Wednesday, October 14, 2009

10/10/08 -- Module #3: Non-Linear Constructions

How can we design lessons that stimulate student inquiry?


Preface


Hey team!

Looking over each group's wiki, I see there is some confusion concerning what I am looking for in the 'ERIC Abstract' section. Summaries of your ERIC articles, not your lesson plan, is what you should be pouring into that space. Writing research article summaries helps organize materials that will be built into the lesson, and to have a reference point, dans la futur, when new assignments occupy the field.

This second purpose of summarizing articles is something I realized the hard way, and I am offering my trials and tribulations to all of you, to save you from the errors of my own life. Many times I have been assigned the task to design a module with various specifications, and, as I developed the curriculum, a flash of memory occupied my mind, recalling me to a place where, sitting a table, I read an article satisfying the specifications of my current writing task. And then the burning question: "where did I read that ... "? I can assure you, my friends, bumbling and stumbling through stacks of paper, seeking the answer never works. Having a conveniently located list of summaries is the best way to answer the question, and, once you develop that productive work habit, I assure you, you will never go back to dumping your research into a pile of processed dead trees, never to see the light of day again.

I put together the following summaries in hour, as an example of what to pour into that wiki space.

LoParrino, Camille A. (2005). A Transformational Process: Facilitating WebQuests (ED 490 748)

A "Day in the Life..." of a Bronx student teacher, likely seeking to bridge the digital divide, developed a WebQuest about Monarch Butterflies with the help of her Fordham U mentor. Elementary students from P.S. 83 in the Bronx chose one of three roles: Researchers, Scientists, and Dieticians. This paper offers a step by step process for developing a WebQuest.

Chatel, R. & Nodell, J. (2002) WebQuests: Teachers and Students as Global Literacy Explorers. (ED 471 843)

These teachers have produced a gold mine of on-line tools to help teacher create WebQuests, including excellent descriptive rubrics.

Young, D. & Wilson, D. (2002). WebQuests for Reflection and Conceptual Change: Variations on a Popular Model for Guided Inquiry. (ED 477 112)

Describes the structure of a WebQuest. The paper links WebQuest activities to a broader, schema-based approach to learning. By linking WebQuest activities to the STAR Legacy model, the authors demonstrate how these types of research are student-centered, and enhance instructional delivery.

Schweizer, Heidi; Kossow, Ben. (2007) WebQuests: Tools for Differentiation. Gifted Child Today, v30 n1 p29-35 Win 2007 (EJ 750 569)

The article takes a long time to download, but is very informative. WebQuests are ideal for differentiated instruction, and the article describes an example of this form of instruction in a Gettysburg WebQuest. Like most of the articles, it breaks the WebQuest down into its various stages, and has a good bibliography. Although it focuses on gifted students, a lot can be taken away for other classroom settings.

I've inserted some comments (in red) for each group's wiki writing so far.

So let's take our Practicum II experiences to the next level, and integrate WebQuests into our unit plans.

WebQuests

Escaping the dusky textbook


So far, we've looked at online educational resources and the nature of "educational social software." Blogs and wikis are by far the most common ESSs used by teachers today. Another genre predates the ubiquitous Web 2.0, the WebQuest. It dates way back to the 1990s, a time when Kathy Schrock owned the educational Internet. What is a WebQuest? Here's a definition:
A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity, where some or all of the material a student interacts with comes from the resources on the Internet. WebQuests eliminate the need for a student to search, sometimes endlessly for information on a topic, since prescreened links are provided in the WebQuest. Another benefit to using WebQuests is that they are easily created and support any curriculum topic. They are motivating and highly interactive, allowing students to use real life resources that are up to date.
WNET has an excellent online workshop about WebQuests. You might even be able to get professional credits for viewing it.

Educators need to view the WebQuest in two ways: how to design and evaluate it, the other is what each step of a WebQuest will look like to a student. Let's look at the final product first.

Instead of writing traditional text with links to click on, WebQuests are decidedly nonlinear, and take a constructivist approach to learning. Usually, the quest is divided in the following sections:
Students typically complete WebQuests in cooperative groups. Each student in each group has a specific research role. Let's jump into one, and see how they work.
Each of you will take on a role, and evaluate a handful of WebQuests. Once everyone on the group has evaluated each WebQuest, based upon their persona, your group will collectively evaluate each WebQuest.

