Author: Neel's ED-554 Blog

Neel's ED-554 Blog https://madematheasy2015.wordpress.com

Library of Congress Certificate

Successfully completed the module,”Supporting Inquiry with Primary Sources”. Really a good module to learn how teachers can use primary sources to guide their students through the inquiry process. Topics covered in this module are- Inquiry Overview, Primary Sources and Inquiry, and Inquiry in action.Here is the link for my certificate

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0vsvF8-6EO7US1IZVJ0T0xHVlk/view?usp=sharing

 

 

Social learning presentation on Sophia

 

I’m thrilled to work on this social learning project as this is an unique assignment and different than past ones. This project gave me an opportunity to come across and explore an excellent website- https://www.sophia.org/

 

Equity in the classroom

Living in a community where high speed Internet is part of HOA, it never made me realize that there are some families who can’t afford Internet at all in their homes or they can’t afford broadband Internet. After reading articles provided on the blog, I realized that homework assignments, which require Internet use, must be challenging for the students who belong to these families. It must be challenging for teachers too who teaches these students because of not able to use good online resources in their lesson planning.

I agree with Gregory Ferenstein’s thoughts, “Free Computers Don’t close the Rich-Poor Education Gap.” Students need motivation from their families and educators in order to get higher education. They also need an environment, where they are encouraged to learn new technologies that are in the market to become a 21st century citizen.

Up to certain extent, Betsy Isaacson is right that, “Digital Divide is ‘Major Challenge’ in Teaching Low-Income Students.” There are some other challenges too in teaching low-income students, like- language barrier, motivation to learn, and so on. But to provide quality online resources through Internet, digital divide is a major challenge.

How much homework should I include in my lesson plan that requires Internet? I’ll collect data about Internet situation in my students’ homes. For that, I can ask parents to complete a quick survey on the first day of the school itself, which would help me understand their at-home internet situation better. Furthermore, I’ll try to provide a list of available free public Wi-Fi spots in the nearby area of the school to the students who don’t have Internet facility at their homes. This will not only provide opportunities for these students to access technology but will also provide an opportunity to interact with new information and technology available on Internet. Moreover, I’ll provide ample time to finish assignments that require students to use Internet resources. Additionally, once class work is over, I’ll allow students to use school computers with Internet to finish their assignments. Most probably, I’ll try to make my lesson plan that allows students to use technology in the class itself. This will help my students to experience technology in the class and will promote critical thinking skills and prepare them for a higher education, and not worry about Internet at home or look for public Wi-Fi spots.

 

Laws of Exponents Flipped Classroom

My flipped class video is for Algebra students, who are planning to learn about, “The Laws of Exponents”. For this video, I have done many things. First, I made few power point slides, and saved these slides as .PNG files. Secondly, I imported those slides into Window’s moviemaker. Next, I used my voice to narrate each slide. After that, I added some animation to finish off the slides. Finally, I saved my first-ever made video.

To give some interactions to the students, and to judge how much they have learned from the video, I embedded a quiz between some of the slides, with the help of Edpuzzle.com. For this, I uploaded my laws of exponent’s video into Edpuzzle. Also with the help of Quiz Tool, I embedded some problems in between the slides.

Frankly I’ll say, after spending couple of days to try making video and not getting success in making it, I start thinking that I’m not going to finish this video ever. But finally, after so many hits and tries, I finished making my flipped class video.

Below is the link of my video-

https://edpuzzle.com/assignments/m/5594ab4133e85121581ece25/55a0531df4080f1d56f7e72c

 

DIGITAL LEARNING 24/7

As a mother of two K-12 grade kids, I know what role the current technology is playing in their lives when it comes to learning. This report provides a lot of data points to support implementation and use if digital tools and resources in classrooms.  As the world has evolved and technology advanced in last few years, it does make sense to revisit the legacy teaching and learning environments and identify how the digital tools, resources and contents can be implemented to transform the learning environment to address the current challenges of new curriculum standards and preparing students well for succeeding in 21st century.

There is huge variety of available devices that has enabled anytime and anywhere learning, and report helps to know which ones are mostly liked by students, which ones they mostly use for which purpose and in what capacities. The report also helps to understand the students’ use of technology at home and in schools, in teacher-facilitated and self-directed learning environments. The report very well summarizes the key takeaways for blended and online learning environments that education administrator could use to implement digital resources and policies around them.

