Seeing as this was the last phase of our project our team definitely felt much more optimistic going into this week. We knew from the previous week that we would need and want to make changes to our prototype but of course we did not know how many or how drastic the changes would need to be made based on the feedback. It was almost like sending out a child to kindergarten for the first time and hoping everything was okay. All the work you put into the project, or in the example given- your child not knowing if you fully prepared them for kindergarten or if it was a big flop. Thankfully once the feedback started to slowly come in we could see that the responses and suggestions were all very similar and pretty straightforward. Overall I would say that our prototype was very successful, but as noted during our collaboration time, true success will be seen when teachers are effectively using 21st skills and teaching CCSS and students are learning and growing in both areas as well. There are already a few teachers at my school site that would like to implement, use and offer feedback once they have gone through a few weeks of implementing our prototype. I am excited to discuss their thoughts through their learning process! As for the group challenges this week they were pretty similar to the previous weeks’ challenges. Although now that we have been through the whole design thinking process I can see other issues that came up in previous weeks that I didn’t take notice until a teammate mentioned it during our meeting time this week. She mentioned how some of the web 2.0 tools made it difficult for us all to do the work since only one person could be logged in and carry the load of doing the work even though we were all online together. With that in mind, I still think we did a good job of trying to balance this every week. In the future as an educator I would create jobs for each week such as the note taker, time keeper, and driver. The note taker would be in charge of documenting what everyone had said or suggested, the timekeeper would ensure that the team is staying on task or giving a time limit to a certain task to ensure everyone’s time is valued and the driver would be the person in charge of using the web 2.0 for that week. While this would look different in a classroom since all students would have access to the same program and everyone would be working together, it is still important to keep in mind that responsibilities should be shared. It is important as the guide of the classroom to ensure those that are not as strong are pushed out of their comfort zone to experiment with different responsibilities while also ensuring those that are stronger give a chance for someone else to develop those strengths as well. The reflection process during this stage allowed us to tie everything together to see from the beginning how our thinking changed over time. For me the reflection also allowed for me to see how I can take this to my teachers in an effective manner. While this was not part of our prototype I saw a glaring need for learning how to ask the right questions. A question such as why does a car need gas to work is not really a question we want our students asking. The answer is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require a student to really take in different sources. However, if the students were to ask how does a Hybrid car help the environment and the economy, the answer is not as straightforward and takes a lot more digging of information and grappling with answers. We want our students to be able to take evidence and form opinions on them that may or may not be correct. Having a student defend their reasoning through conversation, new information and then presenting that information is the higher order thinking skills that we want of our students in the 21st century. However, if we do not teach our students what questions to ask, they will never know what answers to look for nor will they feel any empathy towards problems. We need to provide them with opportunities to empathize and ask questions! My understanding of the design thinking has gone full circle since beginning this class. At first I wanted to say that it has completely changed but I did not have any understanding of the process before to even change! My biggest take away is not necessarily of the process itself but the purpose of the process. I always felt intimidated when discussing inquiry based learning and or design thinking. When I began teaching we had a teacher's manual that essentially gave us a script to follow. I was obedient and followed that script but looking back I feel like I failed so many students to a very shallow education. While I know I have a LOT of learning, and experimenting yet to do I am excited that I can now grapple with the idea of design thinking and take steps with my teachers. There are endless possibilities with learning when we start off by asking questions that need real solutions instead of reading a fiction story from theme 2 because that's what a pacing guide tells us what to do. It's a leap of faith to take risks in our classrooms but we owe our students that leap! Part 2: Creating Memes that represent the 4 C's: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity and Critically Thinking!
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This week I am more proud than ever of my group. Most of us were in the last days of school and yet we pushed through, collaborated and came up with an end product. I think we were all feeling very overwhelmed with trying to process what our prototype would actually look like. I started watching the helicopter video of module 4 on Sunday and thought oh my goodness we need to meet asap. Yet, it was almost ironic as none of could actually find a time that we were all free on such short notice. I actually think this helped us because had we met I believe we would have just confused ourselves even more. It was as if the time apart gave us space to digest, think and process. As an educator I need to keep this in mind. I may have an idea of what the end product should look like and where my students or teachers should go next but if they are not there we need to provide that time and space for them to process and think. Do we do this enough? I do not believe so. Common core has brought in deep thinking skills in the standards but this is a shift for teachers. We are comfortable with standing in front of the classroom and giving the answers through scaffolded lessons that don’t allow for thinking. Short responses or fill in the blanks have robbed our students of the opportunity to think for themselves. The greatest ah- ha I have throughout this process is once you think you have reached the end there is still more thinking and questioning that needs to occur. We cannot allow ourselves to fall short of the end goal because we don’t want to push ourselves to an uncomfortable level. Collaborating and discussing, reflecting and processing will allow us to reach that end goal with answers that we never thought were possible.
