EDUC-6714-UDL APPLICATION

Teaching in today's classroom seems to require constant adaptation and renewal of ideas and concepts in the classroom. To assist in this effort, I have included a PowerPoint presentation and student video example to support the trend towards using technology in the classroom to assist and aid students with 21st-Century Skills.

Example Student Interest Survey

Out of School Activities:

1. What do you like to do in your free time?

2. What do you usually do after school?

3. What are your favorite games?

4. Do you like making things? If so, what?

5. What special tools or playthings do you have at home?

6. Do you have pets? If so, what?

7. Do you collect things? If so, what? 



8. If you could have 3 wishes, what would they be?

9. Did you ever wish you were someone else? If so, who?

10. Are you afraid of some things? If so, what? 



11. About how many hours a day do you watch TV during the week?

12. What TV programs do you like? 



13. About how many hours a day do you listen to the radio during the week?

14. What type of radio programs do you like?

15. How often do you attend movies? 

18. What movies have you liked?

16. Do you play with computers? If yes, explain.

17. Do you like to read? If so, what kind of reading?

18. Do you like comic books? If so, which ones?

Additional Comments:

Reflecting on my GAME Plan

I enjoyed creating the GAME plan for my Video Broadcast Journalism class. The ideas and tips provided over the past several weeks have brought new ideas and concepts I can implement to keep my students engaged in the lessons and use the technology to enhance their learning. I found new websites that I can use for my classes that address social concerns and issues that my students will be working on. With the start of the new school year, I am fortunate to have received new computers, including iMacs, along with new high definition cameras. With the new technology, my students should be able to produce quality videos.

Having the new technology, my students will be able to create numerous instructional and informative videos that can be shared with other classes and the community. Revisions to my GAME plan will be made when necessary. The research part of the GAME plan will most likely change as I implement this lesson in the future. Many web sites change and the content of the sites change. I will have to stay on top of my own research before assigning the lesson to students.

Many of the videos that my classes will produce will be student driven; therefore, their creativity and ideas will need to be addresses. Having an open dialog with my students and collaborating with them will probably make modifications to the original GAME plan. I have already taken steps to change some habits of mine with regards to technology integration in my course. I am going to have students save all work to the external hard drives and create DVD’s that show all their work. They will keep all their work organized and at the end of the semester, they will have an opportunity to create a portfolio of all work that is burned to a DVD.

Integrating technology as well as problem-based learning, social networking, collaboration, and digital storytelling with my curriculum is already taking place. I have a class Intranet web site being designed and built so that my students can collaborate and share ideas and work during school. Outside of school, many of my students collaborate through a facebook page for class that a student created so that they can share and inform. I feel fortunate to teach what I do because it will allow me the opportunity to create many digital stories that can address cross curricular courses, create “how to” instructional guides, address concerns, and allow the students to be creative with their own technology skills.  

Update to my GAME plan, week 4, EDUC-6713

Thank you to my colleagues for providing some great feedback and links to other sites for information that can assist me in the pursuit of getting some things changed in the school district that I work for. I know that I am facing an uphill battle, however, some information shared by you has opened-up new possibilities and ideas.

In an effort to continue my request that the school district allow blogs and wikis, I plan to share some comments posted, and will leave identities anonymous. I will show the powers to be that technology surrounds us all and should be embraced and used in appropriate fashions when and where appropriate. I do not feel that I need to modify my plan at this time, but will continue to surge forward with my request.

I have learned that the district I work for appears to be going in the opposite direction with respect to using blogs and wikis as to those of my colleagues in this course. It seems to me that there are no major issues from other districts with allowing this type of communication tool in a classroom environment from other districts and therefore, should be granted for my courses.

The big question is, how to you convince the bureaurcracy of the district to make changes? It seems to me that a lot of policy is put in place from educators who have not been in the classroom for many years, thinking that the policy is the best for everyone. It is frustrating, and I am seeking help from anyone who can give advice.

Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer, (2009), state, “Use blogs to achieve an instructional goal. Blogs can help students practice and demonstrate different styles of communication, especially through writing” (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). Having a blog for my class will not only help me, it will help my students and their parents see what they are learning and how they are applying their skills with the projects that they are working on.

Reference:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom

            use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc., Custom ed.). Belmont, CA:

            Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

GAME Plan Week - 3 EDUC 6713 Integrating Technology Across the Content Areas

The intended learning strategy I would like to incorporate into my next student activity is the use of affective networking. Affective networking, as stated in Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use by Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer, states: “By offering choices of media and tools within the scope of your required content, you are supporting students’ affective networks” (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). A valuable resource I am going to pursue is access to a classroom blog or wiki page. Currently, my school district blocks access to such sites and I feel that having an online collaborative tool would be beneficial to student learning.

