Learning Philosophy 2.0

Reflecting on my learning philosophy from the beginning of the semester has made me realize there is definitely Image result for get out of comfort zonemore I would like to add to it.  I strongly believe that for the majority of learning you must have a growth mindset.  So much of what my students achieved this past school year resulted from their willingness to take risks and accept failures as opportunities to improve.  My philosophy was very reflective of that.  What I did not mention was the use of technology to take risks, or for teachers to reach outside of the classroom to connect globally with others.  Even though I think these things are extremely important I still believe that these things happen as a result of a growth mindset.  Teachers and students want to learn; this requires stepping out of their comfort zones to try something new and make connections that wouldn’t have been made otherwise.

 

How do you now define learning?

  • Learning is organic, it occurs as a result of your culture, social group or network, and as a result of your own characteristics.  Having a passion for a topic or a problem that you want to solve drives learning.  

How do you now define teaching?

  • Teaching occurs both formally and informally.  I never gave much thought or credit to learning through social networks.  Reading the Greenhow article was very enlightening for me, it really opened my eyes to how much can be learned from developing PLN’s.  After my week at KTI summit and really connecting with and learning from other teachers I think very differently about teaching.  I think the foundation to teaching is connections.  Developing connections with our students but also feeling connected with colleagues and others in our network who support us.

How has your philosophy changed (or not) or been refined from the start of the course?

  • I am still a firm believer in the growth mindset.  I believe that real, authentic learning, occurs when the learner is not afraid to fail.  Failing forward is to take a risk to learn something and if you happen to fail along the way to take that failure and use it to improve your thoughts, strategies, or ideas of what to do next.

How does learning happen?

  • What I have learned from this course is the impact that social networks and PLN’s have in learning for both teachers and students.  It can be challenging for teachers to include a student’s social network into the formal learning environment however with challenge comes opportunity.

What roles should the teacher and student play in this new ecology of learning?

  • The role of teacher must shift to one of a facilitator.  Time should now be spent working as a classroom community supporting and encouraging others.  With the use of technology in the classroom, teachers have the ability to offer targeted feedback based upon what the student is working on at the moment.  This feedback can be offered virtually or in person. For example, a math lesson can begin as a mini-lesson, then students break into teams to complete an activity to apply the skill.   The use of technology in the classroom not only allows the teacher to differentiate what students work on but also allows opportunities for students to have a choice in how they demonstrate their learning.  Student engagement in the learning process would also cause a big shift in classroom roles.  Students can be co-creators of their learning, interacting with the curriculum and working with teachers and peers to determine what the approach to learning might be as well as considering how to share their product.
    Student and teacher role and responsibility shifts are the most interesting to me.  The learning environment is setup to be a collaborative learning partnership with students and teachers thinking interdependently, as well as students self-monitoring and having strategies that allow them to think about their thinking.

How do you know when learning takes place and what visible indicators or signs demonstrate that learning has taken place?

  • Real learning takes place when students are taking risks, sharing their work with an audience and accepting constructive feedback to improve their work.  Perhaps the biggest indicator of learning is engagement.  When students are engaged in their learning they don’t want to stop working!  They are excited and driven to keep going.

What is the role of technology in your learning philosophy and what is a tangible example of how you plan to implement it in the future?

  • Technology is embedded in my learning philosophy because technology is no longer the future; it is the present.  We as teachers must expand our own knowledge base and learn how to incorporate Web 2.0 tools into our everyday teaching lives.  There are many things that I am excited about for this upcoming school year. To begin with, I would like to teach my learners about how to connect and collaborate globally using Seesaw connected blogs.  I will introduce Ozobots to my coding club.  I will use the free instruction offered to teach students lessons with Ozobots that include things like writing your name in code; coding a story; retelling a fairy tale with Ozobots, and even practicing multiplication facts.

Kym’s Personal Learning Philosophy 2.0

Customized Learning

This week we read The Future of Thinking; Learning Institutions in a Digital Age by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg.  This book had me hooked right from the beginning.  In the opening scenario the authors tell about an instructor who grows frustrated by his students.  The students seemed to be paying more attention to their devices than to him as he reads from a book in the front of the class.  He complains to colleagues and receives two very different responses.

  • The first colleague agreed that students are indeed to distracted by laptops and feels this behavior to be outrageous.
  • The second colleague wondered why an instructor in the front of the room is reading out of a book.

Right away I was intrigued yet also reflective.  Is that me?  Am I the teacher who stands in the front of the room dispensing information while my students sit quietly in their seats?  The answer is no, I am not.  Well, most of the time.

Responding to Emerging Technologies

Over the past few decades the ways in which we learn has changed dramatically.  From the sources we use to acquire new knowledge to the exchanging and sharing of ideas, for example blogs, wikis and Web 2.o tools.  There are so many ways to learn and connect.  It is clear that the authors believe that with all emerging technologies that have shaped learning over the years, formal institutions are slow to keep up and implement change.  When I was an undergraduate earning my education degree, I did not take any courses that specifically related to the field of technology and instruction.  If those courses existed then I do not know however, instructional technology was not a requirement to earn my teaching degree.  Now as a teacher I use technology in my classroom every day.  The majority of technology i use for classroom instruction I had to learn on my own.  Over the past few years and in addition to the new technology I have taught myself, I also find myself learning new things from my students.  The authors share this same idea.  “This reversal of who is teaching whom, who is learning from whom, and the constantly shifting hierarchies of expertise and the ability to appreciate those shifts when they happen and to value them are central to digital learning.” (Davidson, C., Goldberg, D., et. al. 2010) It is so important to be open to learning from our students.  Show them what you know about a Web 2.0 tool and they might come in the very next day and show you all the new things about it that you didn’t know!

Pay Attention Educators!

