I think I need to take a class just on Twitter myself ! There is so much information and I am overwhelmed with how to sort it and use it well. All of these new cool tech tools take time real time and I am feeling very rush to understand and frustrated I don't have enough time to spend developing my skills so I can navigate and use these tools correctly. I am a very visual learner , I like to take my time and process these things on my own terms and that just takes time. All of this learning about how to correctly use technology has really made me realize that we are not talking about this enough with our students, staff, and even our own children.
If I saw a post like the one mentioned I think my response would be something similar to what Patrick Larkin's said he did pulling in all his students and speak to them. I would organize a school wide lesson/ assembly /advisory lesson and speak to the seriousness of what we post, who sees it, and how it can be used in ways you never intended. I might try to talk with the student who made the post with my principal and have them help us to develop the information we present to the students. There comes so much responsibility with the use of social media but it is so easy to create accounts and start posting??? WE are in a time when I feel it is difficult to keep up with how rapidly technology and communication is changing. It does seem fitting that maybe even in English classes they start to teach more about these new ways of appropriately communicating. As I was reading the Innovators Mindset book for 791 I was very interested in him mentioning maybe instead of or along with teaching students how to write essays we teach about writing blogs. I think it is really tough to fully understand how many people can see what we post since it seems so personal with our own smart little phone right in our hands. I know we have had plenty of drama due to things students post on social media at school this year. This needs a topic that we as adults model and talk about with our students. The amazing power of social media comes with responsibility.
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We have to know our students and who they really are and what they really need. That is the whole mindset around Design thinking we can't design for someone if we don't know their needs. For me these reading all seemed to connect as I reviewed the Stanford Design Thinking model. It is all about making sense and all the steps and needs we all have to make sense and learn. I have a Maker Space at Valley Oak and when I went through the Makers Certificate Program at Sonoma State I was introduce to the design thinking model. I loved it I could see how this model could help our students solve any problem that they encountered in life. The idea of identifying a problem , creating a plan, prototyping, testing, and then possibly going back and trying again. This is a valuable model for everyone to use and keep in our tool box of life.
Now to talk about our readings before I talk about the different authors I just want to say that all 3 are talking about knowing our learners, the needs learners have, and the work that has been done to aid us as teachers to provide the best learning environment as we can for our students. Dervin
Baggio
Clarke Instructional System Design this is so similar to the Design Thinking Model
I thought a cool image for this post would be a tool box overflowing since this is how I feel so many tools so little time. So then I found the image of the man with all the tools in his hand and i thought wait that is how I feel so I typed in woman holding tools and this is one of the images that pooped up first . HMMMM this is not an accurate portrait of life in general and especially education I see so many men and women embarking of this journey of learning new tech tools. Sorry just needed to vent for a bit, maybe too much time in front of my computer ! I want to start with this question first :
Game Code 645836 it is a homework link if you want to play haha
I have wondered if this is the right tool and I am feeling that it is really working for my students. I am always amazed by how the student who really struggle seem to excel in the coding. I am still trying to figure out what about it works for them and one thing I can say is that the coding makes something happen and action and it gives immediate feedback. I am still learning and this is a journey that will continue to challenge my brain cells but I am grateful I have had the opportunity yo learn. Well let the list of standards continue to expand ! This was an eye opening experience that actually resonated with me this week as my students were wrapping up a lab report and taking their finals. As educators we assume our students come to us with many technology skills which just is not true. I have students who still can't access the ECHO grade book correctly; instead they log in see the home page, see their grade and say "Why did you give me an A?"
