Wicked Problem Project-Final

Link to YouTube video



The Wicked Problem
During my student teaching, I often had problems with getting students to engage in materials that required them to read. This in turn meant that whatever activity and learning outcome I had in mind for the day, was undermined, and I often felt that students were unable to grasp the concepts I was hoping to impart.


The Solution
In thinking about my problem, I decided to bring a set of e-readers into my classroom as a means of helping students access the text. Although I had originally envisioned this on a school-wide scale, it was pointed out to me how hard this would be for so many reasons. I decided to scale back to only a classroom set with the idea behind this being that students with difficulties would not be singled-out, and that students who had not yet been identified by the system as needing extra help would then be able to access the tools as well.

TPaCK Application

TP: How does the technology you have chosen support the teaching strategies and methods you have chosen?

                I believe that in order to understand History, each of us needs to build our own understanding of the subject matter, especially, how history narratives (i.e. textbooks) are created. Both of these forms of understanding come from examining source material, questioning, and drawing conclusions. In this way, students make their own mental webs of information that they can use to learn and to interpret new information as it is presented, and to understand ideas about the society that they live in. The foundation for building these understandings comes heavily from being able to read source materials.

The ideal of digital media is a relative blip on the historic timeline, meaning that until recently everything was done on paper in some manner. This meant that if students were to use these texts, teachers not only had to have access to these artifacts but then make copies of them (if possible) so that they were classroom ready. Many groups have been working to digitize these artifacts so that they are accessible and downloadable through the web. Using e-readers in my classroom means that students would have 1:1 access to the documents and texts for the various activities and lessons that I have planned with a device that aids and encourages them with their class reading.  I try to make sure that students work together to build knowledge and answer questions based on the things they have read and looked at. If the student does not read the text, my teaching methods are useless. E-readers help to bridge that gap. Basically if a student can ‘read’ the material, then their chances of participating in the class and chances of doing well in the class greatly increase.

 The outside sources that I use in order to present information about the time period we are studying can now be collected in an organized manner that students can easily read-access and ‘flip’ between in order to make comparisons or highlight/clip portions to use in their writing. I can now, for instance, provide students with two opposing newspaper editorials, images from the event, artwork (possibly in color), poetry (And I can still be eco-friendly.), and I can have an activity go from these sources, rather than going with a paragraph summary of the event from the textbook. Also, e-readers which are able to access the web do not support the range of programs that laptops do, which means that my students will be better able to stay focused on the task at hand.

TC: How specifically does this technology make the content in your problem more intellectually accessible?  Be sure to think about representation.

                E-readers allow the information in the texts being used in the classroom to become more accessible in many ways. Perhaps most notably, most e-readers have a text-to-speech function that allows students who are struggling readers or who are more aural learners a gateway in the material that will be used in class. E-readers include dictionaries and translators to help all students understand what they are reading without having to take the time to find such aids or interrupt the rest of the class, nor do they have to call attention to their specific difficulties. Some dictionary functions display “in-page” allowing students even greater ease. E-readers allow students to change the font size, and many devices use e-ink, reducing eye strain. These benefits combined with how lightweight an e-reader is allow the reader to focus and place their effort on the content rather than on the effort of reading itself.

 Beyond that, there is a “cool factor” that is involved with using an e-reader. When students are excited about the way they are learning, they become more excited about the learning itself. This excitement in turn leads to a greater willingness to engage in the reading material and approach it with an open mind, especially if they feel that there is a cool tool to help them formulate their ideas.   

   

                PC: How specifically do your pedagogical choices make the content in your problem more intellectually accessible?) Be sure to think about how the student will experience the content given these instructional strategies.

As a history teacher I am a big believer of having students examine documents/artifacts from the unit we are studying as a means of helping them to construct their own understanding of the time/place/people/issue/etc., rather than relying solely on the textbook to feed them a single storyline.

 Often times the text (for a number of reasons both understandable and un-understandable) leaves out persons and stories of the time period that might connect with the people who are reading that text and the place and situation they are coming from. A textbook overview of people’s reactions is not enough. Incorporating art, music, speech (yes, e-readers support .mp3 files), and other mediums help students to connect to the content. The e-readers also make that content available to students as many times as they need, in the medium that works best for them. That is, a student can listen as many times as they need to understand the material, rather only having one 'shot' with a lecture. The e-reader also allows the student to use the various aids and tools without making it known to their peers that they are doing so. This practice should make the student more willing to engage with the material if they can maintain their image in front of their peers.

Allowing students to bring and access their own information and history to the documents while they are examining and making connections means that the discussions that they will engage in will be that much more REAL. And that means that the knowledge and understanding that they build will be real and lasting as well.

Group Leadership Project-Overview to Google Docs

For our project, our group decided to do video tutorial of the various applications available through Google Docs. This would allow access through an easy medium like YouTube, and would allow people to see our steps in action. In creating our tutorial, we had decided that each member would take an application from Google and create a video segment that we would then piece together with transitions. I am not sure about the others, but creating the video segment was ridiculously easy.  I used screencast-o-matic.com to record my screencast. My two favorite features about this site are 1) You do not have to create an account to use it (unusual for free programs) and 2) It has an auto-adjust feature for your microphone.

