Can the use of digital tools increase the quality of academic discourse?
My driving question sprouted from the need to use technology purposefully. My school site was in the process of becoming 1:1 and I always knew I wanted to use technology but didn't want to just use it to use it. Slowly, over time, I've been able to identify where I need to focus on meaningful technology. My district has put an emphasis on academic conversations and I have not seen much research surrounding this so from the start of the program, my driving question has finally blossomed.
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Growing up with technology and seeing firsthand how delivering and receiving information has evolved, I think has helped me understand the need to deliver content on all platforms to engage my students. Transliteracy is the "ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks." Being that these platforms have always interested me. I try to ensure that I try to use a little bit of every platform as all students have different interests.
In my own classroom, we jump from using songs to help us learn how to paraphrase to using social media to learn how to collaborate. The outcome of using these tools has allowed the students to stay engaged but still access the important content. I see students actually buying into education when we're not just using the boring textbooks. It's crazy to think about how so much has changed in the way we deliver content but Socrates said it best about written word, "an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." Pluto, The Phaedrus Growing up I always had my face in a book. So much so that I would get in trouble for reading while we had company. Imagine that, getting in trouble for reading! I always knew I would major in English, but I didn't quite know what I wanted to do with it. I contemplated on being a lawyer, but that just didn't seem to fit my personality. In college, I came across so many amazing professors. Shout out to Dr. deRosa! There was just so much passion when they taught English and it sparked something inside me. I wanted to make others feel about English the same way my professors made me feel learning about it. I had a few friends who continued onto their Master's and are currently teaching at the college level. I didn't quite feel so confident in my skills and felt I needed to gain experience. I thought high school would be a better choice for me. I did my observations at the high school level and eventually my student teaching at the high school level for both semesters. While I absolutely loved teaching high school, being only five feet and constantly being asked if I was a teenager has led me right to middle school. Halfway through my credential program, I went to a job fair and was handed a decision that would change my life drastically.
I accepted the job, packed up my life, and moved 400 miles away from my friends and family. I am now in my second year of teaching English to middle schoolers. While last year was rough being a brand new teacher in a new environment, I am incredibly glad I made this choice. I am now at a school site where the administration is spot on with providing any necessary help and support. Last year I asked for more technology and now I get to work with an Apple TV and all my students are 1:1. The access to technology now has made me question how I can best utilize the technology to really make a difference in their learning. I decided to join this program, still fresh in the middle of my first year of teaching, because I knew I did not want to waste my or my students time with just substituting everything with technology. This one little thought has completely put me on a journey to be more mindful of how I use technology and when. I never thought I would be so involved though that now I have a plan to learn as much as I can and continually crafting this skill so that I can lead my whole school site into this direction. I currently believe that society is shoving all these technological advances down our kids's throat and expect positive results without teaching them anything and what that has gotten us is a zombie apocalypse with all students staring at a screen with a glazed look in their eye. Technology is needed in this day and age, but being mindful of how to teach our students to utilize technology correctly is essential to make this work. I see so much resistance to technology for this reason, but that's why I want to be there to show everyone, administration, teachers, parents, students, that when we use technology with a purpose, we can produce some amazing results. And that's why I'm here. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. This class has taught me so many valuable lessons about what to consider when designing my lessons. Since it was my first year teaching last year I felt that I was trying to try so many new things and was not consistent with what I was already doing. Coming into the new year, I don't want to make this mistake again. While I want to incorporate technology, I have to be cautious about using too much of it and not staying consistent. Understanding the SAMR model has made me realize I used a lot of tech tools as substitution but it did not really enhance the learning. I plan to focus on a few tech tools throughout the school year so students become very familiar with them and can master them by the end of the school year. I think the tools I've chosen will really help enhance how they communicate and collaborate with each other which is the focus for my action research.
