EDT5410 - Final Synthesis project

EDT5410 - Final Synthesis Project
Melissa Shugg
Melissa.Shugg@yahoo.com

For my final project I wasn’t really sure how in-depth you wanted this project to be.  A lot of the stuff we have worked on during the class were tools I plan on using myself beyond the class.  The choices I ended up making were the ones I found would have the most impact for me in the future.  For my target audience, I actually have two focuses, the students/parents in my room as well as my fellow coworkers.  As a kindergarten teacher, my students are experiencing a structured classroom for the first time. But at the same time their parents are learning things for the first time too! The students and parents both have questions about how the classroom works.   I wanted a resource for them to ease this transition. I wanted a list of resources available to them so they could join in to the teaching process as well.  I even included a section called “Homework for Parents” that encourages them to perform an activity with their child.

 As a sub theme on my project, I also focused on the teachers of my school, specifically the new teachers we get every year as well as my coworkers I’ve worked with for years.  I had admitted in earlier reflections that technology takes a second (or tenth) seat in my school due to budget and lack of training.   Each one of us has bits and pieces of useful information.  I wanted something that would allow us to consolidate this into one place where we could all share these resources. 

I decided to create a virtual classroom website to prepare my students and their parents on what my classroom is like on the first day. (Website) I plan on sharing this link with my parents as soon as I get my class list each year. They can log in and learn about my classroom and use the tools there to help prepare their students for school. Hopefully if I can figure it out, the parents will also be able to upload a picture of their student and answer a short questionnaire before class starts.  I find that I spend a lot of time learning about my students and getting them into the swing of things at the beginning of the year.  Anything that can improve this process would be a great help.   

My webpage is designed to be a two way interface between my students and their parents and myself before we have formally met.  Some times people feel easier communicating in a non direct method so I wanted to provide an opportunity for them to do so. Also I will be getting some valuable feedback from my parents.  I have a survey for them to complete on the page that features a list of questions for them to answer. It’s not complete but has some of the biggest ones I like to know about my students.  Also I included a list of resources for teaching parents how to help their students succeed in school.  Some are sites I’ve used before while others are ones I discovered and liked while working on this project.   The learning objective of this site is to share my information with my students and their parents in an easy to use format.   I didn’t want a lot of frills and gadgets on the page so stuck with a simple design with lots of information.   I don’t expect it to replace my welcome packet I send home but to be  more of a supplement to it.

The actual design of my site was created using a template I found on the Google sites page. It’s a fairly basic classroom layout.  I stripped out all of the other teacher’s materials and imputed what was important to me.  As I learn more about how to make the sites I will make it more functional but that will certainly be a hefty learning curve.  For example just figuring out how to get an email address to open your email program just by clicking on it took me about an hour and a half to figure out!  Turns out you need to edit the html which I didn’t know how to do. I ended up having to copy some from another site and just changed the email name to mine.  Presto and it worked!  Some things I could just flat out not figure out how to do.  I wanted an active calendar on my page but the layout of our district calendar did not seem to want to mesh with my page.  The best I could do was have a picture of it that links to the actual calendar when you click on it.  I put a message below it to “click to update” the calendar.  Eventually when our school puts out its own calendar I will replace it with a Google app that has the dates/events for our school on it.

Continuing on the first day theme, I’m creating some other tools to ease the beginning of school transition for the new teachers in my school specifically but also for my current coworkers as well.  First off, I created a second delicious bookmark page. (School Delicious Page)  This is different than my personal one I made for class. I’m going to share it with my coworkers as it lists all the sites we use during a school year.  Things like payroll, grade book, Michigan education standards, etc. Hopefully it will be helpful to new teachers in our school and for the inevitable times when we come back and discover our PC has been “upgraded” over the summer break and all our stuff is gone. I included links to some of the useful free tools on my delicious page like open office, Zoho and Phixr. Teachers don’t make a lot of money so free software is always good.  I plan on getting the other teachers in my school to share some of their favorite links and then update the bookmarks into clear categories.  With a bit of work it can become a really useful page for the teachers at my school.  I considered doing a Wiki instead but found that it would be too time consuming and I have doubts that my coworkers would contribute.   I can see it would be nice for a corporate environment with lots of documents and training materials to share but teachers just don’t have the time or desire to make something that in-depth.  The learning objective of this page is to share useful resources with my coworkers, to save time as well as to pick up useful resources for myself.

