Reflection on ITD 645
Shane Seal There were many applications and online tools that I used for this class. Many of these I can see myself using if I were in a classroom situation, many of them I would not choose to use, but would probably use a project similar. For example, I would never use Google Slides to create a presentation if I had Keynote available to me. I give a brief explanation of each project below and will provide an overall summary along with potential future use cases at the end of this reflection. Padlet I created a Padlet where students can submit their work each day and other students can comment on it. The way I am using this tool is kind of like a discussion board but in picture format. I used a background that was modeled after a calendar and created a Padlet on each day that students were working on project. Inside of the Padlet, students were encouraged to post their work and also provide feedback to other students. This was my first time being exposed to Padlet and I really enjoyed thinking about all of the ways it could be used in a classroom environment. Scoop.IT Scoop.IT allows the user to create something similar to a curated news feed. This allows a teacher to identify articles that are relevant to topics that are being covered the classroom. This can help create a safe environment for students to have access to the materials without full access to the web. I can see how this could make it easier for the teacher to specify the articles he/she wants students to read, but I also wonder if the tool doesn't hamper the growth of student's ability to conduct their own research on the web. If I were to use this tool in the classroom, I think that I would create a Scoop.IT feed with a few articles, but require students to maintain their own feeds as well. Hopefully this would allow me as the teacher to bring some focused articles to the students while allowing the students the ability to gain experience at searching the web for topical articles as well. Rubrics with Rubria I used an online tool to create a rubric for this project. I think that rubrics help students to clearly understand how their project will be graded and can serve as a a great checklist as students are preparing their project for turn-in. Rubria had a large amount of subject areas to choose from to help get started. Once the user chose a topic, they were able to choose various fields within that topic to create a rubric from. The user was also able to add their own fields. For example, in my rubric I added a category for presentation as I was creating a rubric that I would use to grade student's triangle presentations. As a classroom teacher, I would allow students to create their own rubrics for a couple of simple assignments. Thinglink Another tool that I used for this class was Thinglink. This was a really cool tool that allowed you to update a picture, 3D image, or even a 3D photograph. The creator could then add tags to the picture that included audio, text, and/or additional imagery. I was really impressed with some of the examples. There was a 3D photograph of a library that gave the viewer the ability to move the camera around the environment to view different sections. The view could click on various areas to get more information about that section. It was like a virtual tour of the library. This tool had me wishing that I had not chosen a 2D topic so that I could explore how to do that a little bit more. I would definitely do a 3d panorama of the Marsh for the fishing classes I teach. I uploaded a geometric proof of the Pythagorean theorem and added tags to label the legs and hypotenuse of a right triangle. In addition, I tagged the picture with a link to the NASA.gov website. This website gives a demonstration of how they use the Pythagorean theorem in solving problems and provides an environment where students can manipulate the drawing to construct a geometrical proof of the theorem. Google Slides/Google Docs For the collaboration piece for our group, we used Google Docs and Google Slides to collaborate when creating teaching materials and slides. The tools are easy to use and available to everyone. They are however limited and not very powerful. They are also cumbersome to use while offline. This has been one of the difficulties faced by teachers at districts that implement a BYOD 1:1 computing initiative. Teachers often have to resort to the lowest common denominator which can sometime limit the scope of the projects and work done by students. I do think as an introduction to the tools available the tools were appropriate to this class. If I taught at a school that was an Apple 1:1, I would use the Apple Tools (Keynote, Numbers, Pages) instead. GarageBand I used the GarageBand application to create my podcast. I have used Audacity as well in the past and have a nice mixer with a Shure SM58 microphone at my house which makes these kinds of projects fun for me. GarageBand is simple to use and available for free to everyone that has a Mac or iOS device. Audacity is free and open source. This means that it can run on any computing platform for which it can be compiled. I highly recommend it if you don’t have access to GarageBand. There are many YouTube videos that can help Audacity users get started if they do not have any previous experience with recording audio. I would use podcasts in my class as a teacher to help students with memorization facts. They could take the podcast with them as they run, do chores, ride in the car, etc. This allows them to participate fully in the flipped classroom concept. QuickTime and iMovie I used QuickTime and iMovie to create the video project on triangles. I opened up my presentation on triangles, then opened QuickTime. QuickTime gives you the option to do a screen recording. I began recording the screen while I gave the presentation on Triangles. I used the built-in microphone this time vs my Shure microphone to gauge the difference. I could definitely tell the difference in quality, but the built in microphone was more than acceptable. If