The readings have made me come to the conclusion that all of our students have different needs and different styles of learning and the only way we as educators can help them learn and grow is to constantly keep learning and growing as well. We need to constantly change as our students change and not stay static to what we're comfortable with. I hope that what I've learned about presentations can be applied to the different videos and slides I create to ensure students stay engaged with the material and don't just become zombies to them. I'm excited to try everything I have learned! Gamification is the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems. Gabe Zichermann states that games are wired to produce pleasure and that it provides an intrinsic reinforcement where kids want to keep seeking that activity. Since gaming is learning, Zichermann suggests that we identify what it is about the games that keeps kids so interested, what kind of skills can they learn. Gamification analyzes those skills that could be learned from a game and apply it to their lessons. The difference between game-based learning is that game-based learning actually uses games to enhance learning and engage audiences. Zichermann gave the example of Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego as gamification, but I would consider that game-based learning because you actually get to play a game to solve problems which helps support your critical thinking skills. Jane McGonigal pointed out that World of Warcraft is a great game to learn from because it provides the player an opportunity to collaborate, create, think critically, and communicate, all four c's of common core! I think both can be useful in helping engage your students and provide another mode of learning.
I used to be someone who was obsessed with video games, mostly role-playing games such as Bioshock and Runescape. In fact, I still play Runescape... I play to pass the time but I definitely have to think critically in order to pass quests or to ensure that I am utilizing my time the best way so I can maximize on how much I am making. I know for a fact my students are playing fortnite because they talk about it all the time and try to sneak on it in class. I've never played myself so I don't know how it works but I can bet it's teaching them critical thinking skills. They also love to play random online games that they are thinking through to get to the next level. I slightly use gamification in my classroom already in a very minor form. I, being the huge Harry Potter fan, have all my periods as different houses. Since my school site focuses on PBIS, we do use a reward system so they get house points for good behavior and participation. For now, I'm ok with this use until I become more familiar with how to apply some critical thinking skills found in games into a real world context. I think I could use game-based learning to help students get more engaged in the content. An article I read on how we can use video games in an English classroom suggests using games as a text. They suggested using Republia Times. In the game, you are editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Your job is to use your influence to sway public opinion. You earn points by increasing readership and manufacturing more citizens that are loyal to the state. This would be perfect for our persuasive writing and advertisement segment! I also plan on using quill, and vocabulary.com at least once a week to just help increase their basic English skills which is really lacking in today's students. These actually do excite me to use in the classroom. I only wonder if maybe I'm trying to take on too much considering I want to use a lot of these new tools I am learning about. While thinking back on all the readings this semester, I think one of the most important things I've learned is that my teaching should always be evolving as I identify the needs of my students and how to best help them understand what we're learning. I've always thought that as teachers we should be the exemplary model of how learning is vital. Whenever I go to a professional development, I always let my kids know it's because I need to continue learning how to better engage and instruct them as time goes on. My students will always be different from each other and seeing roughly around 165 students a day, it's going into be necessary to tap into various ways to deliver the content so that it reaches all students.
As a first year teacher, I had this whole vision of how I would be the one to introduce technology to my school and innovate how things were done and while I've helped a lot of teachers better implement technology into their curriculum, I think that all I've really brought to the table is technology as a substitution. There's nothing really innovative about making Google forms into quizzes or having them write journal prompts online. It's the same thing as doing it on paper, nothing was really brought to the table. The TPACK model allows me to consider why and how I will be using technology and for what purpose. I want to ensure that I do have a purpose for every new tool I introduce especially as our school site is becoming 1:1. My vision still stands, I think that I can still help my school become more innovative and hope that my action research will help lead us to stronger academic conversations in a 21st century setting. I chose to check out VideoScribe, Vibby, Educreations, and Edpuzzle. I have been wanting to find ways to make presentations more engaging and to really utilize it so that it adds more to their learning. I liked videoscribe and plan on purchasing a monthly subscription (and try to make as many videos as I can as quickly as I can!). I liked the graphics on it and feel that it was very simple to create a video presentation. When I was reading how it could be used it gave me a lot of ideas on how to share the curriculum through video clips that they have to watch before class. With a lot of these tools, I could easily have them watch before class which is something I do as an anticipatory set from time to time. This can help save time to focus on the discussion aspect of it. I really like the opportunity to get creative with my videos so I hope that I can create some content that will be useful for my classroom. Before discussions I can even give my students a quiz to check their understanding of the video which will help me evaluate whether I need to add or improve the videos I create.