As a public school teacher there are certain constraints that are put on me; such as state testing, district assessments, and policies.  Working within these constraints to create learning opportunities that are collaborative, authentic, creative, and innovative is my job as an educator.  I think that the biggest way to do this is to embed Web 2.0 and tech into the classroom.   Recently, I had a conversation with a teacher from Hazelton, PA about how she implemented blended learning into her kindergarten classroom.  She told me that teaching, using the blended model, involves a great deal of work up front but that it is well worth the effort.  Her district has developed an initiative for K-2 teachers to implement blended lessons for both ELA and math.  She found it best to teach ELA blended on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and  math on Tuesday and Thursday.  As part of the blended learning model of teaching her students use Web 2.0 tools daily. She credits a lot of the success she has had this past year to her team members.  They work together to support each other, share ideas, and collaborate.  One of the principles of digital learning is peer to peer sharing. This can happen by meeting as teams within a building or reaching out to your PLN for help with a project or an idea that you want to do but aren’t quite sure how to get started.  When I began teaching I remember teachers being more hesitant to share with others, it was the sense of I created that, I want credit for creating that. As education has shifted throughout the years so has how we view our work.  We have now built networks where we openly share ideas with each other not for the credit we receive but for the benefit of the kids.  “The fluidity and creativity of technological sharing in order to facilitate shared learning can be breathtaking.” (Davidson, C., Goldberg, D., et. al. 2010)

https://blog.blackboard.com/5-tips-for-embracing-blended-learning-in-elementary-classrooms/

As educators we must recognize the need to shift our teaching practice to one that meets the needs of today’s students.  We cannot continue to teach as we did for yesterday’s learners.  That is our challenge!  On Thursday I was privileged to listen to a keynote speaker,  Sara Heintzelman,  the K-12 Instructional Technology Specialist for Centennial School of Lehigh University speak at the KTI Summit.  Her message to the audience was clear. Connect!  Connect with other educators.  Connect with groups and memberships.  If  we want our students to work collaboratively and become an innovative team member then we must first connect ourselves.  We also need to teach our students that a challenge is just an opportunity, that a really tough math problem you just can’t seem to solve is your opportunity to connect.  To connect with someone who can help you solve it and then teach you how to solve it.  Passion projects, Genius Hour and PBL are all ways to engage students in authentic learning that excites and invigorates them.

Week 10 Group Summary

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For the reading this week we were asked to look at participatory culture and identify new media literacy skills that we think we could incorporate into our current teaching positions.  Here is a summary of what our group wrote.

Created using Canva.

Sara:

For her position working in middle school math classrooms Sara identified play, simulation, and collective intelligence as skills she felt could easily be incorporated.  Play could easily fit into Sara’s math class in both geometry and algebra lessons through interactive Web 2.0 tools like Geogebra and Desmos.  Additionally, Sara could integrate simulation through a real-world game about a lemonade stand in which students must plan a budget to purchase items needed and adjust the cost of the lemonade for things such as weather.  It allows them to keep track of  data over a determined period of time and then analyze success through profits. Sara also supported the use of cognitive intelligence in the classroom through the use of collaborative groups which supports a participatory culture in that there is “some degree of social connection with one another.” (Jenkins, H., et. al 2006)

Additionally, Sara wrote about how influential Scratch can be in giving users the experiences necessary to develop many of the new media literacy skills. Scratch offers its users the opportunity to create original work, share it with a supportive community, receive constructive feedback and even remix shared projects.  “Through our observations of the community, we have developed forms of participation in the community that emerge from these varying processes of appropriation.”  (Brennan, K., Monroy-Hernandez, A., Resnick, Mitchel. 2010).

Christina:

Christina, also a middle school teacher, identified play and cognitive intelligence as skills she has and can continue to incorporate into her classroom. Play is integrated in Christina’s class through the use of discovery time while the students are using the iPADS. Students in Christina’s room work often in small groups that change with each new task.  This allows them opportunities to collaborate, share, and learn with each other.  Even though the group work takes place in the formal classroom environment, students are still building supportive communities with each other and perhaps even bringing into the class some social networks they have built on their own.  It reminds me of the Rheingold article about Theory of Knowledge,  when he asked high school teacher Amy Burvall what is TOK?   “One of the key premises is that personal knowledge should result from careful inquiry and examination of evidence rather than simple acceptance of claims.” (Rheingold, H. 2014)  I think that Christina’s use of small group work in her class allows her students the opportunity to dig deeper into their learning by shaping and changing their knowledge based on new information learned from peers.

Kevin:

Kevin easily identified quite a few skills that he already incorporates into his sixth grade classroom.  They are; play, judgement, and collective intelligence. Kevin uses play through 21st Century Skill stations, gamification and game-based learning as much as possible.  Through text-dependent analysis and Passion Projects judgment is being integrated as students are responding to questions with support of information (from reliable and credible sources), writing analysis statements and peer editing. According to Kevin, “Collective intelligence is a new media literacy often integrated into my classroom through jigsaw lessons and collaborative problem-based learning activities.”

One point that Kevin made that really stuck out to me was that young people are already consuming information from sites for both personal and educational needs.  He then connected to the text by Brennan, Monroy-Herandez, and Resnick that we should not just assume that since young people are using and interacting with media that they are effortlessly understanding and that they are creators of content.  This is something that must develop and must be done as part of a supportive community.  Kevin stated that  “As teachers, we need to use the new media literacies to empower our students.”

 

Kym:

For myself, a early elementary teacher, I identified play, performance, simulation, and distributive cognition as skills that I have incorporated in the past as well as ones that I plan to embed into future learning opportunities.  Play occurs naturally in second grade as the students regularly use the room itself as a way to problem solve through learning centers and activities.  Performance is one that I haven’t utilized but can incorporate into our engineering unit as students study about pollination.  STEM activities offer themselves to simulation in that the students are working collaboratively to create a model to solve a real-world problem.  Finally, I identified distributive intelligence as the last skill that easily fits into a second grade classroom.  I think that this is achieved through the use of Chromebooks and Web 2.0 tools.

