Piaget, Dewey, ROFL.

What if some of the most influential learning theorists in history were Facebook friends? Cluttered news feeds for sure.

Locke the Cupboard

Locke the Cupboard was originally inspired by Locke’s idea that new born babies come into the world with a “blank slate” as a mind. I switched the metaphor to an empty cupboard for his status update and in doing so turned it into a double entendre. The empty cupboard represents both his learning theory and an actual empty cupboard in need of some canned goods. The obvious antagonist would be Plato so I tried to think of a clever way to refute Locke’s “blank slate” argument with something out of Plato’s “recalling what the soul had forgotten” playbook. I couldn’t resist the urge to evoke the Windows System Restore utility, as it is a tool that allows a Windows OS to revert back to a previous state. It might be a little bit out of context, but out of context is often the norm in the world of Facebook.

I wanted to make Plato one of the main contributors to the conversation, but strangely enough I reached a roadblock. My brain took me in a different direction as I thought about how my girlfriend organized the can goods in my cupboard a few weeks back. She actually spent the time to group the soups together by type, and also PUT THEM IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER! Crazy as she is, it made me think of Gestalt theory. How something is organized affects how the learner perceives the content. So in walks Koffka stressing that Locke organize his cupboard as he fills/learns.

Then Lev Vygotsky jumps into the conversation to bring about a solution to the problem. Since Locke does not know what to put in his cupboard, Vygotsky offers to take him out to Meijer so that Locke can learn to shop by imitating him. Keeping with Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. But not until after he watches the final episode of Lost, a TV series in which one of the characters is named after him.

Study Party at Lev’s Place

Study Party at Lev’s Place starts off with Lev Vygotsky making a status update letting all his “friends” know that he’s putting together a study party for CEP800. Vygotsky and Dewey are enthused about the opportunity to get together as a group and share their ideas so that they could learn from one another while Piaget, Plato, Locke, and Kohler would rather work individually. This status update attempts to illustrate the contrasting views amongst educational theorists about the role of the learner. The social constructivists (Dewey and Vygotsky) placed heavy emphasis on the role of society on the learner while theorists like Piaget, Plato, Locke, and Kohler depicted learning as something that happens to the learner as an individual. Dewey suggests that they ask the instructor if they could work collaboratively on their final project for the class (Ironically, by having this conversation they actually helped me to complete my project!) and the non-social constructivists chime in with opposition.

This is obviously a gross simplification of the ideals that these gentlemen believed. However, I like that I was able to place these ideas into the context of a group project discussion. Anyone who has ever worked in a group in school or in their career  on a project will identify with the different types of group members represented. Some people thrive while working cooperatively, while others would rather be an island.

For a little added humor, the Behaviorists (Pavlov and Skinner) also make an appearance. Pavlov, being of the classical conditioning variety, acts like one of his dogs would and drools at Vygotsky mentioning the study party. Pavlov has been to Vygotsky’s study parties before and they had snacks there. The study party has become a conditioned stimulus that makes him drool even though Vygotsky makes no mention of snacks. Skinner simply inquires to the schedule that the snacks will be distributed, alluding to a reinforcement schedule.

Attack of the Piaget Clones

Attack of the Piaget Clones is a fake conversation between Piaget, Dewey, and Skinner. I imagined Piaget mentioning that Attack of the Clones was on TV that night so that everyone could tune in and watch. I think that I’ve treated Piaget unfairly in this parody but I couldn’t help myself. Every time I come in contact with his developmental stages, I think of humankind as a clone army. This is outlandish I know. It’s not so much the stages, but the sequential order that irritates me I think. Too rigid.

Anyways, Dewey pokes fun at Piaget’s movie choice because of the irony. Skinner chimes in about how the movie demonstrates a great errorless learning environment. Then the conversation shifts to active learning when Skinner mentiones “implanted”, something Piaget and Dewey would both disagree with since they believed learning was something that the learner did… not had done to them.