The final tool I’m going to mention though it creation is beyond the scope of this class due to time constraints. I’m going to create a screencast video of how I designed and edited my Google webpage.  I just don’t have time to do the video justice in the short amount of time I have left in this class but I was amazed at how easy it was to create the pages.  Before this class if I was told I had to make a website I would of dropped out of the class for sure.  Now I want to share it with my coworkers!  I thought that a screencast showing exactly how I made the various parts of my webpage would certainly ease their fears about making their own. The hard part will be convincing them it will be worth their time.  I honestly think it will.

Though I touched on them above, I wanted to emphasize a bit more on my justifications for using the tools I choose.   Why replace a paper welcome packet for the first day of class with a webpage?  Why make a social list of bookmarks when I could just email the links?  I think both of these have similar answers that tie into how humans absorb information.  I spend many hours at the beginning of each school year creating my welcome packet.  I know that a good portion of my student’s parents never read it.  I know this because I get the same questions every year that are covered in the packet!  Also, I’ve lost track of the number of times I have asked a friend, family member or coworker “did you get that email I sent?” and was faced with a blank stare. We get a lot of information all the time. Our brains have grown accustomed to sorting out the useless stuff. I’m guilty of doing it myself. I read about 20 Facebook updates today from close friends and couldn’t tell you what even a handful of them said if my life depended on it.  In order to get someone to see and retain information it needs to be laid out visually and simplistically.  A lot of our text talked about studies that found the best ways to do this.  To me a website was the best way to do this.  It combines text layout, color and images exactly the way you want to draw attention combined with instant gratification of reaching the information you are seeking out.   You don’t have to flip through pages of information like you do a paper packet when you are looking for a classroom policy, you just click and you have it.  Just as Siegel used Amazon.com as a contrast to a brick and mortar book store, my classroom introduction website offers so much more than a paper packet would.

The delicious page I designed is less visual but features a more streamlined layout thanks to the simplistic engine built into the website. It’s an easy way to share information with those that are seeking it out. In this case, the information being shared are useful bookmarks for myself and my coworkers.  Using metatags is like having an entire index available instantaneously.  Siegel’s concepts in this case are relying on computers to not really improve on a teaching method but to make finding information quicker and easier..  Instead it’s organizing things so you can find them again. I couldn’t imagine any way quicker to share web information except for some of the high tech stuff that was discussed in the last chapter of our text like downloading memories.   I guess we have to make do with sharing bookmarks until then. 

CAA Kindergarten Welcome Website:
https://sites.google.com/site/caagradek/

CAA Teachers Delicious bookmarks:
http://www.delicious.com/mbogucki

My Classroom Website

Hi There!
I would like to share with you my classroom website.  We will be using it this year as a fun and informative way to stay in touch.

Mrs. Shugg's Room

Some fun things to look for in Mrs. Shugg's room:

• Weekly assignments
• Notes from Mrs. Shugg
• Tips for Success!
• The Classroom Pet
• Pictures from our Room
• Fun Activities!
• My contact information

I plan on updating it every week so make sure you come by to visit regularly.

Week 7 Reflection

Learning from Rich Media Content

The ideas presented in this chapter are pretty vast in scope.  I doubt I will be writing any instructional software any time soon.  I don’t currently create any media rich materials for my kindergarteners.  For the most part we use song, silly dances and visuals for most our learning.  In a way you could say that the materials and movements we do are adding richness to our lessons.  For example, when learning letter sounds I have a song, gesture and story for each letter.  My students learn these auditory and kinesthetic tools to go along with the letters themselves and use them as memory queues until they have internalized and memorized the letters and the sounds they make.  Some of the evidence presented in this chapter about what distracts or adds to learning can be helpful in my classroom. 

