at the stage in school and life where they need to read to learn. Here the idea of mediacy enters. Mediacy is described by Paul Strassmann as, "the ability of individuals to successfully cope with communications in their civilization." Literacy and mediacy working together can help them succeed. Another significant obstacle for my students are affective (emotional domain) perceptions. Anxiety, depression, frustration from learning difficulties often color their perception of school in general and of learning tasks. In the SITE model, paying attention to these influences would be understanding their sociocultural motives and values. As Baggio notes, positive graphics can be a powerful tool to influence the affective perceptions of students. Enter the SITE model’s technical subcontext. Perhaps digital resources could be used to support their reading. Some examples of text readers and voice to text I found while following a weekly twitterchat ( #engchat, #edhat, #sschat): Chrome Speakit!, Announcify, and Read & Write for Google. Chrome SpeakIt! Announcify Read & Write for Google My concept of my capstone project is evolving to include an audience that is partly students and partly other educators. I am envisioning a resource page for the students that is visually alluring and provides digital reading support resources. Other parts of the capstone pages would be directed at fellow teachers, especially those who have a need to support learning outside of class time. Essentially, it would provide research, suggestions, and resources. My teaching context is that of independent studies. Often I ask how I can assist my students from afar. They are at home, I am at school. I know other teachers at my site struggle with the same question. Likely, many teachers in many teaching contexts would also benefit. Both the student page and the teacher page fill this need.
“How can digital resources be leveraged to support reading success for at-risk & special needs students?”
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How can/Should social media be used to help you develop/collaborate/communicate as a professional? What are the critical issues to consider? When I first began teaching one of the Go-To resources for teachers was Harry Wong’s First Days of School. I still keep my copy and believe most of what he proposes is valuable for classroom and education practices. I’ve read the book several times, watched the video series and its spin-offs, listened to the audio, and attended several workshops around the content of this book. One of my favorite catch phrases cemented in my mind from this experience is that when it comes to developing as a professional, teachers “beg, borrow, and steal” the best ideas from one another. All my best tools, lessons, and classroom management strategies have come from other teachers. A 35 year veteran teacher I know volunteers his time to serve on a WASC team, just so, he says, he can stay fresh (after 35 years) and get into other teachers’ classrooms to get some good ideas. Getting around physically to see other teachers in action is, needless to say, a challenging proposition. After all, we’re all in class at the same time! Finding time to attend professional development workshops, conferences, even a coffee date with a fellow teacher - that’s not always in the schedule. So how do we experience one another’s little microcosms? We use social media. Student aren’t the only ones who can benefit from the use of social media. In Steven Anderson’s Blog on Three Untapped Social Media Resources for Students, he cites a Pew Internet Research Study from 2016 showing that of all U.S adults,
I have no hesitation in using social media to connect professionally with colleagues. I do think it wise practice to create separate accounts that are used for purely professional reasons and are never intermingled with personal accounts. One critical issue I think we need to consider is the “unfiltered” aspect of using social media for sharing ideas. In Darrell West’s article How Blogs, Social Media, and Video Games Improve Education, he points out that social media can tap into the expertise of the general population. He calls it democratizing the flow of information. “There is no longer any need to wait on professionals to share material and report on new developments. Today, people communicate directly in an unmediated and unfiltered manner.” West does not state it directly, but implies that it is a positive shift that we do not any longer have to rely upon experts to inform us, we can all just weigh in our thoughts without any mediation nor filter. But we must keep in mind when wading through the vast array of ideas available through social media that mediation can provide judgements of accuracy. Peer reviewed articles are more reliable than unfiltered thoughts. Increased, expedient participation via social media is certainly a good thing, but not at the expense of quality. Not all participation is equal in merit. Just as we are trying to teach our students digital literacy skills, such as how to weigh the credibility of an internet source and how to apply critical thinking to what they read, we as professionals must be savvy about applying these same digital literacy skills to using social media for communicating, collaborating, and developing as educators. What would you do if you were to come across an inappropriate post made by one of your students outside of the school. Currently, I wouldn’t probably come across an inappropriate post made by a current student because I very purposefully do not follow, connect with, snap, chat, or gram any of my current students. My understanding of the school district email and social media policy is that teachers are supposed to conduct all communication with students using NVUSD email addresses. Appropriate communication with students and parents by teachers is absolutely essential in this litigious age. Aside from directives from our superiors, it is simply wise to be prudent in how deeply we interconnect our professional and personal lives when we’re role models, mentors, and sometimes a highly scrutinized adult presence. We are teachers… it’s our calling to instruct our students, and that does involve caring about who they are as people. Yes, we need to know their interests and maintain a warm, inviting, safe emotional space for them. Yet we still need to draw a boundary between being a caring mentor and being friends, buddies, or...social contacts on social media. Once students are graduated or I have changed schools, I do occasionally connect with them or their parents over social media. The day will come when I will stumble upon a comment on social media by one of my own students that is inappropriate or harmful to another student. Especially in the latter case, I would feel it my responsibility to speak with the student and the parents. If necessary, I would involve the principal to mediate any restorative steps. In Patrick Larkin’s example (What do you do when you see inappropriate social media posts?) the comment is not directed at another student, so he advocates taking the approach of a teaching moment rather than disciplinary steps. I agree that showing a student WHY not to be so careless with his digital footprint is more valuable than an extrinsic negative consequence. Show the student the natural consequences that may arise from public consumption of what might have been a thoughtless, impulsive social media post that doesn’t show him in the best light. In order to begin formulating my capstone project, I am first in need of understanding WHAT it is and what a final project looks like. Here is what I gather from reading the Capstone Handbook.
