When considering the usefulness and consequences of using social media as an educational tool I cannot help but refer back to a quote from one of this week’s readings.
Social media can be used to build people up or tear them down. It’s not the tool but the user of the tool that makes a difference. - Jennifer Casa-Todd Social media is a powerful tool. Like any other tool in a teachers arsenal it is up to us to determine how to best utilize social media as a mechanism for helping our students bridge gaps in their understanding. The ethical issues that come with the utilization of social media may seem completely foreign to those who have never used social media in their own lives but when more closely examined I would argue that the issues we face are more familiar. Teaching students how to use tools in positive and respectful ways is nothing new. Given a pencil and paper, some students will focus on taking notes and others will commit to distracting others by drawing inappropriate pictures. Teachers have been helping students to interact in positive and respectful ways since the onset of education; now we are simply changing the platform through which they engage with one another. As a millennial I had the extreme fortune of being in high school in the early 2000s. The tech boom had taken place and many of my peers were fluent in the language of technology. This was the pre-IPhone era, a magical time before students were constantly carrying personal computers in their pockets. Despite a lack of such technology students found ways to pass notes in class, write cheat sheets on the reverse side of their water bottle labels and even pre program their TI-83 calculators with video games so we could play Tetris and Mario in Calculus class. Technology and more specifically social media was not the means to distraction, it was something intrinsic in students. If given a tool to distract oneself and placed in a situation where the student is not stimulated by the activities in the classroom, students will find a way to misbehave. Using social media in our classrooms comes with the caveat that students must be shown how to properly use the tool. Time must be spent familiarizing students not only with the use of different social platforms but also how to engage with others in positive and respectful ways. Teachers must be intentional in their instruction and realize that full digital fluency requires digital citizenship to be at the forefront of every social interaction utilizing educational technology. Social media is a wonderful way to foster communication between students who would normally not be able to collaborate. Thinking of my ELLs and their hesitation when it comes to speaking in class, the use of online platforms that let them communicate digitally using translation software, has given them the confidence to share out ideas in class. Social platforms can also allow students to give feedback to one another in ways that are meaningful to them; likes, comments and shares often to more to boost students confidence than the reward of a high mark on an assessment. Video sharing platforms like Youtube are an amazing way for students to show skills or to learn from skilled posters. There is a world of information online and our students must be shown how to access that material in and outside the context of our specific content. A point to consider when using these platforms as instructional tools is: students are who they are perceived to be by the online community; they sometimes do not have the benefit of being known IRL (In Real Life) so what they post, like and RT speaks volumes about them as people. All to often students forget that their online persona is forever linked to their actual self and is sometimes a more accurate representation of who they are. Students should be held to a different standard of communication because their conversations are eternally preserved online and derogatory comments will follow students far longer than they will remember making them. If I came across inappropriate activity taking place on one of my students profiles outside of the classroom I would make the same considerations as if I were seeing this activity take place in front of me in any other public forum. What is the danger? Who can be negatively affected? What message is the student conveying about themselves? If the student’s activity is not appropriate I would have a conversation with the student, discussing the danger of posting such inappropriate material in a public space. Depending on the severity of the students actions and the potential danger it poses to others, parents and other authorities should be made aware, then it would be up to them to decide further punishment.
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Effective teaching through visual design and development of technical training principles...3/2/2019 All of the readings this week connect to the sense making that our students are constantly doing as they decipher and make sense of the learning activities that take place in our classrooms. While we, as instructors, find value in the content that we are teaching, it is up to us as designers of learning experiences to make engaging and relatable materials for our students (users) so they can effectively process the chunks of information we are disseminating, with the end goal of moving through working memory and into long term memory transfer. Dervin explains how our students reach gaps in understanding and through effective instruction we can help them to bridge those gaps through learning events. Both Baggio, through visual design principles, and Clark, through effective structure of technical training modules, speak to the effective design elements that are required to design teaching tools that will ensure our students are learning at high level on a consistent basis.
