791 is coming to a close, so it is time to look back on these crazy weeks of summer. It was less than two months ago that we undertook a climb up the mountain of sensemaking. Several ironic and dense readings and a few prototype drafts later, here we are. I want to take some time to work through some reflections. First though, I want to discuss an update to my prototype.
My original Bubblemap prototype very closely matched the theoretical picture in my head. To me, the creator, my product is a three pronged approach to creating change in classroom. I would enact the purpose of the problem by (1) providing evidence, (2) offering training resources for teachers, and (3) providing learning resources for students. My initial prototype reflected that. Three branches grew off from my driving question to map out how I would support each prong. AS I was doing this, I would occasionally hit a specific item that belonged in multiple prongs, like a growth mindset assessment. It began to complicate the overall picture. Would I have repetition in my capstone? Or did I need to make a decision? Then, I had a revelation about the design. I had been thinking about the prototype backwards. I need to design a system that is useful for my audience. I designed it as a three branched flowchart because I, as the designer, imagine it like that. However, my audience does not care about the three pronged approach. Most of the audience will only engage two of the prongs at a time. It does not make sense to build a prototype like that. Instead, I should design in a way that will be audience friendly. Just because I strategized a three pronged approach does not mean my capstone actually needs to have 3 distinct sections. This really freed up my thinking and my ability to design. Now, instead of 3 sections I can have four or five and they can serve as audience friendly organization, I feel like my work on my prototype kind of exemplifies how this course has changed my thinking. As an educator and a planner, certain things make sense to me. I think in terms of standard, I want written out outlines. I want to record things in words, script certain things out. And I can plan like that. What I can’t do is give the information to my audience in that form. I need visuals. I need a presentation system that meets the needs of my audience. I have TPaCK, SITE, ARCs, and Pebbles in a Pond as additional lenses to evaluate my planning. This is at once the biggest challenge and biggest success. Aligning all of these lenses and theoretical models while shifting my perspective from a knowing teacher to an unknowing audience, translating my verbal thoughts and plans into impactful images for the students. Sometimes, it feels like trying to spin a dozen plates on six foot poles. Sometimes, it feels brilliant. I kind of feel like I have a foot in two camps, but I guess that’s where I should be in the middle of this transition from sense-making to making sense.
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Gamification is something that I go back and forth on a lot. On the one hand, gamification can increase student engagement by making classroom structures more engaging. Cleaning up becomes a way to earn points or levels for your avatar. Turning in homework on time has the added reward of unlocking a badge. Psychologically speaking, adding positive rewards to desired behaviors through gamification of a classroom is a great thing. Adding these rewards hurts no one. Even if a student sees them as a silly gimmick, it does not inherently hurt their learning experience. However, I tend to feel like that student is seeing the truth. A lot of gamification elements I have seen are just that, gimmicks. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Badges, levels, whatever feature you want to add can inspire students and instill pride in their work if (and ONLY if) those rewards are meaningful to them. You can make them look cool with smart graphic design, you can hype them up to your students, but the fact remains that there is no guarantee that 100% of students will latch on to your gamification. I have to quickly say that that is not a bad thing or a reason to not gamify. NOTHING in education is a 100% guarantee, we are working with diverse sets of humans with diverse wants and needs. It is a reality to keep in mind though. A teacher who pours their everything into making their classroom a super hip game might not get resounding success. This brings me to a second caution about gamification. It is a community building tool. An engagement tool. A motivator. A reward system. Not a content delivery system. Not really. A student might be more motivated to do homework to get a badge. A student might also cut corners on homework because they ONLY want the badge, not the content. Gamification can be awesome for class culture when done right. However, gamification will not teach your class for you. Not by itself. I still want to add gamification elements to my classroom. I want to explore badges more to acknowledge the work students put in. I want to explore class dojo more. I want to develop some kind of leaderboard for Khan Academy and Prodigy. It could be a great way to make behavior I want visible and positively reinforce it. However, what I am more interested in is some solid Game Based Learning. Game Based Learning takes technology beyond the digital worksheet and actively delivers content to students in different ways. One system I want to explore more is Lure of the Labrynth. It seems it started out as some educator’s grad school project in Maryland, but is still available and free for any educator to sign onto. It is a full on quest game with a story, choices, minigames, customizable characters, and message boards. It is like a real video game, but every maze, map, puzzle, and challenge weaves in principles of algebra. Students practice factorization without ever seeing the word “factorization.” In fact, most puzzles come with almost no instruction and demand students to either collaborate via message boards for hints or experiment. It pushes them to develop number sense and critical thinking. I want to try and introduce this into my classroom. Let me be clear, it will not replace much content. They will not learn academic vocabulary from it. They will not learn the distributive property name nor will they learn formulas for geometric figures. They will engage the mathematical practices without ever seeing them listed. These are great things and can really engage some students. It will not replace content in the classroom though. Students still need strong mathematics vocabularies, still need to develop proficiency with formulas and procedures. I am excited though. I tested it with my intervention students last year. Some of them really latched on and excelled in puzzles that, according to their data, they did not have the knowledge to solve. They eventually burned out due to increased difficulty and a lack of structure (I literally gave them the url, their password, and said “no class work today, go have fun and try this for half an hour.”). I am excited to see how I can adapt it to my classroom as an extension activity or an optional competition. To be honest, prototyping was an intimidating assignment. What does a prototype even look like? Well, that's the point of a prototype, to decide what the project might look like. After completing some beginning work on mapping out a prototype, I am thankful for the process. I feel like it has begun to add some clarity to the idea spinning around in my head. Everything in this project can feel so interconnected but categorizing it, even into a table of contents and headers adds something concrete to it all. It also helps me to realize where the idea is lacking and where it is overloaded.