We had a great breakthrough moment when Andrea shared her idea through the google doc. It was as if we all went “yessssss!” at the same time. We were all imagining what the prototype would look like but we couldn’t quite put it down on paper, but Andrea did! Moments like that make me grateful for group work and remind me of the value of working in teams. Conceptually I knew what we wanted but tangibly I couldn’t come up with the idea. We met for nearly 3 hours after she shared her idea as it now pushed it through to the next stage of actually creating the prototype. We broke up the different parts of the prototype and then decided on a due date to submit the work. We know that part of the process of this week is to view the work and give feedback so we made a due date of Friday evening. On top of collaboration I contributed to the end product by creating a screencast demonstrating three different student samples. At first I had several tech issues that created some roadblocks. After stepping away for a bit I was able to come back and create the screencast for our prototype. Once our prototype was posted we were ready for feedback. I think once you put something out there it is a little uncomfortable to anticipate what your peers are going to say. Will they like the idea? Will their suggestions make us go back to the drawing board completely? During this class I have learned how important feedback is for our students. The learning takes place during feedback, which is why having an audience that will give feedback is so crucial for our students and teachers to grow as learners. The feedback we received only made our prototype stronger and I am looking forward to sharing it with teachers within my district for feedback! Part 2 (Collaboration with Sheila Davis) If I had a Hammer- Technology in a Language Arts Classroom Kelly’s question 1: How do you believe the following quote resonates with ed tech teachers- “In the end, it's the message, not the tool that’s key in writing”? Sheila’s answer to Kelly’s Q1: I believe that for most teachers in the beginning the focus is on the technology. It’s a novel approach to doing things the “old-fashioned” way. But what happens once the newness has worn off? Ed Tech teachers, however, are comfortable with the technology. For them, they grasp that the technology is a tool and treat it as such. Kelly’s question 2: What are two ways that using google slides made it easier for the teacher to teach writing to her students? Sheila’s answer to Kelly’s Q2: Using Google Slides allowed the students to organize their thoughts. Students used color, style, background and font to convey emotion and differentiate between important words and ideas. Britta Riley: A garden in my apartmentSheila’s question 1: How can open source collaboration, as explained by Britta Riley, be used to solve difficult problems? Kelly’s answer to Sheila’s Q1: Working through problems open source collaboration solves problems that affect individuals as well as universal problems as well. Essentially they are looking out for the concerns of all. Sheila’s question 2: What are the benefits of using co-developers to build and develop new products? Kelly’s answer to Sheila’s Q2: There are several benefits to using co-developers to build and develop new products. Working together on an open source development allows for a grassroots effort to make a greater change for the environment. In essence, it cuts the middle man out as the problem is shared . Through social media anyone can help find a solution to a problem. This leads to the next benefit in the shared joy of finding a solution to a problem together and celebrating that solution through social media. The partnership that is formed and shared allows for others to see from beginning to end the problem and solution. A short summary of ah-ha's, main points, or topics of noteworthy mention for the four questions. In Module 4, there were several key lessons. One is that technology is a useful tool for encouraging creativity and collaboration. While for many teachers technology can be seen as just a computer that may seem to have just one purpose. However, for our students a computer is now a way of life for them. Through the use of the computer writing can be taken to a whole different level, developing both speaking, listening, writing and reading skills. We have only just begun to see the benefits of how technology can be used as an effective learning tool in the classroom. Overall, the more we are able to think, discuss, and reflect together the more we will be able to solve problems together. What each of us sees as problems may not be a problem at all depending on our perspective. We need to continually learn with and from each other. References Jester, R. (2002, March). If I Had a Hammer: Technology in the Language Arts Classroom. The English Journal, 91(4), 85-88. doi:10.2307/822464 Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment. (n.d.). Retrieved June 17, 2016, from https://youtu.be/YhvfOlPYifY This week felt as if we had spent the most collaborating, discussing, questioning, and discussing some more. I don’t think I have ever discussed a topic as much as I have on this project. One of the greatest challenges for me in group work is the actual working together as a group. Often throughout high school or college I would much prefer to handle all of the work myself. Thankfully my team works very well together and the others are extremely responsible. The other challenging part is finding time when all of us can work together on the project long enough. Between working, being a mom and a wife it is very challenging to work 3 plus hours on one small portion of a project for one class however, I am grateful for the team that I am working with as we were able to push each other through the work. Our first meeting we spent time brainstorming ideas. It took us a bit of time to figure out the right venue to post our brainstorming ideas as we wanted to make sure we could