Category Archives: Connections

Moving Forward …

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This week marks the end of my ETEC 533 journey. I went into the course hoping I would find alternatives and resources for teaching math and science to upper elementary students that would improve my practice. Technology makes a regular appearance in my class and by and large I know my students are exposed to  more than most, but I also know there are probably better ways of carrying this out. Actually, there are times when I knew there had to be, especially in the areas of math and science.

Although intense and daunting at times, I have relished the activities and readings I`ve been exposed to in the last three months. This course made me think. It made me analyze, no I think scrutinize would be a better descriptor, my own practice like I never have before. There have been great resources along the way that I have collected and will share with students, but the greatest growth and learning has come from the pedagogical approaches that I have been introduced to and my investigation around how these currently fit with my practice and how they can be interwoven into my future teaching.

I came looking for resources and activities. I am leaving with a stronger sense of pedagogy and who I want to be as a teacher. It’s the latter that will affect the most change and afford more opportunities to use technology, be it new or established resources, to create more authentic and engaging learning opportunities.

From a student’s perspective, I want each of them to be able to:

  • be engaged in their learning
  • develop useful knowledge they can access in future contexts
  • experience authenticity within a learning environment
  • have opportunities to make their thinking visible and see the thinking of others as well
  • socially construct knowledge and build collective understanding
  • share and learn from different perspectives
  • participate in generative rather than passive activities
  • aggregate data and information to see the strength in collective and collaborative learning
  • revise, modify, and apply feedback to continue to refine their understanding and conceptualization

As a teacher, I am more aware of how I can make all of the above happen and how to use technology to enhance the learning experience, demonstrate phenomena that students do not have access to, and carve new paths for understanding concepts individually and collectively. Through this course I have learned the value of:

  • abductive reasoning
  • mental models
  • information visualization
  • embracing coupling: informatic participation through technology overlapping in the same space  normal as traditional classroom participation
  • pedagogically developed social practices to enrich virtual and ‘real’ learning communities
  • networked communities and networked learning
  • inquiry-based learning through the T-GEM and Learning for Use frameworks and how this fits into my practice
  • How People Learn and how the principles of a knowledge, learner, assessment, and community-centered classroom can become cornerstones in the development and sustainability of a culture of learning in my classroom.

Creating the learning environment I want for my students starts with the pedagogical foundation I choose to lay. Pedagogy is never too far from most teachers’ thoughts. But until now, I didn’t fully realize I wasn’t tapping into my own theotetical base as much as I needed to. It’s one thing to understand and contemplate pedagogy in general. It’s another to understand and contemplate it as it applies to your personal practice. This requires a depth of reflection and analysis that prompts you to assess if your ideology matches your actions. Hopefully, they are one in the same. If not, like me, you have some work to do.

For a more detailed synthesis of my learning in ETEC 533, please visit the e-Folio Analysis page.

image: “The real problem is not adding technology to the current organization of the classroom, but changing the culture of teaching and learning” by langwitches released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike license

The Tortoise & the Hare in Education

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Does slow and steady always win the race? The Tortoise would have us believe so, and backing this claim is our steadfast understanding that calm steady perseverance is a hallmark of success. The Hare’s hasty decision making tactics and assuredness are seen as a liability evidenced by the fact that he had not sufficiently calculated the risk in taking a nap during the race. In education we have encountered tortoises and hares, and even rocks that prove immovable, but we’ve yet to effectively harness the risk-taking qualities of the hare and the mindfulness of the tortoise in recognition of the entrepreneurial (philosophically, not monetarily) outlook needed to transform pedagogy and our notions of learning contexts.

After reading the TELE articles this past week, I have been both encouraged and discouraged by the models and instructional design presented in them. Encouraged because with each innovative learning environment, I can’t help but envision how these new approaches can be implemented in my classroom, but at the same time discouraged because these same approaches are not new to education at all, so why am I learning about them for the first time?  Even though traditional approaches to learning are often criticized as leading to “inert knowledge that cannot be called upon when it is useful” (Whitehead in Edelson, 2001) due to its reliance on memorization and recall of facts, adopting new models of instruction that promote conceptual understanding progresses at glacial speed.   After learning from Edelson (2001) that inquiry based pedagogy was first introduced during curriculum reforms of the 1950s and 1960s within the learning cycle framework, and the situated learning emphasized in the anchored-instruction model embedded within the  Jasper Series was developed in the late 1980’s and 1990’s (Pellegrino, & Brophy, 2008), I can’t help but ask: What have we been doing in education? Either of these models would be a pedagogical improvement in many classrooms today, yet they remain predominantly untapped despite their decades of existence. Our dedication to what’s comfortable rather than what’s effective can be unnerving. As educators, we need to be cognizant of what can be learned from the tortoise and the hare and realize that true sustainable progress lies not in the presence of either extreme, but somewhere in the middle where sound pedagogy and reflective practice support risk-taking on the road to reform.

image: the tortoise and the hare by Jehsuk released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – No Derivative Works license

References

Edelson, D.C. (2001). Learning-for-use: A framework for the design of technology-supported inquiry activities. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(3), 355-385.