Creating online inquiry

Framing student exploration


So we're back at the main issue of this colloquium: how to create educational writings that aren't like dusty books, that are more than static lists of information. Creating a storyline line for students to move back and forth through, allows students to learn at their own pace, a hallmark of differentiated instruction. Students searching out what they are specifically interested in, while keeping the focus and objectives of the online research intact is the goal of any successful WebQuest.
Building a WebQuest is easier than you may think. It's important to gather all the materials you want to include in the online lesson before you organize it into the above steps. Here are some additional resources to help you craft your WebQuest:

Evaluation

Homework #3

Let's recap what we've done, or should have done, by now:
  • Each group searched ERIC for relevant education articles (and APA citations) that relate to their lesson plan.
  • Each group uploaded their content area, relevant standards, Aim, ERIC summaries/citations to their wiki page.
  • Each group found 3-6 Internet lesson plans/Websites similar to their own lesson plan, and uploaded their results and summaries to their wiki page.
  • Each group completed the Blog WebQuest and uploaded their answers to their wiki page.
  • Each student posted a comment to this blog, identifying 3 kinds of ESS software listed in the "7 Things You Should Know About..." resource, and describing how you might implement them in your classroom.
And now for today's homework.

Deliverable #1: Each group will use the materials they have gathered so far to develop a WebQuest. To do so, please follow the below steps:
  1. Search for Web-based content that applies to your lesson plan (please use more than Google).
  2. Organize the Introduction, Task, Process, Evaluation, Conclusion, and Teacher Page from your Internet materials, using one of the following templates if it helps.
  3. Use an online resource to generate your WebQuest. The best free one is filamentality, another one is Quests 2 Teach. If you prefer to save your WebQuest to disk, you can use aclearn.net, seneca, or teach-nology.
  4. As an alternative to #3, I am beta testing Quest Garden to see if I should fork over the $10/year subscription fee so my classes can use its services. We have until November 8 to use the trial membership, so I'd like you to upload your WebQuests to that service by that time. If your group can't get the WebQuest finished by that time, then follow the instructions for #3.
That's It!
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9/26/08 -- Class #2: Collaborative Meanings

What is the 21st Century Research Paper?


Deconstructing text

Writing the Body Electric


So you've done your research in a traditional sense, searching and finding several educational articles on the ERIC database about your Aim, APAed them for future reference, summarized them for later use. How should I write up the lesson plan for digital natives? Today's students are often labeled with, "continuous partial attention," perhaps expected in the era of Twittering, IMing, and Facebook. Is there any place left for pens and paper, writing a letter to a friend, or even an essay for a class assignment? Traditional production of meanings, teacher-assign/student-write/teacher-evaluate are evolving into more fluid, permeable scriptings. Once again, to ensure that our students are fully engaged in our instructional objectives, implementing current technologies into the classroom is an excellent way to experiment with developing successful lessons. Educause's Learning Initiative's 7 Things You Should Know About... offers a wonderful resource to keep current with the ever evolving educational/technological landscape. The "Horizon Report" is another annual resource that describes current trends in educational technologies.

All of these new Internet based applications are categorized as "social software." In an educational setting, these technologies are redefining what "text" means. Our understanding of the act of writing has been altered -- instead of an author, lists of friends post to bulletin boards, learning from each other, developing cumulative understandings of a body of knowledge. Open source, "collaborationware," or educational social software, ("ESS"), sometimes called "c-learning,"can create student-centered approachs to learning. Implementing technology in the classroom, therefore, requires finding ways for students to use ESS as a tool for learning.

For example, my unit plan on environmental education can be implemented using ESS by applying geolocation techniques during the field trip, and gathering the photos and captions together using Facebook. Keeping current with educational technologies enhances student interest in my assignments, making it more likely that my students will likely learn something during the field trip, and afterwords, when they are captioning the photos, and summarizing their field experiences. By centering the field trip on a map, the local community can also enjoy the fruits of the class experiences, enhancing the quality of life of an urban village.

