702 Blog #4 Can Social media be used effectively in the classroom? After watching Nadine Gilkison’s screencast about Insta Influencers, and her review of Instabrains by Sarah Weiss, the answer to the question, “Can social media be used effectively in the classroom?” seems like an obvious “Heck yeah!” In order to engage Generation Z and Alpha we have to use these tools in our classrooms. These are the tools they are becoming experts at using and they are the tools that excite them. I am from the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation so this social media craze is exhausting to me and I am slow to join in, but these Gen Z and Alphas tell me, “Come on in, the water’s fine. Actually, it is amazing!” If you are friends or family with any kids that are in these age ranges (my own kids are) then of course you have to have an Instagram account or you will never know anything they are doing. There is nothing more annoying than having your friends comment on what your kids are doing and you have no clue what they are talking about because you don’t follow them on their social media. So what does it mean to use social media effectively? Safety first is still my motto so before I would feel comfortable bringing social media into the assignments in my classroom, I would spend time teaching students about internet safety and digital citizenship. It is especially important for students to be aware of privacy settings, accountability for things they post, and to keep interactions positive. The article in Digital Education, “Social Media is “Tearing Us Apart” Middle and High Students Say” by Alison Klein referred to polls done by Common Sense Media that had some disturbing results. The poll showed that 31% of kids thought it was okay to share something that they know was not true, a third also said that being online meant you would have to accept some of the threatening or offensive content. While 40% of kids said it was okay to be on social media while you are hanging out with friends, 60% did not agree. Cyberbullying has been an issue at our school in the past but we educate students better about the effects of cyberbullying, what to do about it, how to report it, and the accountability and consequences for being a cyber bully. This educational piece has done a lot to decrease problems with cyberbullying on our campus. The lessons were created by our school counselors and delivered in our homeroom classes and included a discussion and community circle activity. The topic is reviewed throughout the year at several different times in the homeroom. The article from NEA also does a great job of defining teacher responsibilities and boundaries for using social media with students. Once a safety threshold is established, there are so many options for social media in the classroom. Some of the platforms that Gilkison included in her review we simply cannot do school without here in NVUSD. Google’s G Suite is used everyday by Napa educators and that is technically a social media platform. YouTube videos are also a staple in the classroom, DL or in person. Our school has a FB and Instagram page for posting school events and news to parents and we also heavily rely on Parent Square for communication, which is another social media ap school’s use. I have allowed students to use a Pinterest board to collect research and collaborate with teammates. TikTok is fairly new but I did have students use it to do video presentations last year. They preferred it because it was so easy to use and share. I use YouTube videos all the time to introduce or reinforce science concepts and it is also how I share my screencasts with my classes. I am beginning to see the value of Twitter for researching ideas and people, but it has a dark side so I don’t imagine I will have my students using it in class. I like the idea that Matt Miller and Gilkison both suggest which is that you can make an assignment or activity look like a social media platform, but not really connect to the platform. I have done this with Snapchat and there was something kind of novel about it for the students, plus it was a great way to get to the gist of a science idea because they were limited by the number of characters for the chat. This is also a good idea for younger students who may not have smart phones yet or access to aps. Matt Miller has 12 templates for free on his website that you can use to create these social media inspired templates that you can use with Google Slides. They are really clever and include a Spotify playlist, Netflix template (this one is really versatile), a Facebook profile (perfect for a famous person report or character analysis), an Instagram story template, and a Tick Tok template that Miller recommends for PSAs. Check out these free templates at DitchThatTextbook.com. Photo credit Photo by Tim Bennett on Unsplash.