As I was working on my bubble map, I realized that I have the best and clearest blueprint for my “Evidence” prong, the section of my prototype dedicated to convincing my audience my project is worthwhile. That is important to me because I do not assume every person who reads my prototype will automatically share my viewpoint on the value of a growth mindset and student agency in a mathematics classroom. I cannot really think of a reason why someone would dismiss it as a bad thing, but I can certainly imagine an educator agreeing but just “not being able” to find the time to do it. Still, even though I believe it is an important aspect of the project, it may be a little too heavy. I recognize that parts of the other prongs (teacher training and student resources) both will involve “database” components that are full of third party and original resources, but I still need to be very cognizant of the purpose of my project. I am not building this capstone to argue with it, but to provide the means for change and growth. I need to turn down the argumentative side of my brain and really make sure I pack in as much value into the other two sections as possible. Trying to categorize the three prongs of my hypothetical model also made me consider the overlap of resources. My target audience is educators, but part of my product is providing resources the educators can use with their students. It really makes me question, even as I am still compiling various resources, what is truly a training tool for educators and what is good for students. Should students also be exposed to articles about a teacher serving as a facilitator? Will the student understanding the teacher role help alleviate frustration and help them take advantage of the structure. If yes, is that something within the scope of project or am I going to far? Is understanding the teacher role part of the “culture of agency” I mention in my driving question. How essential is it? I am glad to be answering these questions now before we really get into the meat of it in our next course. I also appreciate this process because I can see my colleagues protoypes. Even though our topics are different, our motivations are mostly the same, to innovatively improve some aspect of education Jen Ellison’s protoype explicitly reaches for parents as well. It makes me ask if that is an essential part of my model as well? How crucial is parent support of a student at home to the success of my project? More and more questions to answer about my design. The tools I chose to examine for this week were Jing and Vibby. This tools both have to do with video creation, editing, and sharing. I will post a brief review of each below. Jing is a free app that functions on both Mac and Windows devices. It’s main purpose is to record, capture, and share images and videos taken on a device. It is created through Techsmith and functions with Screencast.com, just like other services like Snagit do. The app is active in the background of your device and can be accessed at an time from the upper right corner of the screen. There you can specify a section of the screen to capture or record. Then you can edit your selection with text, a freehand tool, and other options. After capturing and editing your image or video, you can get it quickly uploaded to screencast.com for easy sharing. You can also download it to your device to share in other ways. The app comes with a tutorial to show you the basic tools with videos to show step by step instructions for capturing, uploading and sharing content. Overall, it is incredibly easy to use, is not annoying to have open, and utilizes a platform that other common apps use. Based on my initial tests, image and video capture both work perfectly well. Uploading videos can be an issue due to size, but it can just as easily be saved to your device then shared via your Google Drive. The video/screenshot editing tools are nothing to write home about, but are still nice to have. I would equate them mostly to what you are able to do with Snapchat and other social media for editing photos and videos. So, even though it is nice to have the annotation tools for screenshots, I would still primarily describe this as a capture tool and not an editing tool. There are no real barriers for student use other than teaching them how the app works. It functions on most major devices and, I believe, is available as a chrome extension for the devices it is not friendly with. It is a simple app with only a few buttons and each button will title itself after you hover over it. It automatically uploads and copies a share link to the clipboard, so that is student friendly as well. Overall, it is just slightly more complicated than taking a normal screenshot but auto-uploads and gives some basic editing tools. So, the applications on the student end can be for sharing and submitting work easily. It could be used for peer tutoring as students can highlight their work in screenshots or short video clips. As a teacher, I can use it to easily send screenshots of test results or gradebooks for parents or students. Not a huge tool in terms of creation, but definitely has its merits for sharing information. Vibby is a free video platform that allows you to take highlights out of pre-existing videos. You link to or upload a video to Vibby and then can use a tool to create highlights. When finished, the viewer of the video will only see a compilation of the highlights. As the creator, you can also put comments or annotations with each highlight to title them or simply explain why it is a highlight. The app is web-based, so accessible on all devices with a browser. It has a tutorial for creating Vibby’s and has a search function to find existing Vibby’s. It connects with Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo and other popular video