But let's look at the most common expressions of ESS: the blog and the wiki.

"We Have Liftoff..."



There is a new layer of atmosphere in the 21st century: the blogosphere. The Weblog, or "blog," is the most common "social software" application. Students in college classrooms are often intimidated by mounds of paper handouts (assuming the copier isn't busted). A blog, like the one you're reading right now, allows instructors a low-cost alternative to publishing their course objectives and article clippings, with a unique immediacy with his or her students. Students can write responses to classroom questions quite quickly, and it is easy for teachers to find the responses (no stack of papers hiding the desk) and evaluate students almost contemporaneously with their writing activities.

Like air molecules engaged in Brownian motion, students freely share their ideas in a virtual extension of the classroom. Even academic professors are producing their own blogs, so many that there are now websites that simply compile other educational blog websites. Here's a list of some edublogs. Since 2006, awards have been given for the best ones.

Of course, blogs are misused and misunderstood. So you should use some online resources to help you clearly define your objectives if you decide to use a blog in your classroom. They are mainly used as a public diary, addressing causes and concerns someone may have. "Call and answer" techniques can be useful, where the teacher posts a question or activity on a blog, and student post comments with their own answers and ideas. Because the comments are publicly viewable, students often take more ownership of their responses, compared to writing an answer on a slip of paper, to be stacked up on a pile of papers, that only the teacher will read.

You are reading an education blog right now, the same one we used last week. How am I using my blog? Mainly as an online resource, and homework assignment poster for this class. I have many unpublished drafts, few online posts, and over time, I delete old ones after incorporating the best of their content into new postings. The reason I minimize postings is that the less computer-savvy students often "scroll into oblivion," and can't find the specific posting I'm referencing in class. This deletion technique weakens the organic evolution of blog writing, but makes it easier for "digital immigrants" to read.

Some of my other classes have different objectives, so my blog writing techniques vary from class to class. Blogging, in my opinion, will always be fundamentally teacher, or writer, centered. Our next style of writing, wiki writing, is much more collaborative.

Welcome to the Blogosphere!


So Blog On!

Writing Wikis


The overarching theme to these modules is to avoid coding another static web page that is never updated and collects digital dust. Instead, we should challenge ourselves to develop collaborative editing and writing projects. One of the most common web applications teachers can use to develop student centered content is the wiki. A wiki is computer software that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative writing projects, which make them excellent educational resources. Education Week recently published an article about wikis, citing several examples currently maintained by teachers. Look at two of the two wikis mentioned in the article, and observe some of the similar and different qualities between them.
  • Michael Horton's scienceinquirer is mostly list-based -- many good science teacher resources.
  • Jennifer Dorman uses her wiki, Dorman-Data-Digest, as a gateway into her website, blog and podcast, as well as a cornucopia of resources for various American history units, but no interactive writing either.
Many educators use pbwiki to host their wiki pages, mainly because educators can use the site for free. The website offers seminars to help educators get comfortable using wikis. Getting a feel for wikis yet? Their most important function is to share information about a specific topic, like lesson plans, by anyone who is willing to upload their work, to anyone who is interested in downloading the information. For example, here are several lesson plan wikis:
These wikis could easily be simply called websites as well, but the most important quality of wikis, again, is that many people contribute and edit the online content. Of course, the best wikis are the ones we write ourselves. My classes, collectively, have been building what, in my opinion, is the best lesson plan reference page on the entire Internet. All of you will be contributing to it as well. So let's get on with it.



Evaluation

Homework #2


Deliverable #1: Each group will upload their Homework #1 research to their group's wiki page.

Deliverable #2: Each group will find either 3 lesson plan Websites that offer multiple lesson plans in the groups content area and are not already on the lesson plan wiki, or 6 Internet lesson plans that directly relate to the group's Aim. Combinations of the two options are permitted. An Internet lesson plan on fractions is not appropriate to an Aim about factoring. Each lesson plan reference will include a hyperlink, and a few sentences describing why this is a good lesson plan for your Aim.

