Share any thinking, new design steps, progress, challenges, and/or successes you have experienced during this course. How have you evolved as an innovative thinker?
One of my biggest challenges this semester was creating a driving question that I "thought" I already knew the answer to. I thought I knew exactly what would motivate my students and I tried utilizing that knowledge to implement a new tool with my students. As it turns out, my students REALLY disliked the tool and really disliked creating videos that involved their own faces in the video. I was shocked and overwhelmed with how I was going to mold this into a capstone project so close to the end of the school year. I thought that I had failed. As it turns out, I realized I had been doing mini action research on motivating digital tools this entire school year. Every time I implemented a new tool in my classroom, I talked to students, asked them what they liked and disliked. I gave them surveys throughout the year to find out more. These mini action research projects led me to realize that one single tool was not going to be the key to motivating my students. It truly is a toolkit of tools that motivate my students. If a teacher only uses one digital tool all year, the novelty and magic of that tool will wear off. A blended technique where the teacher crafts each lesson and creates a unique learning experience with a variety of digital tools is key. I will admit, this has been one of the most frustrating semesters because I constantly second guessed myself, felt that I was doing things wrong or was not getting the answers that I expected from my student.s. I have been trying to do a lot more end user work with my students to find out more about their needs and what motivates them. That is what I am most proud of this semester.
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I feel like I am gaining a little bit of momentum this week. My students used flipgrid again and the results were so much better. I am going to implement flipgrid at least once a week over the rest of the school year to be able to collect stronger data from my students. Since we had only used the tool for a limited amount, I felt like the data was not accurate.
I am narrowing down my ideas to focusing on the motivating factors of posting student work for peers to see. I want to also get into standardizing peer feedback but I am worried about making my project too broad. I want to try to focus on making a strong toolkit for my students next year as well as other teachers at my site who want to start using flipgrid and padlet as a digital strategy for motivating students. I spoke with a few teachers at my site this week and there was agreement that students need to learn how to express themselves not only in written format but also verbally. My students were working outside on creating their flipgrid responses this week so we received a lot of attention from teachers on campus. I am happy with the revisions to my project. Even though this new avenue does not have a lot to do with my original research on digital literacy, it is another passion that I have for my students and in my classroom. I can see some connections now that we are discussing transliteracy. My goal of the digital literacy lessons and unit was to help student analyze media online. However, this is only part of what they need to be able to do as a 21st century learner. They need to not only be able to critically consume information online but also create media to share with a larger (hopefully one day global) community. In my opinion "technology in the classroom" is no longer a buzzword. It seems as though the majority of classrooms are becoming 1:1 or BYOD classrooms. With this increase in access to technology came with it a lot of learning for teachers. Teachers needed to learn (and still learn) how to leverage the technology so that we are not just using the chromebooks or other devices simply to use them but to use them in a way that expands learning opportunities for students.
I appreciated how the Tpack video explained that the flow of information is so much faster now that we have more access to technology and with things like social media. We are never going to stop that steady fast flow of information. As teachers we need to equip our students with the skills to be able to navigate the vast amounts of information that can be found online. We also need to teach knowing that all of this information is out there and can be accessed at a few clicks of the keyboard. We have so much more content available to ourselves and our students online. I think we need to design learning experiences that utilizes this content online and also create learning experiences where students can practice 21st century skills that they will be using in the future workforce. As for prototyping, I fully understand the value of looking at who your end user will be of a product and also testing and revising your model several times. As a science teacher, I teach my students to create models of what they think is going on in science and continue to come back to it with new information and revise their model. In a way, prototyping is the same thing for us as teacher researchers. The part that I am truly struggling with at the moment is figuring out how my original action research project is going to turn into some type of product. I am also worried that I am almost racing a clock to test and collect data in my classroom with the end of the year quickly approaching and so many standards that I still need to teach my students. I am worried that my decision in a product or project may come too late. Alice Keeler - Level Up With Badges
Bored to Badges
Badge your classroom How To Motivate Students in the Online Learning Environment What Digital Literacy Looks Like In A Classroom So-Called “Digital Natives” Not Media Savvy, New Study Shows To start off.....I apologize if this blog post is all over the place, but my thoughts and reflections are also all over the place! There is a definite connection between some of the readings we have been assigned. I am seeing the biggest connection between Dervin's writing and the SITE model reading we added this week. Both of these readings focused on learning about our end user or in our cases our "learners" or students. Both of these models focus on learning about our users motivations and current skills in order to help them bridge a knowledge gap and achieve a goal.
In reflecting on my own teaching practice, I know that I often dive right into a unit or lesson and for the sake of time, push aside a pretest where I can see where my students are at. In reading the texts from this class, I can now see how important that pretest is. Having spent 4 years at the junior high school level teaching a Career Exploration class, I have a pretty good idea about what motivates our students. So many of the students reported that they wanted careers that involved fame and recognition, or for others it was careers where they were seen as helping others or the world around them. I can see how this knowledge can be useful in creating products or lessons for my students. In the last year I have implemented many projects where students put their final product on display for not only their own class, but all of my class periods. I have used products like padlet where students can post their final work to a more authentic audience than just their teacher. Tools like flipgrid, where students have to record their voice and have it be viewable to their peers also pushes students into a zone where they are motivated to show what they know. I have found that students put a lot more effort into something that their peers will see and evaluate. This gives me the idea that maybe I want to develop a better peer feedback product for students to analyze each others work on sites like padlet or flipgrid. The site model reading also made it clear that students learn much better when it is in context or when they can apply their new knowledge to the real world. This makes me think that methods like project based learning in a blended classroom are highly effective when the topic relates to the learners in the class. I was very interested in the SITE reading that described learners as autodidacts. I found myself pondering if I thought that my students fit this description of someone who can learn on their own without a teacher. I do think that today's middle school students can find and learn almost anything online. They can find information with a few quick clicks on the computer or their smart phone and watch a youtube on the topic. I think our learners are more and more autodidacts but they are not aware of it. My dilemma is still trying to decide what my final project/capstone will be. My research was about digital literacy and I developed a week long lesson for students but I think that it needs some modification to fit the needs of my learners better. One thing I discovered during the unit was that students had learned some of those skills previously but were not implementing it in my class. One route I could take with my capstone would be to develop some kind of recognition tool like a digital badge that students could display on their profile, which would meet their motivations for peer recognition. Another choice would be to develop some procedures and systems for posting student work to websites like padlet and also developing tools for students to use to evaluate their peers and give strong comments. Who is the audience you want to address for the remaining two semesters?