We’ve all had that moment when we are learning something new and our eyes glaze begin to glaze over.  We want to keep focusing but we just physically can’t.  Mind wanders, eyes focus on everything besides the lesson, and we strain to remember what we watched on TV last week.   I try to keep my students from reaching this point but it’s often difficult as we have so much material to cover and not enough time to do so. The windows for learning are scrunched between bathroom breaks, recess, and art class.  The best way I’ve found to optimize this is by providing a scheduled structure to the day combined with small breaks during the lesson.  If we are learning days of the week we break into a song in the middle and a student moves the proper day magnet onto our wall chart.  Taking examples from some of the rich media experiments,  Adding in visual images that my students can associate with the day of the week would be helpful.   Another thing I learned is that things like adding music to a lesson for background sound can be too distracting while the brain is reaching its limit of what it can take in at any given moment.    You don’t need a song and images and hand gestures for everything that you teach.  I’m not sure if this is truly the case for simple concepts like colors but would probably hold true when working on sentence structure which often my students have difficulty with.  I intend to test this in the upcoming school year.  I will try turning off the music during difficult material and using more hands on materials and moving images (if I can find ones that relate).

The Near Future of Instructional Technologies

This was a fun chapter to read as it seemed to most closely match the tools we have been learning about in this class.  There were things I had to Google like object-oriented programming as the books explanation wasn’t really clear.   Others like metatags we used on our Delicious pages we created.  I found particularly accurate the authors story of young girls trip to a historic village and finding schools were pretty much the same while everything else you could hardly recognize.  I certainly feel like sometimes I’m using antiquated methods of teaching compared to what my students use for entertainment and diversion at home.  It’s tough to compete! 

One area that was particularly interesting to me was the military electronic training jackets that follow a solider through their career.   In schools we have to spend an amount of time at the beginning of the year just feeling out each of our students strengths and weaknesses.   You can ask your coworkers but it’s impossible to get a clear picture with out testing and observation on our own.  Even worse if a student transfers in the middle of the year from another district you have really no idea of what they can do.   I’ve had parents at the end of the year yank out their kids and move them to another district after I told them their child is being retained in the hope that the new school would advance them into the next grade.  Even though it is in the best interest of the student, they want to advance them to the next grade.   With out any sort of advanced record keeping, this type of thing just ends up hurting the students.    I would like to see this type of thing expanded into the K-12 districts where students can advance grades but must receive mastery in given areas.   A training jacket would contain their advancement in areas like multiplication or sentence structure and show them going from introductory to proficient to mastery of the subject.  

Another area I found to be pretty interesting was advanced performance tracking.  I’m not sure how it would apply to teaching unless we put our students into suits that zap them when they get an answer wrong….  Still it’s a really neat concept for things like art or sports and it could potentially be a break through in medicine.  I can imagine surgeons wearing suits that can display precise measurements of their movements, can stabilize their tremors and has tiny cameras in the finger tips to display a 3D view of what they are working on. I suppose for teaching you could have gloves that instruct on penmanship or that display the letters they are shaping on an overhead that visually displays the words so they could create a “story” as they write!  My school is an arts academy so later on they could suit up and learn the moves to a jazz step.  It could be nice perhaps if the suits could slow down a few of my particularly hyperactive students as a benefit as well.

Using Jing to share instructions

Here's a link to a video where I am showing my kindergarten students how to get to learning games during the summer.   I tried embedding the video but it's too big for my internet connection to load or something.

http://screencast.com/t/skqCqWLqnn

Let me know what you think!

