Test 1
I currently teach Chemistry and AP Chemistry at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC.
Boy, did I sound bitter or what? And with good reason I might add. Those reasons haven't dramatically changed now that I have completed this course. Students don't magically have increased access to computers and internet at home now. We didn't get a new computer lab plopped into the school over the summer. No one has decided to bequeath to me a class bank of ipads for educational use. And none of these things is going to change dramatically in the next 2-3 year timeframe. But I'm not quite so bitter now.
I believe my bitterness is a fairly typical response to perceived inequality. And it is typically my first response. But I hate whiners and complainers, and I always tell others either come up with something to do about it or shut up because otherwise you are just part of the problem. So it seems natural that it is this feeling that was one of the driving forces behind me wanting to take this class. This is a way for me to do something about it.
How, you might ask. Well, by simply doing more than anyone would expect could be done with the resources we do have. And how I present these things to the students also matters. We are going to utilize our cell phones to text answers on Poll Everywhere for free and laugh at those schools that bought expensive clicker systems. We are going to use an online homework system through the University of Indiana that only a handful of classes across the country get to use because we were selected to participate in their study as a model urban classroom. We are going to operate almost paperlessly through the use of google.docs, wikis, blogs, and engrade, not because we have a lack of printers, but because we are going to make a bold choice to reduce our waste.
I think this is what it means when I said I wanted my usage of technology to feel subversive. I want students to have a very conscious understanding of the different types of things they are getting out of the ways we are using technology. And of course they will have the added benefit of exposure to technologies that they will be expected to know more and more in the workplace and colleges.
I know I am biting off a lot this year to work on, and I was always going to be regardless of this class since I signed up for the online homework study. I am going to have to figure out how to secure usage of the computer lab during class time on occasion. I will probably have to stay late several days a week to provide computer access in my room for students who do not have it at home. But I think this transition will be worth it in terms of the excitement and engagement of my students. They will know that they are doing something in my class that they do not get to do in any of their other classes, and that will mean something.
Then I'll probably have to train the staff on this stuff the following year :)
As I had mentioned in several previous posts, my final project is a wiki I have created for one of my atomic theory final projects. There are two parts to the project; researching a nuclear technology topic, writing a position paper supporting or opposing the use of this technology. The wiki will help students perform the research in a collaborative manner. The idea would be to create topic pages that look similar to what you would see on wikipedia, including citations for all material at the bottom of the page.
In addition to the home page which details the project itself, deadlines, and requirements, I have created template pages for each of the topics that are available to students to research. Right now I just have the 4 I have used in the past, but it is very easy to create another page on the wiki if I need one. I have also made a page for the project rubric that covers both the wiki contributions to the research, as well as the position paper. These pages are all finished and might only need minor tweaking from here on out.
I also decided to create 2 additional pages to help students. One is simply an example page that gives students an idea of what kinds of information they should be looking for and what a topic page should look like. Other than the initial framework, I have not started this page. When doing examples for students, I typically do something very similar without doing something that they can directly copy or use. So I will probably make this sample topic page on GMO crops or something like that.
The last page is a student help page. This is where I will have tutorial videos showing students how to do specific things on the wiki such as edit pages, use Bibme to add citations, post images and videos, and things like that. I started off using Jing to make my screencast video, but got a bit frustrated with it as others had. I think it is a good tool for editing still images, but maybe not so ideal for video. So I tried what other's have tried, screencast-o-matic! I have to admit that I laughed my ass off at that name. I half expected a picture of Ron Popeil on the main page and text proclaiming that it "slices, it dices, it juliennes!" Anyway, the mp4 format of the video, the ability to alter the video size when creating, and the ability to adjust the volume of the recording made for a much easier overall video experience. I have created and posted the first tutorial video on this page.
So where does that leave me? Well, I still need to create the other tutorial videos, some of which I will work on tomorrow. And I need to finish the example page. Then I think this is pretty much ready to go, and the project won't be assigned until October. So way to go me for getting ahead of the game!
So when it comes down to it, we have really used 3 primary forms of platforms in this course. How ingenious for Eric to expose us to them all so that we both gain familiarity as well as experience in how they can be used in classes. He had us using a wiki from the beginning to post files, distribute information to us, and allow us to comment. We were encouraged to each create a blog which was much more personalized to our own needs and allowed us to showcase our own work and comment on the work of others. And finally we used the actual course management system from the University to have discussions about what we have learned.
