My thoughts about being an innovative educator are eloquently expressed by a famous innovator, Albert Einsten. “Therefore it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analysing long-held commonplace concepts and showing the circumstances on which their justification and usefulness depend, and how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. Thus their excessive authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, or replaced if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason.” Albert Einstein To paraphrase this groundbreaking thinker, as innovators in the classroom, we should become practiced at analyzing our past and current practices. It is not a waste of time, an idle game, to examine the concepts under which we operate in education for their usefulness and correspondence to the reality of the human experience, particularly the student perspective. We must be able to justify our choices as teachers. If our practices are not resulting in deep learning, remove them. If we add too much superfluous material - too much and unnecessary, correct it. And when we find a new system that we prefer for good reason, replace the old with the new. Einstein does not say to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When I began the journey through the Innovative Learning program, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical - I had a preconceived notion that most people who bandied about the word “innovative” were jumping on a bandwagon of glittery newness simply for the sake of the novelty of the strategy or the cool factor of the technology. After being in the trenches for a couple decades, I’ve seen many fads come and go. What began as the latest greatest idea was, a few years later, proven to be poor practice. Then a few more years down the road, that same idea came full circle again, refurbished a bit, rebranded, and “voila!”, suddenly it was the thing to do again. I entered determined not to follow blindly a new trend unless I was thoroughly satisfied that the philosophy, concept, and practice would truly benefit my students. Many of the educators on the forefront of the innovative education movement impress me with the depth of their considerations. At the moment, the thinking that most resonates with me and sums up my evolution in thought is George Couros, a modern innovator in education. He also does not advocate newness for newness’s sake. He defines innovation as being new AND better. He also does not insist that a digital tool must be included in an idea for it to be innovative. Of course, he does encourage the use of technology when it is a better, more efficient, more engaging, less expensive choice, and he particularly notes that technology gives us the ability to access information and learning that we could not previously access. Another advantage is the ability to connect to other people:for educators and students to share ideas and connect globally. One analogy Couros makes that speaks to me is that using social media to network with other teachers is like placing yourself into a stream of information and ideas. A deluge of ideas rush past you and you watch them stream by and use the ones that spark excitement, creativity, and innovation. Not all ideas are usable, not all ideas will “getcha”, some will need to be tweaked. But at least you’re in the path of innovation. Einstein and Couros also agree on another aspect of innovation. Concepts should be corrected if they are superfluous to the given thing. I’ll take our “given thing” to be setting up the ideal learning environment. As a learner in this program, and one who comes to the table not having grown up in the digital age, I appreciate the idea of focusing on the necessary, essential elements first and growing from there - especially when it comes to infusing digital tools into my repertoire. One of the powerful, thrilling opportunities for educators is the vast array of digital tools available to enrich our classrooms and our students’ learning. It can also be daunting. I felt what can only be described as relief when a go-getter innovator like Couros says in his chapter on professional growth for teachers, “If we aren’t intentional, we may promote confusion and burnout, instead of inspiring innovation and deep learning” (The Innovator’s Mindset). His advice is to focus on a few new ideas and practices at a time. Achieve mastery and then add more digital tools to your arsenal. Images are powerful tools. Often they speak more succinctly than words. So here’s the image of my thinking before this program. And here’s where I am now.