Key Points of each reading Qualitative research in information management - Brenda Dervin Underlying Assumptions and Theoretic Foundations
Chapter 4 - What impacts learning?
Chapter 1 - The technology of training
Looking at the CCSS K-12 technology skills scope and sequence I was surprised to see a number of things on the list for secondary students that I am still struggling with understanding. In particular the use of both excel and google sheets in the classroom has been something that I have been meaning to learn for a couple years. Seeing the number of standards based on understanding spreadsheets and appropriate ways to organize and display data, I knew that building a skillset in google sheets was something I had to add to my PLP.
Teaching math and using the lens of my current instruction to determine where I could augment my instruction to address some of the CCSS for technology, I found that there are two major units where I could address many of the standards for technology as they relate to spreadsheets and mathematical application. Statistics unit My statistics unit centers around the collection of data and the various ways that we interact, organize and represent that data to make valid conclusions about real world situations. This unit lends itself so well to the CCSS surrounding spreadsheets and in particular the use of google sheets and Desmos (web based graphing calculator), two powerful programs for working with and displaying data in ways that will help students to understand the data better. For many years I have had students hand calculate measures of centrality like mean, range, and standard deviation but by using formulas in google sheets students will be able to create a quick method for finding these figures for any set of data. In terms of graphing, I had always made my students find the line of best fit by estimating its location in a scatter plot. Using Desmos, students will be able to easily calculate the balance point for a data set and then graph the line of best fit using the graphing tools included in this web app. Geometry unit Incorporating more technology into my geometry unit will certainly address some of the CCSS around drawing two and three dimensional shapes as well as allow me to update my instruction on constructions. I have very little experience with using technology centered geometry tools such a Geogebra or Geometer's sketchpad but I often hear geometry teachers speak of its usefulness for helping students to see certain theorems applied in more meaningful ways. Being that most students are visual learners, allowing them to play around with tools like this might allow them to discover mathematical truths in a more meaningful and authentic way. Constructions is something that I teach very hands on, literally forcing students to use a compass and straightedge to create sophisticated designs. Every year students complain about the quality of the physical tools that I have and are frustrated when those tools fail them. I know that digital tools exist for teaching constructions and those tools will not degrade over time. By switching over to a digital constructions unit all students will have access to the same quality tools and thus access to the same level of understanding via access to the content. I do not want to integrate technology as a means to replace what I am currently doing in the classroom but as a way to increase my capacity to meet students where they currently are. I believe that effective use of technology in the classroom is about showing students how tech tools can take their understanding to higher levels and through effective implementation students can be coached to see the use of technology as an educational tool that will drive their desire to use technology in more effective ways in other areas of their lives. After our discussion on digital literacy and citizenship I began to think about ways that students use technology for unethical purposes in my classroom. I had an experience this year with a group of students turning in work that was solved correctly but not in the manner that I requested they complete the assignment. We were solving systems and I asked students to use a method known as elimination but when their assignments came back to me all of the problems were solved using a method known as substitution. Normally this would not be a big issue but the assignment was intended to help students specifically practice elimination, the method we had most recently learned, so I was confused as to why so many students ignored the directions. After pressing some students I found that they were using an app called PhotoMath to help them complete their assignments. I had to lecture them on proper use of math based apps and how it was important for them to read the directions because the app is only as smart as the person interfacing with it. After talking with other math teachers I discovered that this app is very popular. I decided to download PhotoMath in an attempt to see how I could leverage this app to strengthen my instruction. PhotoMath makes some big promises to students and instructors willing to use it. “Scan math problems for instant results” , “Learn with step-by-step instructions” and “Explore beautiful graphs” are just some of the activities that users can engage with while exploring PhotoMath. The way most students use PhotoMath is by scanning homework problems and then copying down the answers. PhotoMath interfaces with the camera on your device and turns the input into a digital equation which it then solves and provides step by step directions on how the computer arrived to its answer. This process is very intuitive and does not take any time at all to learn. It’s not