https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q9ZEQJ1BVCVdoJMeTVr7jvLUfo4RBB6UFXPY34p_V6o/edit?usp=sharingThis blog and my final product will, eventually, geared towards other educators. I want to use this space to build a resource to help educators develop growth mindsets in their classrooms. Specifically, I want to target fellow math teachers and alter the way students think about math. So my site needs to address the needs of math teachers who are seeking to make a change in their students and, in a way, provide resources that meet the needs of those teachers’ students.
Sociocultural My target audience is teachers, now those teachers can come from a variety of physical locations, cultural backgrounds, and school contexts. They also could come from an enormous variety of professional backgrounds. Some could be new teachers, some could be new to math, some could have been teaching fractions for years. So, it is difficult to really nail down the sociocultural needs of my audience. However, I can focus on what they have in common. First, they are all instructing in mathematics. That brings about certain needs like delivering mathematical content to students and, for many schools, classroom management of some sort. By classroom management, I am referring to engagement, community, and student value in the work they do. It is no secret that, at many schools, math classrooms have the highest percentage of discipline issues. A second need that I will assume about my audience is that they have a desire for students to succeed in a mathematics classroom. If that second need is not present, then I feel my product will be not much use. So, the sociocultural goals that may drive people to my product are a need to deliver content, a need for a productive classroom environment, and a need for students to be successful. Informational What resources will my product need to satisfy the goals of my audience? First, as I am aiming for math teachers, my product needs proof. The research pointing to the value of a growth mindset and its positive impact on student performance in a math classroom is vital. If my audience does not believe the product will serve their needs, why would they bother with it? That proof can come from a lit review, suggested reading, video lectures, videos from classrooms, samples of my own student work. A second resource that I believe is important is practical resources for the audience’s classrooms. Teacher time is limited and expecting my audience to all write their own amazing and personalized growth mindset activities is short sighted. I need to provide resources for them to use. I can link to Common Sense Media, Khan Academy, and other resources I found in my own research. In some ways, I envision my product as a digital library for my audience where they can find the information to prove the value of a strong mathematical mindset and then the resources to get them moving that way. Another resource that could be great would be some type of forum or perhaps twitter chat schedule to allow for discussion between interested peers. Technical What skills will my audience need to achieve their goals and how do I support the development of those skills? This is probably the most difficult question. I feel like one “skill” my audience needs is to the develop the mindset they want in their students. Children are like lie detectors. If a teacher says they need to believe in themselves, but the students can tell the teacher does not have that attitude, they won’t buy into it. They will likely call out the difference as well. It boils down to talking the talk and walking the walk. So one skill I want my product to help people develop their own mindsets. My audience will also need to know how to talk to students in a way that helps develop this mindset. It is so easy to slip up and say something horribly fixed. Adults do it all the time. “I was never good at math and I’m doing great!” “No point in memorizing that or really learning it. Computers do it for you anyways.” We need to re-learn how to talk to kids! There are a lot of ways I can do this and I need to really reflect on Clarke to decide how to do it best for both of the skills I have mentioned so far. These are fairly flexible skills, more than just procedures, so designing a good system for the transfer of this information will be paramount. I think that SITE actually supports the bridge building process well as it can inform my about the potential needs of my audience. I feel like this system is related most closely to a far-transfer task. Yes, there are some underlying facts and procedures in instilling a growth mindset in a student, but ultimately we are dealing with dozens of individuals. These individuals have their own backgrounds, beliefs, and mindsets. There is a difference between building a stronger mindset in a student who already has some level of growth mindset and one who has been in a fixed mindset for years. My audience will NEED to be able to use flexible mental models to adapt to each class, each unique student. So, overall, there is a lot of work that needs to be done in apply the SITE model and its considerations to the vague idea of a product I have floating around in my head. Then, once I find all the pieces to meet all the needs, I need to think about how to structure and organize it in a way that is useful to my audience.