As we know the emphasis on STEM education and importance of science, technology, engineering, and math in preparing students for 21st century, the section around STEM learning environment covers a lot of details that schools administrators can use. It also talks about gender disparity in STEM career interest and provides valuable input into the learning lives of students immersed in STEM education on a day-to-day basis.

As there are challenges and concerns with any change, many school administrators have experienced challenges with implementation of technology and online learning environments, and this report helps them identify what might work the best in a particular school or district.  For me, I learned a lot from this report that will help me introduce or pick the appropriate digital tool or resource for future classrooms and foster a great learning environment for students. For potential educators, like myself, the report helps to understand what kind of digital learning environments and digital learning approaches would yield into positive achievement results. As I know, and now confirmed by this report data, I would be sure to implement flipped class rooms, so that they can watch video and learn according to their own pace. Furthermore, I will give students more online tests and provide more collaborative opportunities via digital media. Additionally, implement mobile, blended, virtual, or STEM education in my future classrooms.

Though the report provides a lot of data points which could be valuable input to creating positive learning environments, I didn’t find data points around potential issues or concerns from implementation of digital tools. E.g. are students focused on learning when they are in the self-learning digital learning environment, what factors may cause harm or distractions in digital learning environments, do the entertainment apps cause distractions? Etc. Overall, the report provides a lot of information that supports a new kind of educational ecosystem and confirms that learning as a 24/7 process now and what we need to do to enable and empower the student-centric digital learning experiences for all students.

 

Let’s use video to reinvent education

Salman Khan, a world known entrepreneur in the field of education world! So many educators and students, around the world, are being benefited by his free assessable online educational videos, in so many languages.

 

In his 20 minutes TED talk, “Let’s use video to reinvent education”, he talked about the benefits of utilizing videos to teach students. He is encouraging educators to change the traditional classroom teaching methods and incorporate videos, where students will watch the assigned instructional videos at home, at their own pace. That way, the students can better utilize the classroom time by practicing problems based on the topics learned in the videos and work with their partners under their teacher’s guidance. According to Salman, this transition will, not only cut the teachers’ instructional time, but will also help them utilize their instructional time in helping students in the areas they needed the most. This video started with Salman talking about how Khan Academy started,  talking about how he created a video and uploaded on YouTube to help his cousins and how they reacted and how they helped them to learn math skills. He was amazed to see the responses he got from so many people who he didn’t even know. According to them, Salman Khan’s videos were fun way to learn difficult math concepts. Moreover, they can just watch the video on their own pace, at their homes. Such overwhelming responses made this tech guy to quit his job as Hedge Funds analyst and gave him an encouragement to open a wonderful educational site called “Khan Academy”.

 

In my opinion, basically he is talking about Flipped classrooms. I came to know about Flipped classroom the first time, during my classroom observation last year. The teacher told me that her school is adopting Flipped classroom model. In order to that, she has to upload videos online so that her students can watch it as a homework and apply the knowledge they got from the videos in the next class and practice solving the problems. Even I experienced by myself in her classroom that how students were using class time in solving math problems while working with their partners. On the other hand, the role of the math teacher was to assist students who really needed one-on-one tutoring. The entire process built the strong foundation for students to grasp the higher level in that particular math topic.

 

Over all, I agree with the Salman’s point of views. I believe, in real classroom situation, it will be beneficial to use math instructional videos to refresh the previously gained knowledge that students already know, and also to gear toward getting a higher level of understanding. Many times, the students need a refresher course before they connect themselves with a new material that they are going to learn.  Teachers can motivate students to learn the new topics with interest via giving them an opportunity to recall their previous knowledge.  

Digital Storytelling Group Project

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My digital storytelling project is based on one of the bestselling children’s books “If You Give a Pig a Pancake”, written by Laura Numeroff. This is a story about a sweet little pig who wants many things that will lead to other things. The story begins with a pig that is given a pancake, next, the pig wants more syrup to go with it, which made him sticky, leads to bath & so on. Eventually, it circles right back to the pancake. Very funny and educational story for kids.

As soon as I learned that we have to come up with a digital story as a part of our group assignment, the first few words that came out from my mouth were, “oh no! Not again.” This is not the first time that I was asked to create a digital story; I had experienced creating digital stories earlier during one of my educational courses. But still, there was something that was making me uncomfortable for this assignment again. One of the reasons could be, sometimes, creating a digital story around higher level math is a bit difficult.