Community building within the classroom is also a theme of my post.  Teachers need to be trusted by supportive administrators, even under the constraints of standardized testing and curriculum, to incorporate new media skills into their daily lessons.  Students must feel comfortable sharing and taking risks individually and with peers.

 

Formal Classroom:

Even though we have various settings for our classroom instruction I noticed some similarities in what we felt we could incorporate into our classrooms.  The first is that we are all comfortable incorporating play into the classroom and many of us felt it is already something that we do.  Collective intelligence and simulations lend themselves well to fit in all of our rooms as well as we spend a great deal of time teaching our students how to work collaboratively as teams, offer constructive feedback, and revise their knowledge based on newly acquired learning.  One thing that I wondered while reading my group members posts were what type of time constraints they are under as middle school teachers?  How often do they see their students and for how long?  This occurred to me only because I know that this past year incorporating STEM and PBL  I had to be more flexible in the schedule of the day and that allowed me more time to use Web 2.0 tools.  If I only had my 2nd graders for 40 minutes at a time I am not sure what we could accomplish!  I am certain they have this all figured out but through my elementary lens I found the thought of limited time overwhelming.

We agree that a teacher does not have to be comfortable with new media skills to incorporate them into the formal classroom, rather he/she must be receptive to them and willing to learn alongside their students. Christina stated, “Teachers can even learn from their students on how to use technology – my students are constantly showing me new tips and tricks that I was not aware of!”  Along with willingness to embed Web 2.0 tools and new media literacies; the room itself should be an environment that supports the use of these.

Overall, the responsibility of writing the group summary was intimidating.  I wanted to make sure that I adequately summarized my group members work and I ended up finding it a rewarding experience. Each time I read and reread their posts I found new connections and learned even more than the time before.

 

New Media Literacies

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In the article Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture a participatory culture can have many potential benefits such as “peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship.” (Jenkins, H., et. al 2006)  The need for young people to become full participants in a participatory culture is clearly related to their “access to the skills and experiences.”  (Jenkins, H., et. al 2006) It therefore becomes the responsibility of those people involved in preparing young learners for the future to help them acquire the skills necessary.  In the Jenkins article 11 new skills are identified to achieve full participation, they are:

  • Play
  • Performance
  • Simulation
  • Appropriation
  • Multitasking
  • Distributed Cognigion
  • Collective Intelligence
  • Judgment
  • Transmedia Navigation
  • Networking
  • Negotiation

 

New Media Literacies in Early Elementary

Students using their iPADS on a solid figure hunt around the classroom.

PLAY: Teaching young learners there are a few of these new skills that I can easily incorporate into the classroom.  The first being play. Jenkins defines play as “the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving.”(Jenkins, H., et. al 2006) I have always felt strongly that children learn many of their social skills through the use of play; resilience being one of them. This requires the right space as well as the right amount of help.  As a teacher you have to know when to step in and when to allow a child the time and space to figure things out on their own.  Play comes quite naturally within our classroom; students are encouraged to use the room daily as a way to problem solve.  They “read the room” to find words that they are trying to spell, hunt for plane shapes, fractions, solid figures. Blocks, cubes, magnets, stamps, popsicle sticks, Legos and dry erase boards are all items that students use to build and create.  I have found over the years is that having items like this available at stations or just available in general for students to use as they need requires a lot of modeling and remodeling on proper use. In regards to Web 2.0 tools, there were times when the students had play time as well.  This was usually their favorite time and honestly sparked a lot of creativity and collaboration.  For example, their “play” time on their Chromebook consisted of  choosing what they wanted to use it for; code.org, Canva, free type on Google Docs etc.  Once given the opportunity to choose what they wanted to do, their very next question was, “Can I work with a partner?”  One of my students decided to use his free time, utilizing Google Docs, to write a 2nd grade memory book, it was one of my favorite projects.  He worked on it daily and would use the camera tool to take pictures and write about each classmate.  Then he would use it to document various things we did in the classroom.  His work inspired others and soon we had many memory books being created!

I have to mention that over the last 13 years, I have worked for 6 different principals.  Some were receptive to the idea of play (or activity centers in 2nd grade) as a way to teach students problem solving, creativity and innovation.  Then there were a few administrators who thought play was only for kindergarten and thought that quiet classes with students in their seat and a paper at their desk was the right way to go.  It is a bit of a balance and within the structure of the formal classroom this time given to playing as a mode to learning has to be one that ties to the standards.

PERFORMANCE:  This is something that I admit I do not use that often in my classroom and I think there are many opportunities that I could.  As part of our engineering program, students read about a young girl who solves a pollination problem with a new plant introduced to the island she lives on. She ultimately creates a hand pollinator using various materials to pollinate her plant. Students also go through the engineering design process and develop their own hand pollinator.   As an extension activity we learned about the decline of the bee population in the United States and how it can affect us in our own lives.  While reading this article I thought about how I could incorporate performance into this unit and how valuable to their learning it could be by allowing them to expressive themselves creatively.

SIMULATION: The third skill I can incorporate into my classroom is simulation. What came to mind right away is the use of STEM activities.  Students works as teams or individuals, they are given a task to complete and a set of requirements to reach.  They work cooperatively sharing  for example, given 10 marshmallows and toothpicks groups would construct a tower that is 10 inches high and can hold up Peppa Pig, a small stuffed animal in our room.  Building a marble run is full of design possibilities and encourages engineering skills. Items such as cardboard tubes, tape, LEGO bricks,  boxes, craft sticks, and straws are  incorporated in some way to create the run.  One of the best parts of being a teacher is watching students go through the design process, especially when they develop a prototype and find ways to improve their design.