Now, not all of us have access to course management systems like D2L, but many have expressed the desire to use, or required usage of Moodle, which is one such open-source version of a course management service. I think we have pretty much all agreed that for fluid discussions that fostered the sharing of ideas, the D2L platform was much more user friendly than either our individual blogs or what had been established on the wiki. This is not to say that a blog or a wiki could not be more tailored for this purpose. But if real discussions are desired between students, or between instructor and students, then a set-up on Moodle or edmodo might be a better idea.
What I have really gleamed from our discussions is that there is no one-size fits all solution with technology. And that is the point. We each have different comfort levels, different resources, different levels of students, and different desired outcomes from the use of technology. So thank god there are hundreds of different ways to get something done using these technology resources.
And I think Eric stated at the beginning that one of his goals was for us to be comfortable creating and building a PLN. Because let's face it, as soon as we think we know how to really get what we want out of a tool in terms of fostering student learning, there will be 100 other things out there that could be better. This whole process during the course of becoming familiar with so many different things in such a short period of time was noted as jarring or overwhelming for many of us. But now that it is done, all one has to do is stay abreast of the latest. We no longer have to start from scratch. And we hopefully have small networks of people that we feel comfortable bouncing ideas around with.
Because of my limited bandwidth up here in the mountains of Colorado (I know right? Life is hard.) I will not be able to play with video until this weekend. But lest you think I have just been hiking, reading, and taking pictures the whole time (I said life was hard), I wanted to post about a few of the things I have been playing with.
First off, I have always been intimidated by some types of writing. And one of the reasons is the need for citations. Now don't get me wrong, I think it is vitally important to cite other people's ideas and bodies of work in your own work. I am very sticky about this point with my students. But I could never remember all of the different MLA formats for different types of sources. And that was before the internet! Good lord, now there are so many ways to properly cite things (did you know you have a cite a newspaper article differently if you accessed it from the newspaper's website as opposed to the physical copy?) and giving a website is not a proper reference. I have found that this has not only intimidated me, but my students as well. One of the reasons they didn't cite things before is they just didn't know how.
I give you Bibme! This is a wonderful website that automatically puts things into correct format for you (And you can choose between MLA and a few others). I don't think it is critical for students to know proper citation format off the top of their head, but rather that they understand the need to cite someone else's ideas and not pass them off on their own. It is easy to use; copy/paste websites of source, provide a few other bits of information, done. Students can then either create a Word.doc file that they can save and print or email to themselves. Or they can simply do what I did on my wiki example, which is just copy from the screen and paste onto my document directly. It is fabulous. No more excuses for no citations on papers. Ever.
I also came across this free tool that let's you create diagrams called Simple Diagrams. There is also a version that you pay for which gives you more flexibility, the ability to save onto your own computer, and access to more shape libraries. I like the ease of use when I was playing around with it, as well as the look. You can alter the background to make it look like graph paper, notebook paper, chalk board, whiteboard, etc. I know there are lots of programs like this out there, but if you aren't trying to make engineering drawings (like my brother on his ipad), then I don't really need all of the bells and whistles. Just give me something that looks like a step up from MS Paint thank you very much.
As I stated before, my final project is going to be a wiki created for a nuclear technology project my students do at the end of our Atomic Theory unit. I have spent some time this morning going about researching the different free wiki services and figuring out which one might work best. It turns out, that due to the number of students I teach, the deciding factor was the number of student users allowed in the free version. I ended up choosing wikispaces as there does not seem to be a user limit on the education version. I am not at home so I can't test out if this site is blocked by our district and will have to test that out in another week or so.
I have now created the wiki, started work on the project intro, and setting up the individual pages for the various topics students may work from. Take a look and give me any feedback/suggestions that you think would enhance the site.
In my exploration of blogs and wikis this week, I kept thinking of how overwhelming all of this could be (please read my previous post to see my imagined reaction). One of the first things I did in this course that made me sigh and feel like I had a better grip on things was using Google Reader. This has been fabulous for following everyone in class as well as creating my PLN. If I were to assign students to create blogs for class or a project, I would have to rely on Google Reader to keep me sane.