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As a math teacher, I feel like social media, for me, has few uses that are directly pedagogical. Twitter and Snapchat do not pedagogically help me instruct mathematics in anyway that a Learning Management System does not. If I want to share a resource or video, I can post it to my class agenda. I don’t need students following me on Twitter to reach them. Now, where social media is useful is in making problems come to life. Statistics in particular can strongly leverage social media as a context to work in and is highly engaging to students. The above infographic could set the stage for dozens of great lessons. Students could consider which platform would be the best for a particular business based on the statistics above. Students could practice using percent proportions to figure out exactly what the percents in the infographic correlate to and see how Twitter’s 9% is very different from Instagram’s 12%. Again, nothing about social media makes with the actual instruction, but it can certainly engage students and leverage some critical thinking skills. Aside from mathematics instruction, I feel like I have a responsibility as a teacher. Our social skills curriculum is partially rolled out in math classes. Our school supports the 6 C’s and 21st Century Skills. Even though instructional time is a precious resource, math is not the only content I need to cover. Teaching digital citizenship is very much tied into the modern classroom. Social media SHOULD be incorporated in the classroom, even if it is not being directly used for instruction. It creates opportunities to discuss the impact of social media, creates space for students to share their thoughts. It allows me as a teacher to provide some context for students to think about how they manage their social media. Every year at my site, I hear of students who get in trouble for social media use. Whether it is group chats on Kik or bullying on Twitter or gossip accounts on Instagram, every year students push the boundaries too far. Students have access to social media and are using it. It is our reality as educators. If we choose to turn a blind eye to it or to ban it from our room, we are surrendering our ability to have an impact in that area of a student’s life. It is like how teachers used to turn a blind eye to bullying because it was not their place, not their content area. If we do not develop our students digital citizenship, then we are allowing negative or destructive social media use to continue. So, if we do engage with social media and see a student post something inappropriate? Not illegal or related to school, but perhaps related to language or relationships that are outside the realm of authority as a teacher? I believe it depends on the student. Obviously you have some relationship with the student because you are connected by social media. You need to judge if your relationship with your student gives you a good opportunity to have a non-threatening discussion about it. Non-threatening is key. If a student feels judged by the people following them, they can simply block them. Now, you have lost our ability to make an impact. So, I really think it needs to be case by case. However, I think self-realization is the best way to deal with it. If an adult tells a student, “hey your social media is inappropriate and makes a bad impression on you,” it might not make a deep impact. Adults reading this, try to remember how you took advice from adults about the music you listened to or the clothes you wore. How did you react to adults critiquing your “image?” I would bet in many cases, your teenage self did not make radical life changes due to that critique. If, however, a student comes to understand how social media can affect your future and then comes to the idea of reflecting on their own social media use, that can be a powerful agent for change. So, if I started seeing bad posts, I would pull some lessons from Common Sense Media on digital footprints and see if students come to the conclusion on their own. I believe that is where students will begin to develop safe social media habits. For the next two semesters, I want to speaking to colleagues. I want to build a case for shifting the culture of a math classroom and intentionally building a new mathematical mindset in students. Now, while that will heavily involve students and they (should) benefit from it, my target is other teachers. I want to change the way they view their math classroom, their instructional models, consider the choices they make in their interactions with students, and so on. Now, I expect that a student who happens to stumble on my product could still learn something from it, but they are not the audience. Not to say that students do not have agency over their mindsets, but that educators should be using their influence to build good ones. Therefore, my intended audience is fellow educators.
Early thoughts for how to share the knowledge:
One tool I have discovered and try to incorporate regularly into my school year is Infogram. It is a web service that allows the creation of and sharing of custom infographics. They can incorporate text, quotes, images, or a variety of customizable charts. The app can link with Google Sheets, making data input from Google Forms quick and easy. Students have control over font, color, arrangement, size, and can pick from a variety of free templates.
