Application 4: Online Learning Presentation

I have included here a link to a presentation about online learning.

Click here to view the presentation.

Reflection - Reaching and engaging all learners through technology

Now that I am nearing the completion of the course Reaching and Engaging All Learners Through Technology I can reflect on the strategies and tools I have learned to teach the diverse learners in my classroom. I have had the opportunity to learn about several resources from my classmates and I will certainly make several adjustments to my instructional practice as a result of taking this course.

One of the first resources I plan on using is my student information survey that I developed during week one of the course. This online survey I created will help me learn about my student’s various learning needs and styles. This information will help me to differentiate my instruction by interest and also provide a variety of ways for students to acquire information.

As I plan the curriculum for my classes I will refer to the three principles of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL). I must provide a variety of formats for students to learn information including using visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modes, among others. I must also provide different engagement strategies to meet the different interest needs of students. Finally, I must provide a variety of ways that students can demonstrate that they have learned the concepts for the course.

After learning about my students and developing curriculum following the UDL principles I will need to use differentiation tools to provide for the different learning needs of the students. Although the learning objectives will remain constant, the method of achieving those goals and demonstrating mastery will vary according to the student. This may be a difficult transition for me to make since there will be multiple activities going on the in the classroom but I believe I can make the adjustments successfully.

We have just started our school year and I have several severe needs students in my classes. I plan on meeting with the teacher of these students to develop some learning goals for them, and we plan on using peer tutors to help them in the class. I plan on using some software programs to help these students such as Pixwriter, which is a program that allows students to create sentences using pictures, and Kurzweil that allows students to hear text being read to them. This will be an opportunity for me to put my new knowledge and skills to the test.

The beginning of the school year brings with it so many new ideas and responsibilities. I am feeling somewhat overwhelmed by all of the things I need to get done with limited time and resources. However, I do feel confident that I can successfully incorporate the learning tools and strategies I have learned in this course to provide a successful learning experience for all of my diverse students.

Reflection - GAME plan

The GAME plan that I developed at the beginning of this course has been helpful in making me realize some important factors I need to change in my teaching. When I developed my GAME plan, I set my goals on improving and increasing the amount of creativity that students will be encouraged to use in their learning. As I have stated before, I truly believe that students must learn to take existing knowledge and leverage it in a creative or ingenious way in order to be successful in the future. By providing opportunities in school for students to come up with creative solutions to problems, I can help them become comfortable in this process.

Problem based learning (PBL) is a great tool for getting students to think creatively. It has all of the necessary elements for students to be engaged in their learning. When students work on real world problems in a collaborative way and then create solutions to the problems and work to implement them, they are really practicing many critical skills that they will need in the future. I will use the PBL process in my classes next year to help my students learn all of these critical skills. This will be a major part of my action plan for the future.

As part of the PBL process, I will also work to have my students do more collaboration when working on problems. This collaboration will take the form of local collaboration within their student groups, as well as distance collaboration with peers from around the country and world. Although I have never done any online collaboration with my students before, I am more confident now that I have found some resources during this class.

Teaching students to be creative involves reducing some of the structure in the classroom. If we truly want students to come up with creative solutions to problems, then we need to let go of the traditional way of teaching where the teacher knows where the project is heading and simply guides the students to “the answer”. As a teacher, this will perhaps be the most difficult aspect of teaching creativity. The key will be providing the right amount of structure so that students understand their task, but allowing them the freedom to follow their own path towards the solutions to problems. This balance between structure and freedom may take some time to get right, but once it is found I believe it will be the key to supporting students in learning critical thinking and creativity skills.

My immediate plans to implement my GAME plan are to become more familiar with some of the social networking program we looked at during this class so I will be able to help my students with online collaboration with their peers. This will be an interesting challenge for me and I look forward to using some of the sites in the fall.

I am glad I have had the opportunity to develop and begin to implement this GAME plan during this course. With the plan in actions in place, I need to continually monitor my progress and evaluate the effectiveness of the plan with respect to improving critical thinking and creativity with my students.

