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.

Week 5 Reflection

Interesting Uses of Instructional Design at Work

A few months before taking this class I mentioned to my dad that I felt overwhelmed by the amount of hours I spend at my school attending professional development training.  In just a decade of teaching that amount has gone up certainly.  I find it interesting that this is stated in the book as affecting the business world as well.  It hits even more close to home when the book mentions technology based training as I do my homework for our asynchronous Internet based training course we are all participating in.

Finding a fit for some of these areas are easy to see for a business field where rapid prototyping can save many hours of trial and error when building a product.  When developing the minds of five and six year olds it’s more of a stretch.  What I see as the best fit is the use of instructional designers to coordinate the creation of learning products we use.  Particularly interesting is not only including those with the skills to create the training materials like editors, writers, graphic layout artists, but including subject matter experts to influence the process.  While working on materials for our science standards and grade level content expectations we never would think to bring in an actual scientist to provide their expertise.  We pull from books, previous course materials and unit lessons we have used in the past.   A subject matter expert could provide neat examples or fun experiments to integrate more layers of Dale’s cone to the learning experience.

I could also see using advanced evaluation techniques defined by instructional design. I sometimes feel that the ways we measure student performance is teaching them to do well on standardized tests and not on their ability to learn and retain information.  It doesn’t do a student to work on memorizing the state capitals over a month of class only to forget most of them only a month later. The book doesn’t really lay out these methods in this chapter besides mentioning various stage processes but there is a strong need to make sure that learning is actually taking place. Adapting somewhat from a sentence in the book, productive evaluation must measure not just simply learning, but also transfer of knowledge gains to the student and the impact on his or her future ability to learn.

Trends and Issues in P-12 Educational Change

In just the years I’ve been teaching there have been calls for systemic change in education.  You read about districts in Michigan like Detroit and Flint that are facing government take over forcing systemic changes.  Even my district has had many schools not meeting AYP landing them on the failing school watch list.  Despite this the changes we seem to plan are more of the piecemeal nature.   The state of Michigan is facing needs for systemic changes caused by budget shortfalls but the districts overall seem paralyzed by this.   Comparing the two methods described in the book here (GSTE and SUTE) there seems to be one better suited for a school or small districts (GSTE) and one for larger organizations or the state as a whole (SUTE). I’m sure either could work for most districts but the SUTE you have seem to have a lot more work before the development of the changes that require a lot more teams and committees.   I don’t recall hearing about the terms being used in our schools so I’m curious if there’s been of our planning have involved them. 

Reading on the Decatur District changes using the GSTE process, I was really surprised to read about there involving community members in the planning process and holding community forum meetings to shape the process.  It can be difficult to get a consensus of views among a group of like minded coworkers.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to bring in large number of people with diverse backgrounds with different views.  I like how after they had compiled information on the educational needs in the community and then broke down into building level groups to work on the actual processes.  It sounds like at the end of the section that the work was still on going.  I checked out their website on Google (http://www.msddecatur.k12.in.us/) and amusingly they actually have a section under their missions and values about initiating systemic changes.   Recently they have done things like engage in a district-wide effort to engage in conversations about systemic transformation through Professional Learning Communities in the 07-08 school years.  Their site is impressive and there’s evidence that they are engaging the community to improve the district.

What was surprising to me about the Chugach School District was how few students they had over such a large area.  I had to do the math and it works out to be about one student per hundred square miles!  That has to make putting together a sports team difficult.  If any district is in need for technology to bring students together it’s this one for sure.  I looked into this school as well but there website was down.  There’s a lot of links about them though on Google.   I found it interesting that  Decatur called their process “Journey to Excellence” and Chugach called it “Voyage to Excellence”.   It’s almost like they attended the same seminars or class on how to make systemic changes.   The most impressive was a statistic saying that in 1994, only 1 student in 26 years had attended college and the school had a massive turn over level.   To fix this they took a lot of steps.  Sorry for the complete plagiarizing below but I thought this was an amazing example of radical systemic change that I would like to see in our Michigan schools

From COSN.org  Case Study on Chugach School District:

Through a series of town hall meetings, the district determined that the traditional industrial model of education to prepare students for college was not relevant to their community. Students needed to prepare for five possible outcomes, equally weighted in importance: college enrollment, business entrepreneurship, full-time employment, military or service learning, or vocational training.