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Although I didn’t call it by this same name, gamification has long been a part of my classroom. Gamification happens in a classroom anytime a teacher sets up a management system with rewards, points, team efforts, levels of achievement. For example, where I did my student teaching, the entire school had a gamified system for math fact fluency. Every classroom did a 5 minute speed/accuracy math facts quiz daily. When you achieved accuracy and fluency you leveled up to the next quiz. Quizzes were grouped in sets and the students on that set belonged to a level named for an animal. After mastering a particular set of quizzes you moved to the next animal group. Many teachers gamify their classroom management system. Fred Jones has a system he calls PAT (Preferred Activity Time). The class begins with a certain amount of PAT time and can increase or decrease their time by meeting behaviorial or procedural goals. For example, a teacher has given the class multi-step directions on how to move into small groups and prepare for team projects. She wants to minimize the transition time and discourage dallying. She tells that class she thinks the transition will take 4 minutes. If they can be ready in less, the extra time is added to the PAT time. Shazam! Gamified! Often, PAT time, the reward, IS time for learning games. Which begs the question… how are games for learning different than gamification? Gamification is the system for incentives. Learning games incorporate this incentive but dive deeper and include content knowledge. Their goal moves beyond motivation and active participation. It’s purpose is mastery of content and/or a skill. One particular experience comes to mind when I think of the power of learning games. One of the courses I took for my K-8 credential was Teaching Math. Thankfully, the course content included the idea that playing math games was a valuable practice. I tried out a game with my students that was simple yet powerful. The game is used to introduce place value units. I’ve now tweaked this game for use in 5 different grade levels. Let’s call the game “Make it Greatest” or “Make it Least”. The object of the game is to make the number with the greatest or least value, you pick or alternate. Players all draw one digit card or roll a die to get a digit. They must place the digit into a place value frame. This can be as low tech as lines on paper, and you can choose to what place value they play. For example, first grade students would begin with ones and tens while fourth graders might play to the hundred thousands and one millions places. Students must all draw digits simultaneously and place them into the frame before drawing another digit. Make the game more complex by including zero as a digit. After creating their numbers, they read them out to one another and discuss who has the greatest/least number. So simple. I found that playing this one game caused the students to experience at least 4 or 5 of the lesson concepts from the unit. Effectively, they practiced actively the concepts that were meant to be instructed over the course of 4 or 5 days of direct instruction. And they had fun doing it. So did I.
Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on how gaming can make a better world highlights these strengths of gamers. As a gamer herself, McGonigal makes a very convincing argument for teaching and learning through extensive, multiplayer games. She makes the case that the qualities gamers cultivate will be valuable assets for our future need to solve problems. It’s easy to see the distinction between gamification and gaming for learning. Gamification is part of learning games, but gamification alone does not always result in learning. This is not to say that gamification doesn’t have a useful purpose in school. It’s a fun motivator. It’s uses as a motivational tool are not just useful in school. Look at the world around us and you see gamification everywhere. Rewards cards at retail and service providers is a form of gamification. Earn points by more purchases, get more purchasing power. Retailers are playing the game to get your business. Many work places incentivize by gamification. A local resort tries to motivate safe work place practices by entering every employee into a Bingo game board for every day that there is no accidents reported in the work place. Employees have a greater chance to win for every incident free day and the cash winnings increase for every “safe day”. There isn’t any harm in using gamification to grease the wheel of classroom management and systems & procedures, just make sure that if your goal for a game is actual content mastery, that you choose the correct game to provide deep learning.
The phases of the design process have certainly clarified the vision of my end product. It’s taken a shape in my head, with room for improvement and the door still wide open for creativity and inspiration. One question still lurks in the back of my mind and I pondered it this week as I mapped my project. Is my project innovative? Does it have the hallmarks of what students will need to meet the demands that the nefariously unpredictable future will make upon them? Am I simply holding onto old pedagogies and perceiving a need that is no longer relevant and dressing it up with fancy tech tools? Will reading ever be obsolete? Is it still necessary for people to be literate with words? In his introduction to the TPACK model (https://youtu.be/eXLdqO0fY3w) Punya Mishra makes a provocative statement. He says that technology has not only changed how we teach (pedagogy), but also what we teach (content). He points out that information no longer comes in a drip, it comes in a deluge. We don’t teach knowledge, per se, of a content area anymore, we teach how to access and filter information. I would add that information and knowledge are not synonymous. Knowledge is constructed and becomes part of a person’s mind. It is usable. It is information put to action by a whole host of other skills, character qualities, and choices. So I asked myself this about reading - is it information? Is reading in danger of becoming obsolete