Image result for image engineering design process

 

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION: Jenkins defines this skill as “the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.”  To apply this skill to my class, I think of embedding Web 2.0 tools into daily lessons.  This occurs gradually as their comfort using technology increases.  When most of my second graders enter my classroom it is their first time using a Chromebook because only IPADS are used in kindergarten and 1st grade. Due to their limited use of laptops they need to be taught the basics from how to turn it on, using the keyboard,  opening the web browser, etc.  Each day as they use the Chromebook for various purposes new lessons emerge and they continuously learn new skills. It is also exciting to see how often they learn from each other; for example when a student learns how to insert a hyperlink into a document and then shares that information with others. Soon enough I am reading dozens of writings about the Titanic or soccer with links to click on!  By the end of the year they are able to create documents and presentations rich with media.  In addition to learning the technical skills of Web 2.0 tools, students may also expand their mental capacities by using programs such as Code.org or Scratch in which interacting and problem-solving within the media is naturally occurring.

When you push yourself to do or learn something that is outside of your comfort zone, you are essentially working on expanding your mental capacities.  The students are using Web 2.0 tools that they are immensely inexperienced with and each day growing and changing their schema based on the new knowledge they’ve gained. They are building their technical skills with Web 2.0 tools and applying them to complete tasks within the new media literacies.  It reminds me a lot of fixed vs. growth mindset.  Someone with a fixed mindset might be asked to create a collaborative wiki as part of a group; unsure of how to do so or afraid of failing that person would request not to do the task.  Contrarily, a person with a growth mindset will acknowledge that they are not familiar with how to work on a wiki and then agree to do the work learning along the way and expanding their mental capacities.

Ways to Combine New Media Literacies Into Formal Education

Aside from the ways that I stated above to incorporate new media literacies into formal education, I feel that embedding these literacies into learning that is already happening in the classroom is key.  Allowing students opportunities to express themselves create, share, mentor, and connect with one another becomes the challenge of the teacher.  In a formal early elementary class this can be done through STEM, project based learning (PBL) as well as through student choice.  Watching the video from Mitchel Resnick about Scratch, I can see how it can be used to create, share, and remix. Building an online community where students share what they created, then finding others who are commenting and remixing it demonstrates great mentorship as well as social connection.  It is a perfect example of a participatory culture!  In my district the students use Code.org to learn computer science.  They use the Code Studio to learn and then apply what they’ve learned in the Play Lab.

I wanted to include the video below that I found online because there was a segment in the video when Drew Houston, the creator of Dropbox, was discussing how to get engineers to work at his company.  He said that one way is to have a fantastic work environment.  Employees can ride around on skateboards and bicycles, play music, ping-pong or video games, or just relax.  It’s a place where playing is encouraged and it made think just how powerful to achieving new media literacy skills that would be if our schools encouraged play too!

 

My First Podcast

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For my first podcast, I chose to interview my colleague Marcia Deeny.  Marcia is a 3rd grade teacher at Albert Schweitzer Elementary School in Neshaminy School District.  She is a veteran teacher who just completed teaching her 25th school year.  When I started teaching at Albert Schweitzer 13 years ago Marcia was assigned to be my mentor.  Through the mentor-ship program at Neshaminy she met with me on a weekly basis to see how things were going, offer advice, or just listen to things I wanted to tell her. Marcia is a teacher who is highly regarded and loved by her colleagues, she is also highly sought after by the students at Schweitzer.  She is dedicated, compassionate, and inspiring.  One of the things I admire the most about Marcia is her ability to connect with students.

Why Marcia?

About 6 years ago I became the technology advocate in our building and one of my responsibilities is to train staff on new technology that the district would like implemented.  When we began our training many years ago Marcia spoke to me afterward and said “Kym, I don’t know if I can do this.  I just don’t understand computers.” This is exactly why I wanted to interview Marcia today.  She, like so many other teachers out there, was hesitant with technology because it was unfamiliar. It was important for me to take the time to interview Marcia because she represents the majority of our teaching staff at Albert Schweitzer, which made her the perfect candidate! Her honesty about  technology and how she has grown over the years was refreshing and I truly appreciate her candor. What I am so thrilled to share with you today is her journey learning Web 2.0 technologies and embedding them into her lessons.

Here are the questions that I asked Marcia in our podcast.

  1. Begin by telling me a bit about your journey learning about technology.  
  2. What do you see as the role of social media and Web 2.0 tools for learning and teaching?
  3. What tools are you using in your classroom?
  4. What have you learned as a result of working with these tools?
  5. What suggestions would you have for someone who is looking to use social media for teaching, learning, or professional development?

I really enjoyed speaking with Marcia and hearing her thoughts on the use of Web 2.0 tools in our school. I was interested in her opinion because Marcia represents a large group  of veteran teachers who have been teaching for 20 + years.  She brought up an excellent point that her education many years ago did not include technology at all.  Now that she is teaching 21st century learners using Web 2.0 tools; she does this without any formal training. Our district does very little in regards to training staff and many may feel uncomfortable pursuing this alone. Our school is very lucky to have teachers like Marcia who are willing to recognize that they need to improve their skills in technology in order to effectively teach today’s learners.  I can relate with that feeling completing this very podcast. I have never done this before and definitely was not looking forward to it.  It felt a little awkward at first; I cringe when I hear the beginning because I could not figure out how to record and ended up recording myself reading the directions!  I listened to the podcast titled Teacher Preparation and Technology in which the author states several facts from various studies about teacher and student use of technology in and out of the classroom both professionally and personally.  I was surprised to find that for many states it is a requirement for teachers to be competent in technology and that it should be a part of their formal education in order for them to be effective educators.  When I heard this I immediately connected to Marcia and her story of about taking a journey to learn how to use Web 2.0 tools without formal training.  It raises for me very interesting and yet concerning questions.  If teachers who are seeking degrees in education need to have some sort of technology competency then what can be done to train experienced teachers who never received formal training as part of their education?  Also, who’s responsibility is it to ensure that training occurs, the teachers or the schools in which they teach?