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791 Blog #4 - Instructional Design Models, SITE and Designing Action Research
This week was full of studying the instructional design models of David Merrill. Merrill is a down to earth, 80ish year old college professor and he explains the principles of instructional design simply and precisely. There are youtube channels full of interviews of him and it is obvious that people love this guy. His principles make a lot of sense to me and completely connect to what I have experienced in my own classroom with kids and learning. When I think back to my favorite days of teaching and examine the types of activities the lessons included I realized that they were problem based like Merrill prescribes. The more real-world I could make the problem, the more motivated students seemed to become. Merrill’s model starts with a problem. The students need to see examples of how to solve the problem and may need a certain skill set to be taught to them in order to solve the problem. Eventually they will collaborate with other students and share problem solving research, data, and presentations to the rest of the class or another real world audience. While Merrill’s ideas helped me with the bigger plan for learning in my classroom, Clarke’s ideas get down to the nuts and bolts of how to use e-learning to effectively teach vocabulary, facts, processes, procedures, and principles. I would use Clarke’s ideas to teach some of the skills, vocabulary, and processes that problem solving in science would require. My research question revolves around using a homeroom model to increase connections between students and teachers to create a mentoring relationship, with peer mentoring and self evaluation and reflection being a part of the model. My school has used a teaming structure to accomplish a lot of this over the years, but I am interested in trying something new to see if we can get better results. Our teams were so large, 150ish kids and 4 teachers, that we never were able to create a true connection between a smaller group of students and teachers, which I think is really a necessity for the years when kids are “caught in the middle”. A lot of the SITE model information will guide my research. I am trying to create and influence sociocultural subcontext that will support students and allow them to experience success in middle school. The technical subcontext will allow them to access the information they need to be successful academically and also will be how we collect data. I am hoping that a few new technical tools will help to lighten the load of mentoring for teachers. If we can use technology, especially video based technology, to connect and conference with kids and to connect them to other people that are in the community that can support them in their life goals, then the mentoring model would be sustainable. During the first part of Covid DL I was able to collaborate with other science teachers in the district to create science lessons. Through this collaboration I learned some new tricks with Google slides. In the past I had used Google slides mostly as a presentation tool for me to present information or for student groups to present information. I learned a great trick from Jenny Ellison with Google slides that I relied on a lot during DL. I would create a small slide deck, about 3-4 slides. In Google classroom I can assign the slidedeck to each student and have it make a copy for them. The first slide would introduce the science hook or phenomena. The next two slides would have more background information, examples, and questions to teach the science concept related to the phenomena. I would use these slides while I am teaching and students can annotate, answer the questions and add in notes as we discuss. The fourth slide is the key slide because this slide is the conclusion slide. The slide would include questions or a graphic organizer like a CER (claim, evidence, reasoning) scaffold and a yellow text box. One of the other science teachers I was working with always used a yellow text box for students to put their thinking in. It was so helpful for my students- the yellow text box was their cue to get writing. This format was also great for me as the grader. I could move right to the 4th slide and grade it. This mini slide deck has become almost an ed-protocol for my classes. They know what to do when they see it. There are a couple of features I especially love about google slides for science. Slides allow you to insert a data table. This is great when we have data from an experiment. Slides are also useful for doing science modeling. Science modeling is how we have students explain what they think is going on during an experiment, especially when some of the components may be invisible. With slides you can add shapes, arrows, labels, and images to basically illustrate your thinking. Here is an example from an assignment we did with air pressure. The nice thing with slides is you can also easily import slides to other decks if you want to show several examples of student work. One thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to add sound to a slide, but I think it is in the Nadine Gilkison resource from this week's Icare. Another tool that works well in science is Kami. Kami allows you to draw, annotate, add text boxes to google documents, and any pdf. In science there are a lot of opportunities to use the drawing tool when we are making models, food webs, atom models, or labeling scientific drawings. Kids seem to catch on to kami very quickly. I haven’t used this feature yet, but Kami will also read the document to students. My friend Chuck Dresel does a lot of Kami pd and if you want to join his Google class, let me know and I’ll send you his class information. Screencastify has been the third tool that I cannot live without. Because kids do have wifi issues and miss class, I use Screencastify to make the lessons available to them whenever they can get online to watch it. Screencastify allows