Learning Outside of School and Self-Directed Learning (SDL)

Lauren Resnick’s The 1987 Presidential Address: Learning in School and Out illustrates the stark contrast between the traditional in-school model of learning and out of school learning. Out of school learning is usually more authentic in the respect that learning is socially shared, tool centered, and all actions are directly connected to events; while the traditional school model measures students individually and uses simulations to represent real world tools. The Internet can be a great medium for learning outside of school because it offers many collaborative opportunities such as wiki’s, social networking, Google Docs, etc. It also allows the learner to use tools that are applicable to the learner’s current or future profession.

In the above video Kevin Kelly described the internet’s impact on self-directed learning. There is an ever constant fear amongst the general public that new technology will envelop our lives to the point that we become sedentary and completely dependent upon the new technology. Before I watched Kelly’s talk, I always viewed this as a black and white issue. One could either argue that technology would take over our lives in a negative way, or that tools would always remain tools from which we could always step away from; never becoming dependent. However, he categorizes the internet as a technology tool that is progressively enveloping our lives, that we are/will become completely dependent on it, and that this is in fact desirable

In his talk, Kelly provides his perspective on digital age tools by linking to similar non-digital innovations.

 Kelly says, “… I want to talk about…this idea that we are going to be co-dependent … I have now gotten to the point where I don’t try to remember things, I just Google it. It’s just easier to do that. And we kind of object at first and saying, ‘oh that’s awful’. But if we think about the dependency that we have on this other technology called the alphabet and writing, we’re totally dependent on it. It’s transformed culture. We cannot imagine ourselves without the alphabet and writing, and so in the same way we’re going to not imagine ourselves without this other machine not being there.”

While I would argue that the web is a communicator of knowledge and language (much more so than an actual language in itself), comparing the web to a language offers a good illustration of how co-dependency can be a positive thing. It touches on Resnick’s argument that tools don’t eliminate or destroy intelligence, it simply shifts responsibility. Kelly says we don’t try to remember things, we just Google them. Resnick would say knowledge isn’t lost to Google it’s just in a different location. I see no problem with this conservation theory; in fact it’s desirable that knowledge be communicable and readily accessible. However being able to export ideas should make room to construct more complex thought, not take all burden off the learner. The calculator shifts the responsibility of solving simple equations from the brain to a tool so that more thought can be put towards complex equations. Google has aided learning via the internet in a similar manner.

The web is always with us on our laptops, phones, vehicles, and other devices. Letting the web flow around us at all times allows for immediate tap in to the pool of knowledge available. I believe very strongly in the relevant timing of instruction. During the 2008 presidential race I was teaching sections of AP political science and was able to integrate current events into my unit on the American election process by way of the internet with tools such as 270towin.com. Unfortunately the curriculum rarely aligns itself to events in the outside world and the students’ current state of mind like this. In self-directed learning, the curriculum will vary depending on student interest, however content is always relevant. If I happened to be watching a movie and was interested in a particular actor/actress’s work and wanted to know more about them, Wikipedia or IMDB are resources that I might tap into to direct my desire to continue my learning. Learning in this way is always sparked by current interest, is immediately satisfied with further exploration for understanding, and is delivered in adequate doses because it is at the learners’ discretion when to cease the learning process. I take great interest in learning how I can translate this self-directed learning into the more structured environment of the traditional classroom.

Culture from the perspective of a 7th grade social studies student...

Do you think that it would be better if there was only one world culture?

Yeah a little, but it would be kind of weird.

  CEP 800 - Podcast assignment (JGer) by Jger
Royalty Free Music by Kevin MacLeod (Kool Kats) http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/index.html?keywords=007&Search=Search


Reflection of What I Learned

I really enjoyed this project because it allowed me to gauge student understanding of a subject holistically without interruption. Under normal circumstances, I would have jumped in to correct many of the errors of fact that the student mentioned. However, after lots of reflection I don't know if this is always best practice.

I intend on playing parts of the interview back to the student for purposes of self critiquing (not only on the content, but speaking skills as well). So much can be learned by interacting with recorded works of yourself and I believe the student will benefit from this rare opportunity.

The actual finished product itself can serve as a great "pre-test" of a subject that we have only begun to study in my world studies course. It was amazing to sit back and listen to this interview in the editing process because I kept noticing new things that the student said that I had missed in the live conversation. After about 6 or 7 listens, I started to gain a clear understanding of the "lense" through which this student views the concept of culture. I can now better expand on his prior knowledge, fill in the gaps in knowledge that he lacks, and correct any inaccuracies that he has on the subject; just by simply listening a few additional times.

