21st Century Classroom

During the month of October, I had the opportunity to attend and present at three conferences, each very different in their focus but at the same time all discussed the same thing: 21st century skills and teaching. The first was just in our West Des Moines school district attended only by WDM staff. Each fall teachers spend a full day in staff development, usually at our individual schools. This year, the district decided to shift their focus away from bringing people into the district to train us, to showcasing the innovation that is happening within our district. Teachers volunteered to put together presentations on using technology in their classroom and Marzano's work with essential elements of instruction. I discussed teacher and student blogging and the Flat Classroom Project. Then, I attended ITEC, Iowa Technology and Education Connection and learned about technology innovation, adaptation, creation.... Here, the Beijing Babes presented their experiences at the Flat Classroom Conference and I presented my diversity curriculum. Finally, I attended the Risky Business focusing on at-risk education, put on by the IAAE, Iowa Association of Alternative Education. I presented my use of technology in the classroom, specifically in wikis, blogs and social media. While the focus was on alternative education, many of the discussions still circled around technology and 21st century skills. In my humble opinion, I believe that if more schools shift their thinking from traditional models of teaching to a 21st century teaching model, we will see more student achievement, less drop-outs and more students moving onto higher education. If, for no other reason than they were engaged in their learning; they were allowed to be creative, independent and take charge of their education.

I started out this school year attempting to do just that, create a 21st century learning environment for my students. I teach all four social studies core classes in an online format, using a wiki as a homepage, giving students the tools to create projects and the ability to show them to a world-wide audience. Since I already know my intentions with the online class, I decided to get feedback from my students. To do this, I used a form that was created by Shawn Holloway, a principal in a northwest Iowa school. In a recent blog, he discusses characteristics of effective instruction and shared a quick checklist that he uses during his walkthroughs to determine a teacher's strengths and weaknesses in the area of 21st century instruction. I gave my students each a copy of this check list and defined the "teacher vocabulary" to help them understand what they were reading. As expected some students just checked every box as fast as possible, but I was thrilled to see most of the students take their time to give me honest feedback.

In a very informal analysis of the results, I was very pleased to see that in "Student Centered Classroom" all of my students agree that "students are at the center of learning, teacher is facilitating the process," "students have choices," "students are engaged in challenging work," and the "teacher leading students to the answer not giving it out." I had an excellent discussion with one student after he completed his form about "cooperative or collaborative learning taking place." He would like to see more collaboration within the classroom, but we both agreed we did not know how to make that happen. I teach four to five different classes each block and the students are at all different spots in the curriculum due to attendance, different start dates, work ethic, etc. He acknowledged that I was not opposed to him working collaboratively with his peers, as he spent all last quarter working through the curriculum with a peer that started at the same day and had the same attendance and work ethic values. Any advice as to how to create more collaborative projects in this type of an environment would be greatly appreciated.

As for the rest of the criteria, most students seemed to agree that I "taught for understanding," "taught for learner differences," and have "technology infused" throughout the curriculum. The area that I have the most room to grow is "assessment for learning." All students agreed that the "essential concept and skills is clear and evident to the students" and "assessment for learning takes place during instruction." However, I have not been able to provide examples to my students and did not provide criteria for quality work. I struggle in this area for two reasons. I do not want to stifle creativity and I do not want copy cats. It is a constant worry of mine that if I show examples of the low and high quality work students will not strive to be better only to match that. I also worry that if I provide too much criteria students will only see their assignment as a checklist, rather than an opportunity to expand their learning and go beyond my expectations. Now that I have taught the course for a semester, there are student examples for other students to follow on the wiki, but I need to reflect on exactly what I want my students to accomplish with their projects and create a rubric for them to follow. I have a VERY generic rubric that I have been using and shared it with the students on their syllabus, but from the feedback received, it is not enough.

Picture obtained from: pathubert.wikispaces.com

ITEC 2011

I could use many words to describe my experience at ITEC this year, but I am only going to choose the most important one....life-changing. Spending three days with like-minded educators that share the same passion for technology and education gave me the inspiration to continue pushing for technology integration at my building. But, the more life-changing experience happened in a break out session where I met Dr. Punya Mishra. He introduced TPACK, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, a theory of education technology integration that takes into account the teacher's understanding of content, pedagogy and technology. I have included a short video, describing the basic belief system of TPACK. In the session that I attended, TPACK and Creativity in the Classroom, Punya Mishra discussed the importance of creativity, not only the creation of something new, but the idea of repurposing a tool for a new task. For example, what teachers are doing now with technology; we are taking web 2.0 tools that may not have been designed or even thought of as useful in education and making them common tools in our room. In my opinion, this is what makes technology so engaging & useful. We can make it into whatever we want it to be for us.

Now onto to the life-changing part...I will be graduating in May from UNI and have been searching for a doctoral program that fit my ideologies & my needs as a working mother. I found just that at ITEC and am in the process of registering for the hybrid online doctoral program at Michigan State. This program is ran by Mishra & a colleague, Dr. Robin Dickson. This program is just what I have been looking for. It is well-respected, focuses on technology and a majority of it is online.

Technology Integration Matrix

Uploaded by nameinprogress on October 31, 2011.

Retrieved from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/beauty_from_pain/6299618300/

In our UNI grad class, Selection and Integration of Technology, Dr. Z asked us to take a look at our current curriculum and see just where it fits in the TIM. Then in true Z fashion, he stretches our thinking and asks us to take it up a notch....this is what I have come up with. Below I have described three of my US History units and two of my Global Society units. I have tried to pick average units that are similar to what happens in all my classes. I have listed one of the the assignments below, you can find all five at Jacobs TIM Assignment.