To get started on this process, I will begin with my department chair with the request and see what happens. I already have the technology in place to allow this to happen, I feel that the technology should and can be used to help the students socially interact about class related issues and topics. I will do some background research on other districts in the metro area that allow teachers to have a classroom blog or wiki and share my findings with whom ever makes the decision on these matters.

By having a classroom blog or wiki page, my students will be able to share what they have been able to accomplish, ask questions, etc. to help each other out with course work. They are already doing this through social media sites such as facebook, but I feel that a class site to discuss specific items related to an assignment or project would be appropriate and should be allowed.

I am reaching out to my fellow colleagues about this issue. Have any of you been successful with a classroom blog or wiki site? Have any of you run into issues from the local school or school district about creating one?  I plan to start this process next month when school starts back and classes begin. Any help on the issue would be greatly appreciated.

Reference:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful

            Classroom use: A standards-based approach. (Laureate Education, Inc.,

            Custom ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

My GAME Plan

My GAME plan: Video Announcements

NETS-T standard 1. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

Teachers use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments.

a.  promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness.

NETS-T standard 4. Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility.

Teachers understand local and global societal issues and responsibilities in an evolving digital culture and exhihit legal and ethical behavior in their professional practices.

c. promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information.

These are two standards that can help strengthen my confidence in my vdieo broadcast course. In order to work on the these two standards, I will develop a video production lesson plan that requires criticial thinking and self-direction from my students. After modeling how students will plan, storyboard, film and edit, I will assign the students to small groups and give them several topics to choose from. The topics will be about public service annoucemnets.

Students will promote and model appropriate public service announcements that affect their everyday lives. They will address the importance of their announcement through a video commercial. During the process, I will address with the students the importance of digital citizenship and responsibility.

I will monitor student progress on a daily basis to see how the students are progressing with the assignment. When the project is complete and the video are shown to the class, a rubric will be used for evaluation. I will also take the opportunity to have an open dialog with my students to see what worked and what can be improved on. Hopefully through the evaluations and open dialog we can determine if the overall goals of the project were met and if not, how I can change things to meet the goals.   


Reference:
International Society for Technology in Education, (2008). National education standards for teachers. (NETS-T). Retrieved on July 4, 2011 from
http://www.iste.org/Libraries/PDFs/NETS_for_Teachers_2008_EN.sflb.ashx         

Reflection - Learning Theory and Technology Tools

Reflection of my personal theory of learning and use of technology.

I mentioned early on in our course that I use nonlinguistic and cooperative learning style techniques to teach my students. Due to the new technology discovered over the past several weeks, I have expanded on my learning style to include these new technologies. I feel that I have deepened my knowledge on the use of certain technologies in the classroom by experimenting with and implementing the technology with my students. New discoveries and creativity with the technology has made my courses more interactive and fun. I feel as if a completely new window of opportunities has opened up for my courses.

Immediate adjustments that I have made to my courses are the use of VoiceThread and Blogs. I created a class blog for each of my classes so that students and parents know what we are working on and can provide feedback and input. VoiceThread is used in my web design course so that the students can interact with each other’s work and offer up constructive criticism through either voice or text. Using blogs and VoiceThread shows that I am using 21^st- Century skills and that I am keeping current with technology. I have had to adjust my teaching style a little bit to accommodate these new teaching tools, and so far, it has been well worth it.

One long-term goal I have is to help train other staff members on how to use VoiceThread and how impactful its use can be in the classroom. I will make a request to demonstrate this tool during one of our tech tool classes, which are offered once a month on Wednesdays. The teacher in charge of this is always looking for suggestions, so I believe I can get it on the calendar for next school year. Another long-term goal I have is to gain access to social media sites at school for educational purposes. As of now, many sites are blocked by the school district, and even the teachers do not have access to valuable resources such as Wikipedia and Youtube. Gaining access to these sites will be a big help.

VoiceThread - Post

To the students of Walden University, Check it out:
http://voicethread.com/share/1702750/

I ask a simple question as to what we, as educators, can do to get large districts on board with allowing access to some very popular social media sites for educational purposes.

Social Learning Theory - Cooperative Learning

The courses I teach are Web Design and Video and Film. My students are already actively engaged in cooperative learning through the use of multimedia and web site creation. My students are constantly feeding off of each other's ideas and work in small groups. With my Web Design class, I give them a topic, they work in groups of 3, and build web sites based on the criteria of the project. I monitor their progress, give them suggestions and help when needed. Typically, they do more than I expect, as they research together to find new web page features that they can add to their sites. My students are becoming more creative with each assignment and are usually in fierce competition with the other groups in the class. The groups will share with each other, things that they have learned while working together and help each other when needed.