In the future, I may wish to alter the format to a complete student led production. Podcasts force students to think critically about a subject in order for the final product to be concise and entertaining. Mastery of content will be needed for a student led production and I like that innate accountability that arises naturally with the format.

Incorporating student blogs would make it interactive, offering praise and critique alike.

Requiring students to make updates/revisions as their opinions change would help to correct inaccuracies in understanding as their thinking evolved.

Reflecting on CEP 812

I think the biggest thing that I learned in CEP 812 is that web-based technologies can have very diverse applications. For example, social bookmarking is an excellent collaborative research tool. However, it can also be used as a presentation tool (Like we did for our SIG presentation). In a social studies classroom it can be used to track current events, grading students on their awareness and insights to the world around them. It’s a great structuring tool for exploratory activities.

In the past, when my technology tool set was a bit smaller, I used to fall in love with specific technologies and think that I could use it for every application. Now that I’m completing the certificate program, I think I’m getting better at identifying specific attributes of applications that will be the most effective for a given problem of practice. I initially started my TechQuest on feedback because I fell in love with Jing. While I still think that Jing is a very effective tool for providing student feedback, I’ve learned that it will most likely be more efficient to combine it with Google Docs. I guess to sum up; I’ve learned to use the tools instead of letting the tools use me.

My goal when I started this course was to learn how to better use Web 2.0 to engage students in my classes. My SIG helped me to discover how to use collaborative technologies to promote socially constructed learning. Not only that, but I myself have become a better collaborative learner in the process. I hope to stay in touch with my SIG members and continue to grow our community of Collaborators ;)

My new goal is to finally APPLY all that I have been learning. I think I’ve thought more critically about education recently than I did when I was actually in the classroom. When I finally get back into the classroom, I want to continue to evolve the strategies I’ve developed in the certificate program.

Best of luck to everyone as we go our separate ways. Hopefully we will continue to follow each other’s status, and perhaps even work together on future projects.

TechQuest Project Evaluation

Before I get to my evaluation, I wanted to share my first attempt at giving feedback using Jing. As part of our paper swap, Shawn and I utilized screencasting to provide each other with feedback on our TechQuests. Click the image below to view my critique of her work:

It was great to finally implement part of my TechQuest. Although it wasn’t on student work, I believe the premise is the same. I really learned a lot by receiving Shawn’s feedback in this manner as well. Namely, teachers will need to be taught how to create their screencasts.

I experienced this as well. How a teacher would normally speak to a student in a one-on-one conference will not translate well to screencasted feedback. The ‘umms’, ‘ahhs’, and pregnant pauses are no no’s. However, it would also be ineffective to script a screencast. So really, a big challenge of mine going forward will be iron out a technique that best integrates screencasting into the grading/review process. I realize that many of my issues can be better addressed once I’m able to implement it in an authentic situation but it never hurts to think ahead.

What stinks about how I created Shawn’s feedback is that she can only listen and watch me interact with her paper. Especially in a format like Google Docs or Word, it may be more effective to use the comment feature to directly tag specific areas of the document. This way, changes could be made immediately rather than watching/listening to the screencast and then making a whole batch of changes later. This would ensure that all areas of concern are addressed individually rather than being buried amongst others.

Most likely this could save time on the teacher’s end as well. Why mention grammatical mistakes in a screencast with it would be much more effective to just put in a comment tag saying “consider revising” or something more specific to the situation. When communicating a more complex idea, the teacher could create a short screencast and then link the student to it via a link in a comment tag. I believe this would better help the student because it’s directly connected to their actual document.

Establishing this process will have obvious growing pains initially because I plan to implement the feedback loops as soon as I get back to the classroom. It needs to be implemented from day one to have the most effect and this will be overwhelming. Personally, I foresee having an urge to downscale or even do away with providing feedback via screencast if I get frustrated with the amount of time I’m spending on it. For the sake of the project, it will be critical to continue to innovate rather than give in.