Our Global Society Curriculum
In response to seeing many of my students involved in gang activity and hearing many racial, ethnic and homophobic slurs in the hallways and in my classroom, I decided to create a class that dealt with the issue of diversity. Students spend the whole quarter discussing topics related to diversity, getting immersed into various cultures and creating change in their own lives.

http://wccglobalsociety.wikispaces.com/

1. Who am I? unit: The first unit in the Global Society curriculum challenges the students to get to know themselves on a much deeper level than most high school students have considered. I model the kind of thinking that I want them to do by watching a professional video called, Ethnic Man and showing a video of my own life. We discuss our values, cultures, and learned prejudices in class and I use the documentary, People Like Us to give the students a starting point in the discussion. As we complete a discussion, students are journaling about their experiences and publishing their thoughts into a blog. The students then go through a process of self-analysis in their “who am I” project. The final task of the assignment is to create a presentation that defines themselves and share it with the group.
1. I struggle to define where this unit fits in the TIM, the students do not have choice in what technology they are going to use, besides what blog platform, however they reach an authentic audience with their blogs that my first year’s students never reached with their written journals that stayed in their portfolios. Reaching a wider audience gives the students, at times, an intense discussion about culture and diversity. They do have a choice about what program they want to use to create their presentation.
2. To take this up a notch, students could also share their presentation on their blogs as the culmination of all their journals in the unit.

Gradual Release of Responsibility Lesson

I was introduced the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model a few years ago in a very short staff development meeting. I was intrigued by the idea as it fit perfectly in my teaching style of being a "guide on the side." It has always been my goal to give my students as much autonomy as possible in my classroom. My classroom is their classroom, they move everything around as they need it, lounge on the floor with pillows and blankets, doodle on the whiteboard, and take over the computer for presentations. As part of my UNI grad class this past week I had the opportunity to meet and discuss GRR with Doug Fisher.

After meeting with Dr. Fisher, we were instructed to take a current lesson that we teach in our classroom and revise it following the GRR model. I decided to work on an introductory lesson for my online social studies classes. The first week of the class is spent teaching the students how to work online, how to create accounts and how to use a wiki. The first time I taught the class, I made the assumption that most of my students would know how to perform the basic web 2.0 skill of creating accounts and logging back into those accounts. I did not spend a lot of time instructing how to do it, just told them to do it and then spent the next week reteaching multiple times. It is my goal with this new lesson, to work with the students as a whole group and teach them how to create accounts, then slowly build their confidence and set them free to work independently on the online curriculum. I have included a link to my lesson below, please feel free to view and comment.

Carrie's GRR Lesson

Picture retrieved from: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13A3cOvm9EEc5i6Mu0ypWNJdCOJjFD6dcfCZSHuG7rUI/edit?hl=en_US

Teaching in an Online Environment--Reflecting on 10 Years

This school year I began my 10th year of teaching. Looking back at that first year, I remember admiring the skills and confidence of my co-workers, many of whom had been in the classroom around ten years. I ask myself daily, do I look the same way I perceived those teachers ten years ago? I am not sure. Yes, I do have ten years of experience. I am confident in front of a classroom of students and becoming more comfortable in front of a group of teachers. I am confident in my teaching style; however I still consider myself a novice in the craft. I am still learning my trade, still learning from those teachers that have been in the trade longer.

I work very hard to keep my curriculum current, changing it sometimes even quarterly when my students show me it is needed. This year I have made a drastic change to my curriculum, offering our core social studies classes as an online hybrid course. Students are completing their US History, Government and Economics classes sitting in my classroom, however they are doing it all online. There is no textbook. There is no lecture. There is collaboration, creation, relevance, and a world-wide audience. No, this is not what I learned in my education classes over ten years ago, but this is what I education has become. Students want real life skills, they do not want to memorize meaningless dates and names about a bunch of guys they do not know.

In an online environment, they are not only learning about history, they are also learning the collaboration and technical skills that will be needed in their adult life. Skills like creating accounts, to maintaining a blog that reflects on their learning and creating online presentations using various web 2.0 tools. As my students and I work through this new learning environment, I remind them constantly that I am learning from them. It is very empowering for them to have a teacher that is listening to their ideas and using them to change the curriculum. I am still learning and still growing as a teacher, even after ten years on the job.

I have spent two days out of the classroom at an iPad training. By participating in this training, I get to have 3 iPads that I have tonuse in my classroom as student tools. Part of the training consisted of finding apps we could use in the classroom, but I am struggling to find apps to use in my high school social studies curriculum....any suggestions out there from experienced iPad users?

Blog and Wiki Training

Wikis provide a homepage for a group of people to collaborate that they can edit by adding information, links and videos. I started using wikis in my classroom about six years ago. I created a social studies wiki that my students could all access from the Internet to download all their projects, communicate with me about the assignments and post helpful hints to each other as they worked through their projects. Now, as a building tech, I use a wiki to support the staff as they integrate technology into their curriculum. I post links to anything and everything that I find helpful and the staff can use the wiki to ask me or each other questions. Your wiki can become the focal point of ideas for blogging, short cuts, how to's, etc. The following are short video tutorials about the creation of a wiki.

The Dashboard

Create a New Wiki

Edit a Wiki

Invite Members to Your Wiki