It can be used as a powerful presentation alternative to Slides or Prezi. This is intuitively more visually oriented, but can be used to deliver text if necessary. The given tools also emphasize solid evidence and statistics being used to make a point or, at least convey information. It allows students to be expressive in choice of chart and think about what charts or displays best communicate to their audiences. It makes them think about what their evidence means and how to explain it, since they cannot read off of slides like in other presentation mediums. This technology tool is not explicitly used for instruction. It is a tool that can enhance learning. What argument are students making? Who is their audience? They have to make choices that are not prominent in other presentation mediums and those choices can help them reflect more deeply on their content. It is used to create end products and, when scaffolded well, can really refine the way students think about the work they have done. The tools provides the opportunity for high quality end products that can be printed out or digitally shared with authentic audiences. Students can send infographics to adults in communities, peers in schools, or politicians with a simple link. I use it when I have students design their own surveys and have it as an option for students for other presentations, such as a PrBL unit on the United States Census. I feel like it is especially valuable to me as a math teacher because it opens students up to different ways of presenting information. Not everything is best communicated in words and sometimes students have gotten so used to creating written arguments, they have forgotten the visual power of diagrams. However, this is not a tool without its flaws. Most importantly, there is a paid version of Infogram. That means that there are definitely features that are deliberately missing in the free version. The next biggest issue comes from being spoiled by Google. There cannot be multiple authors on a single infographic. That means students need to collaborate offline to work online. While that has potentially useful implications, it can bottleneck student production. It definitely requires strong collaborative norms to ensure participation in group settings. The third major issue is that students will need some training to use the tool. Again, this issue presents excellent opportunities, but can cost valuable time in the classroom. The software is fairly intuitive and the templates are a big help, but I always need to assist students when using the program for the first time. On the teacher end, it took me very little time to become familiar with the tool myself. I, however, was also familiar with Google Sheets and spreadsheet software in general, so I had an easy time modifying charts exactly how I wanted. Teachers less experienced with Sheets may find a steeper learning curve, although I still hold the tool is intuitive. What was more difficult was trying to teach this tool to students. Like in our readings this week, the Digital Native is not a reality. I am individually a digital native and had quick success but not all my students did. Most could easily make an account and pick a template and start plugging. However, some found the Sheet disorienting. They needed to change values in column B of the sheet to edit the horizontal axis of a particular chart, for example. It took experimentation. Also, students, mostly, did not have an idea of what made infographics strong. Now, I spend time discussing that with students. I show them good and poor infographics to try and help them avoid common design mistakes. I have used the tool more than four times with students at present and I am still learning about better ways to introduce and instruct students with it. However, I will say that I do not feel like other services like Piktochart are significantly better for students upfront and that Infogram has some more powerful chart options later on. Ultimately though, as a math teacher, I find a lot of value in students discussing the merits of different charts, interpreting data, and presenting alongside a chart with no pre-written sentences. Like everything in a classroom, there is an opportunity cost. Individual teachers need to assess their own needs. Digital literacy is an absolutely essential element of 21st century education. The landscape of the professional world is shifting more and more away from rote memorization of crucial information and moving towards problem solving and collaboration. We have also seen exponential and explosive growth in technology over the last two decades. To ignore technology in the classroom and, more importantly, its authentic use in problem solving is grossly irresponsible as modern educators. However, the Common Core in and of itself is weighty enough to fill an entire school year. Add in state and district testing and time becomes pinched. Add in the normal disturbances of a public school such as fire drills or visits from counselors and teachers begin to get concerned. Then, factor in the need remediation and re-teaching, community building activities, and a desire to make your classroom authentic and engaging and teachers begin to panic about covering everything. Then consider the seemingly inevitable delays of education. A few years ago, my district suffered an earthquake that largely disrupted our first month of school. This last year we adopted a new Learning Management System and had a rocky transition into the new year. Power outages happen. Sick days happen. Training days happen. Suddenly, asking a teacher to cram just one more thing into their school year becomes laughable. Most teachers will smile and nod in a staff meeting and then go back to business as usual in their classrooms. So, the biggest question around digital literacy is not of its value, but of where in pacing guide does it fit in?