In the future, I think I’ll approach my TechQuest’s from the viewpoint that I will never quite finish them. Much like all things in education, my TechQuest will need to be constantly revised in order for it to continue to be advantageous to myself and my students. Therefore, when selecting a future TechQuest it will be important to pick serious on-going problems of practice.

Getting help and advice from peers/colleagues is invaluable as well. My SIG group members offered perspectives that made my project better, and hopefully more adaptable from teacher to teacher. Replication is a very important part of lesson planning to me. So in the future I will want to keep in mind that I’m not only designing strategies like this one for myself, but for my colleagues as well.

TechQuest Project Implementation

For the Project Implementation portion of my TechQuest, I created a podcast detailing what I hope will go well and what I may have difficulties with. If you're using an RSS reader  to follow my page use this Feedburner feed to optimize your experience.

Gerlach-techquest-podcast by Jger
Download (Right Click, Save As)

Internet Research for TechQuest Project

The feedback I received on my project description post last week was amazing. In my portfolio on angel, Susan mentioned that my TechQuest was starting to take on a two-pronged approach. Initially my focus was on improving the quality of teacher to student feedback all while reducing the amount of time and energy required to offer this process to students. I quickly realized that the best way to ease the stress on the teacher would be to share the responsibility with the students.
The goal has expanded to establishing quality feedback loops where students and teacher alike are active participants in the process. While each has different roles to play, I believe it to be the best way to allow students to receive timely, high quality, and time efficient feedback on their creative works.

I used delicious to pull together an annotated list of resources for my TechQuest. I had been using Diigo exclusively for social bookmarking but decided to test out Delicious and was happy with the results. I found that I like using the two in tandem. Using Diigo's highlight & post-it, and group features have been amazing for our SIG. However, I find Delicious to have much more efficient tagging and overall better look (which might not seem important, but when you stare at it long enough you begin to realize the importance). I initially was going to supply my annotated links using Diigo, but I was having problems with Diigo displaying everything tagged with "techquest". I triple checked the spelling on every resource and rather than drive myself completely crazy, I created a delicious account (so a yahoo account :) ).
While the tag searches within my social bookmarking tools led me in some interesting directions, my trusted rss subscriptions really got me started. I looked through the blogs that I frequent and skimmed through posts tagged with "feedback" and "peer review" yielding pretty good results. Many of these blogs have links to blogs that the authors read, so I started to expand my tag search to this second tier of blogs. Teacher blogs proved to be the most effective resource for me. I think that's because they have a lot of tips and tricks, where other published articles tend to be too general.
I was really happy to add five new blogs to my netvibes that I can continue to visit in the future :)

In case you missed it, Click Here for my list of annotated links.

TechQuest - Project Description (Update/Final)

This is an updated version of the TechQuest - Project Description that I posted last week. All new additions are in bolded green text. So if you read the previous post you may choose to skim through to read only the new material. Most of the updates focus on the peer review aspect of the project, which in theory will help with time management & students’ ability to internalize the review process.

Educational Need

One major problem within my personal practice is that I find it very difficult to provide students with meaningful feedback on completed projects or in the early stages of serial ongoing assignments. Common pacing guides restrict the amount of time that can be directed toward any individual subject. This often causes teachers to rush through the content and omit doing a thorough review because it would put them behind pace.

I believe that one-on-one conferences with students are essential, especially in my discipline of social studies. But they are time drainers. If I had a class of 30 students it would still take over a class period (perhaps more) to have just a three minute sit down with every student. I simply cannot devote that amount of time without falling behind the pace. However, to not provide that kind of quality feedback will cause many of my students to be left behind anyway.

In the past when I have tried to have individual conference time I have tried to spread it out over a number of days. Trying to have between three and four conferences while allowing the rest of the class to work on an activity of some sort. However, spreading it out did not help the process much.

I myself would be more worried about what the rest of the class was doing and thus the quality of feedback would suffer. The student could sense my rush and once they left my desk had already forgotten what was said about their work. Because of this, there was really no significant improvement on the work in question. In addition, there was no carry-over effect from the conferences on future work.


While spreading conferences out over an extended period of time helped to ease the stress of falling behind on my pacing guide, it made feedback delivery less timely. By the time I got to meet with the last group of students, we were already firmly entrenched in new content. This rendered my feedback all but completely irrelevant to students and thus the critiques were ineffective.