Learning Wiki

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I am not sure why, but understanding what a wiki actually is has been hard to wrap my head around.  I thought it was just like any other web page, but I was wrong. Like most people when i hear the word wiki my mind connects to Wikipedia. When I was in high school and college it was taught that Wikipedia was an unreliable source due the fact that anyone anywhere can change it.  It was taboo. Don’t use it, don’t reference it.  So when I began to learn about wiki I could not help but associate it with Wikipedia.  The readings this week were helpful in debunking some of my learned biases against Wikipedia.

What I Learned About Wiki

  • A wiki is a website that allows users to not only have access to the content on the site but to revise and change it.
  • Wikis are social, that is they allow the sharing of knowledge for the purpose of learning. (People are not actually present but leave their content as an artifact of their presence.)
  • Once a person starts a wiki then each member of the group, that has access, can contribute their own knowledge to the wiki.
  • A wiki can be public or private.
  • Wikis can have multiple pages and the information on the wiki is displayed in the order in which it is posted.

Here is a short book I created using Book Creator about what a wiki is. Book Creator

Knowledge Building

I spent quite a bit of time exploring the Flat Classroom Project by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis.  According to what I read about the Flat Classroom Project it is an online global connection between learners across the world to collaborate and co-create on a project.  I find the notion of flattening the walls of the classroom and extending learning opportunities global, fascinating. According to the website, “The aim in this project is to encourage students in different places to collaborate, not just communicate, and to enhance understanding of cultures and lifestyles beyond the immediate environment.” Cress and Kimmerie (2007) state that when a person contributes “to the development of a wiki a person first has to externalize his/her knowledge.”  Through the process of externalization a person’s knowledge can deepen.  This occurs because it is necessary when writing about a topic to restructure it in a way that will make sense to your readers and relate it to other information on the wiki that another author may have written. With the use of a wiki the students are building and transferring new knowledge and this allows them opportunities to internalize the information learned. When new knowledge is internalized it interacts with prior knowledge, or schema, and creates new knowledge combining prior and newly acquired knowledge.  If we look at the text  by Ulrike Cress and Joachim Kimmerie, the authors reference the work of Piaget in that with the use of wiki a person can acquire information learned and use it to change their schema to better understand the information; essentially they are modifying and creating new schema.  This theory of Piaget can be applied to the Flat Classroom Project because the students are continuously acquiring information through collaboration with others and reorganizing and structuring it to interact with their own individual schema.  This knowledge bullding occurs when they are externalizing and internalizing information from the wiki.

Knowledge Police (Monitoring)

With all of the online revising, editing, and collaborating there has to be a way to ensure that the information put on the wiki is accurate and valid. Just how do they do that?  When I read the article How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool, I found my answer.  Wikipedia has a group of editors who developed five policies to safeguard the reliability of the work.

  1. Free Content; all writing must be original and can be edited and reused by others
  2. Reliable Sources; information that is the most reliable is fact checked by third-party sources such as academic journals, published books by academic presses , and newspapers
  3. Neutral POV; written work should be free of bias and include all significant viewpoints
  4. Notability; topic is of importance and has reliable sources
  5. Good Faith; all users add their work with the intent to better the content of the wiki

After reading the five policies from Wikipedia’s editors I was honestly still a bit skeptical. It wasn’t until I read How to Use Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool by Adrianne Wadewitz that I understood. Wadewitz compares the global editing and collaborating on a wiki to that of the authors of the encyclopedia. Both a wiki and an encyclopedia are collections of information gathered and refined by multiple writers and it may be impossible to expect it to be completely free of bias and misconceptions, no matter how hard the writer tries to do so.  Of course having such an amazing amount of content on a wiki such as Wikipedia, it can be assumed that not all information can be checked in a timely manner. In addition, having a wiki on a larger scale with a multitude of collaborators, the more people involved in adding and editing content the more challenging it may be to authenticate the work, while on the other hand the more contributors involved also increases the information and content to be learned.  The authors of the text said it perfectly when they stated that “a person’s individual knowledge is a resource for other peoples’ learning.” (Kafai, 2006; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994)

As teachers creating a wiki for student use in the classroom I would make sure that privacy policies are established so that the students can focus on having a shared collaborative resource that only they can revise and edit. Keeping the wiki small, either within the class or with just a small group of students working together it may be easier for the teacher to monitor the quality of information the students are adding to the wiki. One way to create a wiki in a small group may be to have students work on a class wiki for an ongoing science investigation.  Students can begin by adding their schema about the investigation and predictions as to what might happen next.  As they investigate teams can add their data, new schema, and predictions based on their new evidence as well as interact with each other to determine what steps they might take next in their investigation. By allowing the students to act as contributors to the wiki as well as collaborators with other teams they have opportunities to both externalize and internalize their knowledge and to infer and deepen their knowledge.

Teaching students about the five key policies are essential prior to them creating and collaborating on a wiki yet it is not fool proof.  No matter what age our students are, they may be writing opinions and misconceptions on their wiki.  We can hope that others on their wiki team will find and fix errors but it might not happen.

Check out this link to a video that explains what a wiki is.  The video is very simple and for me that was extremely helpful!

