Putting together a lesson plan in the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) format for Week 3 of my Teaching with Technology class was challenging and rewarding. I have been out of the classroom for a few years, so I felt a little rusty at formal lesson design, but the UDL model was easy to follow. The challenging parts were striving to address all three of the UDL brain networks and finding quality resources in a variety of formats to incorporate into the lesson.
I was amazed at the amount of time it took me to hunt down quality resources to address the recognition, strategic, and affective networks. Providing multiple media and formats addresses both the recognition and strategic networks while offering choices of content and tools addresses the affective network. With the Internet, these types of resources are abundant, but the time investment it takes to screen the resources for appropriateness regarding quality and level and type of content is large.
The recognition network was addressed by supporting students' background knowledge and providing multiple examples of critical features in multiple formats. I imagined myself working with students and moving seamlessly from displaying and discussing a diagram under the document camera to manipulating an interactive website on a whiteboard as we began to investigate food chains and webs together. I hope students would be as engaged as I imagined they would be.
The strategic network was addressed by providing opportunities to practice with multiple media and formats. It was also interesting to imagine students getting to decide if they wanted to read from a book (would any really pick that nowadays?) or view movie clips or play interactive games on the computer. Would they work in pairs or solo?
Addressing the affective network by offering choices in content and tools, rewards, and levels of challenge was most engaging for me to think about, though. One of the goals teachers often have is to turn their students into lovers of learning. How much more frequently would we achieve that goal if we strove to connect more with students' feelings about learning through methods that address affective networks?
If I were still in the classroom, I know I would feel challenged to plan all lessons to this level all of the time. And I know logistically that would be impossible. But I hope these principles will stick with me as I design staff development for our teachers. I hope to integrate some of the UDL principles into our staff development offerings, so they become less focused on technology skills and more focused on solid pedagocial practices.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Saturday, December 5, 2009
SixthSense: The Next Evolutionary Leap in Personal Computing & (Hopefully) Edtech?
I should be studying, but I made the "miskate" of checking my Twitter streams first this morning. When looking at my #edtech search, I came across a tweet that actually sent me to the second of the two videos below, which then sent me on a rabbit trail I'm excited to have gone down.
I had not heard of SixthSense technology before today. It's a project being worked on by MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group, led by Pattie Maes and her student Pranav Mistry. Assuming continued successful development, this technology has potential for causing a huge paradigm shift in personal "computing", and it SHOULD be hugely impactful in the world of education. (I say SHOULD because of the unfortunate slowness of adopting new technologies especially in the K-12 world). I predict this for two reasons:
I also invite you to leave a comment on how you think this might impact society and culture in general, and education in particular.
I leave you to the videos, while I go study so I can finish my master's degree and hopefully live to see this technology integrated into K-12 one day. :-)
I had not heard of SixthSense technology before today. It's a project being worked on by MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group, led by Pattie Maes and her student Pranav Mistry. Assuming continued successful development, this technology has potential for causing a huge paradigm shift in personal "computing", and it SHOULD be hugely impactful in the world of education. (I say SHOULD because of the unfortunate slowness of adopting new technologies especially in the K-12 world). I predict this for two reasons:
- The technology behind the device costs around $300, well in reach of the masses in developed nations.
- Mistry plans to open source the technology.
I also invite you to leave a comment on how you think this might impact society and culture in general, and education in particular.
I leave you to the videos, while I go study so I can finish my master's degree and hopefully live to see this technology integrated into K-12 one day. :-)
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Research Shows Technology Strategies That Positively Impact Student Learning
The following was written as a reflection on what I learned during the second week of the Teaching With Technology course I am currently taking as part of my masters in educational technology leadership program.
December 1, 2009
During the second week of the Teaching With Technology course, I learned the most from the research studies we read such as Michael S. Page's Technology-Enriched Classrooms: Effects on Students of Low Socioeconomic Status from the ISTE Journal of Research on Technology in Education (2002) and John Schacter's The Impact of Education Technology on Student Achievement: What the Most Current Research Has to Say from the Milken Exchange on Education Technology (1999). Page's work included an overview of prior studies of educational technology's impact on student achievement and then went on to detail his own study of the achievements and classroom interactions of 211 third and fifth grade students, half of whom were learning in classrooms that were not integrating technology, and half of whom were learning in classrooms with multiple technology resources as well as teachers who were thoroughly and continuously trained in the use of the technology they had been provided. I was encouraged by Page's findings which concluded that when compared to their counterparts in the non-technology infused classrooms, the students in the technology-enriched classrooms posted higher math achievement scores, showed higher self-esteem levels, and participated in a significantly more student-centered environment. As an educator, I have informally observed such results on a regular basis, and it is empowering to be able to point to specific research that demonstrates technology's positive impacts on student learning.