The Role of Technology

A future model must be able to address the current student work as well as help to structure their thinking for future works as well.

To address the educational need, the chosen technologies will need to do the following:

·         Provide meaningful feedback to students on an individual basis.

·         Offer a personalized experience for both the teacher and student. Trying to come as close to an in person meeting as possible.

·         Reduce or even eliminate the amount of in-class time spent on providing teacher-to-student feedback.

·         A real concern is going to be prep time. The solution cannot be to merely record what would be said to the student and then allow them to view it on their own time. This only frees up in-class time at the expense of the teacher’s personal time/prep time.

Research & Resources

1.       The very first resource that got me thinking about implementing a technology solution to the feedback problem was a blog post about using Jing to assess online student writing. I never even thought of using Jing in this way. This technique would provide a very personal experience because the teacher’s voice would be included, almost like the teacher and student we’re sitting side by side. Since Jing captures all desktop activity it can offer interaction directly with the student’s work. The technology advantage is that it makes this process asynchronous, allowing the teacher to compose the feedback during prep time.

a.       Questions to be further explored:

                                                               i.      How will students be able to ask clarifying questions about the teacher’s feedback?

                                                             ii.      Will composing the feedback with Jing save the teacher any time, or make the teacher more effective?

                                                            iii.      When will the student view this feedback? Will they be given in-class time? Will they be expected to view it on their own time? What should be done to insure accountability?

2.       I read a blog post entitled Bowling with Your Eyes Closed: Students Need True Formative Assessment. After the Jing blog post I was looking for other technology application tutorials that could offer more methods of providing feedback… I had great difficulty finding any. However, reading this blog post reminded me that I need to explore the pedagogy in finer detail so that I know exactly what I’m looking for a technology to do.
In the post, bowling is used as an analogy in comparison to daily student work. Both are repetitious activities, but repeated repetition doesn’t necessarily equate to improvement of skill. If a bowler is continually throwing gutter balls they are teaching themselves how to throw gutter balls. Only when they gain feedback on their game (bowler’s tips and tricks literature, personal coach, etc.) will their game improve. This is when they can reflect on what they’ve been doing and implement strategies for improvement. The same goes for students. If they are not given feedback on their work they will continue to produce future work of the same quality.
The blog post mentions the effect of seeing pins get knocked down. It’s instant feedback on the bowler’s progress. But this feedback can only be interpreted if the bowler knows WHY they got the result that they got, and how they can correct it in the future. This would help with the time factor. I must not simply give students feedback, but teach them how to assess their own work in the future. Teach them how to milk the cow. This would require significant time investment initially with diminishing time investment as the class progressed.

3.       A very useful resource that I located is called, Teaching Guide: Using Student Peer Review. It includes sections on planning for peer review sessions, helping students make effective comments, and helping students handle divergent advice among others. It will be important to establish a peer editing community that is rooted in sound pedagogical strategies if greater responsibility in this process is to be shifted to the students over time. There are tons of resources available on this subject including this Peer Review: Narrative from ReadWriteThink and this Advice on Incorporating Peer Review in Your Class from The University of Wisconsin Madison. Synthesizing age old peer review tactics, with new age technology solutions will be very important.

4.       Additional scholarly resources:
Providing Students with Effective Feedback
Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
Researched-Based Strategies: Providing Feedback

The Plan for Implementation

My focus for the duration of this course will be to identify technologies that can help to achieve the criteria established in The Role of Technology section of this post. Since I do not have my own classroom at this point in time, I will need to create a logical plan for accomplishing my goals to be tested in a classroom environment at a later date.

In addition to the role that technology will play, pedagogical solutions will need to be put into place in order to make their implementation successful. The biggest part of implementing this feedback process will be educating students how to recognize why we are doing it. If students are taught how to use critique to better their own work, this project will only be a mild success. In order for this techquest to be overwhelmingly worthwhile, students must be given training to use the technologies and thus provide meaningful feedback to their peers.