I did have trouble with the various video formats that I could save to. The .avi format would not encode. I could save the .flv file, but Windows Movie Maker Live would not work with the file format. That left me with .mp4.

 I then elected to piece the various video segments from team members together in Windows Movie Maker Live.

I created transition images and then simply uploaded the video files that others had sent to me, also in .mp4 format. Again, no sweat. But, the completed product had several issues. First, in movie maker live there is no way (that I know of) to pull out the audio to edit it, so we the user of our video would have had to adjust their volume while watching. 2) We were VERY long on the time, and YouTube has a 15 minute limit 3) The quality of the video was fine in Movie Maker, but any way that I 'exported' it, the visual quality dropped noticeably. I tried converting the files to other formats and then bringing them into Movie Maker, but that only seemed to make it worse-I believe this is essentially the "copy of a copy" issue. I also download another video editing program but was greeted with the same results.

Long story short, the final product was not bad, but not what we had hoped for.

In order for my team mates to see the completed video, I broke them into two segments and uploaded them to YouTube. After contacting Susan Wright, our instructor, we needed to pull the time back to ten minutes. We decided to keep the introduction and the overview of Google Documents since many of the features of Documents are found in the other applications, and then post the original two segments here.

Here is our shortened, official final product

Here is the original segments: Segment One 
                                             Segment Two
All in all, this was not a bad experience, but I certainly learned a lot. In the future, I would have one person do all the recording in one program that they can publish from in a format that is not .mp4. For instance, you can publish to YouTube from screencast-o-matic, but there is no way to piece videos together and then post. If I was going to do a lot of this sort of thing, I would definitely being doing some more reading online about what are the best programs. Much of what I read about Movie Maker Live helped me to understand that it is an ok "get the job done" program, but that a true video editing program is the way to go, and that .mp4 is not always that best file format.

CEP812 Personal Learning Plan

It is interesting to have this project come around so quickly again, and how my thoughts have changed on the task. When I completed the first PLP for 810 I feel like it was very academic and big picture. I had set goals that, by this time, I should have accomplished and haven't. I don't feel horrible for not completing those goals, but it has made me realize how much life can trip up your own personal development goals. You really must be as dedicated in your personal study as your classroom study. The one major goal that I have met is joining the MAET program. I am excited to see what this program will teach me and the people that I will meet. Hopefully I will be able to expand my PLN! Given that I didn't meet my smaller goals from my previous PLP, I decided that the best new goal/lesson learned, was that I really need to have a solid logistical plan, that is broken down into small logistical steps. Having these smaller steps in place will allow me to see progress which in turn will hopefully spur me to accomplish more.

For my Personal Learning Plan I created a 'storybook' using PowerPoint. I admit, it's kind of silly, but I was trying to have fun with it. Enjoy!
Personal Learning Plan

Wicked Project Part D Findings and Implications

I found the last part of the Wicked project to be difficult because not having implemented it in the real world, I have difficulties seeing the flaws or issues that may arise, so gentle reader, if you think of things, please let me know so that I may address them.

 Thinking through this problem, the various solutions available to me, and a mental walk-through of how the chosen solution might work has proved to be both educational and information in regards to how I approach problems. As I think about this project, I can try to answer the following questions:

Did the project get implemented as planned?

            As much I would like to think that getting the readers would be a no-problem process, I am sure that there would be road blocks of any number of sorts. There could be resistance from my department or administration. Finding money may be harder than anticipated, and fund raising may have to be done “by hand” which could, quite honestly, take a school year to do.  That aside, the biggest hurdle I see in implementing the project is making the e-readers a normal part of the classroom. Having students see the reader not only as a tool, but understanding the tool and its purpose, so that it is not just something to play around on or something to disregard as just a gimmick.  If I can get past that point, and I could see that taking awhile, I can see the readers being successful.

What is the evidence of success in addressing the identified problem of practice?

            As I noted in part Part C, I don’t expect to have some sort of miraculous improvement in my classroom. However, I do expect to see heightened levels of student engagement with the text, especially from my students who have struggled with the text in the past. When students work with text, I anticipate seeing more students reading and less zoning out. In terms of hard data, I would expect to see more classwork attempted, turned in, AND more authentic work-that is, I anticipate seeing less copy-cat answers. 

How would you approach another project of this type differently given what you’ve learned here? What are the lessons learned that others might benefit from knowing about?

            The one idea that has benefitted me most in thinking about this project is starting small. Originally, I was thinking on a whole school scale and I understand now how that is not the place to start. I needed to remember how hard it is sometimes to do something ‘different’ in your own classroom, let alone on a school-wide basis.  Baby-steps will help me to understand what problems are bound to arise so that I can help other teachers who want to implement using e-readers in their rooms. Success breeds success. If I would like to see e-readers on a one-to-one basis in the school, then I need to model how it can be realized.