 

Technology Tool List

I created my list for the use in an elementary classroom, although many of the tools on my list can be used in a K-12 classroom and beyond. Below are the ones that I use the most often in my classroom either as a way to drive instruction/learning or to promote sharing to a public audience.  There are some that I use as a way for my students to collaborate however, as I teach 2nd grade, we had to work up to our current level of collaboration. This class is teaching me to look at technology through a wider lens than my early elementary one and I admit, it’s a work in progress.

  1. G Suite for Education  (https://edu.google.com/k-12-solutions/g-suite/?modal_active=none)

G Suite is a collection of tools offered by Google for students and teachers to use in and out of the classroom.  From email, docs, slides, hangout, forms, and classroom there are many choices available. In order to utilize this format all students need a Google account for access.  Classroom allows teachers to assign student work and provide virtual feedback in the form of comments and grades. Students can share docs, forms, and spreadsheets with peers to collaborate and hangout is a great way to hold virtual meetings with classrooms in different schools or to ask questions of experts in the community and beyond.

G Suite for Education– Knowledge Construction; Critical Thinking: Evaluating, Analyzing, and Connecting.

Examples:

This first example is one that a teacher shared on Google + in the Seesaw Ambassadors community.  I thought it was a great example of how two classes on opposite sides of the country used Google Apps and Seesaw to collaborate on a shared creation experience called Playing at the Farm.

Playing at the Farm

Click for an article on G Suite for Education

Click for a video on G Suite for Education

 

2. Seesaw (https://web.seesaw.me) 

Seesaw is a student driven digital portfolio that can follow them throughout their school career.  Parents and families are given an access code which allow them to view, like, and comment on their child’s work as it is posted.  Once the teacher sets up the roster the student is able to sign in with a QR code that the teacher posts in the classroom. Teachers can assign activities for a whole class or differentiate activities to be assigned to individual or small groups of students.  In addition to the activity feature students can upload documents/files, take photographs, videos, attach links, and draw. When students post to their journal they have the option to record, add text, or caption to their work. Seesaw can be used through all content areas.  Students can take a photo of a page they are reading and use the drawing feature to text map the page. Instead of writing a weekly letter to parents about what happened that week in school the student can take turns writing and/or recording their ‘Week In Review’ to post. For a social studies lesson about geography the teacher can assign a link to a video which students can watch and respond to.  With the use of the classroom blog students can connect and collaborate with other classrooms.

Seesaw-Critical Thinking: Evaluating, Analyzing, and Connecting; Metacognitive and Self-Regulated Reflection

Examples:

SAMR Model Using Seesaw

Seesaw – Making the Evidence of Understanding More Visible

 

A student shares a model on Seesaw that she and her partner built using solid figures.

3. Nearpod (https://nearpod.com/)

Nearpod was new to me this year and in all honesty it took me awhile to implement because there were many other Web 2.0 technologies that I was using already.  Once I gave Nearpod a chance I found I liked it and would recommend this technology to all my teacher friends! Nearpod offers a collection of premade lessons ranging in content and grade (K-12).  Teachers can also create their own lessons in Nearpod. Nearpod is an interactive presentation that can be used in a variety of ways. First, the presentation can be done as a whole group using an interactive whiteboard.  Next, the lesson can be taught live with each student following along on their device. In the live lesson students are not able to advance to the next slide and are made to wait for the teacher to move forward. The paid version of Nearpod has a student paced option where the student can move along at their own pace. I think this would be useful when the lesson is being used as a review or for formative assessment.  Regardless of the version Nearpod collects student responses and provides a report for each student that it send to the teacher. I use the free version of Nearpod so I was limited to using the live lesson version as well as a limit of 50MB of storage. I found I reached that capacity before the end of the school year. Next year I will upgrade to the paid version which offers more features that I am excited to try.

Nearpod-Knowledge Construction

Examples:

Deliver Engaging Lessons with Nearpod

A Case Study: The Effect of Nearpod on Reading Comprehension, Focus, and Engagement

Blog about Nearpod

Nearpod Video

 

4. Book creator (https://bookcreator.com/)

Book creator is an iPAD app that my young learners LOVE! They use it to create books filled with text, images, and even audio.  To begin we used it to create an All About Me book that they were able to share with their classmates. As my students began to get more comfortable with it we created our non-fiction books about optimal conditions for growing cucumbers and even dabbled in graphic novels to culminate a lesson about dialogue.  Another feature that we used in Book Creator was app smashing our work into Seesaw so that the students can add it to their portfolio and share it with their families.

Book Creator– Knowledge Construction; Critical Thinking: Evaluating, Analyzing, and Connecting

 

Examples:

50 ways to use Book Creator in your classroom

Hosting a “Book Tasting” with Book Creator

 

5. Canva (https://www.canva.com/)

Canva is a free website that my students used this year.  They are able to sign in with their Google accounts, which is wonderful for 2nd graders, it’s one less login and password for them to remember!  Using Canva they can create graphics using various templates such as poster, logo, infographic, flyer, and invitation. Students can invite other students to be a part of their design team and work together to create a product.  There is a large amount of free fonts, elements such as images, shapes, frames, and even backgrounds they can choose from. Images saved in the Google Drive can be uploaded as well. This year my students created posters for their PBL projects, invitations for families to attend Market Day, created bookmarks to hand out at a school wide Dr. Seuss celebration, and infographics for reading groups. Work that my students created on Canva can also be downloaded, saved to Google Drive and then uploaded to digital portfolios on Seesaw.

Canva– Organization, and Integration with Prior Knowledge; Critical Thinking: Evaluating, Analyzing, and Connecting

 

A Lesson on Visual Poetry using Canva

13 Ways to Use Canva in Your Classroom

Canva for Education

An example of a poster a 2nd grader made on Canva.

Hsu, Ching, and Crabowski,  identify 4 cognitive processes enabled by Web 2.0 technologies below is how I would classify my list of tech tools.

