Week 3 Reflection: “In Plain English”, Creative Commons, and Digital Storytelling

“In Plain English”: I enjoy the videos from Common Craft that Eric has put on the wiki.  They simplify web concepts and illustrate them in an easy to follow style.  Lee Kolbert’s students did a nice job of using that style to tell their own “stories”.  I can see how this could be an effective way to help students understand science concepts since they must physically make their own pictures, graphs, etc. first before putting them together into a video.  We know that the best way to learn something is to teach it and that is exactly what these students are doing.

Creative Commons: I hate to admit that I am not very knowledgeable about copyright laws.  Skimming through “The Educator's Guide to Copyright and Fair Use” made me nervous!  I will definitely have to look this over and talk to school administrators to get a handle on all the regulations governing creative commons.

Digital Storytelling: I have always been a fan of storytelling because I think it is a wonderfully engaging and more personal way to learn about a topic.  Why not do so in a tech-savvy way?  Chapter two of our textbook, Technology in the Secondary Science Classroom, gives some compelling reasons for using digital images and video in our classrooms.  I agree with the cited research that visuals help students comprehend and recall the text better.  I can say from personal experience that pictures, diagrams, and graphs help me understand difficult concepts much better than words alone.  Attending to different modalities is an important component of effective teaching. 

The text does a nice job of outlining four guidelines for using digital images and video such that the experience will benefit the students educationally.  I agree with all four.  They must be appropriate to the content and instructional goal; they must be accompanied by effective discussion that promotes meaningful interaction; they must not replace the teacher; they must follow copyright laws.  I like the examples of questioning strategies mentioned in the chapter.  The statement on p. 13 is so true: “The difference between good and bad class discussion is often questioning versus telling.”   That fits in quite well with an inquiry-based classroom.

Although I have used images and videos in my classroom all along, I have not taken advantage of the many digital means of “storytelling.”  The idea of students making their own video recordings intrigues me, but I am unsure of the time commitment this would require in an already cram-packed curriculum.  But I am willing to investigate this further and I look forward to seeing how others are using digital storytelling in their science classes.

Practicing Embedding a Video

My first embedded video in this blog! It worked!
This is a TED video on bioluminescence.

Web Tools Week 2: Breadth Rather Than Depth

This week I was a dabbler…a little of this and a little of that.  I tried to get a broad scope of the web tools available so I could settle on a few to more deeply investigate.  It certainly can be overwhelming!  I am hoping I become a more efficient “surfer” soon…I feel like I am still just making baby steps even with all the hours I spend online.  Here are a few of my thoughts so far…

Google Reader: I love it!  It has definitely streamlined my viewing of the blogs.  I have not used it for any other feeds yet, but I’m sure I will.  It’s probably the only thing keeping me relatively sane right now!  Being alerted on one page about all new posts for all blogs is quite a time-saver.  I also like that I can search for something specific and all blogs will show up that include that.  Thank you, Eric, for recommending we set this up!

Twitter: I set up my twitter account and have been following some of Eric’s suggested accounts as well as some of the students in this class.  I made a few tweets, but have mostly just been observing.  I am notoriously bad at keeping up with e-mails at school, so I doubt I will be good at keeping up with tweets, but I will keep an open mind!

Delicious: This is one tool I will definitely keep using.  A friend of mine at school has had a Delicious account for some time and so I was already familiar with it, but had never set one up myself.  Now I’m glad I did.  I was always e-mailing websites back and forth to myself from my home computer to my school computer and visa versa.  This will be another time-saver and great resource base.

PBWorks: I set up my first wiki, but didn’t get very far with it yet.  I had used PBWorks before as an editor on another teacher’s wiki for our biology classes, but had not ever been the original author before.  I like using wikis in the classroom, so I am sure this is one tool I will start using on a more regular basis.

Google Docs: Our school is big on using this web tool.  I have set up a few surveys through Google Docs for my students in the past, but not recently.  I like it for that purpose.  I need to research it some more to understand all the ways it can be used.

Glogster: I opened a Glogster account and lurked around the site a bit, but that’s as far as I got.  Someone asked to be my friend and I got a bit weary.  I thought I was in the educator’s Glogster…I guess I better look at that again.  Anyway, I can see how it might be a good tool to add to student projects.  We have them make online posters in Word, but Glogster has many more interesting ways to embellish them. 