organize our thoughts in a way that allowed all to collaborate. After careful review we decided on using Padlet. We then spent several minutes writing down as many ideas as we could. We each labeled our own contributions and continued to write ideas until we didn’t think we could come up with anymore. After coming up with as many ideas as we could we arranged the ideas by teacher focused ideas, student focused ideas and those ideas that fall into both teacher and student. Thankfully most of our ideas are teacher centered since that is our end user. I struggled with coming up with big ideas. Smaller, logistically type ideas seemed to flow more easily but wild “nothing is too crazy idea” was challenging. I think it is challenging for any of us as we have not seen design thinking in our classrooms yet. Even thinking back to the video we watched last week with Project H, many of her ideas were probably shot down by someone somewhere at first. We have to allow ourselves the space to throw wild ideas out there and experiment with them before we think of the reasons why they would not work. This is not an easy practice in education as many teachers are used to doing things the way they would like to do them which is nearly the exact opposite of what we are trying to teach our students with 21st century skills. After we completed that step we went back to the checklist to make sure we were going in the right order and not skipping a step. When brainstorming and or coming up with wild ideas it is easy to go off on different tangents if not continually redirecting yourself to the end goal. This week we all did a great job of focusing on the end goal of completing this stage of the design theory and really contributing, listening and taking ideas and adding to them when we could. There were several moments when I thought how great it is to work with a team as the work did not seem so daunting doing it as a team. We met again the following day as we were all a little brain dead from trying to brainstorm, discuss and listen. This time before meeting we took the ideas from the padlet and added them back to the google doc under the different idea breakdowns. Several of our ideas were repeated which reflected almost a sense of calibration of where we were headed. For those ideas that had several different one listed under it we all discussed the ideas and came up with three that we thought were the most promising. Between those three two seemed as if they fit almost as one so we combined that idea. It was exciting to see when we had decided on an idea as we each could see how we would transfer this to our site or our classroom. It was one of those moments when everyone wants to share because it's so exciting. As I currently mostly work with teachers I can definitely see how I would use this during a time when a teacher has a roadblock and is not quite sure how to move forward. I think it's easy at times to want to give the answer, even to our peers without allowing think time. While of course I hope to be able to use design thinking in its entirety, this process just reminded me of the value of truly brainstorming, and then brainstorming again. In a day when technology has allowed for information to come at us so quickly I believe it is very important to take time to reflect, process, communicate and then move forward. I believe our team did a great at just that this week. This process of design thinking is highlighted in Tim Brown’s video. He discusses the importance of allowing creativity but yet so many creative elements are not seen to fruition because of judgements. After the adults drew a picture of their neighbor there was a lot of laughter and apologies because “we fear the judgement of our peers” (Brown 2008). I thought this was such a strong statement because most of us would want to believe this is not true, that we are supportive of each other and but yet deep down we do fear the judgement of our peers. I think with the design thinking process it is so important to start with empathy because only then we will start to see and feel the problems around us. Only then will our students gravitate toward wanting to solve problems on their own as they will see themselves as true problem solvers. Much of our society lives in a victim mentality instead of a proactive solution finding society. Brown’s video also applies to the design thinking and more specially to this weeks work because when we allow all participants to fully participate and contribute then and only then can wild and great ideas take form. Resources Brown, T. (November 10, 2008). Ted Talks. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/RjwUn-aA0VY BYOD reflection I currently work at a school site that has 1:1 device for all students. However, as a parent my 2nd grade children attended a school that did not have 1:1. Reading through this article I saw how BYOD (bring your own device) could greatly impact my children’s school site but it would not have such an impact on my school site. However, if my school site did not have 1:1 I would be in favor of implementing BYOD. According to Jennifer Imazeki, author of “Bring-your-own-device: Turning Cellphones into Forces for Good” allowing students to bring their own device to use to answer questions in class has shown students are more engaged during class. (Imazeki 2014) However one important factor to take note of is this all “depends on the instructor and the specific way in which the devices are employed.” Another positive to allowing BYOD is this would severaly cut down on costs for schools that are trying to provide 1:1 for all students. However, I believe in every school that allows BYOD that a similar device needs to be available for any student that is not able to bring in their own device. We do not want to increase the achievement gap even more! Overall, I believe with a structure in place that include an AUP, and an agreements between parents and school along with the AUP that BYOD could be very beneficial for the learning in the classroom to reach new levels. Resources Imazeki, J. (2014). Bring-your-own-device: Turning cellphones into forces for good. The Journal for Economic Education, 45 (3), 240 - 250. Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group. For the interpretation phase I found many challenges throughout this process. The first challenge was that I took on the role of observing design thinking in process. As I am a TOSA and have a little more flexibility in my schedule I thought this would be the best for my team considering the rest do have classrooms. Finding a time the last two weeks of school where both my schedule and the teacher I was observing found to be quite challenging. There are many great things happening at the school I observed, including a CBS news crew coming, other schools observing and odd scheduling conflicts. Thankfully we managed to set up a time that I was able to observe! The next part of the process that was challenging was observing so late in the school year, on top of never observing a design thinking classroom before. I had so many questions! What did the teacher already teach before the students were in this step of the process? How did they decide what to make? Are there any rules? The class I observed was in a thinkabit lab using art and robotics combined. Many of the students were cutting the heads off of plastic animals while building a carousel that moved once the students created the appropriate code through the computer. How much training in coding did the students receive? Were they completing a novice coding job or something in depth? How does the teacher grade a project like this? Does grading work? Right as I was walking around the room the teacher approached me and gave a quick synopsis of the students and the learning taking place. I think he could tell by my “what is going on” look that I was not quite sure what was happening! Right away my eye is trained to see the students that are not participating as I work with English learners. A lot of my students have learned to quietly sit back and wait for a more dominant student to take over. I was curious to see if during this type of learning were all students engaged? Were any English learners and if so, how were they participating compared to their peers? Because I did not go in with specific questions I tried to focus on just observing. I wanted to take in as many details as possible about the learning, the environment, the role the teacher took, how the students were interacting and what they were doing.
Once back to the group, reporting back was a little challenging other than sharing out what I learned. The interpretation part could have been a little biased on my part as I asked questions but I didn’t ask specific pre made questions. I think in the future I would love to observe in the beginning of the year, the middle of the year and the end of the year. Also, being from the elementary world, and visiting a middle school classroom the light bulb went off as to how they are able to give design thinking to middle schoolers as one specific teacher is responsible for that class. My next steps will be to observe this learning environment in an elementary setting to see how K-5 teachers use design thinking in their everyday learning, and not in an isolated classroom. I don’t want it to sound that I believe it is easier for middle school to do this as they have blocked classes, I just mean that for the question we are trying to answer the learning that takes place has more structure when the class is broken up by teacher and time. Once we all shared out it was easy and yet difficult to see common threads throughout our interviews and observations. The easy part was seeing that teachers for the most part are just not there yet. The difficult part was determining what was said without repeating the same things just written in a different way. Which themes could be combined? Which ones were not really supporting our work? Which ones helped us bridge the next step in our process? Finally, which themes were the loudest throughout? It was as if we were Interpreting the interpretation of each of our findings yet each one of us have a different perspective and bias as to how we have used 21 century skills in our school and or classrooms. Throughout this process I was continually reminded of how much learning takes place by asking questions knowing the answer is not going to necessarily be there and how important it is to observe! Our teachers need to observe each other more, ask more questions of each other and allow for the space to ask questions of each other without feeling threatened. Questioning challenges our minds to process and reflect and hold the space in our heads for possible answers without having to have the answer. Since working through the interpretation phase with my team I have been thinking about ways our students should be given the space to converse with each other around questions yet so much of their learning is still sit and take. Finally, taking a look at Emily Pilloton work through project H in Bertie County has challenged me to realize that design thinking can happen in any community. Many times new ideas are not supported because of funds or thinking there just is not a way. However, listening to Emily how can one not be inspired to think there is an answer to everything! A few points that stood out to me was that Project H focused on using schools to build up a community. The blue dot image speaks volumes of creating an image of connecting through wifi and extending the learning through the schools. The other point that stood out was using the tires for playgrounds to teach math through gaming. Cost was not mentioned but I believe used tires were used and chalk. Combining the two with multiplication students are able to play, get outside and learn! The third is how incredibly inspiring Emily is! Throught the 16 minute video she touches upon hundreds of ways design thinking is impacting