quite taking a photo but it’s as simple as scanning a QR code - pointing your phone at something and waiting for the device to respond. However, due to the limitations of the scanning technology, I found PhotoMath to be very limited in the types of math problems that it could actually solve. To show these limitations to my students I projected a worksheet that I had created and attempted to use PhotoMath to solve 3 different types of problems; evaluating a function, multiplying binomials and determining if a relation represents a function. PhotoMath was only able to correctly solve one type of problem (multiplying binomials), but it came through on its promise, providing accurate steps and clear explanations for how it solved the problem. In my experience PhotoMath does really well when is is tasked to solve something that is procedurally based and in a format that is acceptable to the limitations of the app design (types of problems that can be solved are listed on the app developers website). PhotoMath does provide very clear instructions and when used as a study tool instead of a replacement for working problems out it can absolutely help students learn procedure. While users are encouraged to create a profile so that PhotoMath can keep track of the problems that they are solving through the app to create a more tailored experience, PhotoMath is unable to think for itself. Users must very clearly understand the instructions of a particular assignment in order to determine if the answers they are being provided are correct. I encouraged my students to use PhotoMath as a way to check answers after having already done the problem themselves, much like an answer key.
In order to manage the reading “The send-making qualitative-quantitative methodology” I applied AVID strategies that I have been teaching for the last four years. I broke the reading down into sections based on the natural chunking that author did with section titles. Within each sections I numbered the paragraphs and wrote a sentence summary at the end of each paragraph. If the paragraph was simply explaining something about the structure of the article then I wrote a brief description of the structure it was indicating. If I came upon a particularly difficult section in the reading and could not find a way to summarize the information in a way that made the text more explicit, I highlighted the section I did not understand and created a question about the material instead. While I found the reading incredibly rich it began quite dense. As the reading continued I began to understand more about the process of sense making. Note taking and further processing allowed me to bridge my own gaps and arrive at what I believe the methodology of sense making is.
My two big takeaways from the reading were:
During the reading I kept thinking back to a question heard in most math classes, “When am I ever going to use this?” This gap-defining question is often a barrier to teachers, preventing us from reaching students most traditionally at risk to failing our courses. For those struggling in their math courses, the work required to be good at something students assume they will never need, is a gap perceived too large to bridge. In the context of my big takeaways this question needs to be addressed on an individual basis in order for the gap to be bridged. Individual circumstances that construct the student must be taken into consideration for the response to be effective. It is undeniable that every single student will need a basic understanding of math in order to enter the workforce or university level studies but the individual desires of the student must be considered to inspire the need to continue past the frustration that math creates. Students looking to simply graduate high school will need 3 years of math credit and so the need to fulfill the graduation requirement could be the gap-bridging motivation they need, while students who wish to pursue a career in engineering will need multiple levels of math past AP Calculus and thus their gap-bridging motivation is the desire to be as prepared as possible before entering university. While sense-making theory attempts to predict the way people bridge gaps, the individual must be taken into account. If I was teaching this content to students I would use many more visual mediums to convey the ideas within the text. To demonstrate the ideas of experienced reality and perception I would use those images that appear to be two different objects and have students debate which one is correct. I would pull in visual representations of the sense-making metaphor to help students understand the gap-bridging process. I would create screencasts explaining the methodology section as it is very dense and students would benefit from a visual and auditory component. To model the sense making metaphor I would have students think of their process for learning a new task and have them detail each step in the process. Students would share out to look for similarities and differences in their processing. I would then have students write skills they would like to learn on note cards and exchange with another student in the room. The students would then have to describe how they would go about learning the new skill they were given using the sense making triangle as a model for each “stop step” in their learning process. As we move ever closer to a fully digitized society the way that students learn is evolving to reflect the larger society. Just as literacy and math procedure are important aspects of a students formation, digital literacy and citizenship are topics that teachers must consider addressing across all content areas, at every stage of a students development.