I made a mistake while recording, I simply paused and repeated the audio. When I finished the screen recording, I imported the file into iMovie and deleted the mistakes. I then exported the file as a .mp4 and uploaded it to YouTube before submitting. I would not hesitate to create videos of my presentation for incorporation witn Edpuzzle which I will discuss next. Edpuzzle Edpuzzle was a tool that I was not familiar with before taking this class. I always struggled as a teacher to assign videos to students. I was never sure if students actually watched the videos or learned anything while doing so. Edpuzzle gives the ability to embed questions directly into the video which provides the teacher a great way to conduct formative assessments on the effectiveness of the video. I would not hesitate to turn every one of my presentations into video format for use with Edpuzzle. I think it makes for a much more engaging video experience. The teacher even gets feedback on student progress and if the students viewed the entire video. One tactic that a teacher can use to make sure the entire video is viewed is to put a question in the last thirty seconds of the video. Future Uses As I am not currently a classroom teacher, I will not personally be using these tools in the classroom. I will be introducing many educators to these tools through my role with Apple. This class has really helped to expose me to many different tools that I can share with other educators. Strengths/Weaknesses My main strength is probably my technology background. This allows me to draw from previous experiences to solve current and future problems. I have many, many weaknesses, chief among them is graphics design/layout. I am good at getting the required content on the page or in a presentation. I am not very good at designing the layout or graphics that would be used to help convey the information. I had hoped to take a class in that specifically within the program, but I think I still need much more work in this category. Shane Seal
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As the ability of students to access information via the internet continues to grow, the expectation of teachers to be Subject Matter Experts will decrease. Teachers will become more of a facilitator assisting students with discovering information along their educational journey. Teachers will help to keep the students on track and on task to accomplish course objectives, but will no longer be the funnel through which all information will flow. Students will more and more perform peer teaching and evaluations in the classroom. I would love this approach as I lean more toward the constructivist viewpoint of education. This will allow individual students to determine their own educational outcomes. This will be adopted much easier in private institutions however as they do not typically have state or federally mandated summative exams that they are forced to administer.
Assignment Reflections Padlet This was a pretty full week for assignments. I created a Padlet where students can submit their work each day and other students can comment on it. The way I am using this tool is kind of like a discussion board but in picture format. I used a background that was modeled after a calendar and created a Padlet on each day that students were working on project. Inside of the Padlet, students were encouraged to post their work and also provide feedback to other students. This was my first time being exposed to Padlet and I really enjoyed thinking about all of the ways it could be used in a classroom environment. Padlet Exercise Quizziz I have used a program similar to this called Kahoot! in the past. I like the ability of Quizziz to create quizzes as solo projects, homework, or host live games. I chose to host my quiz as a live game the keeps track of students progress. I am choosing to require students to sign-in for this activity to test the ability to capture parent emails to do reporting with. I may wind up going back to Kahoot!, but it is always good to have alternatives. Quizziz https://join.quizizz.com Code: 136947 Or you can join my class to take the quizz. Scoop.IT Scoop.IT allows the user to create something similar to a curated news feed. This allows a teacher to identify articles that are relevant to topics that are being covered the classroom. This can help create a safe environment for students to have access to the materials without full access to the web. I can see how this could make it easier for the teacher to specify the articles he/she wants students to read, but I also wonder if the tool doesn't hamper the growth of student's ability to conduct their own research on the web. If I were to use this tool in the classroom, I think that I would create a Scoop.IT feed with a few articles, but require students to maintain their own feeds as well. Hopefully this would allow me as the teacher to bring some focused articles to the students while allowing the students the ability to gain experience at searching the web for topical articles as well. Scoop.IT Exercise Rubrics with Rubria I used an online tool to create a rubric this week. I think that rubrics help students to clearly understand how their project will be graded and can serve as a a great checklist as students are preparing their project for turn-in. Rubria had a large amount of subject areas to choose from to help get started. Once the user chose a topic, they were able to choose various fields within that topic to create a rubric from. The user was also able to add their own fields. For example, in my rubric I added a category for presentation as I was creating a rubric that I would use to grade student's triangle presentations. Digital Rubric Thinglink Another tool that I used this week was Thinglink. This was a really cool tool that allowed you to update a picture, 3D image, or even a 3D photograph. The creator could then add tags to the picture that included audio, text, and/or additional imagery. I was really impressed with some of the examples. There was a 3D