Post #9: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

In the Stop Animation Project, students develop critical thinking and problem solving skills in different steps, which are enlisted and described below, according to the order of the CTPS standards:

1.  The topic of the project is open and they have to align something they are interested in (sometimes related to their major) and instructional technology. Thus, they have to define and identify a hypothetically authentic topic, a content, grade level and subject to use as the audience characteristics. 
2. Throughout the project they have to plan how they will accomplish the activities within the amount of time given. For instance, after seeing examples of storyboards, voice-overs and props, students have to plan and manage their progress to be able to accomplish all that in 4 classroom meetings with 50 minutes each.
3. Students are required to collect two forms of data: first, they have to decide which Educational Standard they will address with their project. They are given the Common Core and the Georgia Educational Standards to explore and choose one. And finally, students research about the topic they will work on so that they can summarize it and create a nice 1-3min stop animation video. They have to collect information, for example, about photosynthesis, how a bill becomes a law, how to make sushi, how to recycle, and so on.
4. As for the last topic, the project does not address any alternative solutions for students. However, since they are working in groups, they have to accommodate diversity of skills, opinions and collaborative work to successfully complete the assignment. They also receive formative feedback, which might be considered as a different perspective (an outsider) making suggestions or offering additional resources for their projects.

Information literacy

During my project, my students will gain information literacy in a a few different ways:

1. Before working on their stop animation video, students have to research, choose, evaluate and plan accordingly their project topic and their approach to address the topic so that they comply with specific Georgia Performance Standard or a Common Core State Standard. Thus, their inquiry about the sleep cycle, the metamorphosis of a caterpillar or the photosynthesis must be planned according to a specific standard, grade level and subject.

2. When students plan to work on their video, they have to explore and choose some resources that will inform them about the content they will have to explain in the video. They also might gather resources on how to use the app myCreate such as tutorials on YouTube. In addition, students are informed that they can only use resources such as images that are published online as free to use. Therefore, they will be locating, organizing, analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing and ethically using a variety of resources.

3. Finally, they will not only be processing gathered information and organizing it in a creative way, but their results will be reported through the final product of this project, the stop animation video, and their reflection on how they performed throughout the project. 

Post #7: Communication Technologies and e-Learning

After this week's readings, I learned a lot about e-Learning and I will try to make connections as much as possible with my teaching experience. The chapters present us the necessary skills, effective strategies and examples of technologies that will foster and develop communication and collaboration skills and also e-Learning guidelines and activities. These activities can have as audience all the subjects involved in the learning process such as students, instructor(s), parents and college administrators. Technology, then, can serve a variety of purposes, since facilitating and being a catalyst element for learning until enabling principals to easily contact parents to talk about their kids performance in class or issues they might have. Along with that, technology can also be used for the three basic forms of communication: point-to-point, one-to-many and many-to-many. Thus, there are tons of possible situations wherein technology can be used.

I have taught this semester a unit on communication and collaboration and students collected many tools that can be used. For instance, they used skype, Edmodo, Google Docs, Socrative, Poll Anywhere, Twitter, Google Hangouts, Remind and many others. However, careful planning is necessary so that Communication and Collaboration tools can be effectively used and have a real, concrete impact on students' learning. I personally believe five aspects are essential when planning those activities: purpose, content, time, participant's roles and forms of interaction.
I think these five components make up a good basis of what effective communication with technology would be.

Examples of benefits from the use of technology-supported communication are: it gives the students the flexibility to work on their assigned roles and assignments even in the comfort of the homes; communication through emails, Google docs, and social media can definitely help students bring together information more easily; classroom blogs or webpages with daily or weekly posts help students and their parents keep track of that is going on in the classroom; Google Drive helps save paper in communities with limited budget by sharing assignments, feedback and grades with students and parents, and many other situations. Using technology, the students can freely express and communicate their ideas without the barriers of the classroom. Communication technologies, therefore, have definitely opened a new perspective on learning regardless of grade levels, subject areas or topic. 

As for e-Learning technologies, I have myself experienced for the first time a fully online class as a student. I would say, first of all, that technologies such as Learning Management Systems and Communication Technologies are essential for e-learning courses, even more than to f2f instruction. They not only help students keep track of their assignments, grades and deadlines, but also enable interactions between teacher-student, student-student or between groups of people. I also believe careful planning is even more important because there is an extra psychological and practical factor involved in e-Learning. Students enrolled in online classes already envision the "burden" of being away from a physical learning environment, which puts more pressure on him/her. From a more practical perspective, students have to be more independent, autonomous and disciplined. In most online classes we don't usually see a closer connection to students due to their diverse characteristics, to the lack of human contact before, during and after classes and because human beings don~t usually feel encouraged to interact with unknown people.

To sum it up, I cannot judge yet whether e-Learning is better than f2f instruction since I have only seen the perspective from a student. In a near future I might have some experience with online courses as a teaching assistant and then I will feel more confident to express my opinion based on both experiences. 

Blog post #6

For my project I am already working on Creativity and Innovation. The plan is to design a lesson unit where students will learn, reflect and apply their knowledge to creatively get involved in the production of a learning artifact. And finally, students will design an lesson plan where they can implement the technological tool they used in an educational environment.

