Red Ink Will Not Be Missed

When watching the No Red Ink webinar hosted by Jeff Scheur, a few points stood out. The first was that the teacher developed his own grammar manual! While I think it is amazing that he compiled his own manual to make the feedback process easier for himself and his students, it brought up some questions for me. What happens when students move from class to class as they get older and teachers use different conventions for correcting grammar? We have discussed the importance of using a professional language in many of our MAC courses. This professional language is important so that everyone in the field is able to communicate with and understand one another. The same is true in this situation. If Scheur teacher is using his numbering system, but next years teacher uses that dreaded red ink to make what I would consider "traditional" editing marks, will students be confused?

After his description of his editing system, he began to talk about noredink.com. I think this website is amazing! When I worked in an elementary school, the kids were required to use a program called Success Maker. This program was very similar to noredink.com in that it catered its lessons on English and math to the individual student. The students received nearly instant feedback and they loved being able to use the computers. I, however, liked several things about noredink.com better than Success Maker. Success Maker had a time limit. The students worked for 20 minutes and then they were automatically signed out of the program. While in some of the lessons they couldn't move on from a problem until they got it correct, they were not given hints or help with correcting their initial mistakes. The school also had a policy against the teachers helping the students with Success Maker because it was supposed to reflect what the student knew without assistance. In contrast, noredink.com gives students the opportunity to go back to the questions at the end of the quiz and really investigate what they did wrong and why. To me, this is a much more helpful exercise.

A theme that kept coming up in this webinar was the importance of timely, useful feedback. I agreed with Scheur and some of the other viewers of the webinar when they said that students should be required to respond to the feedback that is given. I know that I get upset when I spend time looking through and commenting on a student's work only to see them toss it in the trash immediately after I return it. If students are asked to look at the feedback, interpret it, and fix their mistakes, they will learn a great deal more and the time that teachers pour into grading work will be well worth it.

To Everything, There is a Season

In the first half of class on Friday Cohort B met with a panel of former MAC students. The teacher who spoke first teaches at my alma mater, Detroit Country Day! In my last blog, I discussed the 1:1 program the school implemented when I was in middle school. I was excited to ask our visitor about how that program had improved since my high school days. From what she said, it sounds like they have made huge strides. First of all, the school is now wireless. Having to figure out how everyone was going to plug in their Ethernet cables and still sit in a reasonable arrangement always took up quite a bit of time. Sometimes we were allowed to take notes on the computers without an internet connection. This prevented the distraction of the internet, but I still spent many class periods playing Minesweeper. It sounds, however, that she has personally developed ways to make sure students remain on task. She said that if they are using their computers for class work she makes them produce some sort of final product before the end of class. While she can’t prevent the distraction completely, she does what she can. After class, it was fun to talk with her and have her fill me in on what teachers are still there and how everyone is doing. I will definitely try to keep in touch with her as I move through the program and look for jobs in the future.

It was also very interesting to learn about the Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit from another one of our visitors. I had never heard of the school, but it seems like they are doing wonderful things! Pregnant and parenting teens are a high-risk group and the fact that there is a school dedicated to helping these students graduate is incredible. They are also moving toward a project-based curriculum and some of their students are doing work with tiny houses. I have yet to Google the protests that occurred when the school was at risk of closing, but I intend to look into it more after my papers are completed. I would love to visit this school in the future. Our visitor also discussed that they have an urban farm on campus! They grow their own food and keep their own goats and chickens.

The discussion in the second half of class got pretty heated. Perhaps it was sleep deprivation, but the song Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds popped into my head and stayed there for the last hour. I realize that the lyrics are from the Bible, but I do not intend for this to be a religious message. As my fellow MACers were sharing their opinions, I saw a divide in the class between those who were desperate to cling to education without recent technology that we are used to and those who are open and excited to learn how to incorporate new technological methods into the classroom. My opinion is completely defined by the quote, “To everything, there is a season.” Things are changing. We can’t stop it. So we may as well embrace it.

Our instructor made a point during the discussion that resonated with me. She said that when she was teaching in the early 80s the internet was in its infancy. Most teachers and students did not have access to the resources we have now. That was 30 years ago and look how far things have come. We use the internet to do research in every class. She then asked us to think of those 30 years as the “lifespan of the teacher.” Where will we be 30 years from now? Things will be radically different and we have to brace ourselves for that. This begins with keeping up to date with the latest technologies so that we are able to make informed decisions about what will work best in our classes. Things will continue to change and we will have to adapt. 