photograph of a library that gave the viewer the ability to move the camera around the environment to view different sections. The view could click on various areas to get more information about that section. It was like a virtual tour of the library. This tool had me wishing that I had not chosen a 2D topic so that I could explore how to do that a little bit more. I uploaded a geometric proof of the Pythagorean theorem and added tags to label the legs and hypotenuse of a right triangle. In addition, I tagged the picture with a link to the NASA.gov website. This website gives a demonstration of how they use the Pythagorean theorem in solving problems and provides an environment where students can manipulate the drawing to construct a geometrical proof of the theorem. Thinglink Exercise Shane I can appreciate the skills developed in the creation of the course website for this week. I just wish there was a way to sequence the courses within the IT program so that if you have demonstrated success in this particular skill, you would not have to complete this particular task again. This is probably the fifth or sixth course website that I have built using Weebly. I would be interested in learning some of the actual HTML/CSS skills needed to create the course from scratch. I will say however that the whole WYSIWYG class of products has improved greatly and Weebly is one of the simpler ones to use. You can find my course site at:
https://it643course.weebly.com The internet is a great tool for learning. While I do believe that the open internet should be protected and the first amendment applies, I do not feel that to be the case with educational institutions. Educational institutions that have students under the age of 18 and provide internet access are responsible through FERPA and CIPA/COPA for making sure that appropriate filters and proxies are put in place to protect children while they are using the internet. When the students are at home, students can still be provided appropriate filtering through the school's filter system. I think that distance education will continue to grow in popularity. The days of the teacher being the filter through which all education flows is rapidly becoming obsolete. I know that on a personal level now anytime I need to do a repair, the first place that I turn is YouTube. As high speed internet becomes more ubiquitous, more and more students will turn to online or distance learning. Many students today stream games on TWITCH or watch streamers on TWITCH. This means that there is an entire generation of learners that will be seeking knowledge that are already familiar with the online environments. I think traditional educational institutions will either have to adapt or cease to exist. Departments such as the Instructional Technology department could be a very valuable asset to educational institutions seeking to make this transition. Shane This section was probably one of the easier ones for me. I am familiar with GarageBand, iMovie, Quicktime, etc. It only took a few minutes to create the podcast. I used Quicktime to conduct a screen recording while delivering my presentation, if I messed up, I would just repeat the narration. I then imported the screen recording into iMovie. I would then just crop out the sections that I messed up. I was not familiar with Edpuzzle, and I really enjoyed using it. I think this is a great tool for teachers to provide formative assessment when students are assigned to watch videos on a particular subject.
All in all, this week's assignments were pretty straight forward, but I was unable to find the storytelling tutorial that was mentioned by Dr. Wang in her directions. I posted an email a few days ago to Dr. Wang, but have not heard back. I posted the same question about the story telling example over in the discussion forum where another student replied that she was unable to locate the tutorial as well. Here is my post in the discussion section of the ITD 645 Class. I wanted to create my video yesterday, so I looked at the assignment requirements and it suggests that I listed to the lecture on Digital Story Telling. "Please listen to the lecture on Digital Story Telling linked in the Readings folder to understand how story telling can be used in classrooms. And then create your story (materials in video format)." I am guessing that the reading section is the Modules folder, but I can't find anything titled Digital Story Telling. Does anyone have any guidance on this? Here are the assets that I created this week. Link to audio podcast Video Materials EdPuzzle Access Code: mihoite Direct Link https://edpuzzle.com/join/mihoite Shane Seal There are more applications today available than ever before for teachers and students to create, collaborate, and present their ideas in a digital format. There are applications such a Numbers that allow students to easily organize, sort, manipulate and share data. Pages provides students and teachers alike with powerful word processing options and Keynote is the best presentation tool on the market. All three are available on a variety of platforms and are completely free. Applications like GarageBand allow students and teachers to record podcasts, songs. speeches, etc. to share with others. Students and teachers can even create books that can then be shared with the others worldwide through Amazon and the Apple Book Store. For our assignments this week , we used Google Docs and Google Slides to create materials for use with a series of lessons that could be taught by a teacher to students of various grade levels. We were able to store our assets in a Google Drive and then share those assets with our group members. Each group member helped to collaborate with one another to create a teacher handout as well as a presentation. All of this was able to be done with free tools available to anyone willing to provide Google access to personal data or to anyone that has paid for a G-Suite account. I am including below a link to the assets that I create for a Geometry lesson on Triangles.