I still do not have the full grasp of what a Capstone project LOOKS like. I find myself trying to envision the finished product and I can’t see it in my mind’s eyes. I’m one of those visual learners who wants to see a sample of the finished product before I begin. (Does this remind anyone of our readings these past two weeks in Dervin and Baggio?!) There must be an expectation of the finished product but I am just not understanding it.
Based on my current understanding, I think it is safest to say that my audience will be my fellow colleagues. First, it seems the Capstone project is geared toward this audience. Further, we don’t have access to our student this semester. Finally, it seems the purpose behind the capstone is to create a resource to influence others, namely, educators. As I’m progressing through the innovative learning program, I’m coming to the conclusion that Independent Studies should be leveraging digital technology for its learners to a greater degree. Our program is actually an ideal place to implement so many of the 21st century learning strategies we’ve discussed, especially digitally accessed, self-paced, flipped classrooms. I would want to consider that my audience should include my principal and people in the district in a position to allow my school site to broaden our digital tools and following from that, possibly our curriculum choices. Certain materials do not lend themselves to study from home. For example, one of the current district-adopted math programs does not do a good job of supporting learning from home. It is strongly teacher led. We need a digitally accessible program. This, of course, means someone with decision making power and money spending clout has to buy in and support this change. As an ELA teacher, I am most interested in finding a resource for my students that is accessible digitally that will foster a love for reading and further success in reading. I would ideally like to find a resource that is proven by research to be successful, especially for an at-risk and special needs population. I would like to try it with my students to assess if it could be used at my school site in the future. What is the opposite of a digital native? A digital immigrant? I guess that’s what I am. I didn’t really decide to move to this new country, in fact, I moved reluctantly and only adapted as was necessary. I looked fondly back on the simple days back in the old country. Sure, many tasks took longer and you had to commit more to memory, but I knew my way around it and how to get the job done with the available tools. So now, here I am, realizing that I will never be moving back to the old country - it does not even exist anymore. It’s time to learn the language, culture, and tools of my new digital home beyond just surviving and barely keeping pace. Time to become fluent. In fact - it’s far past time! So to the task at hand - to review a digital tool I’ve used in school that is not a GSuite app nor one we’ve discussed in class. Embarrassing to admit - I got nothing! Probably the most significant reason I decided to enroll in the Innovative Learning masters program was to push my own comfort zone and force myself to learn more technology tools. At this point I am still soaking in the knowledge of others and trying out the tools that have been suggested - I have not yet reached the stage where I am the innovator. For the sake of having something to contribute, I’ll review a digital learning platform introduced to me at Credit Recovery Summer School. APEX is an online learning platform used by the Adult School and now the district’s high school credit recovery program. I have four different English semesters running concurrently. Students come in every day and access their online course. The full, Common Core aligned course is available to each student. This course is prescriptive, meaning that each unit is preceeded by a pre-test. If a student can demonstrate mastery of a part of the material, that lesson is taken out of their personalized learning plan. Each student progresses self-paced through a series of readings, activities, videos, quizzes, projects, and writing prompts. As they demonstrate mastery of each part, the program opens up the next unit. Most assessment is done by the program with a couple teacher assessed parts (usually the writing) in each unit. Conceivably, a very motivated student could move through a course quickly by logging in from home. The teacher’s role from the perspective of the use of the program is to maintain the classroom dashboard: enroll students, manage the class content, monitor students’ pacing through the semester to ensure completion, unlock tests so students can only access them from a proctored environment. From the perspective of instruction in content knowledge, the teacher supports each individual student when he or she encounters difficulty. Already