In what ways will you endeavor to do the same project again, and what will you change or not do?

            I don’t know why I would not use the e-readers again in my room, but there are some things that I would probably want to work on or try the next time around-basically things that hadn’t occurred to me until after the “implementation” had happened. During my internship on Fridays, the school encouraged Drop Everything and Read for about 10-15 minutes. This was optional, but I chose to participate and really liked the results. It was a nice compromise with the “Do we have to do work on a Friday?” issue: I didn’t make students do history the whole hour, but they didn’t sit unengaged for the last 10 minutes of class. I would go to the library and check out a whole bunch of books relating to the unit we were in and bring them in along with some of my own and we would all read. I never had any issues with missing books. If I had e-readers, I feel that students would be able to utilize this time even more, and I wouldn’t have to lug so many books back and forth. I also feel that this would help make the readers even more a ‘normal’ part of the classroom. 

The next thing that I would love to implement would be some sort of ‘check-out’ system so that students could take their text home overnight. Many school libraries have implemented such programs with great success. I would need to get a set of extra readers so that an over-due reader would not hinder what I would want to do in class. The other issue that I will have to tackle is whether or not I will allow students to use their own e-readers in class. I would love to have all my readings and documents up on the class website ahead of time where students could access them as a PDF file, and possibly load them on to their own reader. I would not have the capability to monitor the e-readers like a classroom set of computers with a software program. I suppose, just like cell phones, you need to make sure that what you are doing in class was purposeful so that students are compelled to stay on task naturally.

Group Leadership Project Part B-Storyboard.

I am really excited about the progress that is occurring with our group and the tutorial that we're putting together. After creating a template and posting it in a Google Document, we had agreed that each of us would use this copy and paste this template, and then complete it to create our storyboard. This was not a bad idea and things turned out pretty well. I think the only thing I would want to figure out how to work around would be the templates 'stretching' over pages. Sometimes it is hard to remember what slide you're on or what was written before. In essence making each template a 'page', but not have all the white space in between.
Beyond that though, we have agreed that each of us will create our own video clip and then we will piece the videos together, with transitions, to create one longer video. Our storyboard document can be viewed via this link. 
      I worked on the Google Spreadsheet section, and tried to make sure that in the lower right corner of each template that I put my name, just to try and make tracking easier. My original portion was both Spreadsheet and Forms, but given that we think that we are going to be running long on time, and that forms was covered in this class, we decided to drop it. And I figure if we for some reason need more time, then I can always create a portion for Forms as well. I am looking forward to see what each of our videos look like and creating a polished final product!

Wicked Project Part C Implementation

Wicked Project Part C-Audio Only

I did combine the audio with a few collected images if you wish to watch the video below instead.







As a side note, I had issues finding my podcast using iTunes. After looking through Feedburners help section, they said that because it was new and for whatever other reason, not all podcasts show up in iTunes. So. I downloaded Juice, another pocatcher, and did subscribe there. I have a screen snip of my subscription posted below.

Mobile Learning

I have learned quite a bit about mobile learning over the last few days and I can see why educators are eager to integrate these technologies into their schools and classrooms. Although watching the Verizon videos does raise a few questions for me.

I don't doubt that the levels of student engagement in ALL the classrooms has indeed increased since the addition of the MLDs, however, while test scores have gone up, it was not by huge leaps and bounds. I have to wonder if those teachers who agreed to guinea pig the program were not already the more effective teachers whose students would have done better on tests than others anyway, and they only quickly reference one classroom where students had the MLDs, and then didn't and their test scores dropped, but I would still like to see more data on this.

Also, the MLD's have restricted web access. I am not saying that this is a bad thing, but I am reminded of all the other issues raised when we were learning about being a digital advocate and how many times things we don't want to be restricted are and all the other things that come with that.

And finally remember change without difference? Many of the things that teachers say they are doing are the same activities (which are not bad ones!) but simply without paper. This is neither good nor bad, but simply an observation. Does this mean that it is easier or harder for a student to get out the door without having turned something in? If students are doing their homework on devices, and parents don't know how to use the devices, are parents who want to be involved with their kids school work going to be 'shut out' in some manner?

Taking off my negative glasses and putting on a pair of rose colored ones, I can definitely see myself using different mobile learning devices and techniques in my room. One of the projects that I have always wanted to do was to have students record the histories of local senior citizens. With these mobile devices, students can take pictures of places that their subject may want them to see or 'artifacts' a subject may have, record video, record notes, audio, etc., etc., with out having to invest in a ton of equipment or set up time. Plus these media elements can easily be transferred to a blog/web page.

I also immediately see myself using the poll everywhere tool: To check for understanding, to check in on due dates, to ask where the students may want to take the curriculum...and it takes away the burden of being in the spotlight that many teens are not comfortable with. I have embedded my poll everywhere poll below. If you would like to take a minute and answer that would be great! Thanks!

Build television sms voting polls at Poll Everywhere