In my Video and Film class, each student group is assigned a director, camera operator, editor, anchor, and script writer. They will rotate these positions throughout the semester, learning the different set of skills needed to be successful with this course. Most students find a role that they prefer, however, I have them experience them all to fully understand what it takes to get a video produced. Some roles are easy, while some are more challenging. This type of cooperative learning embraces social learning theory and it is a successful approach to get my students to understand and learn the curriculum that I teach in both my Web Design and Video and Film courses.

Constructionist Learning Theories:

I agree that instructional strategies can and should be tied in with a constructionist learning theory. Students today are more technology fluent than many teachers in the classroom. We need to allow our students to be creative and explore the technology to create artifacts of their own after being taught how to do something. Allowing them to either work independently or in small groups will allow students to feel more comfortable with technology and gives them an opportunity to build on their prior knowledge to create their own examples. Teachers need to take a step back sometimes from their lecturing and allow their students to collaborate with each other and use technology in a method that embraces the topic of the lecture and then produce something that can be presented that demonstrates their understanding of the topic.

Using PowerPoint, Excel with graphs, Adobe Suite applications, etc. can all be used as resources that the students can use to create items that they can call their own that demonstrates prior knowledge and understanding. Working in small groups to accomplish this reinforces effort, critical thinking and understanding of the topic. Students feed off of each other’s thoughts, ideas and interpretations to create information that they can present back to the class and teacher.

I am fortunate to teach out of a lab all day and have the resources needed to accomplish this type of learning strategy. Teachers that do not have this privilege should try and get into a lab frequently, or use the technology in the classroom such as smart boards, projectors, etc. that the students can take turns using in groups and then report back when finished. Allowing time to use technology is also important. Too much time and students will drift away from the task at hand. Too short of time, and the concept of using technology to teach a lesson might not be achieved. Rehearsal of the use of technology is important and our students are already ahead of us.

Cognitivism in Practice

This week, I got to review several different instructional strategies that correlate with the principles of cognitive learning theory. In the classes that I teach, and can see a better way to use concept maps that will help my students with their understanding. The concept maps that are on-line and interactive with students will not only reinforce the material that they have already researched, but it will help them build on their prior knowledge to expand on the central concept or node and create a detailed concept map that they can then review from before be assessed over the information. Many of us are visual learners and seeing how the information flows helps retain that information for later retrieval.

In an effort to move all classrooms into the today's technologically savvy environment, this type of interactive concept is great for teachers and students to use. It does not necessarily have to be used for reviewing before an assessment, it can be used to start brain-storming ideas, building on prior knowledge, etc. Having the students interact with a concept map is a good method to keep students engaged, on task, and creative. There are many web sites that offer these tools and many are free. I believe that interactive concepts maps can be used in any discipline and helps reinforce the use of technology in the classroom.

Reinforcing Effort

An analysis of how instructional strategies correlate with the principles of behaviorist learning theories. I do believe that through reinforcing effort in the classroom, teachers are delivering positive reinforcement instead of negative reinforcement that steers student behavior in the right path. Through a stimulus-response method, teachers are encouraging behavior that investigates the mental and psychological processes of the students we teach.

Behaviors are learned habits and understanding how these habits are formed will better prepare teachers in the classroom when delivering curriculum to students. Through positive reinforcement efforts such as smiling back at students, contacting parents about good work, talking with other teachers about student success, etc. student behavior is stimulated and punishment is not typically necessary at this point. However, if teachers do not respond to student success or use negative reinforcement, student behavior might be unacceptable which could force teachers to use punishment to decrease the frequency of student behavior.

Using reinforcing efforts to promote positive student behavior can be successful for any teacher as long as the teacher understands how to use this method correctly. Teachers might want to consider contracts for students in the classroom. Violation of the student contract would lead to consequences and if students are made aware of the contract and consequences in advance, most students will behave in a positive, friendly manner.

Some instructional strategies that teachers can use that support behaviorist learning theory are reinforcing efforts and homework and practice. Reinforcing effort can be achieved by giving students rubrics in advance of a group project or student task to identify what effort and achievement look like. The rubric can be generated specifically for each task and can be quickly created in excel or publisher. Rubrics are a good tool to use that allows students to see the correlation between their grade and the effort they put into their work. Homework and practice is good for reinforcing what was learned in the classroom. Using the Microsoft Office Suite is a good technology tool to use for homework and practice. Not only can students generate typed notes from their hand written notes, which helps retain information as they type it, they can also research and generate graphs and other features through the office suite. Using multimedia software and online educational games in correlation with homework and practice will most likely engage students more positively with reinforcing what they have learned. They are using applications that they are comfortable with and typically gives immediate feedback to the student.

Of course, not all students learn the same way and teachers all teach differently. Using the technology made available in an appropriate, positive manner to educate our students will help shape positive behavior from our students. Hopefully, today's students will take advantage of what they have made available to them and put it to good use and continue to explore and develop their learning throughout their lives.