How can we teach with technology?
Preface:
Diverting students from the virtual gingerbread house
Today's youth are often more skilled with computers than their mentors. In their world, "everybody has MySpace." As "digital natives," children are easily enticed into gingerbread homepages, aglaze with hypertext, rife with meaningless content. Yet the virtual world offers many opportunities to enhance learning. Online information allows students to read and write their own questions, organize events with other students, living a Second Life, even using avatars to define their own identity. Many educators, born before the net generation, often experienced classrooms as a grid of students sitting in rows and columns, reading the next chapter out of a book written by educational authorities. Hence the dilemma: designing lessons in the future will be radically different than the lessons our teachers created, requiring new teachers to integrate current technology into the classroom, like email, if we want pique our students' curiosities.
Too often, students are left to their own plugins in the digital classroom. Many teachers prefer to apply research techniques they used when they were students: walking up a library's marble steps, drifting down dusty bookshelves, the "shushers" behind the desk not so hip as they are today. Some educators, as "digital immigrants," can offer little more guidance than how to log on, or print out a page, adrift in a digital sea of online research. As a result, the "online educational resource" rapidly devolves into a multimedia device satisfying the saccharine, flickering attentions of an adept tweenster: a .mp3 player, a sneakers catalog, an IM chatterbox. We all know the result, schools fine students for cell phone use in class, place "filters" on network access, which digital natives easily circumvent, leading to more and more draconian lock-down procedures, like shutting down access to sites like YouTube and mySpace, or even banning computers altogether from the classroom.
Even if educators are relegated from the "sage on the stage," to the "guide on the side," we cannot abandon our fundamental imperative: framing inquiry in the digital classroom. Without an overarching, organizing pedagogy, students will be tempted to do what you're probably thinking about right now: check your email while I'm delivering today's lesson, chat on AIM, shop on eBay. How can we divert students from virtual gingerbread houses? We can either wave our hands in frustration, moan that learning is dead, accept more and more command-and-control procedures limiting students' Internet access, or, create our own "educational toolbars," that allow us to connect with students, helping to ensure students don't turn down the paths of misinformation, mind-numbing waste, and obscenity so common on the Internet.
Overview:
Upgrading our educational toolbars
Every student who has passed through this colloquium has produced online educational resources. More importantly, we, as teachers and students, will collectively experience a pedagogical process that moves beyond the "textbook brick." The topics we will cover, in no particular order, are as follows:
- Educational Research
- Database Queries
(ERIC, EBSCO, Gale, SIRS, CAIRSS) - Standards Alignment
(USA, NYS, NYC) - Document Production
- Regents Based Item Writing
(Word, Acrobat) - Online Collaborative Writing
(Blogs, Wikis) - Student Centered Inquiry
- WebQuests
Let's first excavate some of the archaeological foundations of the World Wide Web, before it became the "Internet." The earliest, easiest versions of Internet content are the "recipe pages," or the "point-and-click" resource guides. Let's look at some examples of this primitive application of educational online resources.
Virtual hieroglyphics:
The rise of the hotlink
Here are some lists of familiar "online educational resources" -- links to other webpages of interest, usually unchanging, very similar to a stack of books in a library. These links offer access to New York State educational standards, national standards, and some of the online educational publications on the Internet. It is helpful to cluster educational information that we eternally refer to when writing lesson plans all on one webpage, like the standards codes that align to a lesson.
To be sure, the list resource can be very helpful, but once one is created, revisions are rarely made to them, indeed, dead links are often common blights on the "recipe page." For example, the New York City Performance Standards that were available in the Spring of 2008 have mysteriously disappeared, dead links mourn their loss, no explanation of what happened to them forthcoming. The clearest evidence of a poorly managed Internet resource page is one that has dead links, like the NYC DOE website. Instead of quickly accessing needed information, the teacher is cast adrift in the cursed '404' sign – "page not found." More importantly, once a "net gen" clicks through all of the links, their eyes will soon be elsewhere, little learning actualized. Instead of "click and die," where the reader is little more than a passive reader, we should build on the remains of these foundations, making hypertext less linear, more pleasurable. *
Evolving away from the recipe page: Search engines
I've been in professional development sessions where the above example is about as far as today's question was developed: a static page of information, reflecting all of the work done in the session, but as soon as the class is over, the page grows old, neither updated or revised, an electronic dusty book. A lot of teachers' web pages are very similar, listing outlines of content, sample exams, student rankings, but never showing what is most important in education: how learning new concepts can reshape our understandings and perceptions of the world around us.