services. Overall, I found it easy to use and high access. The advantages of this app are huge. I can put multiple highlights on a single video. On youtube, I would need to get a time stamp link but then have no control over where the clip ends and I can only do one time stamp per link. Here, I can take an 8 minute video, pull out 4 highlights, comment on them, and give it to my students as a single video file. Doing that without this service would require downloading the video, editing it in iMovie to pull out the clips and condense them and then reupload them as a single file. In my practice, I would mainly use it to take pre-existing videos and highlight it to the “good” parts. This could be huge for project-based learning. For example, when planning a project about interior design, my team was searching for clips showing a room being remodeled. Some clips from extreme home makeover were useful, but 80% of the 7 minute video was not useful. Unfortunately, the 20% of useful video is scattered through the clip. It makes it difficult to show students in class because it required a lot of jumping around in the video. Sharing with students was not time efficient because they would need to watch the entire clip. So, this could be a great way to abridge longer entry videos or to highlight good bits of instructional videos. I can also see students using this to create their own highlights of instructional videos. Maybe I could have them highlight what THEY think were the most important steps. I could take a screencast of me solving a problem with mistakes intentionally made and have them highlight the mistakes. It actually could have some potential as an assessment tool if used creatively. As I keep considering the specifics of my capstone project, one dilemma in particular comes to mind. My product will be aimed towards educators (although I would not be heartbroken if some students stumbled across it as well) and its intended purpose will be to persuade and enable educators to change their classrooms. My action research had a focus towards increasing student performance but that is really just the carrot at the end of the stick. It is the justification for the product and certainly a great result but not the sole purpose. So I need to answer the question, what do I want from my audience? In a word, I want to create change. All of our readings in 701 and the sensemaking readings in 792 are all pointing to the same thing, the American education system contains deeply rooted and fundamental flaws. Looking at an international context, countries with wildly different educational systems from each other consistently outperform American students. This suggests it is not solely the systems in these high performing countries. Both ends of the educational spectrum CAN be successful. Even America’s messy blend of a system tends to maintain a spot in the top 10 countries in middle school math according to TIMSS. http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2015/international-results/ Granted, I believe America should, based on world status, sit higher on that list so there is definitely a problem, even if we do “outperform” quite a few developed countries. As it is, the top five are all about 70 points or more ahead of America. So, I am fully supportive of integrating technology in the classroom and developing 21st Century Skills and focusing on problem solving. I completely believe that the landscape of the workforce is changing and students need to be prepared in a new and innovative way. However, I also do not believe that pedagogy and computers and standards is the final solution to our performance issues. I believe a cultural shift is necessary as well. In fact, I believe everything I just listed will be even better with a healthier academic and mathematical culture. I talk about math culture a lot on this blog but just to quickly highlight what I’m talking about I will list a few things which I am sure are not unique to America, but are likely rare in the top five performing countries. First, and this is the one that hurts the most, is adults growing negative mathematical mindsets in students. A child brings their parent their math homework looking for help and the parent says “I can’t do this. I was never good at math. Everything was fine though! I have a family, a house, a good job. Don’t worry about math.” That sentiment is so toxic to a developing student. It is a frighteningly common attitude, one I have even heard from non-math teachers! It kills motivation for students. It solidifies the idea that there are “math people” and “not math people.” This is a sentiment that put music in danger in schools. There was a time when music was required in schools. Then the idea came around that some people just are not musically inclined. Well, if some people just aren’t made for music why are we wasting educational resources forcing all kids to learn some foundation of music? When budget cuts come around, music always comes up first. I am deeply convinced that is a cultural issue. And now people wonder why all music sounds the same and no one seems to be able to create “great music” anymore. Quietly, the same has happened to math. We culturally disparage mathematics and then wonder where all the American mathematicians went! I talked about that topic longer than I wanted to but this blog was prompted with what inspires us and math culture inspires me. The idea of a toxic culture around mathematics is involved in many issues we face in mathematics. How many movies have the math teacher as the hero? Even Good Will Hunting has the math teacher as the “bad guy.” English teachers are usually the heroes (probably because scriptwriters have more fond memories of English class than math). How many people think “oh cool!” when you mention a major in mathematics? At least science