Reflection 6715

The assignment I completed throughout weeks 6 and 7 of the course demonstrates what I have learned throughout the course. In my assignment, I developed a plan to implement a technology (online learning module) to help my students reach certain learning objectives. I think the plan demonstrates that I can effectively defend the use of a technology in my classroom to promote student learning. I have learned reasons that these technologies will help students, and am able to backup my argument for their implementation.
I plan to look at any emerging technologies with a more critical eye, and ask myself the following questions:
• How will this technology change my classroom?
• What technology is this replacing?
• Will this technology benefit student learning more than the one it is replacing?
• What kind of training will I need to successfully use this in the classroom?
• How can I convince others that this is a worthwhile technology?
• Does this support the student as a 21st century learner? How so?

I think these questions are important to answer to determine the validity of the new technology. I also think it will be important to gather a group of a few colleagues to help me lead the adoption of the technology in our school.

Online Learning Presentation

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Online learning

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Reflection 6714

This course has taught me a great deal about differentiation, universal design for learning, and using technology to implement the aforementioned. The Differentiation Station social network itself was a perfect example of how to differentiate instruction, using technology. I am thinking of creating cooperative learning groups and having each group make their own social networking site so that they can bounce ideas off each other through this. As they are working on a project, they can post relevant links, ideas, or questions. They can engage in a chat outside of school to collaborate.
As far as the resources my classmates have shared with me, there is a great deal of websites on our own networking site that I have found beneficial to helping me understand the concepts in this course. I will use these sites to pull ideas for activities in my classroom.
I will immediately change the way I use laptops in my classroom. When I have the students work on laptops, I typically have them all working on the same assignment. Instead, I will now have them use them to work in stations, depending on what they need help with.

Reflection

Throughout this course, I have learned a more focused way of thinking. I think that the GAME plan provides a sound structure for development as a teacher, and for teaching my students as well.

Developing my GAME plan throughout the course via my blog allowed me to hone in on a few standards that I would otherwise not know how to improve on by myself. It is a great step by step process. I realized that it was important to evaluate and monitor my progress throughout the process. This helped me achieve my goal in improving in the NETS standards. The blog allowed me to share my ideas with my colleagues, and for them to provide me with feedback that could improve what I was doing. This collaborative piece was fundamental. I gained a lot of great insight from others that I would not have heard had I not integrated this technology. All of these new revelations will deeply affect my teaching as anything I set out to do will now follow a process. Most importantly, any goals I set for myself or my students will really be monitored and evaluated.

I am going to immediately implement a reflective piece at the end of each quarter for my students. At the beginning of the marking period, I will have students set personal goals. Midway through, I am going to have the monitor and adjust to see how they are doing to reach the goal. Then, at the end of the quarter, they will evaluate their progress.

GAME plan with Students

When it comes to helping my students meet the technology standards outlines in the NETS-S, I think it would be great to use the GAME plan. Take, for example, NETS-S standard 1b, “Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology. Students: create original works as a means of personal or group expression.”
To accomplish this standard with my students, I will first set a goal. The goal could be to have the students develop a digital story that demonstrates the qualities outlined in the standard. My action would be to teach the students how to create a digital story by modeling an example, and handing out directions. I could then let them play with the program and monitor them while they do so. To evaluate the assignment, I will look at their final product. The GAME plan works well for each of the standards, and will help the students become proficient.

Revising my Plan

• What have you learned so far that you can apply in your instructional practice?
• So far, I have learned that keeping parent and student communication simple is one of the best ways to keep it open. Too many sites to remember, or too many links to click through can be a turn-off to students and parents who have many other teacher sites to check, and many other things going on outside of school.
  
• I have also seen that participating in learning communities to push technology is challenging, but rewarding
• What goals are you still working toward?
• I am still working on my goal of communicating with parents and students with digital tools. I want to continue to reach out to more people this way.
  
• This Friday, I will work some more on my second goal as I will be attending a workshop on technology implementation
  
• Based on the NETS-T, what new learning goals will you set for yourself?
• I don't think I want to set new goals just yet. I would like to work on the ones I have right now.
  
• If you are not ready to set new learning goals, how will you extend what you have learned so far?
• I am thinking of teaching a technology workshop in the future to colleagues.
  