That being said, I think I would add to that more brainstorming activities. For examples, a couple of videos where creativity is being fostered in schools and a TED talk of a creativity expert. Moreover, I would show some examples of learning products produced by former students in that class to give them a better idea of what is expected from them. By adding those resources, I believe I would providing students with more ideas and knowledge so that they could creatively accomplish their tasks.

Post #5:Thoughts and concerns about Individual Integration Project

I am currently teaching a class and I felt very tempted to use one of the lessons I have already taught for my Individual Integration Project. However, since we are required to actually design a lesson that has not been implemented in the past, I dedicated some time to think about it it I decided to design one of the upcoming units for my class. That way I will be not only working on my project but also saving some time for lesson planning. First of all, the idea I came up with is still a tentative idea and I may change my mind if I find interesting resources and have ideas that best fit the scope of this project and the class I am teaching. If I actually change my mind I will either upload an extra blog post with the update or edit this one.

My idea:

In two or three weeks from now I will be teaching a unit called Creativity and Innovation. This unit requires students to come up with very creative ways of implementing technology in the classroom by designing lesson plans, learning web 2.0 tools that foster creativity and implementing those tools in hypothetical instructional settings. For this lesson I will have students going through three different phases: 

1. Learning a creativity tool; 

2. Using a creativity tool to create a learning object and 

3. Designing a lesson plan where they can implement the tool in a specific learning environment

My concerns

This project requires a lot of planning, exploring, creating ideas, documenting them and actually organizing ideas and resources into the project. the Individual Integration Project is an iterative project that might change here and there as I gather resources, come up with new ideas and make adjustments. Consequently, it seems to be a very time-consuming project. Thus, the strategy I came up with is to take one hour every day until the deadline to cover one or two of the required items for this project. That way I do not feel overwhelmed and I also do not leave aside my other responsibilities. It seems to be very basic, but hopefully this self-regulation strategy will work. 

Another concern I have about this project is that I also might need to create rubrics to assess my students and to actually have a parameter to grade their learning process throughout the unit. I do not have much experience in creating rubrics but I will use some models I have used before to grade them in previous units and make the necessary adaptations since it should be related to this upcoming unit. It might seem I am assessing students on their creativity but that is not the case. What I will do is assess their process of learning a tool, the learning object they will create with the tool (in terms of creativity and content) and their ability to think of an educational use for a web 2.0 tool. 

Post #4: Concerns regarding assessment

One of my concerns regarding assessment is directly related to Problem Based Learning. When a course is all structured in PBL, students have many activities and sometimes there are multiple projects going on at the same time. On that notice, creating rubrics, providing feedback, assessing students and grading might become a nightmare. In fact, that is something I have been struggling with on the classes I am teaching. Since they have many projects with different levels of complexity, I also have to provide feedback and grade them.
These are the strategies I have created so far:
 At the beginning of projects I ask students to not only explore the topic of their projects, but also to find an article on the same topic, read it and summarize it making connections between their ideas and the scholarly piece of writing. That way I can keep track of what everyone is about to work on and maybe interfere here and there making suggestions.
In order to provide formative feedback on the ongoing projects, I created "networking days". On those days students either present their projects to the whole class or in small groups and they receive feedback on their projects. That allows me not only to provide students with formative feedback during class time, but it also allows other students to see different ideas and maybe have new insights on their own projects.
Finally, the most challenging for me is to grade and provide summative assessment. At that stage all the activity relies exclusively on me and, as any other graduate student who also happens to be a teaching assistant, I am always very busy. Thus, I am still struggling to create a strategy or a model of rubric that allows me to grade faster, as well as provide a rationale for students' grades. If anyone has a suggestion on that and would like to share with me I would appreciate it. For now, I am slowly grading my students' projects and I am struggling to keep all up to date. My plan, however, is to let them know about their grades for all the activities so far during midterm week since we do not have a specific activity for a midterm grade.

Post #3: Project Based Learning

This week’s readings allowed me to consolidate my personal and professional beliefs as a student and instructor about Project Based Learning as a catalyst towards fostering students’ motivation, creating a liberating and meaningful learning environment, allowing collaborative work, offering enough time for the incubation of powerful ideas, and engaging students in the construction of a product or artifact.

As a student, I had this experience in the Fall of 2011 in a course called Teaching with Technology, which happens to be the same course I am teaching now. As a student I could develop a website with teaching resources to integrate cultural artifacts in classes of English as a foreign language. Besides working on something I was passionate about and that was directly related to my TESOL major, I felt throughout different tasks and activities (such as Stop Animation video, 20% Project, and so on) that I was learning not only from the teacher, but also from exploring the world for resources (printed and online) and from interacting with peers in and out of class.

Now that I am a teaching assistant, I still believe on how powerful Project Based Learning is. In my class we are working on small-scale tasks that gradually prepare undergraduate students for a continuous, iterative and much more complex project called 20% Project. Despite the fact that I only introduced the 20% Project a couple of weeks ago, students are already searching for articles and resources directly related to their ideas, asking for advice from me and soon they will be sharing their reflections on the ongoing process with peers in order to have feedback from them. Despite the early stage, I already feel students’ higher levels of motivation towards this project not only because it is of their interest, but because it allows them enough time to be creative, to generate ideas, to receive feedback and to engage in the actual hands-on task of constructing their artifact. Hopefully by the end of the semester I will be able to post some of the interesting topics they have been working on.