Pellegrino, J.W. & Brophy, S. (2008). From cognitive theory to instructional practice: Technology and the evolution of anchored instruction. In Ifenthaler, Pirney-Dunner, & J.M. Spector (Eds.) Understanding models for learning and instruction, New York: Springer Science + Business Media, pp. 277-303.

What Do Butterflies Have in Common With Slowmation?

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After watching the video case highlighting pre-service teachers undertaking the process of slowmation (Learner Environment 7) as a strategy to engage learners and increase depth of understanding, I was struck by one comment in particular. When asked if she could envision using slowmation with younger students, one CITE student stated she probably would not as it was a time consuming process. This was pretty disappointing to here, but at the same time I’m sure she is not alone in that mindset.

Teachers have curricular expectations to uphold, outcomes to assess, but I am wary of putting time limits on a learning process that could be a valuable experience for students. When students become creators and teachers, they need to execute higher order thinking skills. Slowmation would provide them with opportunities to “make what they learn part of themselves” (Chickering & Gamson, 1987) increasing comprehension, retention, and connections to their learning. To dismiss this opportunity because it appears to be a lengthy process without considering options for implementation is a slippery slope. Given that the video was a small clip of the pre-service teachers’ learning experience, I hope the course instructor or other peers offered practical solutions to counter the concerns of others.

My initial thoughts on slowmation were quite the opposite. My immediate reaction to learning about it was: how can I make this happen in my class? It will require substantial time to complete, but if students are engaged in their learning I don’t mind providing the time. Plus, a project like this creates several different scenarios for integrating cross-curricular outcomes. Backmapping outcomes on a such a project also maximizes the assessment potential as emergent and inquiry-based learning often creates it’s own path towards a final representation of knowledge. Taking the time to consider the depth of learning demonstrated even if it has veered in any way off an intended path is vital to the process. Another way slowmation can be implemented successfully in a classroom is to use it as a jigsaw strategy making sure that each group of students works on a different component that the other groups can learn from in the end. Each group becomes an expert on one aspect sharing their understanding with the remaining students.

My students are also currently in Grade 7 and another aspect of the pre-service teacher’s  hesitation to implement technology like slowmation was the idea that it wasn’t viable with younger children. It brought to mind a video project my class worked on 2 years ago with their little buddies in kindergarten. The kindergarten students had just finished a unit on the butterfly life cycle. To reinforce their understanding, the little buddies taught the big buddies what they knew about the process. My Grade 6 & 7 students had access to books on the life cycle to help correct any misconceptions and to help their own understanding as not all of them knew the life cycle well either. From here, the buddies created a short narrative together that described the metamorphosis. Little buddies led the process and big buddies typed making sure certain vocabulary was included in the writing. On their next visit, my students helped their buddies record their narratives in Audacity, which was a great experience in learning what to expect from students in kindergarten. The big buddies found they need to record sentence by sentence as reading skills were not well developed yet and they couldn’t hold the entire story in memory. On their own later, my class edited the recording to piece it together as one story.

As a next step, the kindergarten teacher had her students draw and colour the four main stages in the life cycle, while my students looked at the stories and created any supplemental details needed. When the kindergarten drawings were complete, my students followed through with creating the video with help from each other. They were familiar with the process because they had created their own videos on figurative language months before. It was a great process to undertake as the kindergarten teacher was eager to find ways to bring more technology into her class and others around us were skeptical of the project based on the perceived abilities of 5 year olds and the fact that there were students in that class who received significant support. Every kindergarten student ended up creating one. I’ve embedded a couple of these videos to offer a counter argument to the pre-service teacher’s claim that using slowmation with younger students wouldn’t be worth it. The process for completing the two types of videos would be very similar.

images:
Genie III – wall&clock by Cathérine released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike license
“HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!” by MrClean1982 released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial license