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.
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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. 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. 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. |
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October 2017
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