Overall this has been an enlightening week.  I am definitely a rookie when it comes to many aspects of Web 2.0.  Our school uses Moodle, so I do have some familiarity with that type of tool.  The nice thing about Moodle for the students is that they can get to all their classes from one spot. I like d2l for that reason as well and find it easier to get around on that site than having to have so many tabs open on my browser at once!  Maybe I’ll learn a more efficient browsing system in the coming weeks!

Science and Literacy Reflection

After reading the article “Science and Literacy Tools for Life” by Marlene Their, I thought about the various strategies we have tried in our lowest level classes in all disciplines to bring up our students’ reading levels.  For a while we used a computer reading program which seemed to build their reading fluency and comprehension skills within that context, but failed to transfer over to reading in the various content areas.  Last year we began using a program that has students read short passages (in a book, not on the computer) related to each specific content area (science, history, etc.) and answer different types of questions about the readings. The jury is still out as to whether or not this program has made a difference.  We might have burned the students out, though, because many of them were spending one day a week in each of possibly three classes just focusing on reading passages.  I lost an entire day each week of science content time.  Next year we are using the same program, but less frequently.  We will see what happens.

I agree with the article that my “primary task as a science educator is to help students master science concepts, and processes” and that my “secondary task is to help students improve their language skills within the context of science.”  I can see how the three strategies the article discusses, performance expectations for students, explicit teaching strategies that support inquiry-based learning, and student metacognition strategies support these tasks.  I feel like I employ such strategies or similar ones intuitively without putting a name on them, but I do benefit from seeing it in writing.

One repeated point the article makes resonates well with my own philosophy on education: students need to “take charge of their own learning.”  I agree that we as educators need to guide students to do just that.

Draft of Guiding Principles for Using Technology

My use of technology in the classroom should…

·         Be appropriate to the task

·         Improve students’ understanding of the content

·         Further the development of science skills

·         Engage the students in meaningful learning

·         Help the students do “new things in new ways”

·         Encourage inquiry

Setting the Stage

I began teaching in the early 80’s.  I recall that we had one typewriter in our department that all the science teachers shared.  That being the case, I wrote almost all of the papers I handed out to my students by hand.  The only Xerox machine was in the main office so we copied all of our handouts on a ditto machine.  (I wonder how many of you have no idea what a ditto machine is.)  I must admit that I loved the smell of those freshly printed papers!  I also enjoyed using different colored carbons to make my handouts more visually appealing.  One downside to using a ditto machine was that the original document only made so many copies, so every year it had to be rewritten.  Grade computation was also done manually.  I can remember how frustrating it would be when I would lose track of which assignment I was on and have to start counting the numbers all over again.  Lesson planning was simpler back then in a way because there were not as many easily-accessed resources from which to glean ideas.  My planning usually involved a trip to the local library after exhausting the textbook.  Ah, the good old days! 
 

Teaching has certainly changed.  Computers and the Internet have definitely made lesson planning, document creation and grading much more efficient.  Over the years, I have developed good computer skills, but I have only slowly incorporated the Internet.  The first time I heard a lecture on Web 2.0, I felt instantly overwhelmed.  Although I am comfortable with e-mail and online research, I have shied away from the many other uses of the web.  I do not have a Facebook account, and before this class did not have a blog or a Twitter account (which I have not really figured out how to use yet).  But I took this class to “get with it” and try to allay my fear of social networking.  I am still not getting a Facebook account, though!

As I reflected on the readings, I came to the conclusion that Web 2.0, as overwhelming as it seems to me, is a necessary component of education today.  I am sure my students are much more versed in web technology than I am and I do see the need for me to “catch up.”  Web 2.0 is here to stay and I know I need to keep abreast of and use the new tools, otherwise, in the words of our textbook: it “would be unfair to students growing up in the 21^st century.”  Thomas Friedman says it even more emphatically in his “It’s a Flat World, After All” article: “This is the beginning of a crisis that won’t remain quiet for long.”  I especially liked the reading “A New Challenge for Science Education Leaders: Developing a 21^st Century Workforce.”  It was a very informative, practical article that succinctly summarized the 21^st century skills our students will need and the ways we can help them achieve those in the science classroom.

Introduction

My name is Linda Kocian.  I teach biology at Glenbrook South High School (GBS) in Glenview, IL, a suburb of Chicago.  I have been teaching our two lowest level biology courses for a number of years, but this coming fall I will also be teaching our regular level biology.  I taught at GBS years ago, left to raise my children, joined the business world for awhile, and then returned to GBS ten years ago.

My First Blog!

This is the first time I have ever blogged!  What an adventure this will be...