The school board and district leaders proposed radical changes to suit the remote community's needs. The district eliminated grade levels as measures of progress and adopted a standards-based system with levels of mastery that emphasize real-life learning situations. The standards continuum extends from pre-kindergarten to the equivalent of grade 16 and students complete their education at their own pace, graduating at age 14 to 21.

That is an impressive change!  If you read further on their site there is strong evidence that the changes have been successful.

A Social Studies Lesson Plan using Google Maps

View Social Studies Lesson- Walking for Ice Cream in a larger map

As soon as the weather gets nice in the spring, we have a social studies lesson where we walk to a local ice cream parlor.  Along the way I have students point out safety features like traffic lights,  stop signs and crosswalks.  Every time we stop we discuss why we need each of these features to keep us safe.  Also I have them determine the weather conditions as a tie in for our science learning on weather.   Each student is given a map where they draw in the stop signs and traffic lights and circle what the weather condition was.  After the trip each student illustrates a picture and writes a sentence using proper punctuation describing their trip to get ice cream.   

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=213837021522119836791.0004a53a1c19be5538860&ll=42.086949,-86.443455&spn=0.01094,0.01929&z=16

Check out my Social Bookmark site!

It's Delicious!

http://www.delicious.com/mshugg

Week 4 Reflection

1. Web and internet increased use in learning
The author does point to a greater increasing integration of technology with the classroom in the last few years and draws from it a conclusion that in three to five years computers and digital media will become of more importance in education. Looking at it now (compared to the book publish date of 2007) it hasn’t really taken off like he though it would it would. Budgeting crisis has laid off a lot of positions in technology, mothballed computer labs and put money that would have been spent on education programs in technology into keeping the doors open. If funding for education would have been made a proper priority we might have reached the levels he was envisioning.

Unfortunately since we are taking a different route the authors goals may end up being met after all. It’s cheaper to have one instructor broadcast to multiple classrooms rather than having a dozen on staff. A recorded lesson can be played every year with out having to pay for health insurance for the DVD player. These are probably the only realistically approachable ways for it to take shape in the K-12 levels.

Higher education and adult education has a much better chance of incorporating the web and internet for education. Colleges aren’t at the mercy of tax dollars like the lower grades and can pass of the expenses of new and innovative technologies on the students. My younger sister is at the same university I attended just over a decade ago and is paying almost twice the tuition!
Instructional technology is really taking off in the workplace. My husband is always taking part in webinars and was given an ipod full of training videos for his job. The competitiveness of the marketplace makes companies more willing to spend big money on more efficient ways to train staff and allow them to retain information. One of the articles from the first week of class touched on the importance of this.
2. Applying principals to my work
I was a bit dismayed to reach a chapter this late in the book and discover that it was another heavy dose of defining and redefining terms. I can understand importance behind the use of the technology tools we are learning about and the process and methodology of creating these tools. I can also get behind the formalizing and methodizing the concepts of the field of instructional technology and how it ties to into things like human performance involvement. I just wanted to see methods for applying these cool concepts and definitions into my own teaching methods. I flipped through a few more chapters and saw more of the same. It would be nice for more applied knowledge and less historical importance of word changes. The chart on page 141 seems to be the closest to this but would be more informative if they ran through a real life example through the steps for analysis and design. The book example of a rocking chair factory is a step in the right direction. It shows how a training department (or group) can lose its focus when its stated purpose gets subverted by reality boundaries of the company that pays for its employees and budget. In our district these small battles are fought regularly. Schools are like small kingdoms on their own rather than a united district when it comes to budgeting dollars.