through that lens? No, it certainly provides information. It is the skill and process by which we access information. Certainly reading will change with the times. Already the physically bound book is making its way into the annals of the past. Reading, writing, publishing, storing information - all of it will be digital. Those of us who love the smell and heft of a book will need to visit a museum or make our bookshelves our own museums. Probably reading will become more reliant on what we used to call textual clues - pictures, charts, photos. Now infographics and videos will BE text. It’s a matter of semantics. But I’ll maintain that reading itself will not disappear. I’ll use two of the standards for 21st century learning as a couple reasons why. Reading is intrinsically tied to two of the 21st learning skills - critical thinking and communication. Reading well - fluent enough that you can think about the ideas you read and analyze them, is also part of the filtering of the deluge of information. Reading fluently and with automaticity, a necessity for deep critical thinking, comes partly through reading much and many and with absorption. One of the most painless ways to achieve this fluency is by enjoying reading enough that you choose to do it much and many. A bit of a catch 22. Regardless, reading provides fodder, both process and content, for critical thinking skills. Another 21st century learning skill reliant on reading, in partnership with writing, is communication. Communication, especially if it will be global, crossing time zones and long distance, will need to have a written manifestation. Writing, and therefore reading, is not likely to become obsolete as long as humans strive to communicate. So now I’ve answered satisfactorily for the purpose of this project that reading itself won’t become obsolete. (Whew!) What about the innovative aspect. I got to thinking I should analyze my prototype through both the 4 C’s of 21st century skills, but also through the lens of the ISTE standards for students. In my mindmap, I labelled in purple some of the places I saw traits that demonstrate these standards: empowered learner, creative, communicator, constructing knowledge. And finally, I thought about something George Couros said in his book The Innovator’s Mindset. Couros begins his whole book by defining what innovation is and is not. Innovation is not just something new. It must be something done in a new and better way. Further, he proposes that in the context of education, innovation must also be student centered. That is to say that the needs of the student are considered. He treats the quality of empathy as crucial. Empathy is more than just seeing someone’s need. At its fullest, it is being able to feel almost the same thing as another human because your experiences are so similar. At second best, it is using imagination, sensitivity, and intelligence to try to feel what another experiences. For me, teaching a student to love to read is an empathetic outreach. I’ve spent enough years working with students of all ages to have observed the pain a kid feels when he or she doesn’t enjoy reading. I’ve heard enough people, adults and kids alike, say “I wish I liked to read” to know that the endeavor is worthwhile, perhaps even crucial for the sake of our kids heading into the next century. So back to that Catch 22. How DO you get a kid to enjoy reading so that he will choose to keep doing it, much and many, for the rest of his life? If a student gets to 6th grade and doesn’t like to read, is there a “do over” for her? We can’t erase a child’s negative experiences with reading. We can’t turn the ship overnight. But we can turn it! I can say from experience that I’ve seen reluctant readers go from dreading reading to having their noses buried in books. My prototype will attempt to create one humble model to follow. EdPuzzle: I used EdPuzzle to add to a video I found on YouTube. I chose the cropping tool to shorten the ending. I did not choose to use the audio track or to insert audio notes because the soundtrack for the video was already expertly done. I did choose to insert quiz questions that had to be answered in order to continue through the video. I can see how this tool is very useful to assure that students are actually watching the videos with a certain level of interactivity. The teacher gets a summary of the students’ answers and a time stamp for when the student watched the video. You could actually use this feature as an assessment, of course, in the context we were exploring you wouldn’t use the quiz feature as a summative assessment. It could, however, be used as a formative assessment. I really liked this tool because you can find already vetted videos and adapt them for your more specific use. Jing/Screencast: Jing was a very simple (and free) screencasting tool to use. You can simply take snapshots of any portion of your screen and copy them into a document or share them using Screencast. You can also take video and voiceover of your screen. I liked this tool for its simplicity! It’s an easy starter tool for those of us just beginning our journey into screencasting. I used this tool to do a demo for my students on how to use an interactive plot diagramming tool on the ReadWriteThink site. WeVideo I chose to try WeVideo because I’m looking for a way for my students to make their own videos or storyboards for books they read. WeVideo provides a basic video editing platform. It seems most suited for uploading and editing photos and videos you take of real footage. It provides some basic themes, a few overlays (like POW!), sound effects, and music background. You can splice together 2 tracks. Storybird: Continuing on my quest to find a site for students to make their own versions of a story, I found Storybird. This is a website for making and publishing your own storybook, short story, or illustrated poem. The user brings their own text and uses illustrations provided by users, both amateur and professional. The site seems to begin at the premise that the image is the beginning of the story. When designing your story, you begin by choosing images. The illustrations are varied, grouped by themes