I’ve plopped down next to a few students to help them through difficult concepts or writing prompts. It took me 2 training sessions to feel comfortable navigating the platform - the first session was in person for 2 hours and the second was an hour long webcam training. I find the teacher platform very easy to navigate, and I am also very impressed with the content and tools given to the students in their portal. This is a very appropriate and effective tool for this job. Students have only 17 days to complete a semester and receive their credits for the course. It’s also helpful to the instructor because you can run several courses simultaneously without having to create your own lesson plans and assessments. One of the challenges the students face is staying engaged when they’re working at a computer for 3 ½ hours a day with little peer interaction. We have to take breaks often. I’ve also kept a constant circulating presence to make sure they aren’t just surfing the web and also to discuss the content of the course with individuals. As a whole, though, I am very impressed with APEX learning’s course design and online platform. Finding time to instruct digital literacy in a full curriculum is certainly challenging. The minutes in an instructional day are limited. I know all teachers face a time crunch. Here’s a snapshot of my week. I give this not to complain or use it as an excuse not to face the task of teaching digital literacy, but in the hopes that you, dear reader, might have ideas to assist me in being a better educator. Two heads are better than one… and the more, the merrier!
My possible schedule for a week could include any grade from K to 8th. Typically it is rare to have students enrolled in lower elementary, and currently, if there were students in every grade level, they would need to be paired up in multi-grade sessions because we have only two teachers for K-8. Think of me like a coordinator for a homeschool student who has the advantage of having classmates and a teacher with whom he gets to check-in every week. For the K through 5th, I teach all 4 core subjects: ELA, Social Studies, Math, and Science. For the 6th-8th I teach ELA and Social Studies. My schedule is set at 25 instruction hours per week with an extra 7 hours set aside for prep and meetings that include 1-1 student meetings, IEP meetings, parent conferencing, team meetings, a weekly meeting with the principal, and professional development on Wednesdays. Let’s take a typical Tuesday: 8-9am IEP meeting, 9-10am 7th grade ELA, 10-11am 7th grade Social Studies, 11-12pm 2nd grade Math and ELA, 12:30-1 pm one-on-one with student who was absent yesterday, 1-2pm 5th grade Social Studies and Science, 2-3pm 3rd grade Math and Science. Bear in mind that is the ONLY hour that week that the student attends that class; the rest of the learning and work is done at home through independent studies. Students receive 3 hours per week of class time. This year we expanded 8th grade to 4 hours. Our classroom is a little bit traditional and little bit flipped. During the hour a week per subject, we go through what the student studied at home to assess learning and preview and frontload the next week’s content. It is very fast paced and bare bones. The students and parents are truly in control of their own learning. So you can see that when I throw around the idea of teaching digital literacy, I will have to also think outside the box and think about putting the learning in the hands of the learner. That being said, I think the best approach is to integrate the instruction into the existing curriculum. Rather than think of digital literacy and digital citizenship as a separate lesson that needs to be taught as a stand alone lesson, or teaching technology for its own sake, I’d like to take the approach of truly integrating technology and digital use into the learning. For example, let’s take a 3rd grade learning unit where the students’ end result is to create a slide show for an animal report. In the research portion of the lesson the students would learn about efficient ways to search for online information, critical thinking skills to filter information, how to identify legitimate academic sources versus sources that are not credible sources. When the students move to writing their paragraphs and presenting information, they would learn how to cite sources and give credit to others. When creating slide, they would learn how to use images that are in the public domain and to give credit to the source. If they chose to purchase an image, there would be learning around internet commerce and safety. Effective digital visual design could be a mini-lesson. When sharing their slide show with the class or publishing it to the web, learning around appropriate collaboration and digital communication could occur. One of the aspects of teaching digital literacy that I would like to explore this semester is non-teacher-led lessons, or asynchronous, student accessible lessons. My students need to be able to access effective and engaging learning units from home, not just for digital literacy, but for ALL of their content areas. As their teacher and the one ultimately held responsible for “teaching” them, I need to find a way to motivate the students to seek their own learning and a way to hold them accountable to putting in the effort and time from their “classroom” at home. “We have done better at developing understandings of human rigidities than of human creativities.” (Dervin, 67)