( haha they never say that more like an F or a D). Then my response is to look into their grade book and look for assignment which are red, red is bad and green is good. I ask them to write down the red assignments and then come talk to me; in a perfect world this would happen, in my world I must go around to each student and guide them on this exciting quest for knowledge. This to me is one of the most important and basic skills our high school students need to me successful Empowered Learner. I have chosen Empowered Learners as an important standard I would like to focus on as I am so interested in how students learn and own their learning. The definition of Empowered Learner is students who leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences. This is really where I am at til the end of this school year providing technology in a away to empower my students to take a more active role in their learning. I am striving for higher percentage of student engagement. I am using a variety of tools to achieve this such as Quizziz, Socrative, Google Forms, Google Docs, and a few others. What I know I need to start with is that my students can access the agenda in ECHO. Once we have arrived at the agenda I must make sure that they can access the tools and assignments ensuring they are all with me( they are good at pretending). Things as simple as creating drop boxes for assignments and the asking them all to submit it before they even start to work to make sure they know the correct way to turn their work in is huge ! It can take for ever for them to do that I will show it on the big screen until I have 100% I also encourage students to help each other and that works very well. Just look at the challenges we have had as our Cohort logging into Kahoot the first few times we do these activities it is important to build in time for confused lost students, they catch on to these platforms pretty fast though. The standards on the ISTE site are all important and this awareness has really made me think of how I plan to incorporate them into my lessons. For the rest of this year my plan is to explore and develop the Empowered Learner since my students need that so much. Empowered Learner: 1a Students articulate and set personal learning goals, develop strategies leveraging technology to achieve them and reflect on the learning process itself to improve learning outcomes. 1b Students build networks and customize their learning environments in ways that support the learning process. 1c Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways. 1d Students understand the fundamental concepts of technology operations, demonstrate the ability to choose, use and troubleshoot current technologies and are able to transfer their knowledge to explore emerging technologies. I copied these of the ISTE site so I will have them here as a reference as I continue my learning journey. Besides these being important for my students this is where I have been focusing my energy as an educator. I have really been feeling the need to "upgrade" my teaching to keep up with all the change and this Masters program and all of my work with Napa Learns is really helping me with that professional growth. I can write basic code, manipulate linkbots with code, use a variety of educational tools, learning google fun, and I see an increase in student engagement. I want all my students to be Empowered Learners! Blog for 2-10-19 791 Class The Sense - Making Qualitative - Quantitative Methodology This article was very challenging and very relevant to where we are in our process as a Masters Cohort, I almost which I had read this before I did my action research. The title reveals the relevance to us as we begin our next round of research and really thinking about our questions and how we are giving honor to the individual and their sense making process. My blog is late because some family things came up that needed my attention. I am sure I could have put something down to get it done but the more I read the more I realized I was on my own sense making journey and I needed to honor that by giving myself the time I needed to really process and learn what I needed to feel comfortable with writing this blog for my own process of learning. Again it reminded me that my students feel this way so often as I attempt to cover all of my “important” materials and they have life happening. This entire process of being a student has given me a deeper sense of empathy for what our students feel daily. The process of reading this article was challenging. I reread many parts over and over. I looked up the meaning of words that were repeated to understand how they should be interpreted in this very specific context. One word that kept popping up was discontinuity and I felt this was critically important to understanding what was being said here in this article. Discontinuity relates to a break/disconnect, lack of unity, disruption, lack of coherence, disjointedness. This made me think about education and how we often disconnect from our true students needs or voices as we are on the quest of covering the required standards. We need to spend less time on the WHAT and more time on the HOW . As I a student continued to try and make meaning of the article I found myself continuing to make personal connections relating what I read to my classroom and to my action research. This is exactly what we tell our students to do and I found it very important because I was then intrinsically motivate to understand and apply what I was learning. This article really made me think about my action research questions and I know I need to make some change. I also feel like reading this has created interest and anticipation for the information coming from Lisa and Brenna. I will be in the right mindset listening and searching for specific information to modify my action research, this is meaningful learning and I am excited. I need to create more opportunities for my students to feel this way. This image explains how I am feeling about Sense Making and my practice as a teacher and an action researcher; understanding Sense-Making will help develop change making in my classroom and my practice as an educator. I apologize I created a table and could not figure out how to insert it so I added a button with the link to the document. ( Weebly makes me crazy I grow many brain cells using it ). If I was to teach this to my students I would have started with visuals and the two below really spoke to me and increased my understanding. Please press the button to understand. The image from our reading bridging the gap seems very similar to the iceberg visual. The sensemaking is the tacit knowledge. More thinking and connections are down there where we spend less time and we can’t really see what is happening unless we start to ask different questions acknowledging our students as the Human Actors in education. I also made connections reading the first sections of this article to the importance of the personalized nature of learning, the need for choice and voice. I enjoyed my journey of reading, rereading, looking things up to support my learning, and now look forward to having discussions about my learning and questions.
Sensemaking is the process people use to give meaning to their collective experience, for me the learning process for myself and my students. This is a new a refreshing way to interact with the human experience of making meaningful connections. My take away and new quest for myself is “ How can I develop skills in understanding and responding to my students varied sense making practices as part of learning and teaching?” This Button will take you to the first site I learned about in my study of teaching our students to be digital citizens. The site is Stanford History Education group. I really find this site to be very useful for high school we can teach our students content while teaching digital citizenship. The way the site presents the lessons students are learning critical thinking and communication skill as they determine if YouTube videos, twitter, Wikipedia, and other social media are reliable sources. I think these resources could be very useful as our school creates school wide writing and reading assessments we could use content from this site and they would double their learning since they would also be learning digital citizenship. This button will take you to Common Sense Education which is a wealth of information on the topic of digital citizenship, a one stop shop for educators and parents. Looking through this site I realized I have a lot of work to do on this topic. I use ECHO agendas, I link resources, often I create a list of resources for them to choose from as they do research so I know they will have accurate information. With further interaction with this site I realized I need to be more intentional about teaching digital citizenship and call it that in class/ school. I think I am going to mention this to my principal and show her the website because I think this should be taught school wide in our advisory classes and this site has it presented so well for us to do that.