  •   G Suite for Education– Knowledge Construction; Critical Thinking: Evaluating, Analyzing, and Connecting.
  • Seesaw-Critical Thinking: Evaluating, Analyzing, and Connecting; Metacognitive and Self-Regulated Reflection
  • nearpod-Knowledge Construction
  • Book Creator– Knowledge Construction; Critical Thinking: Evaluating, Analyzing, and Connecting
  • Canva– Organization, and Integration with Prior Knowledge; Critical Thinking: Evaluating, Analyzing, and Connecting

The 80% Bicyclist

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I really enjoyed listening to Sal Khan speak in the TED Talk video this week.  I have used Khan Academy in my classroom and my students like the videos.  Khan said that we can use technology to humanize and flip the classroom.  The concept of flipping a classroom was new to me but he makes an excellent point.  There is a significant amount of time spent with the teacher in front of the room teaching a whole group lesson.  This leaves little time for a teacher to interact and conference with students to assess how they are doing and to clear up any misconceptions.  Additionally, with the use of a Web 2.0 tool such as Khan Academy, the student can continue to work on a concept until he/she reaches a level of mastery; that doesn’t always happen in the classroom. In a traditional classroom the teacher introduces a new concept through lecture, modeling, and guided practice.  Students are then sent to either practice the new concept with a small group or independently.  After a few days an assessment is given and then the next day the class moves on to the next concept.  At my school we allow students an opportunity for “second chance learning” only if they do not pass an assessment, but that is it.  Then we move on.  Khan compares this to teaching someone to ride a bicycle, allowing them to practice and then assessing them.  After giving them a grade of 80% the student is handed a unicycle without clearing up misconceptions or reviewing the 20% he did not know.  He said it sounds ridiculous.  He’s right!  His analogy of the bicycle and the classroom are also correct.

Additionally, the use of Web 2.0 technologies can help students to become active participants in the creation of their learning while promoting social interaction.   Hsu, Ching, Grabowski state “Web 2.0 technologies open up individual knowledge construction, organization, and regulation for group review, construction, organization, and regulation.”  (p.355). Take for example a lesson created on Google Classsroom on picture graphs that includes a link to a video from Khan Acadmey to use as a initial introduction or as review.  Using features such as docs, slides, forms, or even sheets students can gather data from their classmate to use to create their own picture graph.  Graphs can be posted in Google Classroom where the teacher can provide virtual feedback in the form of comments and peers in the class can post comments as well. This will allow opportunities for self-reflection or group reflection if the students worked in small teams. Having students engage in these various activities they are becoming the creators of their learning by assessing the information they received from the video, conversations with peers, and evaluating that information to draw conclusions to share.

Second, I would like to use this opportunity to reflect on my post from last week.  Thank you for your kind words about the PBL project that my students have been working on.  It has been such a rewarding experience for both them and myself.  Thinking about the comments I received allows me to reflect and focus on how to improve for next year.  How can I make my project more interest-driven?  At first, I thought there were definitely elements to the project that centered on students interest.  such as, the students choosing what business to have and who they would like to be business partners with.  They choose their name, logo, slogan and even the model that they presented.  I had students writing and recording commercials, creating info-graphics on Canva, creating and displaying flyers and brochures. What I have learned in the first 5 weeks of this class is that there is more to connected learning than student choice.

In the text Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: Issues and Challenges, Hin and Subramaniam suggest that due to so many instructional possibilities using Web 2.0, teachers should become familiar with the technology they want to implement in their classroom.  They state “It is always a good idea to practice with the new technologies before adopting them for learning or teaching in the classroom.”  For me, this is one of the most important things an educator can do beginning the journey and becoming a 21st century teacher.  This year I implemented a few new technologies in my classroom.  The one that changed the way I teach is Seesaw.  Seesaw is a student driven digital portfolio that allows students to share their work with parents and families.  I had dabbled with it a bit last school year and saw it’s potential for 21st century learners, however I wasn’t ready to start using it with my students.  Over the summer I enrolled in the Seesaw Ambassador program and completed training to learn the program on my own.  It was so worth it!  Before the students begin to add to their portfolio Seesaw provides step by step mini-lessons on the features in a “Seesaw Student Challenge.”   Embedded in the challenge are lessons on digital citizenship.  For my young learners we focus on the importance of what is and is not safe to post online.  We also look at how to appropriately comment on another students work.  What I would like to do that I did not this year is create a classroom blog.  On pages 364-366 of Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: Issues and Challenges  the authors discuss the learning opportunities of blogging in the classroom.  I would like to use my class blog to create learning communities that students can connect with through “Seesaw Connected Blogs.”  Through this feature they can collaborate with students in other schools, and perhaps this can be one way to improve my PBL next year.

A student’s post in Seesaw.

The Networked Learner

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Second graders listening to the owner of Benjamin Franklin Plumbing.

My second grade students are currently working on a PBL in which they are to create a business that they think would thrive and add value to our community.  They have been working as teams to brainstorm, create a name, slogan, logo, and write a plan to pitch to potential investors on our Market Day.  Students have done fishbowl activities in which they pitch their plan to a small group of “sharks” consisting of students and teachers.  They received constructive feedback about what we liked about their business as well as what we think they could do to improve their business and any concerns we had about them being successful. As we enter the final phase of their PBL where students are creating a model of their business, good, or service, we took a break to hear a presentation from a local business owner about what it is like to own and operate a business in our community.   Like any good teacher I prepped my students by showing them the business website for Benjamin Franklin Plumbing. We had a great discussion about their location, slogan, what we thought it would be like to be an employee/ employer and then they wrote a list of (at least 2) questions to ask the owner.  We. Were. Ready.