majors are beginning to seem cool in the mainstream. Children soak up these spoken and unspoken sentiments about math and then we wonder why they don’t like math. It’s not cool. It’s hard (and some of that is a pedagogy issue). Life still works out fine when you give up on it. In elementary school, math is the fact memorization and worksheets and boring lessons. Students arrive at middle school and for the first time get a room and a teacher dedicated to math and they are already at a disadvantage. Time to put the soapbox away. That is what I really want to impact. I want to combat the negative mindset towards mathematics most students pick up throughout their childhood. This will enhance 21st Century Skills, tech integration, and the Common Core. I firmly believe it is an investment for a long term achievement in mathematics. So back the question I asked 100 years ago at the start of this post, what do I want from my audience? I want to convince them of the value of changing the culture in their classroom. That takes an investment of time and energy and sacrifices some instructional minutes (although I believe that sacrifice will pay dividends). So my dilemma is, how do I get my audience here? The teachers who find this blog on their own are already motivated to make change. It is an easy win for them. How do I get my small time online blog or capstone website into the hands of educators who AREN’T looking for tools to change their classroom? This is my dilemma, how do I access my audience? There is a sense of irony that in my quest to preach growth mindsets in math, the most likely to listen are those who already have a growth mindset. I feel like my product is in danger of preaching to the choir, so how do I push the borders of my audience? This goes back to Clarke. How do I design my product in a way that it is widely accessible, even to people who might not frequent educational blogs? Google Forms - El Dorado of surveys Google really has spoiled me as an educator. I have a hard time imagining what it would be like to have been a teacher when I was a middle school student. Google is completely free, allows for paperless resource sharing in an instant, allows for collaboration with a built in participation record, the list goes on and on. Even just the ability to get a new resource to my students during class time, no TA or copy machine needed is incredible. One of the incredible, free, and educationally revolutionary Apps is Google Forms. It is a resource I do not use as much as the “flagship” Apps like Drive, Docs, and Slides, but still one that adds a ton of value to my classroom. I can use it to easily and quickly compile student information from a student friendly survey into a Google sheet (no more parent info forms on paper at open house!). I can use it for quick exit tickets, for project feedback, or even as a content assessment (with the help of add-ons like Doctopous or Goobric). They are faster to make than designing a reflection form or survey in a word processor and the responses are easier to organize. The only real drawback in that it does not connect automatically to my gradebook in my school’s Learning Management System. I can restrict access to accounts on my network only, allow multiple submissions, or password protect my Form with the right Add-ons. I can encrypt the results in a Google Sheet if needed (and this was incredibly useful during my action research). Really, it is a user friendly tool and that can create valuable content in a matter of minutes. I probably don’t use it as often as I should. In the future in my practice, I might like to incorporate more content assessments. With the right add-ons, I can easily share the results from assessments with students and parents. The amount of feedback I can quickly give out is incredible. We have also begun implementing home cooked PrBL units in my district. I can continue to use Forms to get feedback from students on how those units can be improved in terms of clarity or engagement. I have even had students design their own surveys to gather data from their peers, to create authentic statistics problems. I could take that even further. Forms could be used for peer evaluation, for finding peer tutors, all sorts of potential applications. My options are only limited by my creativity (or ability to look up what others have created). In terms of my research, if I had to do it again, I would use forms even more if it were possible. I had to be offline for much of my action research due to state testing. It would have been so much faster and easier to use forms than to do all my analysis by hand on all the paper copies. Maybe this is the millennial in my talking, but I can mark things so much fast on a computer in the right programs! Moving forward with my capstone product, I feel like I can use Google Forms in many ways. I can use it to build a differentiated mailing list (if I want to go in that direction) or as a way to submit questions or comments directly to me. I can use it to get feedback on specific parts of my website, perhaps by linking a form after articles or blog posts. Like in the classroom, the possibilities are endless. When you add in the organizational and productivity add ons, like Autocrat, you get even more value. What really sticks out to me about Forms that puts it well above other surveying resources is how interconnected it is to the rest of the Google Apps. I can export to spreadsheets, have charts automatically made, have responses put into premade Google Doc templates, use add ons to mass e-mail based on responses. It even goes beyond Google. Google Forms connects to Google Sheets which is used by infographic design websites to quickly create graphics. I feel like the real treasure of Google is its interconnectedness. |
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