I really liked Educreations, but I think I'd have to learn how to draw or use it well with other graphics. I was reading how one teacher used it whenever she was absent and would just have the sub play the video for while she was gone so that she could still technically teach them. She was a math teacher so I can see how that could work very easily. As an English teacher, I feel that in order to make this really work, I would have to know how to draw well enough to explain concepts. We don't really focus on grammar or spelling so I couldn't just write anything down, I would have to draw things out. I can also see the students using this themselves to create short presentations that I can assess. I only liked Vibby for student presentations. Our newest English teacher also taught video production and so I already had ideas of having students create a video project so Vibby can be useful for giving their videos a wow factor. I would only be worried that it would be a bit too difficult for my students to navigate and use. Finally I thought Edpuzzle would be useful in the same way that I used VideoScribe but easier because it already has a lot of content to choose from that I can frontload to my students and have them take notes before they get to class. I like that some of them already have built in quizzes so I don't have to worry about it. I've used many of the others such as Flipgrid and Screencastify and would love to check out the rest but they were mostly for iPads and since my students don't have any access to any, I didn't quite bother at the moment. Taking the Baggio Visual Connection quiz, I got a 60% on visual, 32% auditory, and 8% kinesthetic. I think these percentages aren't quite accurate. I am very visual in the sense that I need to see what I'm reading or being told in order to comprehend it. I was actually surprised my auditory was higher than my kinesthetic score because I like to learn by doing and I feel that when people talk to me, if I have nothing to follow along with, I tune a lot of it out. I felt the test questions doesn't really show an accurate score of what your learning styles really are. I would want to find a better test to try this out! But I still plan on giving it to my students at the beginning of the year just to get to know them a little better.
Reading Daniel Pink's book has got me really thinking of a lot of new ideas to incorporate into my classroom. The whole idea of using more of your right brain really fits my alley because I've always felt that I've been an R brain user more so than an L brain user. BUT this last school year was more of an approach for L brain users. I guess I was so focused on their behavior that I didn't want to stray from anything that didn't follow the curriculum because I thought they couldn't handle it. I think it's more that I couldn't handle doing both. Pink's idea of what skills are important to learn are all skills I've always said I wanted to incorporate and so now I have a few things to try out this school year. Eventually I'll keep adding onto it so that students are ready to go out there and not be outsourced. Thinking about the next step of my action research, I'm worried about the timing of the school year with when everything will be do. I really need and want to focus on my expectations of my students for the first month, so I need to somehow find a way that my students can practice their academic conversations with the digital tech tool while still showing them what I expect during these conversations. I think it will work out well and be good for the rest of the school year, I just have to figure out what I'm going to do! As a new teacher, I get really inspired with 21st century learning. I grew up during the no child left behind era and I felt that I was taking standardized tests and doing paper worksheets all the time. That's not how I think teaching should ever be. So for me what is most important is getting my students to really understand the 4 C's of common core because for English at least, I feel that it works very well in ensuring our students are ready for the future because it really focuses on critical thinking and collaboration which happen to be key points to the jobs that are popping up in our society. I wish that I could have a classroom that was completely 21st century and that includes the furniture and technology access. I really want to do more with technology but I don't want to just substitute technology for what we are already doing, I want to make sure that whatever I do with technology is actually going to benefit them. For my action research, I really want to try to identify how I can bring that 21st century environment (technology use) to help advance my students skills in academic discourse.
I think SITE can be useful in helping me to identify different sites that might help me understand what will best fit the needs for my students. At least in the sense that I can use it to see whether it's actually going to help me help my students reach their goals. But I also feel that SITE is a bit too extra for looking at the purpose of a website. I can easily assess whether a website will help my students or not without doing a whole analysis. I personally don't think I would use it that much because as someone who has been tech savy my whole life, I think I can easily asses whether a website is useful for me and my students. I originally thought SITE was only for websites though, but the more I thought about it the more I thought about how I can adapt this to just technological tools which right off the bat will help me in understanding what tools will actually work because I can and should analyze their benefits. I use Twitter often but find it difficult to follow along with hashtags because sometimes the tweets are relevant and useful and sometimes it has nothing to do with what I'm looking for. What I did find were a couple of new things I can try to implement in my classroom. I really like the idea of digital storytelling that someone posted. This is a great way to enhance the assignments that my students already do. It will give a chance for my more artistic students to learn a skill online and my less artistic students to possibly do better than they would drawing it out. I was also really excited to find out some improvements with Google Classroom such as creating an area for classwork. I think that organization will help keep things separated and allow students to easily navigate to either their homework section or classwork section. That's why I liked using Google Sites in conjunction with Google Classroom because I was able to keep the sections separated, now I need to play around with this new feature. Overall the ISTE conference looks like there would be a lot of information to take in and take back and I would love to see how I can attend next years conference!
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