The decision-making process in creating a lesson integrating collaborative technology for use in the classroom requires more planning than a standard lesson. Not only does one need to create the lesson itself, careful consideration must be given as to which technology will be used and in what capacity. If the instructor simply adds collaborative technology to a lesson as an afterthought without deliberating its usefulness, the results could be detrimental instead of beneficial to the learning process.
When planning such a lesson, the first step is deciding what type of collaborative technology to use and how much its integration will add value to the lesson. The teacher has to evaluate if he has or can acquire the technology needed to successfully integrate it into his lesson. He must examine the lesson objective and what the collaborative technology will bring to the lesson. The technology side must add enough value to student learning, knowledge, or real life experience to justify the extra classroom time required to implement it.
The next step is to decide if the use of the collaborative technology is in compliance with district policies. The teacher may have to get special approval from administration, school board and/or parents before using the technology they have chosen. The potential risks that teachers run when using digital technology tools to collaborate outside the school can be very high. The more open source the collaborative technology, the more protective safeguards the teacher will have to take. If the collaboration is by email between your students and a second party outside the school domain, what is the teacher’s liability? How does the teacher monitor the emails between the two? How does the teacher keep the student and second party from using another means to communicate later with each other unbeknown to the teacher or student’s parents? These are all ethical concerns that must be addressed when considering the use of collaborative technology.
A few years ago I had my Introduction to Engineering and Design class collaborate with freshmen students at the University Of Kansas School Of Engineering. The educational goal was to encourage my high school students, especially minority and female students, to get a better look at and feel for their possibilities in studying engineering. I started planning for this collaborative exercise a full year in advance by partnering with YouthFriends of Kansas City, who happily agreed to be the liaison between the two groups.
My students first visited KU to be paired up with an engineering student at the university. It was decided the two groups of students would email about once a month throughout the school year to discuss the ins and outs of university life and the field of engineering. YouthFriends had a special software developed which put in place safe guards for the protection of students and teachers. The collaborate technology, including hardware and software worked fine, but did take advanced planning and implementation. The KU students later visited Harmon. At the end of the year everyone thought the collaboration was a success. However, I found it very difficult to formatively assess this type of an endeavor.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Multimedia Technology in the Classroom
In my classroom the use of multimedia has been on the conservative side. In a couple of the courses I teach I do not use any. It is not that I am against using some form of multimedia in those courses, it just that I have not been able to find anything that would be a natural fit. I feel that if I am going to use a form of multimedia it should be related to the subject, it should add to or build on the lesson, it should be interesting to the students, and in short, it should be a positive not a negative for that particular class subject.
When I do use a video to enhance my classroom lesson, I like to have some form of assessment that goes along with it such as a handout with questions to answer as they are watching or just shortly afterwards. Sometimes I have them write a short essay over the video. I also use major points or facts from the video on a more summative assessment either in the form of a question or a short essay.
In my Introduction to Engineering and Design class I play two videos that introduce and tie into one of my first lessons. I use my teacher’s computer tied into a surround sound system and projected to a larger screen in the front of the room. The first video tells the story of how one individual develops an idea to solve an engineering design challenge by first brainstorming with his family and friends, and then builds an awarding winning product. I show this video to help students see not only how an engineer uses the skills we talk about in class, but how an individual working out of his home on his own can put these skills to great success.
The second video I play shows how a modern day design company uses brainstorming to design an award winning new product. This video flows from the introduction of a client’s needs, to the design firm’s brainstorming ideas, to the final product showing all the steps and missteps between. I especially like this video because it has a woman that leads the design team, and has several other minority engineers in professional lead positions. I believe this to be important for my urban students to see. This diversity in the design world would be hard for me to show so well by any other means. Furthermore, the video adds something to the lesson that I could never fully explain or model in my classroom. Even taking my students on a field trip to a design company would not give the same level of understanding of process that is demonstrated so well in this video. I feel these videos meet the criteria I listed above and add to the value of the lesson.
Most of the classes I teach have state-set benchmarks that do not leave much room or time for deviation. The benchmarks are so plentiful that it is very difficult to address even half of them. There is something I have learned about in my graduate class at MNU that I do believe will blend in with my engineering class. I think I will start having my engineering students take digital pictures of different stages of their work from day one and upload them into Photo Story 3. This will allow students to document and give evidence of their work. Gifted students could show creativity by recording their voices and music to make their projects more appealing. Also, with my students using Photo Story 3 to document the progress of their work I will have a medium to better help parents understand what it is we are doing in class. Parents will be able to see their child’s progress. Photo Story 3 is a free software download that matches the technology I already have, and the expense of adding a few microphones and digital cameras is within my already constrained classroom budget.
When I do use a video to enhance my classroom lesson, I like to have some form of assessment that goes along with it such as a handout with questions to answer as they are watching or just shortly afterwards. Sometimes I have them write a short essay over the video. I also use major points or facts from the video on a more summative assessment either in the form of a question or a short essay.
In my Introduction to Engineering and Design class I play two videos that introduce and tie into one of my first lessons. I use my teacher’s computer tied into a surround sound system and projected to a larger screen in the front of the room. The first video tells the story of how one individual develops an idea to solve an engineering design challenge by first brainstorming with his family and friends, and then builds an awarding winning product. I show this video to help students see not only how an engineer uses the skills we talk about in class, but how an individual working out of his home on his own can put these skills to great success.
