Over the course of the last 4 months, I have struggled with finding a balance between my teaching life and my own personal academics. The challenge has come from numerous sources. Time management has been a particularly difficult thing to figure out. It seems as though I could be spending twice the amount of time on the actual teaching part and yet a lot of that time has gone to other places. Incorporating technology into the mix has seemed like an entirely unnatural and invasive process. I mean, teachers successfully did their job for years before the first laptop was even invented, right?
But, I have to concede that even with the limited amount of technology available at the school and my classroom's stunning lack of cellular service, there are things that would be entirely impossible without the use of technology. Here is a list of technology tools that I could not have done without this semester. 1. Translating documents: In a school of 80% ELL students, along with many students who have very little comprehension of English, it is important to be able to provide materials in other languages. Mapleton School District uses Microsoft Office 365, which has had its own learning curve for me, but I will admit that the translate feature is accurate, reliable, and easy to use. Please head to my lesson plans page for examples of work that I have translated using Microsoft Word. 2. Showing Videos: Let's admit it. As a science teacher, you are going to show a lot of videos. It is inevitable and very helpful, and admittedly, far more convenient than talking and giving notes. I haven;t had much success with a flipped classroom model, perhaps because of the age group I work with, but I think that older students who have a longer attention span could be very successful with this model. 3. Sharing classwork with students and parents: It is hard for me to imagine a world before email. It has been invaluable when communicating with students and parents about work that is missed in class or work that needs to be caught up on. Students often share their documents with me on google drive, email me late at night if they have questions about homework, or inform me that they will be sick ahead of time. In the future, I would like to implement a classwork page which students can use to reference assignments and additional resources and slideshows. 4. Teacher Absences: Recently, I have started implementing youtube videos to give instructions to students on days that I am absent. It is important to me that I utilize every hour of class time efficiently, and so when I record direct instruction in the form of a youtube video and have the substitute teacher play it for my class, it gives me a higher level of confidence that the students will understand the task and be able to complete it without the primary teacher there as a guide. I have only implemented this a few times and am excited to refine this practice as much as possible. Please go to my Lesson Plans page for examples.
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This blog post is a formal evaluation of using student-created videos in the classroom. This tool is perhaps one of the most broadly applicable and accessible tools available to teachers and it certainly has inexpensible utility. My assessment of this tool comes from the PLN edutopia.com. A strong overview of the four main uses of this technology tool can be found here at https://www.edutopia.org/article/student-created-videos-classroom.
Since the topic of the module we are studying at Fort Lewis College is “Students as Collaborators,” I thought that student-created videos would be a perfect tool to look into for the day. By having students watching and creating videos, interaction with the subject matter goes from something relatively superficial to something personalized and intimate. In my experience, students love assignments in which they are required to create videos because it allows them to explore their creativity and make something totally unique. A mentor of mine often tells us that she is not a creative lesson planner but tries to keep assignments as open-ended as possible in order to allow her students to be as creative as possible. When a student comes up with a unique idea, she sees it as her duty to encourage them to run with it. I like the idea of student-created videos exactly because of this open-ended nature. According to my PLN, edutopia, there are four main uses for student-created videos: learning product videos, response videos, reflection videos, and tutorial videos. Each of these are unique and all of them provide opportunities for students to dive deeply into the material. You can read more about them in the aforementioned article written by Courtney Sears just this last September. Jon Spencer’s article, “10 Tips for Global Collaboration,” mentions that student choice is seen very differently from teacher to teacher. In other words, every teacher seemed to have a different opinion about whether or not students should be given multiple chances on assessments and also disagreed about what the role of cooperative projects should be in the classroom. One of the tips that he suggests for global collaboration is using asynchronous tools. This has become obvious to me as well as I continue my educational studies in an online format. Student created videos are an excellent example of asynchronous tools that circumvent to drawbacks and limitations of time and space. Global collaboration is but one of the many possible uses for student-created videos. Jefferey Carpenter’s article, “The Virtual Workroom,” talks about about the benefits of social media use in the classroom. One of the more memorable sections of the article speaks about how a certain teacher felt very lost and unable to transform lessons until they discovered a certain hashtag used by a PLN. What I gained from this article is that social media (there are 54 listed sites in the article) can be incredibly useful in transforming lessons. I feel as though one of the main features of using social media is to create videos in order to overcome the