As a related side note I participated in a webinar on Climate Education at the beginning of the year and the entire reason for the webinar was due to a resource that was mailed to science teacher saying scientist don't agree on climate change and made claim climate change was not supported by scientific data which is a huge fallacy . The title of the webinar was Turning Misinformation into Educational Opportunity. They presented a method to have students evaluate scientific information which I am beginning to teach this week called FLICC: The five characteristics of science denial (Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, Conspiracy theories). So now that I really think about it I am teaching this in the context of my subject of science but I need to expand this further. This is a big topic that will take a village to teach it needs to come from district, school, teachers, parents, and peers. Technology is moving faster than we can keep up. Keeping up is necessary for our students to be safe responsible digital citizens. Thank you for this information and resources Scott. Becoming a student and allowing myself to make mistakes, reflect on them, and grow in my teaching has been very valuable experience. The work around student math achievement is serious and needs to continue. We can all learn math. I am very interested in how people learn, what are the best ways for people to learn math especially. My driving question "What effect does mindset have on math achievement?" is my overall focus for my research due to the improvement I saw in my students achievement during my first round of studies. It did become clear to me that many factors influence student mindset and achievement which does add some layers to this research. The mindset of the teacher is very important; being willing to try new things and make mistakes isn't just for our students. The relationship that is developed between the teacher and students plays an important role in the development of mindset and student achievement. The curriculum is very important especially for students who have repeated Math 1 more than once. They need something different pushing them to higher level thinking. Finally they need knowledge about mindset growth and how the brain makes connections and grow.
There are changes I want to make to my classroom to increase engagement and reinforces positive behavior, choices, and learning. I am going to introduce "Class Craft" as a way to update my teaching practices starting 3rd trimester in a few weeks ( I have some serious learning to do). I also want to be more intentional about mindset growth lessons by calling Mondays Mindset Mondays. Currently at Valley Oak Mondays are our intervention day students check Echo, improve assignments, make up missed work, and work on extra credit. This is the perfect place to include a 5 - 10 minute mindset lesson and discussion. Finally I am using the C-Stem curriculum 85% of the time as my main math curriculum. I am seeing such interested results using the C-Stem curriculum; my most distracted unfocused students are experiencing really success . I am struggling with how is my research innovative and scale-able ? As I looked at other students capstones with the discovery of the innovative learning lab I now understand what I need to create . I now need to fine tune my practice and research to create something that other teachers can use to experience increased math achievement with their students, a learning environment promoting mindset growth. What is the role of personalized learning and competency-based learning in education today?1/27/2019 This is a subject that really intrigues me as an educator in 2019. I know something needs to change business as usual is not as effective as it should be with our changing student population. One of my biggest concerns is students personal accountability, “OWNING THEIR LEARNING”. I am also very interested in how personalized learning supports growth mindset. Teaching at Valley Oak it is very clear that business as usual did not work for my students and I believe they deserve something different. We do offer smaller class sizes and more individual support and that used to be enough to support our students to reach their goal of graduation. Now I see our students needing more; engagement is a challenge, personal accountability is a struggle, and work ethic ( agency) is declining. I believe developing growth mindset is part of the solution and I know see how personalized learning could also help support development of work ethic and accountability.
I have been very interested in the research around alternative seating choices. As teachers we tend to use seating as a ways to control/ manage the class but I do often wonder if the students have needs I am not providing to them. I will use my 5th period Math 1 as an example, this class is driving me absolutely crazy. Their behavior is so unfocused, changing everyday, and it seems no matter what I do nothing seems to work for more than a couple days. I have decided they are going to teach me many important lessons involving teaching Math 1 as well as how to meet the needs of struggling students needing mindset development and skills to develop focus. This is a class full of boys, there a 2 sweet girls, and they need to wiggle. So I am going to borrow some wiggle stools from another class and some of those ball chairs as well. I want to develop trust to give choice but it is hard since their past behaviors have been less than desirable. I am also teaching the 100% using the C-Stem computing and Robotics curriculum and that makes a huge difference. Students who usually struggle experience real success while coding. I am also looking into new classroom management systems I went to a class DOJO training and it seems amazing just a bit to juvenile for my crew so I am looking into classcraft. These kids are gamer and I need to try to connect on their level. One thing I do know these changes of personalized learning and competency based learning will take time, thought , and practice. Change is exciting, scary, and difficult. As I was reading through these article and watching the videos my gut instinct was this seems right ! Teaching our students the skills needs to operate in a personalized learning space would teach them very valuable life skills that many are really lacking. This is why I am getting my Masters I want to grow and improve as a teacher. I want to learn what current trends are and I want to talk about them and learn from like minded teacher like my wonderful Cohort 16. My mindset is growing exponentially. |
Julie LovieJulie Lovie Is a Math and Science teacher at Valley Oak High School with 25 years experience in teaching at a continuation high school. Julie Also teaches at Napa valley Adult School in the High School Diploma Program. She is passionate about the environment, loves gardening, and learning. Archives
June 2019
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