Forgive me while I go “mental” on you! No, not crazy...just metacognitive. I had heard that Brenda Dervin’s From the Mind’s Eye of the User was dense material. Having read the framing question for the blog, I had recalled the course on childhood development I had taken during my credential program and remembered that metacognition is largely the ability to think about one’s thinking. So I began mentally tracking my decisions and preparations. Knowing that the material was a deep read, I decided to print out the chapters because I know I process and retain information better when I underline, highlight, and make notes in the margin. I also decided to watch the YouTube video FIRST so I could get a framework or a summary in advance. I read the article with pen in hand one day intending to re-read it the next day. Last semester we learned from Brain Rules that sleeping on an idea or information helps the brain assimilate it and perform better. I woke up thinking about how I would teach this concept. Of course, my waking thoughts were also tangled with plans for coffee, mowing the lawn, grocery shopping, preparing for summer school, and a friend’s birthday BBQ. As I read, I noticed that I was aware of the level of my own understanding, or sense-making, of the content. I would realize I had not comprehended a sentence and would reread it until it made sense. I found myself trying to recall content I had studied in college in my philosophy courses. Dervin references human nature. “Discontinuity is an assumed constant of nature generally and the human condition specifically.” Dervin also delves into how humans perceive knowledge, or in philosophical terms, reality or truth. “Fundamental to the specific application of sense-making to the study of human use of information and information systems is the way in which information is conceptualized.” I was glad these philosophy courses had provided a context in which to frame her thinking. I recalled the progression, or various schools of thought, on human perception of reality. My memory moved over the basics of Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, and existential phenomenology. Basically, that I have come to understand that while there may be objective truth (or knowledge, for the sake of this article), it is never understood without being processed through a specific individual’s lense and that person’s experience of existence. Along those lines, as I read Dervin’s chapters, I also applied a recent personal experience of knowledge seeking to her ideas. I walked back through the steps I took to “bridge the gap”. I examined how I had defined my gap, or “situation stop”. I pondered how I came up with a strategy to solve my problem. I realized that I had tried to repeat past behaviors to solve my problem, but I had to refine the behavior in order to apply it to this new situation. It was what Dervin describes as being at a specific moment in time-space. Finally, I reviewed the actions I took to arrive at my goal and asked myself if I was satisfied with the process. It was this self-reflection that helped me arrive at how I might approach teaching the concept of sense-making to a high school student. I believe I would begin by actually conducting a micro-moment time-line interview with a brave volunteer for the class to watch. Then I would use the YouTube video I watched as an introduction. Next, hit the content from the chapters. Finally, I would have the students try interviewing each other. In conclusion, how I made sense of this article… Learning is a personal experience. Knowledge MAY exist as an objective truth, but it is never transferred as such. It is constructed by an individual, thus Dervin’s assertion that the study of the human use of information and information systems must be done from the perspective of the actor (person seeking the information) and not the observer. As teachers, understanding this concept is especially important. We must become proficient at helping our students construct knowledge. We need to understand the structures of human thought and behavior, or “rigidities”, and move toward creating knowledge and skill, “human creativities”. Here are three ways to teach various aspects of digital citizenship in a personalized way for the students.