Deliverable #3: Each group will access the Blog WebQuest to fill out the remainder of questions on their group's wiki page. Students only have to :
  1. Reference/read the 'content material' resources to collectively come up with definitions of "blog" and "wiki."
  2. Determine a way their lesson plan can use a blog or wiki during instructional delivery of the lesson.
Deliverable #4: Each student will post a comment to this blog, answering the following question:
  • Referring to the "7 Things You Should Know About..." resource, identify 3 kinds of ESS software listed in the resource, and describe how you might implement them in your classroom.
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9/19/08 -- Class #1: Educational Research

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
These topics will be applied across curriculum. Groups of 2-3 students will choose a subject area (Language Arts, Social Studies, Math, Science, Art, Physical Ed.) as well as an Aim for a lesson in that area. As we explore the above topics, each group will apply what they learn to developing a Unit Plan organized around their chosen Aim. Each group's final product will be memorialized on our class wiki, freely accessible for any teacher with Internet access. This process will help us all experience writing as an organic, evolutionary process: easily uploaded and downloaded, constantly upgraded, hopefully valuable to other educators.

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
Note: Once a group has posted their choice for a content area, no other group may choose that content area.

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
    1. the lesson plan Aim chosen
    2. how the ERIC research articles helped shape the design of your lesson plan
    3. the NYS standards that are applicable to your lesson plan, and
    4. how you plan to implement this lesson plan
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4/11/08 -- Module #5: Keeping it Current

Avoiding Obsolescence: How to Keep a Good Lesson Drift into the Archives...

http://www.themediadrop.com/archives/001588.php#more

RSS Feeds

Managing Multiple Media Flows


Over the years there have been lesson plans I have created that I have fallen in love with, so much that every year I teach them without any variation. As you might expect, every year the lesson gets a little more stale, until finally a lesson that I used to teach with passion is little more than something to give to a substitute teacher when I can't be in the classroom. Everyone in this class has created a wonderful unit plan, but if you don't retool it every now and again, adding new material, removing parts that didn't quite work, you'll end up handing out worksheets to your class, reading the newspaper while your students are filling them out.

We often don't have the time to stay current with the many educational journals that are published every week or month. But if we don't read up, our lessons won't continue to evolve into more effective, engaging instruction. Before the days of computers, "clipping services," used to summarize news and journal articles, so that you could quickly scan a list of articles to see if there was anything of interest to you.

Today, there is a "killer app" called RSS News Feed that allows you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as it's published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from. The easiest way to set up your own personal news reader is to subscribe to a Web based service. The following websites are the most commonly used:
You can also download an add-on for Mozilla Firefox.

Let's look at an example of an RSS compiler. My Bloglines webpage is where I track over a dozen online educational publications. You can click on the 'EDU 33692' link in the left window to view all of the headlines from all of the publications, or click on any of the listed publications to just view that specific publication's recent articles. Whenever I have a few minutes, I can quickly scroll through the headlines of all of these publications to see if there is anything of interest to me. Instead of subscribing to each of the publications and getting swamped with email, or clicking on scores of links, I can have each website feed me their digital news clipping, all on one list that I can quick scan through for articles of interest.

Anyone can create their own RSS feed webpage by subscribing to one of the services described above, and then simply clicking on the orange 'RSS' button most online journals provided on their homepage. Here are some lists of the most commonly subscribed to RSS feeds:
And here are some directories:

Mashing Feeds

Filtering Multiple RSS Feeds


Even with RSS feed listing, you can quickly end up with hundreds of titles to scan. Hence the next leap in online content gathering: the mashup, sometimes called the Web 2.0 remix. The mashup is expected to be one of the technologies most likely to reshape educational pedagogies in 2008. Instead of viewing multiple RSS feeds in a linear fashion, line by line, a mashup can search for specific keywords of interest, and filter down all of the articles to only those that have the keywords of interest. An example of a mashup can be found on the Washington Post's website.

There are several online providers of mashups, I use the Yahoo Pipe service. Let's look at one of my mashups. I'm constantly on the look for Chemistry Teaching positions, so I've created RSS feeds to craigslist.com, insidehighered.com, and monster.com. I then created a filter that would only post entries that included the term, "chemistry," in it. Hence, in one page I can view multiple job posting for chemistry teaching positions. It's all good!

