Putting Your Learning into Practice

In this activity, we are asked to work with another teacher. Since it is summer, I am going to pull a lesson from our Atlas Rubicon and go this one alone to get practice coming up with suggestions.

I'm not sure if it's because of the summer, but lately, I have been trying to brainstorm ideas for interesting lesson ideas but have been coming up flat.

Ask if they have an activity that the two of you might improve through collaboration.

Character stories - Realism/Fantasy/Plays

Review the information about ways that technology might enhance learning from the last activity with your learning partner.  

Questions to ask ...

How could we add a real-world problem to this unit?
Are there any tools that might scaffold learning?
How can we provide more opportunities for feedback, revising, and reflection?
How can we give students access to quality information, primary documents, or points of view not available otherwise?

How can we allow students to engage in learning activities that would otherwise be infeasible (examples: human/animal anatomy, or online scientific investigations)?
How can we differentiate learning for students with different needs?
How can we help students understand abstract concepts?
How can we help student gather information, organize, synthesize, analyze information and draw conclusions?.
How can we foster student discovery of a concept or construction of their own understanding of a concept?
How can we enable students to share ideas and collaborate with remote groups?
How can we help students receive feedback on their work from outside the classroom?
How can we enable students to participate in the democratic process?


Now review the common learning tasks- communication, collaboration, gather and analyze information and creatively share their learning- with you peer.

communication
Students will read and write during this unit. They will also




collaboration




gather and analyze information






creatively share their learning



STANDARDS

Writing a Play
Write a play with Characters, Setting, including a problem and solution.

Language Arts (HM Theme 3)

·           Compound words

·           Synonyms

·           Action verbs

·           Suffix –able

·           Main verbs & helping verbs

·           Word endings ­–edand –ing

·           Syllables

·           Past/present/future tenses

Performing in a play
This is an oral and visual assessment. Must include props and work on voice.

Identify ways that some or all of those are present in the learning activity your peer wants to improve.
This unit has been


Discuss ways to improve the lesson, and incorporate the changes the two of you agree on.


Once you are through revising the activity, take some time to debrief the process.

• Be sure to ask you peer what was helpful about the process you followed and
• What they might suggest you do differently next time.

Idea - Sway

Technology Integration Example

Lesson being examined:

Your goal is to identify some of the educational tasks like communication and collaboration the teachers who created this project wanted their students to complete. In addition, draw on what you learned about how technology enhances learning from the last activity to identify ways technology is being used to enhance learning in the River Yamuna example.

When I read "educational goals", I think of skills. When integrating technology, I think teachers should first look to learning outcomes/standards, and then think of what skills they want students to learn, so that is how I am approaching this assignment. 

Standards:

Class 11^th NCERT:-

Environmental Education Unit III, Environment Pollution and Global Issues, (Project and activity )

Collect samples of water from different sources and study their physical characteristics like turbidity, colour, odor; the measure of pH, the nature of suspended and dissolved impurities and pollutants, the presence of toxic materials like mercury, lead, arsenic, fluorine and the presence of living organisms. For testing the presence of toxic materials and living organisms the help of a local laboratory or institution may be taken, if available. 

Identify the most polluted sample of water and locate the sources of its pollution. 

Devise an action plan for mobilizing public opinion for checking the pollution. 

image via mypchat.wikispaces.com

Skills from the lesson: (Based on above)

• Research - Information Literacy
• Self-management - Organization
• Thinking - Critical Thinking
• Communication - Communication
• Collaboration - Collaboration 

Identify ways technology is being used to enhance learning in the River Yamuna example:

• Computers are being used to read websites
• Digital camera to photograph the scene (this could be substituted with the student's own cell phones)
• Science lab tools to analyze the water samples
• Multimedia in the presentation (I guess the presentation itself)

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I'm going to take this activity one step further and try to identify an additional three ways in which technology could be used.

Making a chronology of state of Yamuna in different years post discussions with senior citizens of the area.

Create the chronology using a site such as hstry.com or timeline from Knightlab.

The notes used should be created using Google Docs, or another collaborative tool.

Instead of posters, how about the students create commercials that include some footage of the interviews they did?

Ideas on how technology can improve or enhance learning at my school ...

The following is from ISTE

The authors of How People Learn (2000) believe technology enhances learning by:

• Bringing exciting curricula based on real-world problems into the classroom
• Providing scaffolds and tools.
• Giving students and teachers more opportunities for feedback, reflection, and revision
• Building local and global communities that include teachers, administrators, students, parents, practicing scientists and others. (Bransford, et al., 2000).