While the teacher will continue to provide feedback to individual students, having students take on this responsibility will instill valuable team skills in addition to allowing them to be more critical of their own work. Not to mention this will allow the teacher to scale back their role. Providing feedback to only a select number of projects, or only final drafts will allow the teacher to be drastically more efficient.

The danger of this process is removing the teacher’s presence too quickly. Also, there will always be reliability issues with the quality of feedback that students provide to one another. The teacher must carefully monitor this process to ensure that these issues are avoided or at least resolved quickly once they arise.

The Four Common Places of Education

·         Teacher: The teacher will be responsible for providing meaningful feedback to students in a format that is personal and easily understood. The teacher should also be concerned with maximizing the efficiency of the feedback process (time spent vs. quality of feedback). Part of this will be teaching students to reflect on their own progress so that the student can assess their future work more independently. In addition, the teacher will be responsible for teaching students how to take on the roll of feedback-giver.

·         Learner: The learner will be responsible for reading/watching/internalizing feedback that is given. The learner must be equipped with the knowledge of how to apply feedback to future works. The learner will also be responsible for learning how to take on the role of feedback-giver so that they may provide feedback to their peers.

·         Subject Matter: My plan will be designed to be used in Middle School/High School Social studies. However, these tools will be able to be adapted across the curriculum as an aide to all teachers.

·         Settings: Feedback content will need to be created during a teacher’s planning period. The environments in which students will view their feedback will vary. Initially, class time will need to be set aside to introduce this concept. However, after awhile I may be able to rely on students to engage with the feedback content on their own. Once students are sufficiently trained to provide peer feedback, in-class time will need to be set aside to monitor this process. Once students become efficient and comfortable with the technology/feedback process, it would be ideal to shift this responsibility to out of class time as well. Only through trial and error could this possibility be addressed.

TechQuest - Project Description

Educational Need

One major problem within my personal practice is that I find it very difficult to provide students with meaningful feedback on completed projects or in the early stages of serial ongoing assignments. Common pacing guides restrict the amount of time that can be directed toward any individual subject. This often causes teachers to rush through the content and omit doing a thorough review because it would put them behind pace.

I believe that one-on-one conferences with students are essential, especially in my discipline of social studies. But they are time drainers. If I had a class of 30 students it would still take over a class period (perhaps more) to have just a three minute sit down with every student. I simply cannot devote that amount of time without falling behind the pace. However, to not provide that kind of quality feedback will cause many of my students to be left behind anyway.

The Role of Technology

To address the educational need, the chosen technologies will need to do the following:

·         Provide meaningful feedback to students on an individual basis.

·         Offer a personalized experience for both the teacher and student. Trying to come as close to an in person meeting as possible.

·         Reduce or even eliminate the amount of in-class time spent on providing teacher-to-student feedback.

·         A real concern is going to be prep time. The solution cannot be to merely record what would be said to the student and then allow them to view it on their own time. This only frees up in-class time at the expense of the teacher’s personal time/prep time.

Research & Resources

1.       The very first resource that got me thinking about implementing a technology solution to the feedback problem was a blog post about using Jing to assess online student writing. I never even thought of using Jing in this way. This technique would provide a very personal experience because the teacher’s voice would be included, almost like the teacher and student we’re sitting side by side. Since Jing captures all desktop activity it can offer interaction directly with the student’s work. The technology advantage is that it makes this process asynchronous, allowing the teacher to compose the feedback during prep time.

a.       Questions to be further explored:

                                                               i.      How will students be able to ask clarifying questions about the teacher’s feedback?

                                                             ii.      Will composing the feedback with Jing save the teacher any time, or make the teacher more effective?

                                                            iii.      When will the student view this feedback? Will they be given in-class time? Will they be expected to view it on their own time? What should be done to insure accountability?