I believe it requires a perspective shift. Technology is not an add on to the schedule. It should be blended in. It’s a powerful tool when used properly and can accelerate learning through powerful visuals, interactions, and differentiation. Saying “I don’t have time for classroom tech” is like saying “I don’t have time for graph paper.” In many ways, technology can be a time saver! In some cases, the time saved can give students more time to actually think about the content! An example of this in my own room is teaching compound interest. Students spend so much time just doing calculations over and over that they don’t get to reflect and consider what is happening as interest earns interest. However, when I began to utilize spreadsheets as a way to calculate interest, it sped up students abilities to do calculations.They could calculate for much longer investment periods and see the results of compounding to an even greater effect than before. They learned how to use a spreadsheet and several tools, such as the formula writer.They practiced the mathematical practice of looking for repeated reasoning in the spreadsheets code and attended to precision in writing their equations. Some of them were able to extend their learning by learning how to create charts digitally from a spreadsheet to provide visual evidence for a presentation. Not to mention, because they finished faster, they got to compare results with others in the class and think about the pros and cons of choosing a bank. They got to think about why people might choose a bank with a lower interest rate and what those extra features might be worth to people. I share this example because the “solution” to digital literacy is integration. My compound interest yielded extra results. They learned the basic formula and understood the difference between simple and compound interest. Along the way, they also learned how to reorganize a spreadsheet and use cell names to write equations to automatically calculate interest for any principal. All in the same amount of time my pacing guide allowed for those lessons from the curriculum. Proper technology integration should at the minimum make your class time more efficient. There may be some upfront investment. I briefly “fell behind” while I taught students how to read cell names and how to type operations into the spreadsheet, but they quickly made that time back because typing “B4*A6=” is significantly faster than doing 2237.53*1.0125 on a calculator. In the middle of the road, students master the content while learning valuable skills alongside the content. At it’s best, technology integration provides new opportunities for students to explore content and come to conclusions. An example of this I enjoy is Desmos, an online graphing calculator resource. They have a game called “Marble Sliders” where the students only objective is to get a marble to slide down a ramp, gather stars, and land in a target area. The catch is that they have to build and adjust ramps by using coordinates or writing equations but there are incredibly limited instructions. Students basically need to experiment with different numbers and ideas until they find things that work. Their thought process is authentic. Some of them complete the entire activity with only coordinates. They count squares on the screen and visualize and convert it into an order pair. Some students realize how tedious that could be and start trying linear equations. They learn that the coefficient adjusts the steepness of the line. They now have a concept of slope and what effect changing slope can have without any lecture or vocabulary or books. All this while learning how to make graphs online, how to write mathematical ideas on a computer, and more. Technology is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere and we owe it to our students to teach it. Luckily for us, we just so happen to benefit from it when we do it well. From the Mind’s Eye of the User is certainly a complex introduction to the theory of sense-making. In it Dervin describes a theoretical framework as concepts and principles justified by prior research and evidence. She then grounds and frames these principles by providing several processes to make the concepts a reality. Her framework directly defies certain conventions and challenges a new perspective on qualitative data, while also critiquing the “standard” form of information systems. These processes give practical steps to realizing her framework and she exemplifies this by pulling from already complete studies on sense-making.
Ultimately, I feel as if Dervins is attempting to communicate a “new” philosophy of research and its principles. I put “new” in quotation marks because I feel Dervin would argue sense-making has always been there, just ignored or misused. Not to mention the forty articles she brings up in her conclusion. It is new in the sense that it challenges a conventional framework, the “versus” framework. It also defies a conventional system structure. We typically, in society, depend on experts. It’s what we do. We get jobs and we become experts at them. Most people have a conceptual idea of what it means to be a teacher, but only teachers actually KNOW what that experience is like. Some days, I feel like I fill out paperwork and write e-mails more than I instruct children. My step-father was a fire fighter at one point in his professional career. Many people have conceptions of what firefighters do, but only those who have experienced being a firefighter or close to a firefighter know