One-to-One

I have been looking through several of the edublogs recommended by our instructors and there is a ton of interesting information out there! Edublog is a term I had not heard until a few weeks ago. I think it is pretty incredible that so many educators are sharing ideas in such a public and world-wide forum.

When looking for a blog to comment on, I ended up on a blog titled "The Open Classroom" written by a woman named Jo McLeay. Many of her posts are very interesting and touch on topics we have discussed in class. She has a couple posts about gaming in education! The post that caught my eye was about a school she visited that was in the early stages of implementing a 1:1 program. Such programs provide computers to every student. She mentioned that she "felt that this school was on the verge of some major breakthrough with regard to the learning of students." 

In 1999, when I was in 7th grade, my school implemented such a program and all students in grades 6 through 12 were required to have laptops. This was a very early implementation of such a program and there were MANY kinks. The teachers were not adequately trained or prepared, the networks were slow, and the laptops proved to be more of a distraction. At the time, having your own computer in middle school was rare. We were excited to have this new technology at our fingertips and Napster was more exciting than homework. Bottom line: the program wasn't that effective since all of us already had computers at home.

That being said, I think such programs would be much more beneficial now. Technology has come such a long way and education computer programs have grown. I agree with Jo McLeay's enthusiasm about such programs because I believe that they will be extremely influential if implemented well. I look forward to seeing how such programs transform education.

http://theopenclassroom.blogspot.com/2011/12/effective-11-programs.html 

Organizing My Online Life

The best part of Friday's class for me was that it was in North Quad. As a freshman at Michigan, I lived in a tiny dusty room under a yellow sign that said in big black letters, "CAUTION: Asbestos." Not super comforting. I'm jealous that current Michigan undergrads get to live in such nice places! I'm excited to explore the building even more when I take a class in the School of Information in the fall!

In class, we gathered in our groups of 4 to explain our assigned online organizational tool. I was assigned Diigo and I really like it! I absolutely hate reading on the computer screen mostly because there are few programs that allow highlighting and annotating on the computer. Diigo solves this problem! It only works for websites, not pdfs, but it definitely makes things easier. It also allows you to access bookmarks from anywhere, which is very helpful. At the end of class we set up a SecMAC Diigo group. This will be a convenient way for us to share important/interesting documents with each other.

I have used Skype for a long time now, so I didn't really learn anything new there. I had never heard of Endnote or Dropbox before last week. I didn't see much of a difference between the two, but I think it is handy to have a place to store files online. Having another place to back up work or store large files is never a bad idea.

All in all, class was enjoyable and I continue to be amazed by how many online tools can be used to make our lives easier. I'm starting to lose track of how many of these things I've signed up for!

Killing Two Pigs With One Bird

As usual, I really enjoyed our 504 class on Friday, July 20^th. A former MAC student joined us to describe his use of video games in the classroom. To teach parametric equations in his math class, he used Angry Birds. He thoroughly explained his lesson, its successes and failures, and how he plans to tweak it for next year. He mentioned that he felt his students were drained after a long trigonometry unit. While there were some failures with his lesson, it geared his students up for the rest of the year. I thought this was an interesting application of video games in the classroom and made the ideas presented in our readings more concrete.

He also described where he got this idea: twitter. I swore to myself (and others) that I would never join twitter. I still haven’t, but his presentation made me really think about it. He introduced us to the tweet deck. This is an application on which you can join groups (his were education and math groups) that can provide some great teaching ideas. He went so far as to say that the tweet deck has saved his life a few times. How can you argue with that? I guess we’ll see.

In the second part of class, we created websites for ourselves that we can use as online portfolios. The website, Weebly, is extremely user friendly and I think everyone’s websites looked great. K mentioned that these portfolios could help us in our job searches and that we could have our students use Weebly to create their own portfolios.

The amount of new technologies we have learned in only three classes is amazing and I look forward to learning more! 

Epic Win

So I’m going to admit something here. I love video games. I don’t consider myself a gamer, but an afternoon of Mario Kart for N64 sounds like a great time. I grew up, however, listening to my mom tell me that these video games were going to “rot my brain.” Several arguments could have been avoided if I would have had access to McGonigal’s talk. I found the Gee paper and McGonigal’s TED talk fascinating in how they actually gave solid evidence for the place of video games in education and even as tools to save the world. 