• What learning approaches will you try next time to improve your learning?
• I think I would like to participate in more online forums next time to gather information about what I am learning
  

Progress towards GAME goals

This week, a great deal of progress has been made towards my GAME goals. I continued to work with the school based professional development committee, and we finished our plan for next year's school professional development. In our plan, we have included school wide goals of: improving in writing, improving problem solving skills, implementing more technology, and implementing cooperative learning amongst our students. This is a big step towards working on standard 5a, and I think is quite effective towards helping meet this standard.
This coming week, on the 12th, I will be attending two in-district technology workshops to help me learn more strategies to use in my class. I am really looking forward to this! I hope to use this in my instruction immediately.
I am also planning to start experimenting more with the online grading program I use to communicate with parents and students instead of relying on my website. I think that since most people are already familiar with this site and use it often to check grades, this would be a better vehicle to communicate. The program (snapgrades.net) has recently implemented new features for teachers, so I am going to check them out.

Monitoring my GAME Plan

I can say that I have taken baby steps to carry out my GAME plan. For example, I started a class discussion board as a test run. I only did this with two groups of students (grade 7) and we only tried it out for one topic, but I think it was important to do this to become familiarized with the process. I realized through this how much work it is to moderate student comments/posts.

I also already have a website, which includes a lot of the information that I would like to include on my blog to keep students AND parents in the know. I think I will have to find out how many of my parents/students actually view the website to stay abreast of happenings in the classroom.

Finally, I have recently participated in a professional development opportunity to try to promote technology. As part of a recent state mandate, I have volunteered to be part of my school's professional development committee. The people I am working with on this committee and I will use data collected to determine next year's professional development plan for our staff. We will be working on this throughout the next couple of months. I will be trying to provide more technology opportunities for my colleagues, if possible.

I do not plan on modifying my plan, as I still feel the goals I have set are worthy and attainable!

Carrying out my GAME plan

To carry out my GAME plan effectively, I will need a site to host my blog. My district has already setup wordpress for everyone if we would like to use that. I think it would be a good place to start as our technology department would be able to provide support if I run into problems. I would also need information on effective uses of classroom blogs. Perhaps someone has done a research study on this already? It would certainly be beneficial for me to read up on this, or even talk to colleagues who already have blogs implemented and see what strategies they use. Video would be another great way for me to achieve my goals- I could find video tutorials on making a classroom blog, uses for a blog, or videos on the topics that I would like to attend workshops for. I have already explored the blogs of some other colleagues to see what types of things they are doing with them. I am going to try to also contact district supervisors to see if they could recommend blogs of teachers in the district who I may not know.

My GAME plan

The first standard that I do not feel completely confident in is, “3b. collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation”. In order to improve how I feel about this standard, I think I would like to experiment with a class blog. Because I have several different levels (Italian 5, 6, 7, and 8), I think I would start small and practice with just one level until I become more comfortable. The blog would include things like a class calendar to show upcoming assignments, links to websites for practice, a question of the day that relates to the topic we are studying, and maybe a cultural fact of the day, etc. Although I already have a site, I think a blog would allow for students to communicate with each other and collaborate more. My only concern with a blog is that I would have to moderate comments, and it would take up a lot of time to do so with over 100 students. I would also include a link to student grades on the blog. Parents and students could use it to check overall averages, missing assignments, etc. I would monitor my progress by the participation in the class blog. Over time, if the percentage of students who participate in the blog increases, I would think that the blog is a successful one, assisting in improving student success. In order to extend my learning, I would like to spend some time on other classroom blogs to find more ideas or ways to improve the one I create.

Next, I know I need work with the standard, “5a. participate in local and global learning communities to explore creative applications of technology to improve student learning.” My goals to strengthen this indicator include attending more workshops or professional development opportunities where I can share ideas with colleagues on implementation of technology. I can request release time from my administrators, or suggest topics for them to teach us about during professional development days in-district. Once I attend these meetings, I will make it a goal to implement one new thing learned in my own classes. After implementing these new strategies, I will observe how effective they are with my students, and adjust/modify my lesson from there.

Reflection: EDUC 6721

Throughout the course, I think the most striking revelation that I had about teaching new literacy skills is that as much as we think our students (who have grown up with technology at their fingertips) know how to navigate technologies well, they really do not. Despite how much access our students may have to computers and the Internet, they still need a lot of training in reading and analyzing the information they find. In fact, literacy skills that were taught in the past do not suffice for them. It is necessary that new literacy skills are taught in schools as well as traditional ones for students to be successful now.

Going forward, I would like to incorporate more lessons where I focus on new literacy skills. Prior to engaging in an activity that involves technology, I plan to do a lesson that focuses in on how to appropriately locate and evaluate resources. The knowledge gained in this course will give me the tools to teach students the “how” in locating valuable resources.

I would like to seek out professional development opportunities (workshops) so I can grow as far as teaching literacy skills. I think it would be beneficial to attend workshops on inquiry based design. I could also seek out professionals within my own district for this. I know that one of the supervisors has everyone in his department use inquiry-based lesson planning. I am going to seek him out and see if he has any materials I can use.