that they spent the minority of their time actually putting out flames. They have other important duties as well. The point being, we build a society of experts and rely on them. A non-firefighter does not fully understand the full duties and therefore relies on the firefighter to accomplish them. Since we rely on experts, our systems are geared towards the people who, in theory, need them the most, the experts. Librarians used to rely on card catalogs, which may not be the best for the average person but were certainly effective and useful for librarians who were familiar with the tool. So, naturally, when sensemaking challenges to take things from the viewpoint of the actor and not the observer, it exposes “flaws” in the design of our information systems. Exemplars 2 and 6 indicated this well. In both, a patient repeatedly stated they did not understand a procedure and received no real explanation. Their gap was not bridged, they did not acquire the help or knowledge, and remained with their feelings of suspense of confusion. This is because the system of medical information was not designed for their use, but for the nurses and doctors use. The new mother was given cold water and instructed to walk because her doctors had information stating they were the best methods for her recovery. The new mother, according to this system, did not need to know that for the treatment to be effective. She just needed to comply. It is a results-focused or outcome focused method rather than a holistic and individually-focused approach. Sensemaking begins to critique this. As for my sense-making of the article, I had to read it through, watch the video on the topic, read it again, focus on the exemplars while referring back to the methods description, and read the conclusion twice more. It was hardly efficient, but reminded me of the chunking and analyzing that my philosophy classes in college required, leading me to my conclusion that sense-making is a research PHILOSOPHY more than a methodology. As I type this, I reflect on how I could have done it differently. I also reflect on how (with a little irony) this structure of academic article did very little to bridge my gap on sense-making. It took me as a motivated individual plowing through the provided tools repeatedly to process things. I wish someone had done a timeline interview with me as I was reading it the very first time, it would have been enlightening. In a strange way, I feel like the exemplars did the best job bridging the gap for me. At first, I was stuck on the idea of quantifying the qualitative, but the exemplars helped me see that it was really a perspective shift that allows qualitative things to become qualitative. Starting with some of those, even without the framework presented first may have given me more of a lightbulb moment. If I had to break down this article to a high schooler, I would question the person who was commanding me to do so. Like I said, in a rather ironic fashion, the article’s structure is anti-sense-making to me. I don’t feel like jigsawing the article would be supremely helpful because all the methodologies and procedures serve a larger purpose, highlighting the idea of analyzing qualitative responses through the system the individual was acting in. My students could completely understand the idea of an image survey and miss the dots that form the bigger picture of sense-making. How I would approach this topic, if it was required of me, would be a fishbowl simulation. I would convert some of the exemplars into scripts, have students simulate the exemplars in a small group with the peers watching, and have a discussion about it. I feel like seeing the respondents struggle to get access to information might get students onto the idea of analyzing how information is shared via systems. Then they can move onto analyzing images of companies or tools being presented to actors and start making sense of what the individual is experiencing. I believe students would need to practice seeing things from the actor’s viewpoint via simulation and then work towards making sense of the tools and systems. Even then, this is very heady material and I wonder how different it would be for students with no experience or knowledge of how research is done. Ultimately, I think the magic word her is "differentiation." It is what sense-making is all about at its core, recognizing the individual and adapting to individual needs and experience. Learning sense-making should probably occur in a similar fashion. The school I teach at is technology rich and is looking to become more so in the future. We are a BYOD school but are hopefully going to be move closer to a 1:1 model with a check out system for students who are in need of devices. We have an online Learning Management System called Echo that teachers are expected to use on a daily basis. Google Classroom is being activated for our district. All teachers are given laptops and projectors and my site has been supportive of teachers who request additional technology such as document cameras. We have intervention classes with software components and a fully stocked computer lab. Students are given e-mail addresses via Gmail that will be theirs through the end of high school. My site is a PBL site and is becoming a PrBL site in math and my district includes 21st Century Skills in their mission. Students use technology every day. Students use shared space on the internet, such as Google Drive and other apps, every day. The need for digital citizenship training is overwhelming.