2.       I read a blog post entitled Bowling with Your Eyes Closed: Students Need True Formative Assessment. After the Jing blog post I was looking for other technology application tutorials that could offer more methods of providing feedback… I had great difficulty finding any. However, reading this blog post reminded me that I need to explore the pedagogy in finer detail so that I know exactly what I’m looking for a technology to do.
In the post, bowling is used as an analogy in comparison to daily student work. Both are repetitious activities, but repeated repetition doesn’t necessarily equate to improvement of skill. If a bowler is continually throwing gutter balls they are teaching themselves how to throw gutter balls. Only when they gain feedback on their game (bowler’s tips and tricks literature, personal coach, etc.) will their game improve. This is when they can reflect on what they’ve been doing and implement strategies for improvement. The same goes for students. If they are not given feedback on their work they will continue to produce future work of the same quality.
The blog post mentions the effect of seeing pins get knocked down. It’s instant feedback on the bowler’s progress. But this feedback can only be interpreted if the bowler knows WHY they got the result that they got, and how they can correct it in the future. This would help with the time factor. I must not simply give students feedback, but teach them how to assess their own work in the future. Teach them how to milk the cow. This would require significant time investment initially with diminishing time investment as the class progressed.

The Plan for Implementation

My focus for the duration of this course will be to identify technologies that can help to achieve the criteria established in The Role of Technology section of this post. Since I do not have my own classroom at this point in time, I will need to create a logical plan for accomplishing my goals to be tested in a classroom environment at a later date.

The Four Common Places of Education

·         Teacher: The teacher will be responsible for providing meaningful feedback to students in a format that is personal and easily understood. The teacher should also be concerned with maximizing the efficiency of the feedback process (time spent vs. quality of feedback). Part of this will be teaching students to reflect on their own progress so that the student can assess their future work more independently.

·         Learner: The learner will be responsible for reading/watching/internalizing feedback that is given. The learner must be equipped with the knowledge of how to apply feedback to future works.

·         Subject Matter: My plan will be designed to be used in Middle School/High School Social studies. However, these tools will be able to be adapted across the curriculum as an aide to all teachers.

·         Settings: Feedback content will need to be created during a teacher’s planning period. The environments in which students will view their feedback will vary. Initially, class time will need to be set aside to introduce this concept. However, after awhile I may be able to rely on students to engage with the feedback content on their own.

Wrapping things up

Looking back on my experiences in CEP 811, I have a lot to be proud of. Eight weeks is such a short period of time to accomplish all I have. There are plenty of things to be proud of, but I know that my accomplishments are merely building blocks upon which even greater teaching will be built upon.
The WebQuest and StAIR projects were clearly the most labor intensive, but I learned a lot of lessons during the process. Both projects encourage student exploration which is awesome. However, engaging exploration without boundaries can render your lesson largely ineffective and in some cases even put your kids in a dangerous situation. Building the WebQuest taught me that restricting internet research to a chosen list of sites can really help to focus students. The StAIR taught me to try to predict problem areas with content and create mechanisms that will provide extra assistance to students. A teacher can never think too far ahead, especially using when using technology.
Educational application of Web 2.0 has been the biggest eye opener for me. While WebQuests and StAIR’s are very powerful tech tools, they take a very long time to create. I see Web 2.0 as a digital update to classic analog classroom activity. It takes very little effort to move student notebooks from spiral notebooks to a blog format, but there are very real benefits on top of that ease.
I will take advantage of wiki’s and Google Doc’s for collaboration. I will use jing to provide dynamic feedback to my students on projects so that I do not need to use valuable class time. I will use Web 2.0 to expand my classroom beyond the classroom walls and beyond school hours. Really, there is so much that I want to do with Web 2.0… but I need to implement these tools in a logical manner.
The philosophical difference between my tech approach now after taking CEP 811 is that I start with an educational need and then think of the tools that will help me to address it. I’ve always used technology to enhance learning, never to use technology just to use it. However, using the “problem solving” philosophy allows me to maximize my instruction.
A new goal of mine going forward is to keep building upon the work that I’ve already started. I want to make my StAIR and WebQuest better than they already are and I want to continue to make new ones. As a lifelong learner I cannot be satisfied with my teaching, I must continually improve it.

Michigan Merit Curriculum Online Experiences (say it five times fast!)