A more complicated mashup is my educational social software pipe. I listed about 20 RSS feeds to various educational online publications, and filtered hundreds of articles using the keywords, "blog," "wiki," e-learning," "digital natives," web 2.0," and "WebQuest." Currently, 12 items are posted, all relevant to my interest in technology in the classroom – what this class is all about.

Respectfully submitted,

Robert Lewis

Adjunct Professor
Boricua College
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4/4/08 -- Module #4: Creating Evaluations

Finishing Up: How can we know students learned the lesson?

Here is what each group should have completed so far:
  • Each student has read the three introductory articles, and write a wiki entry that describes one thing discussed in each article that you would like to implement in your classroom.

  • 150 word summary of your research for your lesson plan, including
    1. NYS Standards
    2. How the research informed your lesson plan
    3. How you plan to implement your lesson plan
    4. 4 APA Citations

  • Six Website links that have lesson plans similar to one you created, and descriptions that will be added to our link list.

  • Complete the Online Collaborative Writing Project, which will help your group define the words, "blog," and "wiki."
    1. Common Blog Features
    2. Blog Characteristics Sheet
    3. Blogger Planning Sheet
    4. Process Rubric Sheet

  • Completing the worksheets from the WebQuest About WebQuest site.

  • Adding content to the Wikispace webpage, including
    1. 150 word summary
    2. Lesson Plan
    3. Lesson Plan Websites
    4. Materials for WebQuest
    5. Lesson Plan Websites

Lesson Plan Templates

Avoiding the rush to insanity


There are wikis , online generators, Excel spreadsheets, and webpage lists on lesson plan templates. We will use my simple Lesson Plan Template to help build your lesson plans. All you need to do is type or copy/paste your information into the template, and save it. That's it!

Writing Regents Questions

How do we know our students know
what we know we taught them?


The best way to find Regents questions appropriate to your lesson plan is to go online to the Regents archive and find the appropriate subject matter.
Let's say we wanted to create some Science Regents questions for Grade 4. First, we would find a recent exam, and access the Rating Guide for that exam. Go to the next to last page of the document (page 17), and look at the item map that links each question in the test to relevant standards. Let's say my lesson applied to Standard PS 5.1. Question 9 is appropriate for that standard. So let's download the Spring 2007 Grade 4 Science Regents Exam and create a question that we can save as a Word document.

Looking at Question 9, we can see that we need to create a question format, a graphic format, and an answer format. Open up the final document to see what we will be making.

Homework

Each group will create 5 Regents based questions that apply the New York standards appropriate to that lesson, using the techniques modeled in class.
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3/28/08 -- Module #3: WebQuests

How can we design lessons that stimulate student inquiry?


Preface


Hey team!

Looking over each group's wiki, I see there is some confusion concerning what I am looking for in the 'ERIC Abstract' section. Summaries of your ERIC articles, not your lesson plan, is what you should be pouring into that space. The purpose of writing summaries of your research articles is to help organize materials to build into the lesson, and to have a reference point, dans la futur, when new assignments occupy the field.

This second purpose of summarizing articles is something I realized the hard way, and I am offering my trials and tribulations to all of you so to save you from the errors of my own life. Many times I have been assigned a task to design a module with various specifications, and as I developed the curriculum, a flash of memory occupied my mind, recalling me to a place where, sitting a table, I read an article satisfying the specficiations of my current writing task. And then the burning question: "where did I read that ... "? I can assure you, my friends, that bumbling and stumbling through stacks of paper, seeking the answer never works. Having a conveniently located list of summaries is the best way to answer the question, and, once you develop that productive work habit, I assure you, you will never go back to dumping your research into a pile of processed dead trees, never to see the light of day again.

I put together the following summaries in hour, as an example of what to pour into that wiki space.

LoParrino, Camille A. (2005). A Transformational Process: Facilitating WebQuests (ED 490 748)

A "Day in the Life..." of a Bronx student teacher. She developed a WebQuest about Monarch Butterflies with the help of her Fordham U mentor. Elementary students from P.S. 83 in the Bronx chose one of three roles: Researchers, Scientists, and Dieticians. This paper offers a step by step process for developing a WebQuest.