The games discussed at the end of McGonigal’s talk were very interesting. I have to admit that I was a little skeptical in the beginning. I mean, saying that 21 billion hours of gaming each week is going to solve global warming? This seems a little counterintuitive. When I think of games, I think of the hours I’ve spent helping Link or Mario save the princess. I don’t think these skills will help me solve the world’s problems. When she described “A World Without Oil,” I started to see where she was coming from. This game, she said, actually got people to think differently about spending and oil usage to the point that they actually changed how they acted outside of the “virtual world.” This is a powerful tool that can be used to get people to think about problems and be able to virtually solve them. Perhaps they will then feel that they can solve similar problems in their real lives.

What fascinated me most about the Gee paper is all of the connections I saw between the positive outcomes of gaming and some of the teaching goals we have discussed in all of our classes. For example, Gee makes the point that games are able to provide feedback and new problems to the gamer. We have discussed the usefulness of effective and timely feedback in our classes. In a video game, that feedback is instant, which allows for faster self-evaluation. If your character “dies” trying to defeat the “boss,” you know you did something wrong and you can go back and try something new. He also talks about how games effectively facilitate practice and give appropriate challenges. Games allow the gamer to practice certain skills for a period of time before offering new problems with new required skills. Therefore, the gamer spends a lot of time practicing a particular skill set. Once the player has mastered these skills, the game poses a new challenge. We have discussed in several of our classes the importance of practice and providing work at the appropriate difficulty level. Gamers are willing to devote HOURS to practice. If the gamer is playing a game like those discussed by McGonigal, these hours of practice could actually lead to positive change.  

The only part of the talk and the paper I took issue with was that they talked about how, in games, there are no real consequences for our actions. If we fail a level, we just go back to the beginning and everything is reset to the original conditions. This is the one aspect of gaming that, to me, is nothing like real life. I am all for encouraging risk taking, but if gamers are to take such risks in real life, I believe it is necessary to have an accurate picture of possible consequences. If you “fail” and something in real life, things don’t just reset to how they were before. Certain actions cannot be undone.

All in all, I really enjoyed this weeks reading. I’ve learned even more technological applications I can use in the future. McGonigal described gamers as an “untapped human resource.” I agree that we should move away from dismissing gaming and actually try to use gaming to solve the problems that, as McGonigal said, will help us survive the next century. I also hope that by the end of this program, we all feel as though we have achieved an “epic win.” 

Reflections on July 13

I learned quite a bit from Education 504 this week. In the morning, we were put into groups according to our majors and each group was paired with a school librarian. The librarian paired with my group, Rachel, was extremely knowledgeable and helpful. She introduced us to free online databases of which I had never heard, but will definitely use in the future. The Opposing Viewpoints page on the Michigan eLibrary will definitely come in handy down the road (http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/ovic/?userGroupName=lom_accessmich).

We then, as a group, formulated a lesson plan regarding the pop ban. Due to the fact that I have a psychology minor, I was placed in a group with social studies interns. My previous blog was a lesson plan for a biology class (my major), so I was excited to work with new people to gain a new perspective on the issue. While my knowledge of government and policy wasn’t up to the level of the rest of my peers, I feel I was able to contribute to the discussion and combine my ideas for a psychology lesson with their ideas for a government lesson. We did, however, have some trouble coming to a group consensus on an overall goal for the lesson. We concluded the morning session agreeing to disagree. The MAC interns are a passionate group and none of us were willing to compromise our teaching goals. It is never a bad thing to interact with people who challenge you, but it is equally important to make sure that you are heard. All in all, it was a good experience and our basic lesson plan can be followed to fit each member’s individual teaching goals.

The afternoon lesson was very exciting for me. I always listen to podcasts, so learning how to make one was, as Kristin often said, “wicked awesome.” I love the possibilities that podcasts and the use of Google Voice offer for the classroom. Having students call in and record their homework is brilliant! The only issue I could see arising with this is time. If each of your 100 students records a 5 minute podcast, that is 500 minutes of listening. You also have to factor in the time it would take to provide feedback. This is an application that would have to be used for an assignment in which the student can explain what they have learned very quickly.

Overall, I enjoyed our class time on Friday. I enjoyed listening to everybody’s podcasts even more!