you to make a little video of your screen as you explain a lesson. If I am doing a demo or lab in class, a quick Screencastify means I don’t have to redo labs but students still get the chance to learn. I can use this to send my class messages or explain a part of a lesson that I’m getting email questions about and post it in my announcements. It is super easy to use. It will automatically save your screencasts to a folder it makes on your drive. You can also upload these to your own youtube channel if you want to use them in slide shows. All students will need to be digitally literate in order to be successful in school because so much of our learning is technology based. They will need to be digital citizens. I like how ITSE defines this citizenship, “Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical. “ The California Department of Education website defines a digital citizen as “a member of a worldwide community linked by the internet” and repeats the same idea as ISTE with the need for students to be “safe, legal, and ethical” and how to protect themselves online. ITSE also describes the Empowered Learner as a student that can “leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving, and demonstrating competency in their learning goals”. An empowered learner- yes! This is what we want for all our students. We want them to be lifelong empowered learners, but in reality some of them are powerless. Our delivery system for education is relying more and more on technology, and some kids don’t have access to or are not savvy with how to use it. At my school we have had a digital LA and math curriculum for several years, and all kinds of technology based lessons and testing. This year we adopted an online science curriculum. If a student doesn’t have decent wifi at home it will be so frustrating and challenging to complete homework or make-up work. This is a huge equity issue. On the California Dept of Education website there are all kinds of articles about the “Digital Divide Taskforce”. The video from CUE conference 2018 with keynote speaker Rafranz Davis sharing her own personal experience with not having technology or wifi at home for her son during a time period in her career really emphasized to me what I know some of my students are experiencing right now. As I teach my classes online I am just so aware of the kids that are so comfortably sitting in their quiet, well lit bedrooms, with full access to the internet without any glitches or distractions, compared to my other students that have a storm of sibling activity around them and wifi that drops them out of the meeting every few minutes and takes so long to load our online science curriculum that they often can’t pace with what we are doing. The learning gap just gets wider. I know our district has provided a lot of hot spots to deal with the wifi issues but I still have students that are struggling to just get online. One of my students was told they are out of hot spots. We are troubleshooting like crazy but I feel like I am so out of my league. My husband is a computer consultant and troubleshoots for companies all day long. Sometimes when he overhears me trying to help my kids with computer issues it baffles him. It seems like our IT department will need to expand in order to deal with the basics of the digital divide- getting the kids online! The wifi at my school is great so I am anxious for students to return to campus so they can at least have some part of their learning time free from wifi issues.
The first part of the equity equation deals with access and the other half deals with implementation. When I first looked at the K-12 Technology Scope and Sequence I was shocked! Things that students are supposed to master by 5th grade are still new to them in 7th grade. Spreadsheets, multimedia and presentation tools, research techniques, data tools, and simulations, plus digital citizenship is all listed under “mastered” by 5th grade. From what I am experiencing with my 7th and 8th graders, I think we do not have an effective implementation plan for these standards. I can tell some kids have had technology training, others have not. The kids that have not just start a step behind their peers on multimedia projects. Last week I did my hyperdoc lesson on digital citizenship and focused on the safety information. While they all understood the dangers of cyberbullying, most of them also confessed to using the same password for all their accounts. If we are going to rely on technology to help us deliver and evaluate learning, we simply must dedicate time to the implementation of the technology standards in order to keep our kids safe and to create equity in our learning communities. Some people suggest having a Tech Week where a lot of these standards would be taught across different content areas. I know some schools do this with Art during one week a year so that may be something to experiment with. I think for me, nesting technology standards within my lessons makes a lot of sense. Certain standards are especially connected to science like creating and analyzing datatables and also being able to identify quality news and research sites. I have been doing a lot of multimedia teaching during distance learning so that students can create models for science digitally. There were so many great ideas in the reading this week and you can check out my plethera of notes in the link above. My favorite quote from this week's notes is from The Visual Connection by Baggio. It is the opening line from Chapter 1 and reads, "You create your own thoughts. No one can think for you except you. You- and only you-- have the power to construct thoughts in your mind." Mic drop... |
AuthorHello! Welcome to my blog! This will be a fun place to share thoughts about teaching and learning. I am a middle school science teacher at Redwood. When I'm not teaching, I'm hanging out at home with my family or enjoying nature somewhere in the valley. Archives
March 2021
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