We're all familiar with the ubiquitous term, "Google," or its energy efficient companion, "Blackle." But there are many Web-based search engines available to help you find information that can enhance your lesson plans. More importantly, there are several educational search engines that are gold mines of information for curriculum development. The best, by far, is the Education Resources Information Center, ("ERIC"). Let see how I have used the ERIC resource to help develop a unit on environmental education.
I am interested in creating "self-guiding walking tours" of the local neighborhood adjacent to the campus where I teach science lab classes. Of course, I set up a blog for the class, but to really fine-tune what I wanted to achieve with the environmental education, and how to assess student learning, I had to begin with the foundation of any good lesson plan, reading educational literature on the subject of instruction.
So I went to the ERIC search engine, typed, "environmental education" in the first box, and, (very important!) checked on the 'Full Text Availability' box, so that I could download the entire document in .pdf format. I clicked on the 'Search' box, and voila! — on the first page of search results was an EPA document titled, "The ABC's of Environmental Education." Besides showing me how to apply for grant funding to get paid for my research, pages 10-12 provided a checklist of step to help me develop my environmental education unit. 3,127 results also appears, so I narrowed the search by adding another term, "urban," to the second box. Now I only had 197 results, still too many for my tired, bleary eyes to sort through, so I added the term, "mapping," since I wanted to develop a community mapping project as part of the unit, and clicked on all of the boxes for post-secondary education in the 'Education Level(s)' box. I now found two articles, narrowly tailored to what I wanted to do in my environmental educational unit.
APA Citation Format
As a first year teacher, I often grabbed whatever information I could find for a lesson, chunked it all together, and once the week was over, forgot about it in collective cloud of oblivion shared by my colleages at the local pub. A year later, I found myself asking the following question many times:
"Where did I find that article?"Knowing that I had to do it all over again added to the normal "second year darkness," that many teachers experience. To avoid reinventing the wheel, creating a citation for any educational materials we find valuable is an imperative part of curriculum design. Citations include the author's name, the article's title, date of publication, page numbers, name of publisher, and any other relevant information, such as a URL link, that will help us find the article in the future.
Educators usually use the APA Citation Format to memorialize helpful educational articles. Here are some common examples to help create the correct citation format.
Article in Journal Paginated by Issue
Journals paginated by issue begin with page one every issue; therefore, the issue number gets indicated in parentheses after the volume. The parentheses and issue number are not italicized or underlined.Scruton, R. (1996). The eclipse of listening. The New Criterion, 15(30), 5-13.
Article in a Magazine
Henry, W. A., III. (1990, April 9). Making the grade in today's schools. Time, 135, 28-31.
Article in a Newspaper
Unlike other periodicals, p. or pp. precedes page numbers for a newspaper reference in APA style. Single pages take p., e.g., p. B2; multiple pages take pp., e.g., pp. B2, B4 or pp. C1, C3-C4.Schultz, S. (2005, December 28). Calls made to strengthen state energy policies. The Country Today, pp. 1A, 2A.
APA Citation Format
Once I began accumulating articles (and citations), I was ready to begin creating what would eventually become my environmental educational unit plan. The first step was to summarize in one or two paragraphs what I learned from each article, and include the APA citation at the top of the summary. By compiling a list of summaries, I was ready to begin the next step, the actual writing of lesson plans. Notice that I included the six digit ERIC code for each citation.Evaluation
Homework #1
Before leaving this class, each student will complete the following:
Deliverable #1: Students will form groups of no less than two and no more than three students. Each group will decide which content area (math, science, social science, art, or language arts) they will research for their lesson plans, etc.
Deliverable #2: Each group will choose an Aim for a lesson plan appropriate to the chosen content area.
Deliverable #3: Each group will post a comment to this posting, listing their names, content area, and Aim.
To post a comment, follow these instructions:
- Scroll to the end of this posting, on the line that starts, "posted by terminus," and clicking on the 'comments' link. On the right side of the screen, type your information in the text box. Below the text box, click on the 'Anonymous' radio button.
- Make sure your name is at the top of your entry to ensure receiving credit. Also make sure to include:
- Each person's name,
- the content area
- the Aim
Before next class, each group will complete the following:
Deliverable #4: Each group will identify the New York State and New York City standards that align to the Aim, using the Educational Standards listed on the class wiki.
Deliverable #5: Each student will use the ERIC search engine to locate 2-3 articles that pertain instruction and delivery of that Aim.
Deliverable #6: Each group will post a comment that includes their names, their Aim, the NYS and NYC standards, and the APA citations of all of research articles to this blog.
Deliverable #7: Each group will produce a 150 word essay that summarizes
- the lesson plan Aim chosen
- how the ERIC research articles helped shape the design of your lesson plan
- the NYS standards that are applicable to your lesson plan, and
- how you plan to implement this lesson plan
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