Digital Literacy In my teaching context at Independent Studies, we already have a blend of classroom time (teacher/small group time) and independent learning time. Any given student is in the classroom only 3 to 4 hours per week. Students could be more involved in learning content online. This would allow me to flip my classroom by using web based programs to create content for the students that they can access away from the classroom on their own schedule. Ideally, this content could even be personalized for individual students. Also, students can increase their digital literacy by searching out apps, sites, or programs that keep them interested in the material. I could even have the students fill out a survey about their favorite apps so far (educational or otherwise) and then as the year progresses, expose them to more and as an assignment have them find and use their own favorites. Digital Health and Wellness “ But even beyond the physical aspects, adults need to be aware of the amount and type of technology used by students… digital health and wellness issue...becoming addicted to the Internet or to video games and withdrawing from society” (Ribble). I hear many of my students talking about their gaming. One student spends about an average of 4 to 5 hours a day gaming. I was thinking about how little time that leaves for other activities that should be included in a balanced, healthy lifestyle - exercise, socializing, plenty of sleep. I think it might be a good activity to promote awareness of time usage . Brainstorm on a padlet the student’s ideas about what daily actions and choices keep a person healthy, happy, and form good habits for a lifelong habit of health and wellness. Then have each student log their days and come up with pie charts representing time allotted to various activities each week. Compare the brainstormed list to the ways students are actually spending their time to see how we fare. Digital Communication From reading Luvvie Ajayi’s article “How to Keep Your College Admissions Letter” I got an idea of how to make appropriate digital communication personal to each student. I’ll call it the JumbTron Lesson. Ask students to find a textstream to a friend and take a screenshot of it. Now ask them to post it to a class padlet. Many are likely to object claiming it is too personal or private. It makes the point quickly that nothing is private when posted to the internet or even sent digitally from person to person. Someday, that text stream may be retrieved and used to show your choices and character. Would you want your text streams or your instagram account or your Facebook page on a JumboTron in New York City? Another quickie to try with students to make their internet presence apparent to them is to have them Google themselves and see what comes up. Likely most students have done this already. The person held responsible for making it happen will usually have a different perspective than the people looking in from the outside. So I chuckled at Katie Varatta’s blog, “Teaching in a Competency-Based Education Environment”. Of course the general reaction to the idea of all students passing through their education with mastery of their learning targets is a positive one! As Ms. Varatta says, though, the teachers (where the rubber meets the road, so to speak) ask some very good questions. First, my ponderings and questions… then the ways technology integration might be able to offer solutions. Competency Based Education (CBE) aims to individualize learning targets to each student so he can grow from current understanding (where he is now) through a learning goal. The proposition is that the student is the center of his education and his learning goals are personalized to him. Also, in CBE, the student has choices for demonstrating what they’ve learned - assumably it can be performance tasks, tests, presentations, projects. Ms Varatta ostensibly dealt with the questions from teachers of needing to write multiple lesson plans and managing all the levels. She indicated that multiple lesson plans were not necessary and that logistics would help manage the levels. Admittedly, the answer left me a little dubious. One way I can see technology assisting in the “logistics” is in the most basic elements of tracking of learning goals. Leaving aside my ponderings about who makes the learning targets (are they like standards? State mandated? Truly decided by the student?) and who provides the curriculum for those standards… let’s assume there’s a web-based program where a data base can be accessed and a set of learning goals assigned to each student. Teacher, student, and parents could all have access to facilitate a team effort. The teacher could update the progress, or even better, the student herself could do it, and the parents could have anytime access. Proponents of CBE point out that students pass through learning targets and ideally, would not even be tracked by grade level. Again, leaving aside the massive overhaul of the U.S. system of education that would need to happen to truly achieve this goal, I wanted to examine the idea of mastering one learning goal before progressing to another. One website points out that in the In traditional school settings, students can move through grade levels even if they only understand 60 percent of the material. From my experience, social promotion in the elementary and middle schools means that some students are progressing onto more difficult material with even less of 60% understanding of material. A 5th grade student only understands 55% of the math concepts presented that year, gets to 6th grade, and is expected to begin on gaining proficiency in 6th grade math concepts. The label of being a “5th grader” or a “6th grader” determine what learning goals, or standards, a student will be given to tackle. There is no information other than a final grade from the previous year passed on to the next teacher. The new teacher spends weeks or months just figuring out the gaps in each student’s learning. Technology could help by having a database that tracks individualized learning targets. The information would follow the student and she could pick up where she left off. Realistically, this would also mean that the curriculum, lessons, and some evaluations would be at least partially computer-based. This summer I will be teaching in a credit recovery program (summer school). I will be using a program called APEX. The learning goals, curriculum, quizzes, activities, and exam for a course are all accessible through this self-paced, web-based program. Students only progress to the next unit after having “passed” the previous unit. The administrator for the school site sets the level at which students pass through each unit - in this case 70%. The teacher has access to all the materials and can even modify the requirements for each student individually (ie: include or exclude certain parts or teacher-grade or teacher-pass a section). Students can work as quickly as they want and retake portions until they achieve mastery. I am interested to work with this program to see it in action. It could be a viable option for technology integration for CBE. |
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December 2017
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