Online Documents Program Review
docs.google.com

For this assignment we’ve been asked to use a free document program and I choose Google Documents. I’m actually writing this review on it. I choose Google docs because I love Google as a tool and thought I would love anything with the word in it as well. I’ve used Open Office before and this looks to be similar except for being shared out over the Internet rather than downloading it.  A nice feature if you are always connected but for me that’s not always the case.  I looked around to see if there was a way to download it.  I don’t really see it.  I know the worlds getting more connected but we aren’t totally there yet.  The functionality seems to be easy to use with most of the basic features of office that a user would use.  For example you can insert an image pretty easy with out searching around.  This blog wouldn't let me copy it over except for one photo though for some reason. I had to go back and edit them back in.

It seems to be missing a lot of the advanced functionality that would prevent it from being used in a corporate setting.  At previous jobs I’ve had to use macros, document templates, and weird formats and this just doesn’t really have that.  It would be great for students looking to do simple word processing or write reports however.  I could see it saving on a school budget from having to purchase licensed copies of office for each computer in its labs except for that Microsoft already offers the student editions for almost nothing.

A couple of other perks i just noticed, it autosaves almost instantly which is great if you have toddlers trying to shut your laptop (like my angels above). Also you can save the document on to your computer but its not as straight forward as Microsoft Word.  You have to download it and choose what type of document format to do so in.  Anyone know what a ODT is?

As a side note, I did click on Zoho to see what it was. It seems a bit more complex as you have to create an account but I was amazed by the depth of tools it offered.  You can pretty much do anything document or data related that you could ever hope for.


Photo Program
www.Phixr.com

First off I tried FotoFlexer and just got an IO error on every picture I tried uploading. Next I choose to use Phixr and uploaded a picture of my little girls.   It was pretty neat seeing all the fun things you could do with it.

I even uploaded a few to my Facebook page after I got done playing with them.  I’ve seen people do some neat things with Photoshop but for the average user this site would be perfectly acceptable.  It would save on the 150$ or so that Photoshop costs.  I could see using this program to make silly photos of each of my students for cubby ID’s or our daily chores chart.


Once again this program is limited by Internet availability.  You can’t download it and then work on a batch of photos at a time.  Since my home computer is a laptop I like to move around with it a bit.  I visited my father this weekend for father’s day and had to do with out Internet for a while. This is a drawback for programs like this. You can’t argue with the free price tag though.

Week 6 Discussion

Improving Our Professional Working Environment with ID

Comparing the three areas covered in business, grade school and higher education, there are a lot of similarities.  Each shares the same goal of improving the speed, impact and retention of instructional materials and teachings.  Where they defer is in some of the driving motivations for changing and improving these areas. 

In business, the ultimate goal is to generate profits for the business unit.  It wasn’t always the case but companies have realized that well trained employees are the most productive employees. One of our first week articles by Reigeluth and Joseph touched on this by contrasting employees during the industrial age and information age.  What ID offers is the most bang for your buck to a company looking to train its employees in the shortest amount of time with the most amount of retention.

In P-12 levels of schooling, to me the driving factors are budgetary and communal growth. The perfect situation would be one teacher for each student, but we don’t live in a perfect world.  Schools have a finite amount of dollars to spend on teachers and materials and must allocate these to have the most impact to the students.  Every purchase of educational materials and training must be carefully weighed against using that funding somewhere else. Instructional design helps this allocation process of the budget.  Also, beyond just facts in books and how to form letters, students learn how to fit in to their community and get along with others.  Properly designed materials and technologies allow students to work together on projects, interact with the world beyond pictures in a book and even converse and share with other schools.  Instructional Design allows educators to reach further down Dale’s cone to make learning an enriched and immersive experience.

Higher education to me is really where Instructional Design can flex its wings and bring improvement to education.  It’s where learning takes place not to prepare you for society or a specific job but for the sake of learning.  Each field can take a different approach to educating its students, and even multiple approaches with in that field. The interesting part is despite different approaches they can all be correct.  Also they can all be improved.  Taking our course as an example, the tools we have to learn online are vastly improved over my first online course I took years back.  In that course we were emailed a syllabus, purchased a book, and then emailed in an assignment each week.  No discussion and no interactivity at all, it was basically just self study with someone grading your work.   Pretty soon with every laptop and smart phone having a camera we will be sitting together in a virtual classroom having real time discussions!  