the county, the students, the community (both young and old) Using community projects and the youth the community is able to see the work that is being done for and with the community. Before starting this class I would have watched that video and felt overwhelmed as to how Project H got to where they are at. Now after experiencing just a couple steps in the process I know they started with asking a lot of questions and asking questions of those questions and challenging themselves to find answers that have been used before! Upon starting this class I was very excited to start the design thinking process. Actually, I was excited to explore what that actually meant. Buzzwords in education are common knowledge and right now, design thinking is at the forefront. However, do we as educators charged with educating our students with 21 century skills truly understand what that means? As my group began the discussion around design thinking we collaborated to come up with a general problem or guiding question that we wanted to answer. Throughout the discussion the same theme began to show up, but we couldn’t quite pinpoint what exactly it was that we wanted to answer. Or better yet we kept thinking about what the general answer was going to be and we weren’t quite satisfied with digging deeper into that problem. Each of our experiences with teaching with technology as well as observing others- either experts or novices has influenced our idea of what blended learning looks like or should look like. Yet, we continually came back to the same question or problem. How do we ensure CCSS are met while blending technology in the classroom? How do we as teachers know that we are covering what needs to be taught while pushing for technology to be used at the same time? What needs to be let go? What skills are no longer necessary and what skills need to be emphasized more? How do we do this (work as a community) when the ideas of everyone can vary depending on our own ideas? One issue that came up during the first phase was who was our end user? If we are all working to improve the achievement of students then our first thought was the end users are the students. However, in order for student learning to change the teacher also has to adjust and change. If we focus on the learning (by the teacher) then as a by product the student will then also change. As we began discussing this more I couldn't help but laugh because our team became both the student and the teacher. We are moving through this process bouncing ideas off of each other, trying something and realizing no, that's not quite right all while looking through the lens of an educator trying to simultaneously answer a question we are all processing in our classrooms. Something that I have taken away only being a few weeks into this class is that the problem was not given to us to solve. We had to come up with the problem ourselves. I find this very motivating as the learner as I am not just researching something someone else is telling me to find. The problem is something we have all agreed upon which ups the motivation to want to find a solution. Even if the solution is somewhat ambiguous right now, the learning that will take place to find the solution will benefit each one of us in some aspect. I see this as a huge shift for our students (in a positive way). Why should we be telling them what they need to answer? If we truly want our students to be real world problem solvers then we need to step back and allow them to define what it is they believe are problems. Instead of “teaching” them we need to guide them to discover what it is that they want to investigate and solve. Vision and Action Steps My district already has a vision set in place: “Our vision in Vista Unified School District is to be the model of educational excellence and innovation.” Our missions as follows: “The purpose of Vista Unified School District is to inspire each and every student to persevere as critical-thinking individuals who collaborate to solve real-world problems.” I would expand on this vision and mission to say that our students will work collaboratively together to solve problems and learn to effectively communicate together through utilizing technology both inside and outside of the classroom. Students will take ownership of the learning by setting personal goals and challenging themselves to persevere to attain their goals. In order to reach this vision the following are three steps that we will take as a learning community to support our students and teachers in reaching this vision: Steps:
Technology Use at my school site Currently my school site is a 1:1 device school. Our kinder through first grade classrooms use ipads and our second through fifth use chromebooks. We also utilize several programs that are computer based, as well as apps that teachers use to share out documents. We have a fantastic tech team that is very supportive to respond to any needs. After completing the previous course on architecture enterprise I would say our technology department is very advance but our systems and support with curriculum and instruction is where teachers are feeling frustrated. Many are still trying to grasp the standards along with the programs that they need to use. This is where the breakdown between instructing 21 century skills and teaching students college and career ready standards are conflicting. My district has done a fantastic job to learn the needs of each teacher when it comes to using technology. Several surveys have been sent out and follow up to those surveys via professional development has been delivered. Currently this summer there are several opportunities for our teachers to learn more about technology and how to blend it with their teaching. The problem I see is not resources but teachers attending these trainings since it is by choice. While choice is good, we have much room to grow in order to fully utilize the technology that we have at our fingertips in every classroom! |