I didn’t get a clear picture of the concepts of this chapter so I’m not really sure how to apply it to my classroom. We have systems for human performance improvement in our weekly team meetings, curriculum planning sessions and professional development sessions. HR doesn’t have a role in this like other companies leaving a sort of disconnect between its roll as discussed in the text and how it supports us. Our school improvement programs are closer matching to the way the book is defining HPI. As I mentioned above this chapter seems to be content light despite being word rich. I don’t see a way it can improve the programs we already have in place.

Note a typo in the book: the chapter pages are titled at the top “Chapter 14 The Development and Evolution of Human Performance Involvement” which caused me to do a double take. Involvement is much different than improvement. Of course I would like to see human involvement increased in my classroom when it comes to my students parents!

3. Podcasting
I’m not a fan of the name podcasting as it doesn’t clearly define what it is. It seems like its just a recording on the internet. Why the fancy name? This type of recording would be difficult to use with kindergarten students. They have enough trouble sitting still as it is with out having to be silent to listen to an audio recording. They are much more excited with a “silly songs” CD where we can get up and dance. A podcast for teachers would be helpful allowing theme oriented training on various subject matters that relate to our field. I found one podcast related to early childhood education but haven’t had time to listen:
http://www.helendoron.com/podcast.php
It seems like it would be a lot of work to organize and record a weekly podcast. I could see if there was monetary compensation a person might be more motivated to record one. If it was of sufficient quality I would pay to subscribe to one related to early childhood, organizing learning stations, or differentiated instructional groups.

4. Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking to me had immediate value. I’ve lost websites over the years and have spent time struggling to remember that one link I have on my work computer but not at home. I don’t have a lot of tech savvy friends to take part in the social part but perhaps sharing links with other students in this class will give me enough of that. I recommend adding each semesters students you have to one continuous list that you share out at the end of the semester. That would provide a wealth of links for educators! I’ve already talked about it to some of my coworkers and will bring it up at the next staff meeting we have. The value it provides is clear!

technology podcast

The only early childhood education Podcast I could find:
http://www.helendoron.com/podcast.php


A technology podcast similar to what we are learning.  Maybe we will learn about twitter in a later lesson!

Week 3 Assignment: Adding media

Image from my Wiki

Embedding a Video:


Embedding a Map of where I would like to go someday:

View Larger Map

Link to my photobucket:

http://s1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc385/MelissaShugg/

Reflection #3

Chapter 1.

What was most surprising to me in this chapter was that there was this huge of a debate about defining the field.  Maybe I’ve worked with younger students for too long to require a precise wording on anything. I’m just happy to have them put their names on each assignment!  I can understand refining the title as technology of the media advances and new insights in methodology are developed.  Refinement of something should clarify it. Creating new mission statement for the field every few years blurs the definition in my eyes. 

The most concrete definition to me in the book is from 1994:

“Instructional Technology is the theory and practice of design, development, utilization, management, and evaluation of processes and resources for learning.”  

It’s not restrictive, it doesn’t use fluff words, and it doesn’t need to be reread, yet is still broad enough to be applied to the field as a whole.  Our school is working on interdisciplinary curriculum units for our district that merge subjects into a focused learning experience.  For example if we are teaching insects in science they would be writing a paper on bugs in language and drawing.  Technology allows for bridging a lot of these disciplines into a cohesive learning experience.  I’ve already thought of ideas that I will be bringing to this summer’s meetings. 

The biggest thing missing to me what were the driving changes in each of these time periods. What changes in technology or methodology brought about these revisions in defining the field?  Most specifically what drove someone in 1977 to break it down into a quick 120 page read!

Chapter 2.

We are using a new program called Curriculum Crafter this year.  It allows you to look up cores and standards as well as published assessments and incorporate it into our lesson plans. It’s almost a wiki for curriculum materials.  Traditionally I would look up the state standards and use that as a framework to develop my lesson plans.  I’m sure I internalized methodology like ADDIE and learned similar methods in school and professional development meetings.  I’ve just never formalized it into a process.  Reading this chapter is sort of a refresher on why you need a structured approach as I can see it with the program we are using now in our district.   The part that breaks down for me is that not every lesson plan layout should follow a methodology like this and that different age groups will have widely different structure for design.  As an example is gauging meaningful performance (one area listed as a characteristic of instructional design) when there often is difficulty in measuring this.  I’ve only been teaching and student teaching for just over a decade and I’ve seen four or five different approaches to measuring performance.  Our current system is extremely confusing to parents and to doesn’t really accurately measure students.  It was designed by some large education group who clearly put a lot of time, research and effort into it.  This is an area where a structured design failed to produce a good result.