Teacher Handout https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xzoZvytwl5mg269k0AzTEWJ4OFKaDtk_9PYfU3oQpTE/edit?usp=sharing Teacher Slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G0rg7lqMKkEncIsQldsVJEtUS2TpTeYps_6Vm8nQVoM/edit?usp=sharing CLD Students and Technology When technology is used to support culturally and linguistically diverse students, it is often remedial. Some students find themselves using technology that has been designed for younger learners simply because the vocabulary level matches their current language acquisition. This types of remediation via technology can be frustrating to use. Imagine yourself living in another country, trying to learn its language, and being asked to learn via remedial software. What concerns would you have about this instructional approach? What other options might be found to avoid remediation when it is instructionally unnecessary? This is an interesting situation that can be solved for, however it does require that proper technology resources are available. When I taught the Cisco Networking Academy, I was very fortunate that both the curriculum and assessments were available in over 20 languages. This was because Cisco had taken the time to localize the curriculum for those languages. Students enrolled in my class were able to take the class in their native language which they were very grateful for. My class was one of the very few classes that had curriculum available in languages other than English and the students enrolled routinely requested the same accommodations for their other classes without success. I can understand the student's frustration level as their cognitive level was equal or greater than that of their peers, but the language barrier made the material much harder for them to acquire. The cognitive level of the learner should always be considered for CLD students when choosing the appropriate materials for courses. Remediation software would be extremely frustrating to a Gifted student for example that had a cognitive ability much higher than that of a student needing remediation. Teachers could help mitigate these problems by choosing digital books for the students to use that have the ability to translate languages on the fly. Technologies that allow for speech to text can also assist students learning English as a second language. These students are often referred to as ESL students or Culturally Diverse Learners. The Apple Book Store for example allows for publishers to make their textbooks available in multiple languages. The school district could provide the texts in CDL students native language along with the English version. Cloud Storage Discuss the cloud storage. Why is it advantageous for educators to share resources and programs on a network? What concerns are associated with program sharing? Cloud storage has really been a boon to both students and teachers alike. Cloud storage allows users to access their information across a multitude of devices. This allows users to work on projects and collaborate on topics without always having a specific device with them. Cloud storage allows consumers to carry smaller and lighter weight devices on trips because a majority of their data can be stored in the cloud. It also allows photographers to create digital portfolios to share via the cloud with potential customers. Cloud storage is also a great way to achieve the 3-2-1 methodology of backing up critical data. I feel that data is always at risk unless there are three copies of the data, on two different types of media, and one of the backups has to be offsite. Cloud storage makes the offsite backup much easier. Cloud storage also has a few negative attributes as well. Typically cloud storage is more costly than traditional hardware based storage. Cloud storage is also heavily network dependent. If your network access to the Internet is slow or if you have bandwidth caps, cloud storage can be time prohibitive, cost prohibitive, or both. Another thing that should be considered is if the data being stored is sensitive in nature. Cloud storage has an increased attack vector when compared to local storage techniques. Customer should only use companies with strong track records of protecting data and should read all user agreements carefully to fully understand how their data is stored and if the data is shared with any third party entities. Classroom Wishlist After considering the various types of digital technologies presented in this chapter, what three pieces of equipment do you think you would most want for your future or current classroom? Explain why you selected these three and how you would use them for teaching and learning. The three devices that I would want for my classroom would be an iPad, an AppleTV, and a large screen TV. The AppleTV and large screen TV are both primarily conduits through which I would display the screen for the iPad. The iPad has replaced almost every single use device in the classroom and in a much smaller and more convenient form factor. The iPad has a very high quality camera that can be used as a document camera. The camera can also be used by teachers and students to record videos of presentations or experiments. It can be used with applications like LeafSnap can be utilized by students to classify trees in the wild while on field trips. The camera can even be used along with Augmented Reality to teach concepts. Check out the JigSpace application and how Augmented Reality is being used to teach concepts about topics ranging from heart stints to how to repair dry wall. Applications like Explain Everything allow teachers and students to use iPads as interactive white boards eliminating the need for expensive interactive boards in the classroom. You can check out my tutorial on Explain Everything to learn more about it . Managing a classroom is also very important for teachers and the iPad excels in this area as well. Teachers can use the free Classroom application on their iPad to manage student devices. You can view my project on Apple Classroom here. Add to the above all of the over 100 thousand educational apps for iPads, and I can not think of a better single device for teaching in a classroom environment. Shane Seal Chapter 1