Reflection: Final Blog Post

Upon reflection of my "Personal Theory of Learning", I found that not too much about my thinking had changed. In my theory, I talked about the importance of creating a classroom environment where the student is exposed to a variety of learning acitvities to practice a skill and as much of the target language as possible. It was important to me to create a classroom setting that mimicked the country we were studying as far as the amount of the target language spoken. I think I would add to my theory the importance of having the students make connections throughout these lessons. It is important to connect student to student, student to text, student to teacher, and student to world. This will make the material studied more relevant.

I would like to immediately implement some of the ideas that I came up with throughout the course to my instructional practice. For example, I would like to use VoiceThread as part of a culminating assessment in one of my units. This will enhance my students' learning because they will be working collaboratively on a VoiceThread of their own then by extension, commenting on others' threads to critique, or ask questions. I would also immediately implement Quia.com to provide immediate feedback to students when they are practicing a skill. Finally, I would like to implement blogging in my class to extend the lesson outside of the classroom. Students could ask questions or discuss ideas after the lesson and this will hopefully solidify the content for them.

As far as the long-term goals are concerned, I hope to keep searching for new technologies, and try to modify my existing lessons to be more student-centered and to include technology. I plan to accomplish the former by joining in teacher discussion boards on the internet and also collaborating with the technology department in my school to keep abreast of new technology that can be implemented in my lessons. I hope to accomplish the latter little by little. Perhaps each month, I will choose a lesson and try to modify it to include one of the tools learned in this course or that I have found on my own to make the lesson more engaging.

Cooperative Learning and Social Theories

Social learning theories believe in the following:

• people learn by observing and imitating
• reality is constructed through humans' activity: it does not exist until people create it
• learning is a social process
• knowledge can change when new knowledge is created (connectivism)

Cooperative learning strategies support social learning theories. In cooperative learning, students are involved in a social process. They interact with each other in groups to learn. Students can pick up something from someone else in their groups and add that to their knowledge pool (observing and imitating).

In multimedia projects, students in the cooperative learning group can divide up the work and, depending on each other, come together to make a whole final product. Each student masters a task and can then teach the rest of the group about what they researched in a jigsaw fashion. Again, knowledge here is social.

Voice Thread: Problems in the Classroom

http://voicethread.com/share/571379/

Constructivism/ Constructionism Projects

Powerpoint is a great tool for the Constructivism/ Constructionism theories to be applied. It is one of my favorite programs to use with my students for assessments. I think any technology that the students create a product with applies to this theory. I also like to use podcasting with iMovie and garageband with my students. You can do so much more media wise with these. What are some other technologies you use in your class that can apply to this theory?

Constructivism/ Constructionism

The constructivist constructionist learning theory is centered around a basic principle that learners construct their own knowledge actively. It is believed that people learn best doing hands on activities, by making something. Through that creating, the learner makes his or her own experience. There are several ways for the learner to be successful in the constructivist constructionist learning: active learning, solving authentic problems, collaboration with others, discovery and inquiry, viewing many perspectives to the same issue, and ownership.

The instructional strategies presented in this week’s learning theories involve generating and testing hypotheses. The tasks that are presented in the book correlate to constructionist constructivist learning theory because they actively involve the learner in creation of something to help them learn.

In the systems analysis task, students are involved in discovery and inquiry where they predict what would happen if a situation changes. Using research, background knowledge, and any other resources they may have available to them, the students would be creating their own knowledge and guessing what an outcome would be. The teacher could then confirm their guesses. Problem solving is similar to this in that the students examine different outcomes to an issue.

In historical investigation, the students are involved again in problem solving, discovery and inquiry as they try to come up with a solution to a problem that has not yet been solved.

When students setup an experiment to test their hypothesis in an experimental inquiry task, they are actively engaged in carrying out the experiment. Making and doing an experiment is especially what this theory is about as it involved creating something to learn.

Finally, with decision making, the students are involved in viewing many different perspectives before they come to a conclusion about an issue.

Throughout all of these tasks in the generating and testing hypotheses strategy, the students are learning through making something. They are collaborating with others and sharing ideas, they are taking ownership of their learning. It is truly a constructivist constructionist theory.

Cognitive Learning

Cognitive learning theory assumes that learning proceeds as learners transform short term knowledge to long term knowledge. Prior knowledge is a very important determinant in what students learn in this theory. Students who have more initial knowledge and more prior knowledge learn new information much better. The instructional strategies described in this week’s learning resources are perfect to satisfy this theory.