Week 2 Reflection: Technologies, Cones and Imaginations

Let me begin with a summary:  So far we’ve covered cones and immersives, Luddites and new technologies (in 2002) for learning, and built our own blog and wiki and set up an RSS field.  This is a lot of information for a kindergarten teacher!  I’m wading through as best I can.  It’s taken a lot of time but I’ve learned a lot as well.  It’s been nice to be pushed outside my comfort zone a bit.

Creating a blog was a smooth and fun experience.  It made sense right off the bat.  I found some useful stuff online about new posting of blogs: http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/. Some of the stuff is way over my head but there’s basics in there as well that’s useful.  I’ve always enjoyed writing so this was a natural format for me.  I definitely will be keeping this going after the class finishes.   The RSS field was not so much a fit. I subscribed to a few websites but haven’t figured out how to get the other student’s blog addresses added.  Is there a list we can cut and paste from?  As for its use it seems like signing yourself up willingly for spam.  I’ve already removed a site that I thought I would like due to the massive amount of links that it gave me.  It would probably be more useful if you could get to filter the sites a bit more for content I want.

Applying Dale’s cone to a blog media format has it fall across the top four layers of the cone.  Most blog content is text, but it can be enriched by pictures, visual symbolism and links to videos or audio tracks.  It matches the majority of the technology we already use for teaching students.  Having a student create and maintain their own blog would include match Dale’s Cone definition of Direct Purposeful Experience but only on teaching how to create a blog or use the technology.  It would be useful tool to allow students to organize their thoughts, share their work and dabble in technology.  I can see it being a handy tool for secondary grade level students.  It could be made imaginative by allowing students to use their blogs not just as a digital notebook but as a tool to interact with each other.  I could visualize a savvy teacher grouping students in to small groups then give each of them a section of a problem to solve.  By sharing their answers and checking with each other they could learn together what the bigger picture problem they all are working together to solve.  This would let them to learn from each other as well as the course work.  It would be a new twist on small groups where the students wouldn’t have to meet together face to face.  This solves the problem we all remembered of group work being social hour back in high school!  Of course blog time would have to fight with Facebook and video games but that’s already more of a war than a battle.

An RSS feed I don’t see as being a good fit for K-12 students.  I subscribed to a learning feed but it wasn’t much better than a random Google search would be.  It feels akin to flipping through the channels on the TV in hopes something good is on.  You control the channels you click too but have no idea what’s coming on them.   Applying Dale’s cone to an RSS feed has it also laying in between the top 4 layers.  It incorporates text as its primary medium of communication but can link to videos, pictures, and possibly invites/schedules to more hands on events.  Having only scratched the surface of using an RSS feed I have a bit more difficulty figuring out a good use for it in learning.  An easy answer would be as we are using it now to share our blogs, but that’s no different than email alerts or similar.   If content could be shaped and searched, students could perhaps use an RSS feed to save time on long term research for a project or paper.  A news feed on a weather site would allow content to filter directly to you for a paper on weather and climate.

                                                          

When Wikipedia first came out it seemed to be a science experiment more than anything else.  People updated what ever they wished when ever they wished.   There seemed to be skepticism on if it could ever really “work”.   Now most people use it as their primary source of information on a given subject.   Editors strive to keep the content as close to truthful and useful as possible.  Companies use their own internal wikis for their files and information, and there are specialized wikis all over the internet. Here’s a list of some of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis.   Once again it falls short of actual experiences or being hands on like the other computer accessed media so it lays in the top 4 layers of Dale’s cone.  It can link to exhibits or educational videos but is hampered by its digital format.   It’s unique layers of hyperlinking allow for some really imaginative layouts for presenting learning media.  I remember reading about someone using wikipedia to write a “choose your own adventure” style of novel but I can’t seem to find a link to it.   Layering of hyperlinks can provide a more three dimensional access to data, not in a visual sense but in how we can dig deeper in to parts of it with out moving away from the main focus.   For example in an entry on volcanoes I can choose to read the entire content or drill deeper on tectonic plates or a list of active volcanoes.  Using technology in learning needs to allow for more of this as it empowers the students to take the lead on their learning rather than sitting back and trying to absorb it.