Likewise, all of the summaries in Schacter's work were interesting and demonstrated various instructional benefits of educational technology. I was particularly intrigued by the West Virginia Basic Skills/Computer Education study by Dale Mann (1999) which Schacter referred to. The finding that "Consistent student access to the technology, positive attitudes towards the technology (by both teachers and students), and teacher training in the technology led to the greatest student achievement gains" (1999, p. 6) was again reaffirming what I have come to know as best practices in the use of technology in instruction. I wanted to know more specifics about the West Virginia BS/CE initiative, so I did some looking around the Milken Family Foundation Website and found West Virginia Story: Achievement Gains from a Statewide Comprehensive Instructional Technology Program (Mann et. al. 1999). Upon skimming the information, I discovered that the State of West Virginia started to infuse classrooms with computers beginning with Kindergarten classrooms in 1990-1991, and moving the initiative up one grade level during each successive year throughout the elementary grades. Teachers were thoroughly trained in the use of the technology as it was implemented. It turns out that the specific software the teachers were trained in was primarily a drill-and-practice approach aligned with West Virginia's basic skills goals, making it easy to correlate the infusion of technology and teacher training directly to increased standardized test scores. These were interesting and encouraging findings which led me to wonder if any studies had been done since the late 1990's or early 2000's on the impact of technology on student learning, particularly since it has been since 2000 that Internet use and the read/write web have become mainstream. I put a request out amongst the edtech professionals I network with on Twitter, and Teri Wilkins pointed me to Technology in Schools: What the Research Says 2009 Update, an overview of recent educational technology research which seems to be similar in design to Schacter's work. I have not had time to delve into this promising find, but I look forward to reading it and finding out what more recent studies have to say about educational technology impacts on student learning. The next question I'll be looking to answer is, "If we have studies going back at least ten years showing that thorough teacher training and consistent student access to adequate technology resources positively impacts student learning, why are we still struggling with how to properly implement instructional technology in our schools?"
Photo of kids at computer courtesy of edenpictures used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license agreement.
December 1, 2009
During the second week of the Teaching With Technology course, I learned the most from the research studies we read such as Michael S. Page's Technology-Enriched Classrooms: Effects on Students of Low Socioeconomic Status from the ISTE Journal of Research on Technology in Education (2002) and John Schacter's The Impact of Education Technology on Student Achievement: What the Most Current Research Has to Say from the Milken Exchange on Education Technology (1999). Page's work included an overview of prior studies of educational technology's impact on student achievement and then went on to detail his own study of the achievements and classroom interactions of 211 third and fifth grade students, half of whom were learning in classrooms that were not integrating technology, and half of whom were learning in classrooms with multiple technology resources as well as teachers who were thoroughly and continuously trained in the use of the technology they had been provided. I was encouraged by Page's findings which concluded that when compared to their counterparts in the non-technology infused classrooms, the students in the technology-enriched classrooms posted higher math achievement scores, showed higher self-esteem levels, and participated in a significantly more student-centered environment. As an educator, I have informally observed such results on a regular basis, and it is empowering to be able to point to specific research that demonstrates technology's positive impacts on student learning.Likewise, all of the summaries in Schacter's work were interesting and demonstrated various instructional benefits of educational technology. I was particularly intrigued by the West Virginia Basic Skills/Computer Education study by Dale Mann (1999) which Schacter referred to. The finding that "Consistent student access to the technology, positive attitudes towards the technology (by both teachers and students), and teacher training in the technology led to the greatest student achievement gains" (1999, p. 6) was again reaffirming what I have come to know as best practices in the use of technology in instruction. I wanted to know more specifics about the West Virginia BS/CE initiative, so I did some looking around the Milken Family Foundation Website and found West Virginia Story: Achievement Gains from a Statewide Comprehensive Instructional Technology Program (Mann et. al. 1999). Upon skimming the information, I discovered that the State of West Virginia started to infuse classrooms with computers beginning with Kindergarten classrooms in 1990-1991, and moving the initiative up one grade level during each successive year throughout the elementary grades. Teachers were thoroughly trained in the use of the technology as it was implemented. It turns out that the specific software the teachers were trained in was primarily a drill-and-practice approach aligned with West Virginia's basic skills goals, making it easy to correlate the infusion of technology and teacher training directly to increased standardized test scores. These were interesting and encouraging findings which led me to wonder if any studies had been done since the late 1990's or early 2000's on the impact of technology on student learning, particularly since it has been since 2000 that Internet use and the read/write web have become mainstream. I put a request out amongst the edtech professionals I network with on Twitter, and Teri Wilkins pointed me to Technology in Schools: What the Research Says 2009 Update, an overview of recent educational technology research which seems to be similar in design to Schacter's work. I have not had time to delve into this promising find, but I look forward to reading it and finding out what more recent studies have to say about educational technology impacts on student learning. The next question I'll be looking to answer is, "If we have studies going back at least ten years showing that thorough teacher training and consistent student access to adequate technology resources positively impacts student learning, why are we still struggling with how to properly implement instructional technology in our schools?"
Photo of kids at computer courtesy of edenpictures used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license agreement.
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