It is important that cues are used by the teacher to help the learners activate prior knowledge about the topic at hand. Cues are one of the first steps in the cognitive learning theory process. Questions work in the same way. The teacher may ask a question to activate prior knowledge before introducing new material, or they may ask questions after introducing something to try to help the student remember previous lessons that they can connect the new knowledge to. The more connections the students make, the better it will be for their learning. Advance organizers give students a visual representation of the connections they are making from prior knowledge to new knowledge to the topic at hand.

Using technology to accomplish these strategies makes the process less tedious, and more interactive for the learner. Sometimes, with the use of technology to learn new information, the learner becomes immersed in the topic. (As they would in a virtual field trip.)

Summarizing is another important means of effectively carrying out cognitive learning theory. It would be impossible for students to remember and make a connection to every thing they hear, read, and see in textbooks and in the classroom. However, summarizing is an effective means of stripping away “extra” information and really focusing on what is important. The word processing markup method is another wonderful way for students to literally see what they need and do not need when taking notes.

REFERENCES
Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Behaviorist Learning Theory

The instructional strategies in the learning resources correlate with Behaviorist Learning Theory. In this week’s learning resources, two different strategies were presented: reinforcing effort and homework and practice.

The concept of reinforcing effort is straight from behaviorist learning theory. The theory is built on the two concepts of reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcing effort highlights the part of the operant conditioning idea. When a positive behavior is shown by a student, behavior theory says the teacher should reinforce it. “Technology makes it easier for students and teachers to track the effects of effort and facilitates more immediate feedback” (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malinoski, 2007, p.156). When a student keeps track of their effort in a chart like the one shown in Figure 8.1 (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malinoski, 2007, p.157), and the teacher gives immediate feedback, the student’s positive effort is immediately reinforced, therefore encouraging the student to continue the positive behavior. A positive, encouraging response from the teacher is the desired response to motivate the student to continue the positive effort.

Homework and practice are designed to give the student a review of a concept taught in school as well as help the students expand their skill level. When a student completes their homework, and is given immediate and constructive feedback on it, they are very likely to complete it again.

REFERENCES
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Bridging learning theory, instruction, and technology. Baltimore: Author.

Orey, M. (Ed.). (2001). Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Reflection: 6701

This course has helped me develop my technology skills because it allowed me to experiment with new computer programs that I had not used in the past, or knew very little about. Though I had experimented with podcasts in the past, I did not know anything about Audacity, and using it in this class has given me better ideas to developing podcast assignments. I have also learned how to update and manage blogs and wikis. I have so many ideas for implementing either a blog or wiki within my department or in my classroom.

This course has opened my eyes even more to the importance of making my classroom a student/ learner-centered classroom. Because students have access to information in so many ways other than their textbooks, they may come in with knowledge prior to it being brought up in the curriculum, or they may go online to research a topic and find information that causes them to question what they have heard in school. As educators, we have to be prepared with not just the knowledge that backs our curriculum, but we need to know how to adapt to our 21st century learners. Moreover, we need to address 21st century skills in our classrooms. Our students should not JUST be learning about our content, but also real-world skills. How many of us teach how to determine what information on the internet is valid and what is not? How many teachers encourage students to check the information they find against more than one source? Who encourages collaboration in their classroom? It’s imperative that teachers move from a teacher-centered class to establish and teach these important 21st century skills that students will need when they are out of school.

I can continue to expand my knowledge of incorporating technology in several ways. One of these is to continue with this masters’ program. Just two classes have sparked so many new ideas in my head for future performance-based assessments, activities, and homework for my class. I would like to create a department wiki for the world language department in my district, so that the teachers can collaborate and share materials and ideas for different units. I know this may take a while, but I hope to develop this over the next school year and train my colleagues to contribute to it. I foresee some challenges with this because I know many people in my department are resistant to technology despite repeated attempts to use it. I plan to utilize a department meeting or two to spearhead this project.
I would also like to attend professional development days that center around incorporating technology in my field.
Finally, I plan to utilize blogging in my classroom. I think I can use a class blog to create a study guide. One of my colleagues assigns a student each day to do a class report the next day that summarizes the day’s class, but I could assign someone to post to the blog notes from the day or answers to handouts, so that by the end of the unit, the students can have a study guide.

My answers have changed from the start of the course on the survey. I am starting to collaborate more with my students on technology where before I did not at all. It turns out that many of them are very helpful with troubleshooting and have great ideas for ways to incorporate technology in the class. I have also reached out to other teachers in my district to try to learn more about using technology in the classroom. I feel I have certainly grown throughout the course.

Students and Tech