Week 2 assignment: Creating a Wiki

My new wiki page is up:
http://melissashugg.pbworks.com/w/page/40229917/Assignment-week-2

Week 1 discussion

Technology in the classroom is a touchy subject in these days of government cut backs, layoffs and budget shortfalls.  Is it better to purchase an updated computer lab or to retain a handful more staff to keep classrooms at a reasonable student to teacher ratio?  Where is the money better spent?  And at what point does it become diminishing returns on either end?  I recently read about schools with rooms full of computers, but no one on staff that knows more than how to turn them on.  Technology offers a lot of potential to improve learning but with out resources to utilize it or build curriculum enhanced by it, then it falls short of the price.

When I started reading the article by Reigeluth and Joseph I had to look at the publish date. It looks like it was published in 2002. At this time, the internet was everywhere, and computers were starting to show up in every home from computer geeks to little old  grandmother’s.  There was no such thing as social networking or Facebook, and hand held devices like Ipods were still brand new and seemed like something from Star Trek.

The authors sort of seem like visionaries when they say buzz words like peer assisted learning or self regulated learning as these are powerful drives for social media formats of learning.  They would probably be blown away if you could show them Wikipedia way back then.  So in about a decade we have made leaps and bounds in the field of technology, but most schools are using computers as just fancy electronic books. Students use them as the encyclopedia world books that we grow up with in class, or to update Facebook when done with their assignments.   Learning is often done the same as it was a decade ago just flashier and in a smaller box.  I’ve never really thought about why this is from a technology perspective as I’ve always focused on the teaching perspective in the room.  The computer has always been a facilitative teaching device not a method to reform education.

I had to Google what a Luddite was when reading the second article.  When I began teaching I was enthusiastic about technology in the world but now I fear I may be bit of a Luddite myself.  I’m curious to know what the author thinks about technology in 2011 as his article from 1993. Does he still refuse to use a word processor? Does he know his articles are linkable from the internet (by ~1.6 billion internet connections in 2009)?  Does he still feel that Al Gore’s 50 billion dollar investment in to the internet isn’t a solution to anything?

Despite sounding akin to my grandfather talking about the good old days, some of Postman’s Luddite fears have come true.  I just read an article about the extinction of the secretary position in American business due to the rise of the smart phone, highly organized access to data and budget cuts.  Call center positions are flowing overseas due to the quick internet connections and cheap labor costs.  Technology helped the bankers funnel money back and forth in shady deals that caused the crisis in 2008 that we still haven’t recovered from. Right now as I write this, the news has on an article about minors using Facebook and the dangers of the information and people they have unmonitored access too.  So maybe we shouldn’t ask what problem does technology solve, but instead what problems is it creating? A Google search of “social problems and technology” returns almost 3 million hits…

Putting the luddite in me aside, I am a fan of technology.  Between my husband and I, we have 6 ways of getting on the internet: 2 smart phones, 3 laptops and his stupid Xbox that he plays until late in the night.  I don’t often have time to use it, but it’s always nice to be able to have any piece of information available at any time.  Who was that one guy in that one movie? Oh yeah, ask Google!  My students enjoy computer time in the classroom and we have participated in web learning with other schools.   Cut and paste has saved many hours of writing the weekly classroom newsletter and those darned lesson plans that my principle is always hounding me for.   We are better off in some ways than we were in 1993 or even 2002.  In others we are falling behind.  It would be nice if not only education but other areas of our society could be updated from an industrial era view point as discussed by Reigeluth and Joseph’s article.

First post of my blog for my Class :201120 Intro to Educational Tech

Welcome to my Blog!