After reading the Michigan Merit Curriculum Online Experience Guideline Companion Document, I am very happy with the progress that the State of Michigan is making in the way of establishing educational technology standards.
My task for my CEP 811 course was to identify one of the technologies that qualify as an online experience (according to the guidelines), and discuss how I would incorporate that technology into my own teaching. While I believe that I will eventually use most of these strategies in some shape or form as I develop my craft, there are definitely some tools that I could implement tomorrow and some that would take time to implement. For example, while I would be more than able to technically support a conference with an expert (I would have no problem setting up the conference hardware/software) I do not necessarily have a contact that I would consider an expert at this point in time. In addition, I would love to take part in a collaborative lesson with a teacher/class on the other side of the world but I need to establish a relationship with that teacher before that reality is even fathomable. Thus, the strategies I must focus on in the short term are those technologies that I need not rely on any outside influences to establish in my classroom, but have the potential to expand into a global collaborative community so that eventually we’ll be able to tap into those resources.
What I want to do most is to have my students establish their own personal blogs, serving as a digital journal for class participation. I believe the blog to a diverse communication tool because it can be used by itself for students to reflect on their thoughts, or use it as the response element in tandem with another online instructional method.
For example, I recently completed designing a WebQuest that assigned each student a member of congress to profile. Students explored both the House and Senate websites in addition to votesmart.org. Instead of writing a traditional paper in Word and then submitting it to the teacher, students create a visually attractive blog post in the style of a political blogger. If I had each student set up their own RSS reader pages, I could have students easily comment on eachother’s blogs; establishing discussion and feedback loops.
I really like utilizing these tools in a inner-connected manner like this. I think it improves the lesson itself because the different tools each add their own pedagogical advantage and it models web 2.0 use for students with real interactions. I would also say that if the teacher was able to establish a community of active bloggers within their classroom population, it would be a good building block from which to branch out and plug into a more global learning community. Opening up the doors to some of the learning opportunities that I mentioned would be difficult initially.

Google Spreadsheets

As part of the Google Docs suite, Google Spreadsheets is a remotely hosted spreadsheet application intended for collaborative works. At first glance, Google Spreadsheets is like Microsoft Excel with less toolbar capabilities and to some a less friendly user interface. But to uncover its true potential it should be viewed as a live data collector rather than for static data compilation.


My Experience
I’ve used Google Docs a great deal in the past, as far back when it was still Writely. Mostly I used Documents with classmates to take notes in college classes. Google Wave has improved upon this real-time concept and I see that as the next generation of the remote based collaborative document.
Spreadsheets I have used less frequently, but lately I have become very interested in the forms element of the application. When I have a classroom again I would really like to use forms to collect contact information from parents. Sending out forms (either via email or embedded on my website), would be both paperless and better organized than the traditional contact card method.
Something to be weary of is that if most of the information is being provided by one user, the interface is not worth the frustration. I would much rather use Excel or OpenOffice Calc if I was making a spreadsheet with very little input from others. But again, if thought of as a collaborative tool only, you can minimize this frustration.


Student Knowledge
In order for students to use this software in the classroom they will need to have a basic knowledge of spreadsheet software. Students must know that a spreadsheet is a grid with vertical columns, horizontal rows, and each individual box is called a cell. Students should know that each cell can simply hold data or hold equations that reference other cells. These equations are hidden so as to show the data seamlessly.
Students need to also be taught how to create and use forms as this is perhaps the best unique feature that Google Spreadsheets offers in comparison to other spreadsheet software.

Sharing
Spreadsheets can be shared by simply clicking on the “Share” button in the upper right corner of the spreadsheet and then choosing one of the share options (Seen at right). Collaborators can be invited via email and/or the creator can choose to make the document public and establish a web link for it.



 
Teaching Social Studies with Google Spreadsheets
Google forms can be used quite effectively for surveys which would be good for collecting opinion data. The information can be displayed graphically to the class as a whole to illustrate the range of responses. Teachers could design forms for their students to respond to, or students could create their own surveys to collect opinion data from friends, family, and community members.




Check out this two part tutorial on how to create a self-grading quiz using Google Forms:
Part I | Part II


Helping Students Collaborate
Unlike Google Documents, the collaborating benefits of spreadsheets are not as easily apparent. It will be important to model the use of forms for students, for this might be the most foreign concept.


Organization
With remotely hosted collaborative applications it is important to establish appropriate editing etiquette. Students should use comments to indicate rationale for changes. A great environment all stems from good communication. You have to be overly detailed in your statements so that there is no misinterpretation.