What are your initial ideas for where you might go in addressing the challenge of creating a resource (the “resource” will evolve into your Capstone project/product) to influence others and share your knowledge & research based on early readings of Dervin, Baggio and your beginning readings in Clark?
CLARK
3 core ideas from Clark
DRIVING QUESTION
4 keys ideas from Dervin
At this point I am having a difficult time relating Dervin to Baggio. One connection I saw was on page 6 of chapter 1 in the Baggio book. It mentions that adults need to know why they are learning something and their experiences play a role in their learning. Adults have a strong sense of self and make their own decisions about learning. I think this relates to wahat Dervin was suggesting for focusing on the user or the actor in your research (which could be children or adults) and also understanding that all of our actors/users have their own different experiences and learning styles they are bringing to our classroom and have a different way of making sense of content and information. Completing the action research in my classroom last semester reminded me a lot of doing cycles of inquiry but in a much more formal manner. My first teaching job was at a high school and we often completed cycles of inquiry in our classrooms. We would identify a problem or area that we wanted to improve and then we would perform an action and evaluate how well it solved the problem. We would then decide if we would want to perform a second cycle on the same problem or identify a new problem. I sincerely enjoyed collecting the data that I did from my action research project. It was interesting to be able to see trends in the data amongst my 160 students. It was very challenging to conduct the research required for the paper we wrote. There had not been very much research performed on students digital literacy skills. Moving forward, I much preferred the more casual cycle of inquiry. Writing this blog made me realize that even though I do not write 18 page papers in my classroom, I am conducting cycles of inquiry and mini action research projects weekly if not daily in my classroom. There are always problems that we identify with a specific student, a specific content standard or even a classroom management challenge. As a teacher we ask other teachers, read some articles on the topic and make a plan moving forward. We then reflect on how well our actions worked in solving the problem. In my opinion, teachers are experimenters and researchers on a daily basis. The thing that has stood out the most to me from the reading of Dervin is her focus on the researcher focusing on the user. Researchers should use methods and language that is familiar to the user. I think this is so important to our research as teachers. I often give out surveys to my students, even before this class, to collect data on how students liked or disliked a certain unit, tool, or method in my classroom. I always tried to put the language in the simplest forms so that the students would feel comfortable sharing with me how they felt. Once I established this culture with my students, they felt much more comfortable and free to share with me constructive criticism that has helped me develop my curriculum. I think surveys like these can be given by teachers to help understand how students are making sense of information or bridging a gap. I gave Brenda Dervin's "From the Minds Eye of the User" 2 reads. I still have a LONG way to go in fully understanding what she has to share about sense making and how this can be used to further my research. As I read through the text I kept trying to think about how this could relate to my classroom and my teaching practice.
On page 64 Dervin explains that studies should include how a user or human actor acquired or made sense of the information. Researchers should not just analyze if an answer is correct or for a certain piece of information. Rather, questions should be asked about how a user made sense of the information or found a piece of information to be accurate. This section stood out to me as a teacher because We should all be interested in learning more about how our students are learning and making sense of the content in our classes, not just the correct answer. As a science teacher, how are my students determining if something is accurate and what criteria are they using to decide if something is not accurate. Dervin suggests that actors are trying to bridge a gap of discontinuity. At the moment I am the human actor who is trying to bridge a gap in understanding sense making. I am now trying to chose the right tactic to bridge that gap. If I can understand sensemaking and overcome the situation I am in right now, I can become a better teacher researcher. I am hoping the conversations that we have in the upcoming classes and future reads of this text will help answer questions that I have and strategies to understand it. Dergin provides several visual examples of this "gap bridging" and shows that it can be linear or more of a cycle. Sense making seems to be mostly tied to data collection. The idea of research interviews was discussed. The research interview is much better at getting into the decision making process that the actor goes through as they try to obtain information and bridge a gap. There are several interviewing methods discussed in the chapter to help get to this type of information during an interview. The sample exemplars were also helpful in seeing how these strategies could be used in research. I was surprised to read that only 40 sense making studies had been conducted at the time that this book was written. As I read through the text, I was trying to make sense of her information by trying to relate it to gaps that my students may have. My research in the last semester was focused on students digital literacy. I came up with this research project because I see many gaps that my students have in their skills and knowledge of how to properly and efficiently use the internet. I would say part of my goal of the pretest I gave my students in my action research project was to identify gaps in their ability to evaluate websites for credibility. I could see how a research interview could have provided me with more information about how students perceived the gap, how they intended to bridge the gap and strategies and tactics that they currently used. |
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May 2018
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