The second video I play shows how a modern day design company uses brainstorming to design an award winning new product. This video flows from the introduction of a client’s needs, to the design firm’s brainstorming ideas, to the final product showing all the steps and missteps between. I especially like this video because it has a woman that leads the design team, and has several other minority engineers in professional lead positions. I believe this to be important for my urban students to see. This diversity in the design world would be hard for me to show so well by any other means. Furthermore, the video adds something to the lesson that I could never fully explain or model in my classroom. Even taking my students on a field trip to a design company would not give the same level of understanding of process that is demonstrated so well in this video. I feel these videos meet the criteria I listed above and add to the value of the lesson.
Most of the classes I teach have state-set benchmarks that do not leave much room or time for deviation. The benchmarks are so plentiful that it is very difficult to address even half of them. There is something I have learned about in my graduate class at MNU that I do believe will blend in with my engineering class. I think I will start having my engineering students take digital pictures of different stages of their work from day one and upload them into Photo Story 3. This will allow students to document and give evidence of their work. Gifted students could show creativity by recording their voices and music to make their projects more appealing. Also, with my students using Photo Story 3 to document the progress of their work I will have a medium to better help parents understand what it is we are doing in class. Parents will be able to see their child’s progress. Photo Story 3 is a free software download that matches the technology I already have, and the expense of adding a few microphones and digital cameras is within my already constrained classroom budget.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Audio Multimedia Technology in the Classroom
In my classroom the lesson that I am teaching most often dictates the audio technology I use to present that lesson. There are couple times when I will play a digital movie with sound to help introduce and reinforce a lesson. Another deciding factor in audio technology is what I have available to use. In my very diverse classroom I have always had a great need to reintroduce a lesson more than once to my students.
Until recently I have never considered using a podcast to deliver a lesson or part of a lesson to my students. In my classroom environment, podcasting could be a great additional tool to reach many of my students. Approximately 20% of my students are absent each day, with a percentage of those students absent several days at a time. This high absenteeism is a real problem. Since students at Harmon all have school assigned laptops with wireless capability, podcasting might be a good solution to this problem. A podcast of my lessons would be a positive tool to help those students who are absent from class understand the lesson or lessons they have missed and to get caught up in their work. Podcasts seem like a natural fit for my classroom and students since my classroom has computers, software, and the teacher and students all have access to audio free ware to produce podcasts. A small expense would be an investment in headphones for my students to have to hear the podcast.
Almost 50% of the student population at Harmon is ESL. By having a podcast of lessons available, my ESL students could listen over and over again, stopping and starting as needed. Because all students have desktops and laptops networked to each other and to the Internet in my classroom, they would have easy access to podcasts. It would take only a few minutes of instruction time to show students how to listen to the podcast of my lessons. On the other hand, it would take a considerable (but reasonable) amount of time on my part to make most lessons available to students in a podcast form. I would most likely want to podcast the lessons that many students have trouble understanding, especially the ESL students. Once I created the podcasts, it would be very easy to make the lessons available to students by placing the files on the school network to download and listen to at any time. I believe that creating podcasts of some of my lessons is something that I should seriously consider doing to help make my classroom a 21st century classroom. This would be a very positive learning enhancement for my students.
I have always tried to have a mixture of teaching and learning techniques in my classroom while incorporating collaboration when feasible. The MNEA 2010 summer edition article “Teaching with Technology: Being Part of the Shift” published these statistics about retaining what students learn from different mediums: 8% of what they read, 18% of what they hear, 25% of what they see, 50% of what they hear and see, 75% of what they hear and see and discuss, and 92% of learning is by doing. One can tell by these stats that multimedia alone is not sufficient, that a teacher must incorporate all the tools at their disposal and students must participate in their learning to achieve best results.
Until recently I have never considered using a podcast to deliver a lesson or part of a lesson to my students. In my classroom environment, podcasting could be a great additional tool to reach many of my students. Approximately 20% of my students are absent each day, with a percentage of those students absent several days at a time. This high absenteeism is a real problem. Since students at Harmon all have school assigned laptops with wireless capability, podcasting might be a good solution to this problem. A podcast of my lessons would be a positive tool to help those students who are absent from class understand the lesson or lessons they have missed and to get caught up in their work. Podcasts seem like a natural fit for my classroom and students since my classroom has computers, software, and the teacher and students all have access to audio free ware to produce podcasts. A small expense would be an investment in headphones for my students to have to hear the podcast.
Almost 50% of the student population at Harmon is ESL. By having a podcast of lessons available, my ESL students could listen over and over again, stopping and starting as needed. Because all students have desktops and laptops networked to each other and to the Internet in my classroom, they would have easy access to podcasts. It would take only a few minutes of instruction time to show students how to listen to the podcast of my lessons. On the other hand, it would take a considerable (but reasonable) amount of time on my part to make most lessons available to students in a podcast form. I would most likely want to podcast the lessons that many students have trouble understanding, especially the ESL students. Once I created the podcasts, it would be very easy to make the lessons available to students by placing the files on the school network to download and listen to at any time. I believe that creating podcasts of some of my lessons is something that I should seriously consider doing to help make my classroom a 21st century classroom. This would be a very positive learning enhancement for my students.
I have always tried to have a mixture of teaching and learning techniques in my classroom while incorporating collaboration when feasible. The MNEA 2010 summer edition article “Teaching with Technology: Being Part of the Shift” published these statistics about retaining what students learn from different mediums: 8% of what they read, 18% of what they hear, 25% of what they see, 50% of what they hear and see, 75% of what they hear and see and discuss, and 92% of learning is by doing. One can tell by these stats that multimedia alone is not sufficient, that a teacher must incorporate all the tools at their disposal and students must participate in their learning to achieve best results.
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