Researching ways that I could integrate digital citizenship in my classes, keeping in mind that I teach high school Math and AVID, it became apparent that there are many ways I am already incorporating digital citizenship into my courses. Through our current learning management system, ECHO, I have students access my daily agendas which link them directly to trusted sources for math content. I spend a lot of time talking to students about using the internet (google, khan academy, etc) to find help when I am not available. Students often forget that they are able to find reliable tutorials on problems very similar to those we cover in class scattered among their favorite conspiracy VLOGS. The Common Sense education resources highlight that creating responsible digital citizens protects the digital community we must interact with just as responsible citizens protect the communities we live in. As my school moves closer to 1-1 student and device ratios, students could easily find themselves distracted by the proliferation of technological distraction. I think that most educators shy away from the use of technology because they don't think that students can learn to adjust to such distraction. Also, a lot of my peers refuse to engage in online activities because they do not trust the students be appropriate. With resources from Common Sense students will learn to act more responsibly in a digital space. In the high school section of resources there are topics from learning respect for others online privacy to creating online spaces free of hate speech. I think its necessary for any teacher engaging in any collaboration or communication activity with students in an online space to review these procedures with them. The resources cultivated by the Stanford History Education Group encourage teachers to work with students on developing a critical eye when it comes to evaluating sources of information they find on the internet. These resources are especially important for my AVID students who will be going to college next year and who will be expected to gather, synthesize and evaluate information gathered from multiple sources. Most of my students think that the first hit on google is the most reliable course of information and will cite this information to teachers, unchecked. I will absolutely be using the resources from SHEG to review with my AVID students the importance of checking sources, finding reliable content online and determining if a source is trustworthy. Digital citizenship is important because students need to understand that the personality they cultivate online is a reflection of the personality they carry with them in the non virtual world. How many recent stories have we heard about celebrities and politicians haunted by their digital activities from years ago? The digital footprint that our students leave is easily traceable and if they are not careful they can be forever linked to a toxic online presence that restricts them from becoming everything they truly want to be. InnovatED was an amazing teacher led conference for teachers in the NVUSD and surrounding areas. Sessions highlighted the innovation that is taking place in our district and encouraged all attendees to aim for innovation in their own practice.
Keynote - Teach better and work less with CUE craft Keynote speaker Jon Corippo opened the conference by speaking about the CUE craft protocol. The focus of his work is the reduction of time that teachers spend working while simultaneously increasing the creativity that we inspire in our students as they explore our content. Jon highlighted that we are currently experiencing a revolution in education, moving away from pedagogy that valued the ability to remember facts in favor of the ability to create, apply and innovate. Jon used socrative.com which is a tool, like padlet, that collects student work and allows classes to interact with the answers collected. I could use that in my daily practice during warm ups and bell ringer activities where students answer a question in a group forum I can quickly determine if we need enrichment or reteaching based on quickly scanning the answers that I receive. Screencasting made simple - Scott Marsden Screencasting is something that we explored in the first semester of the TU program but by no means have we mastered it. In this session we explored both screencast-o-matic and screencastify, two of the more popular freemium products available. I found screencast-o-matic easier to use and much more customisable. In my own practice I will need to post my lectures but I will also want to have a drawing or paint app open so that I can do math examples as I go through my slide deck. Posting this combination of materials online, students will have a much more comprehensive experience in comparison to simply having access to my lecture notes. This could be a game changer for any students who are habitually absent and need to catch up on lots of missed materials or for students who sit down to do their homework and realize they need a refresher on the material. Another innovative use suggested by the presenter was allowing ELL students to create screencasts so they could rehearse their material and re-record if necessary, instead of having them present in front of the class. Slides into Digital Notebooks - Ethan Pham Ethan Pham presented all of the very impressive work that he has been doing with his 6th grade science curriculum over the course of 3 years. Ethan has developed a system of digital interactive notebooks, hosted through google slides, that have allowed him to go completely