Technology enhances learning when it is used to:

• Give students access to quality information, primary documents, or points of view not available otherwise.
• Allow students to engage in learning activities that would otherwise be infeasible (examples: human/animal anatomy, or online scientific investigations).
• Differentiate learning for students with different needs.
• Help students understand abstract concepts.
• Gather information, organize, synthesize, analyze information and draw conclusions.
• Foster student discovery of a concept or construction of their own understanding of a concept.
• Share ideas and collaborate with remote groups.
• Help students receive feedback on their work from outside the classroom.
• Enable students to participate in the democratic process.

This is the next part of the assignment. I am not sure in what direction I should take this question. Maybe it is tricky because I think it is such a fundamental question that everyone should know it is the right path to take.


Ideas on how technology can improve or enhance learning at my school ...

Assessments can become more authentic. I have seen assessments that contained straight "remembering" questions and teachers have to watch over students to make sure the students are not Googling the answer.

What if assessments were made to be Googlable?

I think it sounds exciting to have an assessment where knowledge needs to be synthesized into something new instead of a question that resides at DOK 1 [Depth of Knowledge]. (Alice Keeler writes a lot about this topic.)

I think that is the basic way in which technology can help student learning. Teachers have the ability to use technology to push student thinking forward as well as scaffold their progress.


And leaving myself with some unanswered questions from Silvia Tolisano:

Ask yourself what happens to student learning when: 

• a teacher does not have a (teaching) plan that they are able/required to follow? 
• the “plan” is outdated/has been used for the last 5 years? 
• teachers (across grade levels and subject areas) teach in isolation of each other? 
• teachers have forgotten, are not interested in, don’t have time for, or are not supported in their own learning? 
• collaboration and communication among administrators and teachers in order to pursuit of the common goal called student learning is out of sync or non existent? 
• teaching means covering lessons, units, objectives and standards and does not involve teaching for understanding?

Making the Linkage

After reviewing both the teacher standards and the student standards, think about a learning activity you, or one of the teachers you might coach, are currently offering to students.

• How can you use the ideas found in the NETS-S to integrate technology effectively?

One way I am using the ISTE Standards is by giving examples of what the standards look like in the form of a Scope and Sequence. We adopted our technology standards around the 2007 ISTE Student Standards, and we are building upon the Scope and Sequence developed by Singapore American School. The examples in Slide 4 will eventually be linked to a blog post/video explaining/showing the lesson.

I hope to complete a linked document showing the development from standard to lesson in a hyperdoc format. Below is a sample.

For me, a large part of the coaching role is to help teachers help themselves. (Give someone a fish ...)


As a teacher, reviewing the Student Standards can help me see the larger path for students to take. The Student Standards show many ways in which students should be taught.

• How could the ideas found in the NETS-T guide you, or your peer, to develop the skills you need to integrate technology into this learning activity effectively?

Like any standard, the NETS-T are goals to reach. I should be reviewing the standards when lesson planning to see if there is anything in there that might help me advance my lesson. Often I forget which skills I want the students to learn, so reviewing the standards could help me remember a skill that could be easily integrated or discover one I hadn't thought of before.  

Reflection

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1. How are these ideas in Part B and Part C above consistent with your thoughts about how technology enhances student learning?  
2. How do these ideas align with the ideas your colleagues outlined when they talked about how and why these use technology?
3. What are some ideas you have on how to coach your peers to incorporate some of these ways to integrate technology to enhance learning?

Coaching Plan

One of the drawbacks to trying to complete this course over the summer is that I am relatively on my own. While I could send emails to my coworkers who are off resting during their break, I prefer to not bother them. So there are a few things I could not do to make this plan more robust, but school starts in two weeks, and at that time I can make the necessary changes that need to be made.

Throughout the summer I had been writing down my ideas for the upcoming year. So when we got to this point, I had something I could fall back on (see Jim Collins Good to Great). But it didn't come to me at first and I had to play with a few ideas before I had my plan. The first plan I made didn't have a school-wide goal. Which could be OK because I will be able to go to school tomorrow and talk to someone, but the group I chose to use was not very solid. That's when I thought back and decided to use the Elementary Team.

I am excited to get this plan underway for a few reasons. It ...

• is aligned with school's goal
• gets teachers talking with each other about tech integration
• creates transparency among teachers. Transparency leads to more ideas.

Again, this is not a final plan, but a direction I want to take.