aforementioned limitations of time and space. With the ease and availability of creating videos in the modern world, as well as our responsibility to teach digital citizenship and literacy, I would recommend that students in all classrooms have some form of video-creation. In regards to students learning in the 21st century, videos are the epitome of modern learning. At any moment, a student could use a video to look up the cell cycle, learn a song on guitar, watch a TED talk, or really anything else they wanted to learn. Not to mention the fact that making videos is now easier than ever and will most likely be an expected part of any job or academic environment a student finds themselves in. Videos are the fearless leaders of 21st century learning. Student directed videos meet all 7 of the ISTE standards, especially empowered learner, digital citizen, creative communicator, and global collaborator. They also meet the SAMR model expectations of transforming lessons as there are many designable lessons that would be impossible without the use of student created videos. In regards to the TPACK framework, I think it falls to the teacher to integrate this tool in an effective way, especially on the PK side of things. Videos have drawback and can be used negatively if the pedagogical consideration isn’t taken. TQS standard 4 seems to fall to the teacher and TQS standard 3 takes a lot of responsibility to find accurate online information, but if integrated appropriately, student-created videos, especially as assessments, can bolster both of these requirements. Throughout the Module 2.0, our cohort at Fort Lewis College has been looking at Technology Tools through the lens of the learner. One o the aspects that I repeatedly return to is equal access to devices. This article, What a Decade of Education Research Tells Us About Technology in the Hands of Underserved Students . directly examines this from an asset perspective, funneling the responsibility of technology use into the teacher's hands instead of the students, who may or may not be able to find time or resources to access technology.
The second resource our cohort looked at in this module was the National Educational Technology Report from 2017. Section 3 here lays out a report on the state of technology access throughout the country and provides a framework for how to use it most effectively. This report is comprehensive and highly applicable to my topic of choice. I examined an article from my PLN, edutopia.org, (found at this URL: https://www.edutopia.org/article/getting-kids-outdoors-technology) that described 5 helpful technologies that can be used outside the classroom. I love this idea because although most students in low income neighborhoods don't have the same access to technology as students in the wealthier parts of town, they still have access to the outdoors (one of the strongest tools science teachers have at their disposal) as well as access to smart phones. The tools outlined in the article are citizen science applications. For the most part, they involve students going outside, observing plant and animal species, and uploading photos to an app with a record of date, time, and other data. The result is that real life scientists receive the information, use it for real life science, and report findings back to the students. Zelinski's article outlines some of the familiar statistics about high school retention rates and then goes into the unfamiliar statistics about how these are correlated with technology. I think this issue is complex and it is important to realize that correlation does not equal causation. There are certainly other factors in play, such as the other parts of life that come with living in poverty. I did think it was an interesting point that they were making however. Near the end of the article, the author states,"If you are a student without access to a computer at home and limited access to technology within your community, you simply cannot engage deeply in the kind of tasks the literature recommends." They then go on to say,"To help our underserved students learn, we must eradicate all traces of the argument that access to digital tools is key to minimizing the digital divide, and instead advocate for changes in the use of these tools to better engage our underserved students in authentic tasks that support the development of higher-order thinking skills." I think that the distinction between having access to technology and engaging with it in an authentic way is important. It places responsibility into the hands of the teacher with respect to thoughtful lesson planning and task-specific design strategy. The second article was comprehensive and incredibly relevant. The first section set a goal for all students to engage in empowering and engaging learning experiences. I think we can all agree that going into the great outdoors and using technology to perform citizen science is both empowering, relevant, and engaging. This article also focused on using technology tools to create equity in the classroom, which I thought was a really interesting take on the subject because of technology's power to cause extreme division. Through the use of speech assisting technology, augmented reality, and other tools that exist within the same vein, students can come to have a more equitable access to the academic material in an engaging and empowering way. I have one student who needs to use an iPad to communicate do to his ability level. If he didn't have access to this tool, he would not be able to interact with the world on nearly as engaged of a level. When it comes to getting students outside using technology, I still think that the power lies in the outdoors and not in the hands of the technology. Teachers have the power to create engaging lesson plans that exist with pencil and paper instead of being tethered to the apps that my PLN mentioned in this article. I think that these tools can be incredible helpful, empowering, and engaging, but they are tools and should not be considered boundaries within which a lesson plan must be required to exist. |