and by illustrators. The interface is simple - select and drag the image you want for the page, type in the text. Add the next page. In my opinion the artwork is of good quality. StoryboardThat Of all the storymaking sites I explored, this was my favorite. For my capstone project, I want my students to interact with their favorite books by storyboarding. StoryboardThat lets you choose how many frames you want and select and drag the elements into each frame. Provided for the user is a multitude of backdrops, characters, dialogue bubbles, and the ability to upload your own. All of them are able to be layered, positioned, and edited in multiple ways. Though there are MANY options for editing, the interface is amazingly easy to use! There is a certain style to the outcome, but the storytelling tools are vast and rather easy to use. The site also comes with sample lessons already created. As always, when using digital technology, student access to devices and the internet can be an issue that must be considered. Another aspect to take into account is that each tool takes time to learn. Just my own surface investigations of these sites took hours of time. When giving assignments that incorporate making videos or storyboards, the time commitment involved must be taken into account. I also think it would be wise to stick to one or two platforms to give your students (and you) time to master it and plumb the depths of its capabilities. Dearest Cohort 12, I’ve just come from my 1:1 with Brenna and I find myself in that simultaneously exciting and frightening place where ideas are igniting and swirling and some shape is beginning to form around what my final capstone project will look like. So I find myself needing to write a different kind of blog - rather like a brainstorm: a bit more freeform and seeking the insight and suggestions of the group. Why-How Ladder In working through my Why-How ladder, I started by going back to my real passion. It was behind my driving question for my 790 research topic and I keep coming home to it. At the center of my ladder is the provocation: “How might we help students enjoy reading?” WHY might we...? Here, my ladder branches into to 2 answers.
Proceeding through the Ladder gave shape to my passion. Exciting. Victory! Alas, it seemed to broaden the topic and not narrow it! Frightening. Defeat! Enter the 1:1 with Brenna. Her advice...keep it simple. Less is more. If you want a student to enjoy reading for the rest of his life, well, it starts with one encounter. Make the first encounter a positive one, and he is more likely to repeat. And repeat. And repeat. So begin with one experience. Obviously, we can’t get a “do-over” of childhood, but we can build one enjoyable experience with reading. Why not simplify the driving question to focus on one lesson? Provide an experience where a student gets invested in her reading choice in the hopes that she continue to be invested in choosing books of interest and therefore continues reading in general. Use digital tools to help the student take away obstacles and connect to the book and to other readers. So now the provocation, or driving question, becomes “How do we use digital resources to create an initial positive, enjoyable experience for a reader?” Next steps:
Before joining NVUSD this past year I was not a Google suite user. As I’ve progressed through the year, I’ve become familiar with the suite, but by far do not consider myself a fluent user. Surprisingly, I had only been asked to fill out about a dozen forms surveys over the course of this last school year. This was my first attempt at creating my own Google Forms and I am excited to see where the adventure leads. Since my students work predominantly from home, I wanted to create a survey meant to discover what their home access is to the internet and to what kind of devices they have access. My first question was a yes/no answer. Depending on the answer, the student would or would not have to answer a few more questions. I recalled my frustration in taking a couple surveys when my answer should have eliminated the next questions but didn’t. I did a little searching around, and to my delight, found that Forms has a function to create sections and to jump to a new section depending on the first answer. So, for example, when a student responded NO, she did not have a cell phone, she was not required to answer questions about the functionality of that nonexistent phone, but skipped to the next section on home access to internet/devices. My students come to school once or twice a week. If they are absent, they still have to turn in work in order to get their attendance credits. If a student is unable to get a ride to school, this presents a problem. I made a form that enables students to submit work from home. The next step is for the student to schedule what is called an “intervention” meeting. The students find a list of available times to schedule. The add-on Choice Eliminator will take a time off the list when a student chooses it. Choice Eliminator can be used for scheduling, sign ups for parents, students choosing topics for projects when you don’t want more than one group/student doing the same topic. The next form I created was done mostly to track when students check out and check in books from the class library. Mosty I did this one because I wanted to play around with Autocrat, which is a mail merge add-on. When students check out a book, a spreadsheet is formed and a letter is emailed to the student with a confirmation and a due date. You create a folder in your drive to collect the individual letters, so they can be emailed again or emailed to the parent if the book does not come back. I kept it simple for my first run, but I can see how an email could also be sent when the book is checked in. I would like to use forms and the autocrat add-on to have parents check in on orientation day, when they give us basic necessary information. I’d like to find out their preferred method of contact and to send a welcome letter to them from that information gathering. |
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December 2017
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