The school I teach at is a middle school and every year I have been at this school, without fail, we have had some technology related or social media related student issue. Whether it is cyber bullying via Twitter or Instagram or students bashing on teachers in Google Docs or Chat or even things as serious as sexting, students can take their tech use too far without boundaries and training. One year, a student who was in excellent academic shape and had won awards got involved in one of these technology mishaps. It will surely follow him for a long time. I have no doubt that without digital citizenship, more students will wind up like him. Fortunately, my site values digital citizenship. In sixth grade, students complete a digital citizenship project in social studies, focusing on how to use technology professionally and manage their footprints. In seventh grade Language Arts, students do an argumentative project about social media. Yet despite this, students still get into trouble each year. I do not believe there are any shortcomings to the wonderful projects at my site, but maybe students need more. Or maybe it is just a middle schooler’s nature to push boundaries until something snaps back. Either way, the course of action is clear. Students need consistent digital citizenship training in all classes and all content areas. When I reflect about digital citizenship and math, it feels difficult at first. Common Sense Media links all their activities to ELA standards, but not to math. There could be some interesting work in statistics of identity theft, but making students aware of identity theft is not necessarily digital citizenship. Teaching students how to protect themselves against identity theft is closer to digital citizenship and that is something math can help with. Every year, before even thinking about digital citizenship in my own room, I had students do a Problem Based Learning Unit on password strength and why longer and more complex passwords are so valuable. Ironically, students learned that their assigned passwords were not incredibly strong and made many of them glad they changed them. This connected well to mathematical standards on sample space and probability models and begins to get on the fringes of digital citizenship. While being safe and secure online is a foundation of digital citizenship, I believe more can be done. A second idea for integrating digital citizenship could be using Google forms to create surveys. I would prefer this to Padlet because it can export to Google Sheets while still allowing the anonymity of Padlet. Then the data can be organized and used in a structured way. Teaching students to use Sheets also increases their digital agency and 21st Century skills. Ideally, students could design their our survey questions. Perhaps questions like “How many social media accounts do you have?” to show how wide a footprint can be or “Have you ever had a negative experience on social media?” to show the prevalence of cyberbullying in their community. This could help make the issues more authentic for students by seeing data that relates to their classmates. Then they can create charts to demonstrate evidence and make mathematically supported arguments about cyberbullying or other topics that they are interested in. A third idea I have is less mathematically inclined, but still can develop useful skills. This resource from Common Sense Media, which I want to build into a lesson plan soon, does not include math, but is very similar to what my site calls a “Claim-Evidence-Reasoning” process. We do it in all subject areas to help prepare students for the CAASPP and beyond. Students need to put together a claim and research evidence to support it. The evidence they choose is justified by their reasoning. This activity has students do just that. Students need to make a claim about which host to do, find evidence for their claim, and provide reasoning to support their evidence. This activity is perhaps more intuitive to students than some math problems and can be a great way to scaffold and practice the CER process with them. This option is the least personal of the three, but i could add reflective journals to it so students can relate the problem to their own experiences. I don’t feel like any of these ideas particularly tie into digital communication directly. The third idea gets into the idea of “passive” communication where public information has an impact on your opportunities. The second idea could tie into the effects of previous communication on social media. If I needed to focus more heavily on communication and wanted to do it in a mathematical way, perhaps I could focus on infographics and how students can effectively communicate via digital products. Most students do not understand what makes an infographic effective and clear at first. While that is more niche than say, professional e-mails or social media postings, I believe that it is a part of digital literacy and impacts a student’s digital citizenship. In other words, citizenship can show up in a lot of ways. The more literate students are with different apps and forms of information sharing, the more they can participate. A student who knows how to code has different opportunities online than a student who designs graphics than a student who runs a blog. However, all those different skills can impact a student’s citizenship and I imagine that digital citizenship will only continue to expand as time moves on. As a math teacher, competency based learning feels like a Holy Grail. I want my classroom to be self-paced, I want my students to not waste time sitting through notes when they already understand the material perfectly. Math is fairly unique in that it is super progressive. If a student has master 7th grade content, why shouldn’t they move onto 8th right away? Most people seem to answer “well, then they will be bored next year…” That feels like a weak answer to me.
I feel like math is on the road to competency based learning. Softwares like Khan Academy and Prodigy both allow for individualized assignments, self-paced learning, and individualized rewards systems. Other game based learning systems like Lure of the Labrynth also allow students to work in a learner centered away. Even better, all these things are totally free for the classroom! There are some struggles still of course. Can a video module every truly replace teacher interaction? How do you build a culture where every student is confident enough to ask for help when needed? Some systems have great feedback tools, but they can only provide feedback when a student provides input. What about the equity of technology at home? I feel like making a learner-centered environment without technology would be resource intensive (lots of printing). I wonder if, in the constraints of the public school system, it is possible to have a truly learner-centric environment. Without the guarantee of equity and access for all students, I have doubts that a tech-rich system is possible. However, every year I am moving closer to a blended approach. I feel like every school year a new learning system pops up. I have gone through Tenmarks (Amazon), Khan Academy, Prodigy, LearnZillion, Lure of the Labrynth, and more in the last 3 years and I’m sure it only gets better with time. |
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October 2017
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