Chatel, R. & Nodell, J. (2002) WebQuests: Teachers and Students as Global Literacy Explorers. ED 471 843.

These teachers have produced a gold mine of on-line tools to help teacher create WebQuests, including excellent descriptive rubrics.

Young, D. & Wilson, D. (2002). WebQuests for Reflection and Conceptual Change: Variations on a Popular Model for Guided Inquiry. ED 477 112

Describes the structure of a WebQuest. The paper links WebQuest activities to a broader, schema-based approach to learning. By linking WebQuest activities to the STAR Legacy model, the authors demonstrate how these types of research are student-centered, and enhance instructional delivery.

Schweizer, Heidi; Kossow, Ben. (2007) WebQuests: Tools for Differentiation. Gifted Child Today, v30 n1 p29-35 Win 2007 (EJ750569)


http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/jul99/webquest/webquest2.html

http://webquest.org/search/


m-Learning

WebQuests

ubiquitous

digital divide

http://webquest.sdsu.edu/taskonomy.html

So let's take our Practicum II experiences to the next level, and integrate WebQuests into our unit plans.

WebQuests

Escaping the dusky textbook

So far, we've looked at online educational resources and the nature of "educational social software." Blogs and wikis are by far the most common ESSs used by teachers today. Another genre predates Web 2.0, the WebQuest. What is a WebQuest? Here's a definition:
A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity, where some or all of the material a student interacts with comes from the resources on the Internet. WebQuests eliminate the need for a student to search, sometimes endlessly for information on a topic, since prescreened links are provided in the WebQuest. Another benefit to using WebQuests is that they are easily created and support any curriculum topic. They are motivating and highly interactive, allowing students to use real life resources that are up to date.
WNET has an excellent online workshop about WebQuests. You might even be able to get professional credits for viewing it.

Educators need to view the WebQuest in two ways: how to design and evaluate it, the other is what each step of a WebQuest will look like to a student. Let's look at the final product first.

Instead of writing traditional, linear text with links to click on, WebQuests take a constructivist approach to learning. A WebQuest is, "an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet." Usually, the quest is divided in the following sections:
Students typically complete WebQuests in cooperative groups. Each student in each group has a specific research role. Let's jump back into one, and see how they work.
Each of you will take on a role, and evaluate a handful of WebQuests. Once everyone on the group has evaluated each WebQuest, based upon their persona, your group will collectively evaluate each WebQuest.

Creating online inquiry

Framing student exploration


So we're back at one of the main issues of this colloquium: how to create educational writings that aren't like dusty books, that are more than static lists of information. Creating a storyline line for students to move back and forth through, allows students to move along at their own pace, searching out what they are specifically interested in, while keeping the focus and objectives of the online research intact.
Of course, if you're creating a WebQuest (hint, hint) you're more likely to gather all the materials you want to include in the online lesson before you organize it into the above steps. Here are some additional resources to help you craft your WebQuest:


Evaluation

Homework #3

Let's recap what we've done, or should have done, by now:
  • Each student searched for and summarized three articles about how the classroom will look different than it is today.
  • Each group developed a lesson plan that includes NYS and NYC standards, an Aim, development of the lesson, and a summary.
  • Each group used ERIC to find four education articles (and APA citations) that relate to their lesson plan.
  • Each group uploaded their information to their wiki page.
  • Each group found 3-6 Internet lesson plans similar to their own.
  • Each group completed the Blog WebQuest and uploaded their answers to their wiki page.
And now for today's homework.

Deliverable #1: Each group will use the materials they have gathered so far to develop a WebQuest. To do so, please follow the below steps:
  1. Organize the Introduction, Task, Process, Evaluation, Conclusion, and Teacher Page from your materials.
  2. Use an online resource to generate your WebQuest. The best one is filamentality, another one is blogs2teach . If you prefer to save your WebQuest to disk, you can use aclearn.net or seneca.
That's It!
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2/4/08 -- Module #2: Blogging and Wiki Writing

What is the 21st Century Research Paper?