Social Networking

In my original GAME plan, I set goals to increase the amount of creativity and innovation that my students are required to use in their projects. In last week's part of the problem based learning unit I described how I wanted to utilize a social networking site like NING to help the students collaborate with other students from around the country. Collaboration can be such an important part of teaching students to be creative because they can see how other people have worked to solve similar problems that they are facing. It forces students to think "outside the box" and I believe this is a critical skill they need. During the remainder of the summer I plan on spending some time learning more about NING and Moodle so I can use them with my classes next year for collaboration.

PBL and Social Networking

I am excited about using problem based learning ((PBL) projects with my classes when we start up in the fall. One of my original goals was to promote creative thinking and inventiveness and I think that PBL can be a great way to achieve this. Over the summer I will have some time to think of some more local problems that we can use to work on solutions.

I really like the collaborative piece in the problem based learning. I can start by having students work in groups to discuss and analyze a problem and then work together to develop potential solutions. I will be able to use technology tools to further allow students to then collaborate with other students from around the world. For example, once they develop their potential solutions to the problem they can get online to see if others have experienced similar problems in their communities and how they have solved their problems. Students can solicit feedback on their problem and solutions and gather information from different areas of the country and world. This will give the students not only information on the problem at hand, but also different perspectives of problems from different areas of the world. I am excited to try this out with my Internet Skills class this fall.

My next step is to familiarize myself with some of the social networking tools available to use and to start finding different groups that my class might be able to collaborate with. I have set up a Ning account and plan on checking it out this week.

Chris Lorenz-

GAME plan - update

This week we had a technology training conference in my district. It was a two day conference with national speakers and local presenters. It was a lot of good information and training but at the end I was ready to be done for awhile.

Right now, the progress on my goals will be in deciding how I can best utilize the technology and other tools I am learning about. I am fortunate that I have attended the district conference, I will be attending the ISTE conference in Denver later this month, and I am taking these courses through Walden. I have three sources from which to draw from. Certainly I cannot take everything I learn and implement it into my classes, so now the challenge is to choose what works best for the classes and students I will be teaching.

Summer is a great time to try new things and get a new perspective on things without the daily distractions that we deal with during the school year. My plan right now is to take several new ideas into next year and implement them with my classes.

Chris Lorenz

GAME plan - progress

My progress on my GAME plan has been good, but now that the school year is over, I will have some difficulty implementing everything in the next two months. My goals involve providing projects that allow students a greater level of freedom to express creativity. I believe that I am often too structured in my teaching approach and that what needs to change is my teaching style. This will only happen if I focus on the creative aspect of projects when planning. I can do this by reminding myself during the planning of the projects of this important aspect. I also plan on asking colleagues how they ensure that their students can express their creativity to get some ideas.

I will be attending the ISTE conference in Denver this June. I am quite certain I will be able to get some good ideas on creativity and innovation and how I can incorporate these into my lessons.

For my last project of the year, I purposely did not provide as much structure as I normally do when students were creating their digital yearbooks using PowerPoint. In the rubric, 30% of their grade for the project was based on creativity. I saw some very creative animations in PowerPoint – some that I had never seen before. So, I think when we allow students the freedom to try things, they can be very creative. I am encouraged by this.

Chris Lorenz

GAME plan - Resources and Information

In order to implement my game plan I will need to change the way I approach teaching my lessons. For example, I will need to allow students more opportunities to complete projects and assignments in a way in which they choose as long as they are still meeting the objectives of the lesson. I plan to reduce the amount of structure in projects and allow students more freedom to choose how to solve problems. In the past, I have been quick to help and make suggestions, but I believe to help students learn creative thinking and innovation, I must lose the temptation to always help them and instead, allow them to solve their own problems. Being flexible with students and allowing them a variety of opportunities is the key.

Additional information I need would be ideas on how to modify my lessons specifically to allow for more creativity. I can ask colleagues, or use information from the internet or other trainings and conferences. I am going to be attending the ISTE conference in Denver this June and will probably be able to get many ideas there.

So far, I have begun to implement my plan by having students figure various aspects of programs on their own, rather than me showing them every step. For example, using PowerPoint, I am letting students figure out on their own how to do various things, such as custom animations, and inserting music into the presentation. Since many times, students will need to learn different aspects of programs on their own, it will be beneficial to allow them to problem solve and figure things out independently.

