Light Bulb

Even though keyboarding is not a real exciting topic, I am really glad this was what we discussed during the last class. I am writing a journal article for another class and want to focus on using web 2.0 technologies throughout the entire writing process. I was going to focus on research paper writing, but decided to generalize a little more. I think I will still address some web 2.0 apps that can be used for parts of a research paper, too. Anyway, during class, a light bulb went off in my head and even though it is kind of a "duh" thing...I thought of basing my ideas about incorporating technology on TPACK. Since we were talking about having the "T" without the PACK, I thought this would be perfect to talk about for this particular paper. I know I don't have a novel idea, but at least I'll be able to use some solid research to support my ideas. I loved Eherpad which is one app I will talk about for revision step. And even some of the keyboarding research that was in the powerpoint will be helpful. Hopefully, all goes well.

Dr. Schmidt, thanks for the excellent timing of this class topic for giving me ideas I needed. :-)

Idea for blogs in the classroom

I am going to share a specific example of a lesson I would use for students to blog about on a class blog. Students would be asked to go to our class blog for seventh grade language arts and read the prompt that I posted. This is my prompt: What would Sandra Cisneros want you to learn from The House on Mango Street? Using what we have discussed in class and through previous blogging activities, create a found poem using what you think is the most powerful excerpt from the book. The poem should portray the theme of the book. Please post your found poems on the class blog as a comment. Remember to indicate page # and paragraph #'s where you found your inspiration.

Since there are very short chapters in this book, students choose their favorite one and make a new comment on the blog. They need to indicate the 1-2 paragraphs from that chapter that they think are most powerful and put page # and paragraph #’s. (i.e. p. 28, para. 1 & 2). In a found poem, students choose no more than 10 interesting words or short phrases from those paragraphs that capture what they think is the theme of the novel. Then they put the words/phrases they chose into a poem. The poem should be ONLY the words they chose from the excerpt. They would also be required to comment on one another's poems with positive feedback and what they think their classmate's poems mean. I would then share the "best" poems with the students in class and our discussion about theme in this story could continue. This activity has students interacting with one another, offering feedback and thoughts on each other's creative work with poetry. It also promotes classroom community by having everyone's poem available to view.

Constructivist Technology Use

Niederhauser, Dale N. and Denise Lindstrom. "Addressing the NETS for Students Through Constructivist Technology Use in K-12 Classrooms." J. Educational Computing Research. 34.1(2006): 91-128.

The second research article I chose is research done by Dr. Niederhauser, who is an ISU CIT professor, and Denise Lindstrom, who we actually met in this class. I thought since this was close to home and tied in with our class, it would be perfect to summarize for my blog.

This article analyzes how teachers are using technology in the classroom according to the six National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) that were created to promote a more constructivist hands-on use of technology. One interesting thing about their research is that they used anecdotal findings to evaluate their research. They did this by creating questions that teachers answered during an interview which are available at the end of the article. The research included 1078 "technology-using" teachers in K-12 classrooms. By filtering schools based on technology use in a core content area, they had 716 stories that were used for this research. Coding of the data was based on the NETS core ideas...i.e. student use, communicate information, reporting the results, etc.

Standard 1 requires that students are actively engaged in using technology as a tool to help them understand information. The research found that only 38 of the 716 teachers used technology exclusively for students to absorb such as showing videos or searching online for information. The other teachers did engage their students in using either hardware or software to develop their technological skills. There is a chart that shows that computers (hardware) and web browsers (software) were used by students most often.

Standard 2 requires students to be responsible, critical, and ethical users of technology. It is interesting that only 58 of the 716 teachers reported any mention of responsible use like citing sources or avoiding inappropriate sites. I think it's interesting because web browsers are the most used software tool. Another aspect of standard 2 is collaborative work which was pervasive in many teacher stories. Most instances were "intentional collaboration" where they were teamed up, but some were "spontaneous collaboration" where students helped each other when needed. This standard is important for 21st century workplace skills of collaboration and cooperation.

Standard 3 addresses using technology to enhance creativity and learning. They coded the types of products students produced. Some examples included first graders creating a KidPix original graphic, desktop publishing document, and graphic organizer in Kidspiration. Seventy five percent of the activities reported had kids creating at least one product with technology. The products are moving from word processed to desktop published documents which shows a move towards greater creativity and higher-order thinking skills. Multimedia presentations were actually the most created product using software like HyperStudio and PowerPoint.

Standard 4 wants students to be able to successfully communicate with others within and beyond the classroom. They coded one-way and two-way communication of their data. Seventy four percent were one-way communication where mostly students would present a powerpoint to their class. Because constructivist theory says students should be engaged in real-world tasks, they also looked at audience as either inside the classroom, inside the school, and outside the school. In only 8 percent of the cases, students communicated to an outside audience which did not include their families. One group worked on a service-learning project which required communication for an animal shelter. Only 7 percent of the cases involved students interacting with an outside audience through something like email or blog.

Standard 5 requires students use technology to retrieve information (research). They also need to be able to select the appropriate tool to collect information and analyze it. Most commonly students located or collected information. Several activities combined different research skills. They believed the activities where students used teacher-selected websites were merely collecting information but unable to use the real-world skill of analyzing reliability of websites they found on their own. The cases where students evaluated reliability were rare.

Standard 6 is very important. It addresses the need for students to use technology for problem-solving and decision-making. They discuss using real-world, ill-structured problems as the best activities because they allow for multiple "correct" answers. They do not limit the students' ability to search out information they think is relevant. Overly structured activities do not encourage students to develop problem-solving skills. As mentioned earlier, multimedia presentations were widely created but only 28 percent of them actually involved students in a real-world meaningful task.

They found in their conclusion that teachers are beginning to use technology in ways that students need to become proficient according to the NETS but the NETS were definitely not fully addressed through the types of activities teachers were using. They wanted to emphasize that teachers failed to help students become aware of ethical issues, communicate with outside world, use technology in meaningful research, and develop strong problem-solving skills.

That is a long summary of the article, but it is pretty long. I liked that they used anecdotal data to conduct their research because it gives more life to the actual technology use going on in classrooms. I was appalled by the small number of teachers who either feel unable or do not understand the importance of teaching their students about responsible internet use. That is definitely something that needs to be emphasized because without providing these ill-structured problem solving opportunities, students will not be given the opportunity to explore what the WWW has to offer. They will constantly be relying on their teachers to tell them which sites they can and cannot use. Of course some kids will take advantage of being given that freedom, but they have to learn somewhere. Better at school than somewhere they aren't being monitored.