paperless in his classes. Ethan’s work was very inspiring and although the front loading to create the materials is daunting, once it is created and students are taught how to use the digital tools, daily activities are completely streamlined. I think that doing math by hand is an important activity that all students must engage with in order to develop deeper understanding of procedure. I am not sure that I will ever want to go completely paperless but it would make perfect sense to convert all of my note taking elements into digital notes that students could access through their google drives. I currently have students take paper notes and then require them to organize notebooks. Students often lose notes and note checks are time sinks. Making a digital alternative to my note taking system would help students to stay organized and provide a resource to them that lasts beyond my class. Google classroom for beginners (Jen Ellison) and advanced (Nicole Langton) The last 2 sessions that I attended were on google classroom. NVUSD will be converting over to google classroom next year and with no experience using this service it was refreshing to see how easy it is to use. I was able to create classrooms and assignments, agendas and announcements in those courses. Google classroom will be able to unite the innovative techniques that I learned throughout the day. In 2017 I was lucky enough to be able to travel to San Diego, CA and visit the campuses of High Tech High. As described in the article, “What does personalized learning mean? Whatever people want it to.” HTH is an amazing demonstration of what fully realized personalized instruction could look like. During my visit I was able to witness student behavior, and teacher instruction that looked worlds apart from what was taking place in my classroom. During my visit I saw students in a digital arts elective working on the creation of a virtual reality framework where they could complete in games of skills with other schools. I saw history classes building boats, actual 10 person boats, with the end goal of having those boats carry students across a body of water. I saw students working in traditional classroom settings, I saw students working in wood and metal shops, I saw students working in open studios and stairwells; despite all of the distraction around them, they were all working hard.
Interviewing students at High Tech High they spoke about how important it was that teachers allow flexibility in demonstrations of understanding. Students highlighted that being able to work collaboratively with their instructor to determine learning goals and unit objectives added to their feelings of relevancy in reference to the required learning materials. I had a million questions about standards, supervision, safety, the transition from high school to college, budgeting and of course CAASPP. How could something like this ever exist in a traditional public school? I was left with the feeling that despite my current feeling of inspiration, back at my site, to many limiting factors would prevent instruction like this from working effectively. Thinking specifically about math, the subject I teach, elements of personalized learning have always been necessary. It is common for some students to excel at the procedural aspects of mathematics, while others fall behind. For every student that understands why we move variables to one side of our equation, why we follow the rise and the run of slope, why we factor and reduce, there are 5 who do not understand the concept of negative numbers, how to undo multiplications or how to add fractions. Most math teachers must create a system of interventions that allow students who need more practice with basic skills the time and space to do so without slowing down the pace of the remaining students. When I think of personalized learning the first thing that comes to mind is Khan Academy. This amazing service includes tutorials and practice problems for a variety of subjects in STEM and beyond. Khan Academy even has the power to create personalized lessons for students who create profiles, tracking their progress through various courses. Khan Academy is a powerful tool and one that many of my colleagues use in their classes to help students who need remediation. If I were to incorporate competency based learning or personalized learning into my curriculum I would absolutely begin with creating student profiles on Khan Academy. Students would be able to access online tutorials as well as additional help when they are not able to work directly with me. Khan would also allow students to track their progress on skills, allowing another way for them to demonstrate mastery of content. I could also incorporate standards based competencies. I would break down units into skills that must be mastered before a student can move one and then allow students to choose how they demonstrate proficiency to me. I imagine that for most students they would opt in to passing a quiz related to the competency but others might want to do a project or report related to the content of that competency. This would allow me to continue with whole class instruction while also allowing student voice and choice. Lastly, knowing that teaching content is the best way to ensure that you fully understand content I could incorporate small group instruction where students who have already demonstrated proficiency in a certain skill work with students who have not. The students leading instruction would have to plan a lesson that incorporated some element of technology. I believe that each students progresses at a different rate. Our current system of education prescribes topics and makes learning all subjects mandatory. Students have limited motivation to study subjects they find boring and without flexibility in assignments their teachers get frustrated by a student’s lack of motivation. Personalized instruction is something I am very interested in and I hope to learn, implement and experiment with it soon. As my action research progressed there came a point where I assumed that I would see a certain result. I predicted that at the end of my research project I would see a decline in the average level of math anxiety that my students experienced but that I would also see a stagnation or slight decline in their average math performance scores. There were a variety of reasons that led me to believe student capacity to perform mathematically wouldn’t increase, including: the increasing difficulty of the material being covered and the students losing interest in certain teacher based interventions toward the end of the research. After surveying the students and having them choose the most effective teacher led interventions for reducing their feelings of math anxiety I learned that students were essentially choosing interventions that provided them increased review and (because they felt that my instruction was clear) direct interaction with the instructor. Looking at the bigger picture of reducing math anxiety and increasing student capacity I concluded that students are not able to perform on assessments because the methods we use for review are largely ineffective in actually preparing them.
Seeing students largely select the same teacher led interventions: guided notes with every lecture, practice unit tests with answer keys and teacher clarity and interaction with students, it became more apparent that students are simply looking for clear, mindful instruction with intentional review elements that reflect the material they will be tested on. Keeping with the theme of reducing math anxiety in students and increasing their capacity to perform mathematics I believe that I want to refine my teacher led interventions, integrating technology like interactive video editors (EDpuzzle) and online note taking templates to create supports for student review. I will absolutely need to do more research into effective ways to unite technology and the teacher led interventions that I identify as effective. I hope that I will be able to find already existing apps that track student response and collect data so that I can more easily measure effectiveness. Based on what I have already learned in the Innovative ED program I will need to expand on my tech tool box, determining the best additions for my practice. I believe that my research is innovative because it causes me to be reflective on the interventions that I implement in my classroom. I assess how effective certain interventions are at reducing math anxiety and increasing capacity for all students. I will have to be creative in how I reach all students, integrating technology to create interactive experiences but also making those experiences just as authentic for those with limited technology. Math anxiety is a debilitating and pervasive force in education and if this issue is not addressed there are many adverse effects to both our domestic and international community. At the root of my research is the desire to see students look forward to learning math. I will have to be collaborative in working with students and other teaching staff, identifying needs, then identifying ways to satisfy those needs. As rote as learning procedure and taking notes is, innovating those processes could make a huge impact on the global math community. In many ways I am not ready to begin analyzing data because I have only established my baseline assessment of students math anxiety. In order to truly analyze results, then come to accurate conclusions, I will have to wait until the end of the semester. At that time I will have reassessed the students to determine how their levels of anxiety have changed and I will have also determined their final grade averages. While, at this time, I am not able to state any valid conclusions, I can guess at what I will see. I think that I will see a decrease in students math anxiety due to the teacher interventions that we have tried but despite that decrease in math anxiety I do not think that I will see any drastic increase in student performance over the course of the semester. If this is the case then I will have to confront the reality that low levels of math anxiety may not be the biggest predictor of student success in math classes. This will help to answer one of my guiding questions for my research, " What correlation exists between math anxiety and students performance in a math course?"
While I may not see a dramatic increase in student academic performance I do believe that I will see a decrease in students math anxiety. This will have an impact on where I go next with my research in that I would want to determine which teacher intervention has the most affect in decreasing students math anxiety, when implemented effectively over time. Diving deep into the teacher interventions that I implemented over the course of the initial study, I would want to further survey students in order to determine how to best reduce students math anxiety, increase positive dispositions towards mathematics and hopefully, eventually find a way to increase students performance in math courses. |
Brandon DeJesusMath Archives
July 2019
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