Chris Lorenz

Personal GAME Plan - Goals

Two NETS-T standards that I would like to focus on for my GAME plan would be Standard 1a and standard 2a. Both of these standards deal with creativity and innovation and I believe these are the two most critical aspects of education today.

Standard 1a states that teachers “promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness” (NETS for Teachers, 2008). As a teacher, I need to create lessons and projects that encourage students to be creative and innovative with the knowledge that they have and that they can access. Because knowledge and information is now readily available to anyone in the world, students must be able to actually DO something with it – something that hasn’t already been done. Teachers must design projects so they are not just cookie cutter, one size fits all, predictable outcome projects. In order to monitor my progress on this goal, I will continually consider the creative aspects of projects that I create for students to complete. If they do not have a creative aspect to them, I will modify them so students have more choices and opportunities to show creativity.

Standard 2a states that teachers “design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity” (Nets for Teachers, 2008). This standard requires the teacher to utilize digital tools to help students with creativity. Utilizing various communication and multimedia technologies will allow me to provide students with the tools they will need to express their creativity. To monitor progress on this goal and evaluate my progress, I will list this NETS-T standard in my lesson plans when planning for projects so it becomes a necessary part of each lesson I teach.

I truly believe that creativity and innovation are the two most important aspects of teaching 21st century skills. If teachers can focus on ensuring that these two things are evident in each lesson and project, we will be providing two essential educational elements for our students.

Chris Lorenz

References:
Nets for Teachers (2008). International Society for Technology in Education. Retrieved May 13, 2010 from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_for_Teachers_2008.htm

Final Reflection - Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry

I have learned several important things after completing this course on Information Literacy and Online Inquiry. Our school has been doing an 8th grade inquiry project for the past two years and many of the skills and concepts we discussed in this class relate very closely to what we have been doing. I have learned not only how I can create and implement inquiry projects in my classroom, but also how I can better assist other teachers using technology during their inquiry projects.

First of all, one thing I have learned is that perhaps the most difficult part of an inquiry project is getting students to come up with higher level questions that they really have an interest in learning about. This is the underlying key to a good inquiry project – that the students develop a question that has interest to them and has no known answer. They cannot be just finding facts and reporting them back to the teacher. They must develop an open ended question that inspires passion for learning. Without this quality question, the inquiry project will fall flat on its face.

Second, students should be creating a digital product to communicate their message to a genuine, authentic audience. Students and teachers are so used to creating projects just for the teacher, just for a grade. If an inquiry project is to be a powerful learning tool, students must be communicating to more than just their teacher. They should feel like their project can affect the world in some way, and in order to do that they must communicate their message to an audience that has an interest in and a connection to their topic.

Finally, it is essential that students understand that they must be critical of any information sources they use. There is so much information available to them that they must develop strategies for distinguishing between credible sources and ones that have a hidden agenda. They also must recognize that in today’s world, there is rarely an information source that is completely unbiased. The key is to understand why a source may be biased and what effects that bias may have on the information being published.

One goal I would like to work on for next year is to be more active in making sure our current 8th grade teachers have a more successful time implementing our 8th grade inquiry project to their students. This year went pretty smoothly, but the students did not present their projects to an authentic audience, and some of the teachers don’t see why this is important. I am starting to correct this situation this spring by reminding the teachers that the whole premise of the project is to do something that is genuine and not just an assignment for the teacher. Next year I will need to communicate with the teachers more to make sure we are all on the same page. We plan on having a reflection meeting with all of the 8th grade teachers at the end of this year to find out what went well and what we need to improve for next year. This will be a good time to document what changes we need for next year.

I really do believe that inquiry projects can be great learning experiences for students and teachers. The difficult part is getting both students and teachers to get out of their usual mode of finding facts and simply reporting them back to the teacher. This process that has been taught for generations has little impact on 21st century skills, and is certainly not the teaching model we want to continue to use. I am finding that it is difficult to break both teachers and students out of this ingrained and limited process.