After I finished my digital story with my group members, I realized, it was easier than I had thought. In fact, I loved working on my digital story project and I realized that digital storytelling is an effective technology tool to integrate in today’s classrooms, where students can learn educational stuff in fun and exciting ways. It will, not only, motivate students to learn but will also help them achieve higher in their educational goals. Moreover, it’s not hard to create a very basic version of digital story; this is exactly what we did. As a group, we all gathered pictures  related to this story  from the internet and placed them in PowerPoint slides, then we downloaded all our slides into the Photo story 3 software and finally,  each group member added narration for his/her particular character. With very less efforts and time we all finished our digital story telling project.

Most importantly to say, my group members (Eyad, Monica, Tony, and Miriam) were very supportive and collaborative which made this project work very enjoyable and memorable. Our digital story can be watched through the below link :

 

 

 

 

BAM! Radio podcast

http://elearningindustry.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/flipped_classroom.png

“Flipping Your Class? Do This, Puh-Leeze Don’t Do That”, podcast by Jon Bergmann of “The FlipSide radio.”

Very informative video for educators who are new to the field of flipping their classrooms. There are three episodes in this series; in each episode, Jon is suggesting teachers to avoid potential mistakes when they are trying to flip the classrooms.  According to him, three common mistakes are :

  • Interaction with videos –  Not teaching student how to watch the videos effectively and efficiently and how to interact  with their contents.
  • Accountability – Not making students feel accountable for their own work and learning.
  • Lengthy videos – Lengthy videos with too much information.

The podcast by Jon Bergmann for teachers to avoid common mistakes was very short, precise and informative. Often, teachers think that their students know how to watch videos as they are the 21st century students, but at the same time, teachers forget that it’s not just watching the video like a movie, it’s actually how students should interact with the contents. Furthermore, teachers, often times, make a poor choice of rescuing their students from not watching the video, but it shouldn’t be like this. Teachers have to make each student feel accountable for his/her own learning so that he/she is focused and can grasp the entire content. I completely agree with Jon’s thoughts that many times, teachers try to give too much information about a topic in one single shot and that becomes overwhelming for students. So, keeping one topic per short video will allow students to stay focused, learn the topic and save the information for a long period of time. Two rules of thumb: 1 – 1 ½ minute per grade or age of the students + 1 minute.

In my opinion, the utilization of podcasts will be a beneficial tool for the classrooms. Not only it’ll motivate students but will also improve students’ listening skills. Moreover, it’s easy for teachers to upload and differentiate podcasts according to various learning/skill levels of their students, and on the other hand, students can access these podcasts any time whenever they wanted to. Most importantly, students can listen/watch podcasts according to their own pace. With so many benefits, why not use podcast in professional learning too? I’m, definitely, going to consider podcasts for my future professional learning.

http://thejournal.com/~/media/EDU/THEJournal/Images/2014/09/20140903_Flipped1.jpg

From Fear to Empowerment

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Great inspiring video from Scott, on using technology in an innovative way! No doubt that in today’s world, the technology is having a great impact on our daily lives and it has affected our lives, both positively and negatively. One aspect of technology made our lives easier, faster and connected people to the entire world and the other aspect of it made our thinking process slow, raised a lot of health issues, cyber-bullying, put our privacy at risk and many more. Often, we hear from parents and media that teens are having negative impacts on their social and emotional lives from the use of technologies and social media. But, this video showed a positive aspect of introducing technology and how social media became a strong platform for kids to show their creativities, abilities, likes, dislikes, and interests. Also, showed that many people like their small efforts. Now the question is, how many kids’ thoughts and creativities are liked by others in the actual world?

I’m sure that most of the schools are using technology and blogging sites that are safe to use in their classrooms, but not sure about social media sites like: Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr and many more sites like this. I believe, many educators want to use the social media sites in their classrooms to promote learning and thus to motivate their students to become a better candidate of 21st century, but at the same time, educator are hesitant to use the social media sites due to the possible emerge of conflicts. According to me, educators’ fear is justifiable because today’s generation kids are tech savvy, they live on technology and spend a lot of their time on social media sites, but may not be aware of vulnerabilities and associated risks of social media.

Today’s kids are fearless trying anything, and thus may risk themselves. Educators do realize that technology is beneficial for their students’ future and for preparing them better for high-tech world, but they are fearful to try emerging technologies with the similar fear what if something goes wrong and doesn’t yield into success.

I completely agree with the Scott’ s thoughts that schools have to come out of the fear of using technology in schools in order to provide a better learning environment to our students. My question is, how, as a teacher, can I learn the tech-tools and implement them in my classrooms without compromising the safety of schools and students?