Collaborative Writing

Blogging the Body Electric


So you've done your research, found several educational articles about your Aim, APAed them for future reference. How should I write up the lesson plan for digital natives? In the era of twittering, IMing, and dodgeball, is there any place for pen and paper? Once again, we need to reevaluate our writing techniques to ensure that our students are fully engaged in our instructional objectives.

There is a new layer of atmosphere in the 21st century: the blogosphere. Like air molecules engaged in Brownian motion, students freely share their ideas in a virtual extension of the classroom. Open source, "collaborationware," or "educational social software," (ESS), can create a student-centered approach to learning. The result, our understanding of the act of writing has been altered -- instead of an author, "mashed up" data. Even academic professors are producing their own blogs, so many that there are now websites that simply compile other educational blog websites. Although ESS origins date back to the 1940s, community learning, or "c-learning," is all the rage, and since 2006, awards have been given for the best ones. Here's a list of some edublogs.

Like any technology, blogs are misused and misunderstood. So you should use some online resources to help you clearly define your objectives if you decide to use a blog in your classroom. They are mainly used as a public diary, addressing causes and concerns someone may have. "Call and answer" techniques can be useful, where the teacher posts a question or activity on a blog, and student post comments with their own answers and ideas. Because the comments are publicly viewable, students often take more ownership of their responses, compared to writing an answer on a slip of paper, to be stacked up on a pile of papers, that only the teacher will read.

You are reading an education blog right now, the same one we used last week. How am I using my blog? Mainly as an online resource, and homework assignment poster for this class. I have many unpublished drafts, few online posts, and over time, I delete old ones after incorporating the best of their content into new postings. The reason I minimize postings is that the less computer-savvy students often "scroll into oblivion," and can't find the specific posting I'm referencing in class. This deletion technique weakens the organic evolution of blog writing, but makes it easier for "digital immigrants" to read.

Some of my other classes have different objectives, so my blog writing techniques vary from class to class. Blogging, in my opinion, will always be fundamentally teacher, or writer, centered. Our next style of writing, wiki writing, is much more collaborative.

Writing Wikis


The overarching theme to these modules is to avoid coding another static web page that is never updated and collects digital dust. Instead, we should challenge ourselves to develop collaborative editing and writing projects. One of the most common web applications teachers can use to develop student centered content is the wiki. A wiki is computer software that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative writing projects, which make them excellent educational resources. Education Week recently published an article about wikis, citing several examples currently maintained by teachers. Look at two of the two wikis mentioned, and observe some of the similar and different qualities between them.
  • Michael Horton's scienceinquirer is mostly list-based -- many good science teacher resources
  • Jennifer Dorman uses her wiki, Dorman-Data-Digest, as a gateway into her website, blog and podcast, as well as a cornucopia of resources for various American history units, but no interactive writing either.
Many educators use pbwiki to host their wiki pages, mainly because educators can use the site for free. Just a couple of weeks ago, a seminar (for credits?) was held on the site. Getting a feel for wikis yet? Their most important function is to share information about a specific topic, like lesson plans, by anyone who is willing to upload their work, to anyone who is interested in downloading the information. For example, here are several lesson plan wikis:
These wikis could easily be simply called websites as well, but the most important quality of wikis, again, is that many people contribute and edit the online content. Of course, the best wikis are the ones we write ourselves. My classes, collectively, have been building what, in my opinion, is the best lesson plan reference page on the entire Internet. All of you will be contributing to it as well. So let's get on it.


Evaluation

Homework #2


Deliverable #1: Each group will upload their Homework #1 research to their group's wiki page.

Deliverable #2: Each group will find either 3 lesson plan Webpages that are not already on the lesson plan wiki, 6 lesson plans already referenced on the lesson plan wiki, or some combination thereof. The Webpages must be directly related to your lesson plan Aim, so a Internet lesson plan on fractions is not appropriate to an Aim about factoring. Each lesson plan reference will include a hyperlink, and a few sentences describing why this is a good lesson plan for your Aim.

Deliverable #3: Each group will access the Blog WebQuest to fill out the remainder of questions on their group's wiki page. Students will make the following revisions to the WebQuest:
  1. Include the links above in this posting to help you with definitions of "blog" and "wiki."
  2. Each student will include two summaries of the articles found for last week's homework.
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