Then the owner walked in.  She’s a girl?  My students were surprised. I told Michelle, the co-owner of Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, that my students were surprised to see her and she so fabulously said to them, “Why? Can’t a girl own a business?”  What happened in the next 45 minutes is what teacher’s dreams are made of; they were on the edge of their seats, fully engaged and inspired listening to Michelle talk.  They asked their questions and more and eagerly wrote the answers down.  But when Michelle left and they were back with their teams sharing what they learned with each other Claire came up to me and said “Mrs. Cridland, I thought you were just teaching us all this stuff for our project.  I didn’t really think that girls can have a business.”  After I choked back my tears I asked her what she thought now and her response has made my year, “I think girls can do anything.”

As I watched Entrepreneurial Learner by John Seely Brown, I was reminded of Claire when Seely Brown said that students build conceptual lenses through play.  That play gives them permission to fail, fail, fail until they get it right. That moment when they get it right is their epiphany and that when a student has an epiphany it will stay with them for the rest of their life.  Now Claire’s epiphany happened not directly through play but because she was able to tie together what she had been creating for her business (C & C’s for Dollies) with what she had learned listening to Michelle speak to the class.  It was a moment for her wrapped in a brilliant message, that she will undoubtedly take with her moving forward, that nothing is impossible.

I chose to read Chapter 2; Peer-Supported Learning from Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom and felt inspired by the story Wanna See the Movie?  In the story the teacher reflects on work she has done on urban literacy issues as part of the National Writing Project.  Her school, like so many, has mandated weekly assessments, data tracking, and a scripted literacy curriculum. One aspect of the project required the teacher to loop with her students through their next year of schooling and it was during the second year where she decided she wanted to learn what it would be like to be a first grade student in her class and to see how literacy might fit into their ordinary school lives. So, she added the job “videographer” to her classroom job chart and the students were off and running collecting short documentaries throughout each school day.  Together the class would watch and reflect on each documentary and it became an integral part of their day.  If we want to see how the role of a learner is changing with the context of connected learning then this is a perfect example.  Traditionally, students are receivers of information and the teacher is there to transfer knowledge to students.  In this context of learning we (teachers) have very tight control on student voice and choice.  Now, students and teacher learn together.  By putting a camera in students hands and allowing them to choose what they feel is important and giving them an opportunity to be the narrator of their lives in school.  They aren’t sitting in their seats completing worksheet after worksheet.  Students are making things, tinkering with their learning.  This avenue of connected learning allows students to demonstrate their learning in a way that has never happened in a traditional learning classroom.  What intrigues me the most as a teacher is what happens next.  Sitting with students and analyzing the video, connecting with peers.  I think that would be so powerful for them but also as a teacher to learn what their day is like from their perspective and how students are making decisions about their learning by looking at when and what they record.  Clearly, there may be challenges along the way such as ensuring that students are videoing and narrating appropriate content but with the challenges would come opportunities for learning to occur.  As teachers we are used to having the privilege of being the decision maker for what and when activities occur and I think for this to be successful we must be comfortable with the uncomfortable feeling of allowing students to have that privilege as well.

Life Learning

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Reading this week’s text from Thomas and Seely Brown I found myself enjoying and agreeing with what they said.  I also thought about what the new culture of learning would look like in a second grade classroom and it reminded me of a book I had read when I had my first child. When I was a new mom my sister loaned me her copy of The Danish Way of Parenting by Jessica Alexander and Iben Sandhal and in the book the authors discuss how important unstructured play is to a child’s development. It is through play, they say, that children learn to cope with stress and learn resilience.  This happens because children are playing for fun, not to earn a medal or to learn a set of skills.  It is their own desire that motivates them.  In the section titled A Tale of Two Cultures, Thomas and Seely Brown called the new learning an organic process and that phrase really resonated with me, both as a mom and teacher of young children.

I have been around long enough, like many of you, to know that every few years in education there comes about new buzz words and best practices for teaching.  Some are implemented and others fall flat never to be heard of again.  Teachers change as well and learn along with their students. Five years ago our school district changed math programs from “Everyday Mathematics” to the “Singapore Math” program.  Attending a two day training on Singapore Math was enough to get my feet wet, but I didn’t actually learn the program. It reminds me of Siemens view of connectivism in which the true learning, for me, happened outside of a traditional education environment.  The training was a great introduction to the program but my learning took place when I actually implemented the program in my classroom. I also learned while communicating and sharing with my colleagues what worked and what didn’t. It is a completely different way of thinking about math.  Now that I am very comfortable teaching the program and helping students learn concepts through the concrete-pictorial-abstract model, I see it’s benefits.  Still though, the main complaint I hear from parents when work is sent home has remained the same, “I never learned math like this” and “I don’t know how to help my kid.”  It can be uncomfortable and frustrating for parents, the same can be said for teachers who are now faced with 21st century learners and technology in classrooms.

Image result for continual learning photos

Thomas and Seely Brown describe the new culture of learning as, a learning based approach in which the traditional classroom model is replaced with environments of digital media.  One where the focus is on “learning through engagement within the world.” This new ecology of learning requires a shift in how we think about when and where learning takes place.    Learning for our students is a continual process, one in which content and standards are embedded within work-related tasks.  Another principle of connectivism which applies here is that “learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinion” when students are engaging with each other as well as a community of personal networks that they can learn from. Take the example of Tom, a 41 year old man who used an online community forum to learn more about living with adult-onset diabetes.  There he could connect with others who have faced similar challenges and who have gone through what he was.  It reminds me of when my daughter was diagnosed with Celiac disease at the age of 3.  We received top of the line care from the doctors, nurses, and dietitians at CHOP, but leaving each appointment I felt like my head was spinning.  Through the use of website like Beyond Celiac and attending support groups at CHOP, I was able to talk with other parents of children with Celiac disease and their advice has helped our family tremendously.