Question 3: The number of technology tool available to teachers is already daunting, and more are emerging every day. Given the value of these tools to enliven and support 21stcentury learning, what will you do to keep yourself informed about the options available to you? How will you manage your discoveries and work toward integrating them into your classroom? While it is true that there are almost innumerable tools available to teachers, I believe the teachers should focus less on "Silver Bullet" applications for the classroom and focus more on applications that allow students to create, communicate, and collaborate. These applications should be the foundation for teachers to use in the classroom and will be applicable to any curriculum. Applications that allow for presentations, videos, podcasts, etc. allow students to communicate the knowledge of whatever subject matter is being taught in the classroom. It is important to remember that unless the teacher is teaching a technology class the technology needs to be transparent to the end-user and the focus should be on the content itself. There are exceptions to this of course and instructors should be encouraged to find applications to help students gain a better understanding of specific topics. The vast majority of the time however students and teachers will use the core set of application to collaborate, create, and communicate. There are many resources that teachers can use to help find these core sets of apps. Podcasts, Facebook Groups, list-servs, and other places where educators meet are all great sources to find tools for use in the classroom. Here are a few that might be of use to teachers: https://www.apple.com/education/everyone-can-create/ https://medium.com/gosynth/communication-and-collaboration-podcasts-for-empowering-student-voice-e5e565712643 Christopher Columbus Imagine that you are going to teach a unit about Christopher Columbus to the grade level of your choice. What strategies immediately come to mind as good possibilities for teaching this unit? What relationship can you discern between how you might want to teach this unit and your learning or cognitive style? Describe how you think your own personal style might affect your teaching styles. What lessons can you draw from this realization when you teach your diverse students? The first thing that I would discuss with the students is Christopher's need to persuade someone to help pay for the trip across the ocean. Once the students understood that need, then I would let them begin brainstorming on how much to ask for. They would be allowed to work in groups, but each group member would have a role. This discovery process would be allowed for one day.On the next day each group will be allowed to present their plea to be funded and would have to justify the expenses. Each virtual ship would be equipped with the supplies that the group asked for if they were successful in their persuasion and received backing. Each day for the next 10 weeks, the weather app would be used to discuss how their trip would be impacted if they had departed from Spain and were headed to the New World. Supplies would be subtracted from the inventories of each ship on each day and each group member would be responsible for writing in their journal as if they were the Christopher Columbus. These are just a few ideas that I have about how I would teach this. I may be way off base, but I think that I would find this method interesting. "DID I do that?" To effectively design instruction with technologies, a number of instructional design models are used in education. After reading this chapter, discuss the Dynamic Instructional Design (DID) model with the focus on its five steps. Step 1 of the DID model is to know your learner. This step really resonated with me as a teacher and education major. We were always taught to do this before class began. What I found rather ironic however is that step is rarely if ever given much attention outside of core education classes. I can't remember the last time I had a teacher gather information about me, my cognitive level, my interests, or even my education goals in a way that I felt impacted the class delivery method. I have filled out plenty of information about myself through introductions in discussion boards and in blogs. I don't know if that information has had any impact on the class as the syllabus, assignments, assessments, etc are already set and do not change. Maybe the real world simply doesn't work in a way that information about the learner is important. Step 2 of the DID model deals with stating the objective. Most of my classes have done this in the past, and I always felt as a teacher if you could state the objective up front it helped students stay focused on the task at hand. I typically follow the ABCD format for objectives. Objectives themselves can be either enabling objectives or terminal objectives. Enabling objectives are typically objectives that students master on their way to terminal objectives which are usually measure through summative assessments. Step 3 of the DID model deals with Identifying teaching and learning strategies. The teacher will use information from step 1 to help identify the correct strategies for teaching the objectives. This could change from year to year as each group of students could be drastically different and have different learning styles, experiences, or cultural backgrounds. Step 4 of the DID model deals with Identifying and Selecting Technologies. I feel like many of the courses that I have taken have not revisited this step often enough. Many times I am taking classes using applications or software that is no longer relevant in the real world. This is a daunting task for the teacher of technology classes however. They are often the only teacher to teach certain classes and have full work loads which leads little time to review and update technologies. Perhaps some of this work could be crowd-sourced by students to help keep the classes updated and modernized. Step 5 of the DID model covers assessing and revising. This can take place through both formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments have the ability to shape classes/units in midstream. Summative assessments typically take place at the end of classes and are able to shape future courses, but rarely have an impact on an ongoing course. My name is Shane Seal. I am currently working on my last class required to obtain a Master's Degree in Instructional Technology at the University of Southern Mississippi. I received my Bachelors' degree Mathematics with a minor in education and computer science in 1995. I worked as an Instructional Technologist for three years at Pearl River County School District before becoming employed as a Systems Engineer with Apple, Inc. My primary role is assisting school districts that are integrating Apple technologies with their curriculum.
I believe that this is the second weblog and fourth site created as a requirement for the program. I have also created my own WordPress Blog before enrolling in the program and developed a few websites I the past. My hobbies include Ultimate Frisbee, Discgolf, and fishing. Shane |
AuthorShane Seal
Systems Engineer Apple, Inc. Blogroll |