There are a lot of things each of these three fields can offer to my own education experience.  Most of these changes would be piecemeal at best with out approval of our school staff and as they grow in scope the district as a whole.  That’s a shame as there are some systemic changes needed for sure!  One thing I would absolutely love to see was from one of the vignettes in chapter 22.  Brenda Litchfield mentioned asking the teachers what workshops they would like to see offered in a school year. I couldn’t believe that when I read it!  I’ve sat through so many professional developments that didn’t match my grade level needs or even had any relation to what areas I need improvement.  This would save the district money as well as improve both the skill levels of the staff and let them feel involved in their own development.  There are other things like this that would not cost money and maybe even save money but have a big impact on our staff.   

Achieving My Professional Goals

This chapter for me finally drives home what I’ve had trouble with understanding in this course. Our homework assignments focus on technology tools to use for learning but I believe the book is using a different definition of technology.  From Dictionary.com:

Technology
1. The application of practical sciences to industry or commerce (or education; my edit).
2. The methods, theory, and practices governing such application: a highly developed technology.
3. The total knowledge and skills available to any human society for industry, art, science, etc.

The tools we are learning about fall under definition one, while the book is using the third definition of technology. We are discussing technology tools and how we can use them in our classroom, and the book has been talking all along about how to clearly define Instructional Design and classify the rules and best practices that can be used to improve the instructional experience.  This seems to be a disconnect for me as I’m finding the tool lessons to be incredibly helpful and the book to be arduous at best.

In this chapter there was a lot more discussion on the defining the steps of ID and the refinement process and history behind the revisions of the process.   There are two really good sections in there that can be applied to teachers like me.  In the ibstpi section there is a table (27.3) that has eighteen competencies for an instructor.  The ID and training manager sections are a bit too high level to really apply but these eighteen are a great guidebook for a teacher no matter what level of expertise they possess.  I tend to focus on the grade level content expectations (GLCE’s) when designing my lesson plans and often don’t think about ways to improve the way I deliver my lessons.  Areas like promoting transfer of knowledge and evaluating instructional material effectiveness don’t really cross my mind. Instead I tend to focus on how much my students would enjoy the lesson and how I will test them on the materials.  I could see brainstorming one area of improvement in each of these eighteen categories and making a year long goal to complete.  It would certainly make me a stronger teacher! 

The second area I thought was really good was again in a table (27.6) that listed the ISPI/ASTD performance technology competencies.   This book is heavy on the precise word use in its definitions and diagrams almost to the point of being difficult to understand.  This list of ten competencies is clearly written and easy to understand and apply to my teaching methods.  It provides a great checklist to writing your own instructional materials like lesson plans or curriculum thematic units.  I’m pretty quiet and don’t have a lot to offer in staff meetings where we are developing our thematic units. This list provides some discussion points to strengthen our work.  For example asking “How can we work with in our resource constraints to develop better materials?” would certainly open up some discussion among our staff and encourage thinking outside of our normal ways.  I already am looking forward to using some of the tools we have learned about in the classroom and with my coworkers.  These competencies could be a great way to provide personal review on my contributions.

Concept Map Lesson Plan: Living Things

This is a concept map of a Science lesson I actually perform with my students on living things.   I bring up traits and types of living things then ask  them to give me some examples of each trait and type.  The students are encouraged to raise their hand and provide answers for each category.  I place these on the board and have students match them into groups.  For example,  a crab walks, needs to eat food, drink water, etc.  Grass needs sunlight and water but not shelter.   Once we complete the board exercise I have each student draw a picture of one of the animals or plants and something that it needs to live.  The next lesson we branch out into further classifications like parts of a plant,  grouping animals into types, and so on.   I could use a concept map displayed onto an overhead to "save" the discussion for the following week.  This would allow students to pick up where we left off and expand further into each feature bubble.