But something else was still frustrating me about this class that would be next to impossible to keep a handle on if I had students' blogs to follow. I could never remember whose blogs I had commented on, and I always forgot to go back to those entries to continue on the conversation. I didn't realize how frustrating this was until Eric asked us for some of our comments.
Of course I am not the first person to find this frustrating. People found it frustrating like 12 years ago and I am just old in coming to the dance. Behold, co.mments. It is as easy as delicious or any of the other bookmarking sites. You create a link for it on your browser's bookmark bar (which it tells you how to do and provides different ones for different browsers). Then when you write a comment on someone's blog, you simply click on that co.mments button on your bookmark bar and it pops up that you are now following this conversation. You can either track the comments on your co.mments page or you can put the co.mment feed for your account into your Google Reader.
Beautiful. If you decide to go the route of having students create blogs, then I think using co.mments and Google Reader together, both for you and the students, is going to keep everyone sane.
I also wanted to talk about Jing again. I taught my mom how to use it! The whole family is converging on a cabin in the mountains in Colorado and it is apparently a bit tricky to find. There are lots of trees which made the Google map she wanted to use rather difficult. Well I showed her how to use Jing, take a screen shot, then add arrows and text boxes so she could point out the visual landmarks and add specific turn by turn directions. Quite cool.
But so far the editable screenshot is all the functionality I have played with on Jing. I promised earlier in the month that I would test out the video capability as well. This is my plan for the final week as I think I will make some videos explaining to students how to do things on the wiki I am creating for the final project.
However, I am also interested in this. Knovio is a site that allows you to create videos using your webcam and microphone from your laptop, and a powerpoint presentation. For those who want to create a "flipped" classroom, this could be a handy tool in your arsenal. You don't have to have a video camera if you want to capture a power point lecture. In some ways it seems similar to Jing, but also different. I think they could both be useful in their own way, and I can see incorporating both of them. I could see this being a way to "record" your notes for absent students in a way that would be more valuable for them as opposed to just some power point slides.
So this is my other task that I am setting myself for next week, creating a Knovio video from a power point. Because I'll be in a cabin in Colorado with wi-fi. So obviously what I want to be doing is making Chemistry power point presentations, right?
To blog, or not to blog. That is the question.
Sooooo, um, I have 150 students in Chemistry and another 25 in AP chemistry. The thought of trying to moderate a blog with 150-175 regular commenters makes me want to crawl into a corner, wrap my arms around me knees, start rocking back and forth, and stammering while drool leaks out of the corner of my mouth. Following and commenting on 150-175 student blogs elicits the same urge with the addition of random head-banging on a wall.
Does this mean blogging will not occur this year? No, I don't think it does. What it means is that I do not think I will use blogs to require commenting and introspection on class topics. Not until I figure out better ways to try and do this (or continue to fight with my administrators to hire 1-2 more science teachers so we can have class loads in the 100 - 120's like the rest of the school).
I must admit, I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging this summer and imagine that it is something I will continue doing. I can see me posting resources for students on a blog and creating extra credit opportunities for students by creating blog posts that I would post. Blogging is something I want to explore and continue to play around with over this next year before I take the full dive and involve my students with it.
Wiki, wiki, whaaaaat?
My first experience with editing a wiki was 3 years ago. The school I was at had a group of teachers who created a PLC wiki that was just for our school (The administrators there had a lot of weird demands in terms of instruction and documentation. It was common for everyone to feel like they were constantly spinning their wheels and reinventing it at the same time!). We shared templates for different documents our administration wanted, provided examples of different ways to try out instructional techniques that were being dictated to us in the different subject areas, and created rubrics that could be easily adapted for different types of projects by any subject teacher. This was a great resource and a life saver for many teachers. I used it and contributed to it as did a core of other teachers.
So of course our administration put the kabash on it. (Palm meet forehead)
But since I have had that experience, I can think of some ways that I would want to use this type of resource in my classes, and I have some limited experience in how that could work.
The first one will be expanded into my Final Project. I have my students investigate all sorts of new nuclear technologies at the end of our Atomic Theory unit. You could think of it as "Nuclear 2.0". I think we could construct a wiki in a collaborative manner as the culmination of these investigations.
The second one would be a wiki for my AP chemistry class. This could be a space where I can post basic AP information, links to practice sites as well as content explanation. Students could also use it as a type of homework help forum. I can see them creating review pages for each of the main topic areas as part of their 3rd quarter grade. Or even using the further refinement of the information on it as a final project after the AP test to use in the next year's class. As it will be a much smaller class with older students, I can see this being a more collaborative and enriching experience for them. I really want them to feel that we are in it together and that we are not competing with each other, but against the system of AP. Us against the World you know?
(Ha, I made you think I was going to talk about Moodle! And I am not going to talk about it at all because my district doesn't support it, and I have enough on my plate without finding server space and administering that class management system on my own. Damn, you still got me to talk about Moodle.)
I figured that we may not all spend the time crawling around the wiki files to view each other's work, so I am posting mine here for your viewing pleasure.
I ended up going with a project that has students justify the inclusion (or not) of any and or all of the trans-uranic elements, from neptunium at 93 through ununoctium at 118. Let me know what you think.
When I saw last summer that I would have access to a projector to use in my classroom, my mind began to think of useful ways to incorporate this into my instruction. One of the first things I thought of was virtual labs, and online simulations. Chemistry is such an abstract thing for students to grasp because you can't see it. Students ALWAYS ask the question, "Well how do we KNOW that's what an atom looks like if we can't SEE it?" And that is a completely valid question. It really does get to the nature of science and how we construct scientific knowledge. I like starting with Atomic Theory for this very reason, it let's us talk about this stuff. And this type of content is very difficult to create labs around.
I typically do a lot of modeling labs during this unit, but the students don't always "see" it as doing science. As we were going through the classical experiments from Thomson, Rutherford, and others last year, I used online simulations of these to help students understand how we can create models of things we can't see by interpreting results. The modeling exercises we did in class were black-box type of activities that were very similar. This was the first time I had done these two things together and my students seemed to have a better grasp on the structure of the atom and the relationships between the various subatomic particles. So go me!
But after this promising start, I found that I never did any online simulations again. Many of the resources for simulations that were in Chapter 3 as well as on the wiki I had found before. But now that I have my wonderful delicious account I have bookmarked and tagged them to specific units! I will be starting an AP program at the school this year and have found a lot of really rich lab simulations on college websites that will allow us to do required AP labs without having the resources (because, uhhhh, we are seriously lacking in resources).
My goal with these will be to both use them in class, as well as provide links to students so that they can work with them at home. Some sites and topics lend themselves better to that than others.
As for the online data, this is a bit of a different story for Chemistry. I have experience with using online data-sets from this past year when I taught Environmental Science to seniors. As it was considered to be a culminating science class, I really wanted students to do a lot of their own thinking using raw data. I think there are a lot of resources out there for environmental data, and I relied heavily on NOAA and EPA, as well as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. We could get text files and excel files filled with all sorts of things, not to mention tagged google maps and google earth files. We did a lot of hurricane tracking overlayed on ocean current maps, as well as looking at historical trends of hurricane strength and amounts. We could also map out the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the sites where fracking was taking place in Pennsylvania, and attempt to predict future outcomes and craft policy positions.
The students said that they appreciated that one of the roles of government agencies is to collect these types of raw data and provide them for free to be used by scientists. They also saw that the types of data freely available are directly related to the topics we were discussing in class. I think this is largely true in the life sciences and makes using online data for the life and earth sciences relatively easy to incorporate instructionally.
Now, to be certain, there ARE ways to obtain online data for Chemistry. The problem I have found is that it is often at a level that is above my content in a general high school course. You can easily obtain free NMR/IR/mass spec/UV-Vis data for all sorts of molecules and compounds. The problem is that these techniques are not discussed or used often until second semester organic chemistry or analytical chemistry in college. A lot of the cannon of chemistry that is taught at the high school level is what we would consider "settled" and not much research is being done in these areas.
This does not make online data moot for Chemistry, but I think it means I will need to get more creative. I know how valuable it can be, both from the reading as well as my personal experience in class. But I think I might need to reach out to people or institutions that might have data that I would want to use. Could I convince a University of Maryland professor to release some data about certain kinetics reactions to me? Probably. But that means I need to decide what I want, and then go find it. That is going to take some more thinking on my part. It might also make sense to try and find some local teachers who use probeware extensively in class and attempt to share data sets with them for my students to analyze as this is a resource we are lacking.
