How will you use these technology applications to improve learning experiences for your students and/or improve your own practice?
I picked a few of my favorites to talk about in this section:
Productivity Tools (Word to .pdf and Google Calendar): I currently use and will continue to use the Word (and PPT) to .pdf format extensively in my classroom. I find that students encounter much fewer problems downloading and/or opening files on Moodle when the files are in .pdf format. And now that I’ve found some tools that can convert a .pdf file to another format that could be edited, that might end up being even more helpful since students could now download a .pdf file I have and convert it into something they can edit. I also liked the idea of a Google Calendar. I’ve entertained the idea before, but I think that it might be something that I would be willing to try next semester or next year. I think that visually seeing due dates on the calendar (rather than just listed on the board or on a unit overview sheet) can be extremely helpful for some students.
Research Tools (MEL and the citation tools): I think that I knew about MEL before, but never really explored there. We have Infotrac at school, so it seems like a lot of the same data bases were there. But MEL had so much more. I think that is reason enough for me to start requiring that all my student research projects use mostly articles and sources from MEL rather than just a “blind search” on the internet.
RSS (Google Reader): Since I learned about the RSS concept and iGoogle/Google Reader last summer, I’ve been very intrigued with the idea of trying to incorporate RSS subscriptions into a “current events/biology in the news” type of ongoing assignment. And even if I don’t use it for a class assignment, I think that using if for my personal and professional life would be nice. There are lots of great blogs out there that I could subscribe to and just try to carve out a few minutes here and there to skim through the headlines to see if I wanted to learn more.
Virtual Classrooms (Moodle and Face of the Classroom site): I already have a Moodle classroom for the courses I teach. But, as I mentioned before, I am very intrigued with the idea of creating a separate website/face of the classroom site that would send students to Moodle for some assignments/tools/references, but would allow a little more flexibility with incorporating other types of content in a more visual way.
Visual Tools (Wordle/Tagxedo): Love Wordle! Not quite sure how to use them in my class, but I will continue to try to find ways. Even if it was a fun little optional activity that was included at the end of an assignment that students might finish early, it would be fun to see what students could create with all the varieties of vocabulary that come up in Biology and Anatomy & Physiology.
Screencasting: I really hate trying to annotate a screencast and abhor listening to myself in the recording, but I think there is real value to these. I think that I will be creating a few of these over Christmas break and using them right away (since I have jury duty). I can also see tremendous value with adding these to assignments that require specifics on the computer or things that students just don’t always understand right away. Then students can go back and watch the video on their time and as many times as they need (and pause when needed) to make sure that they understand the concept. I can also see some potential for recording parts of lab activities that are hard to understand (or make up if absent) and figuring out a way to screencast/podcast or some combination of the two so that they would be available after that particular class period is over.
What effective teaching and learning strategy(ies), based on the work by Marzano (http://gets.gc.k12.va.us/VSTE/2008/ ) will these technology applications address, to make a difference in the learning experience for your students?
Summarizing and Note-taking: The productivity tools (file conversions, etc...) and research tools (MEL and the citation tools) would definitely address these strategies.
Homework and Practice: I think that the research tools, the virtual classroom, and the screen casting tools would help and assist students as the complete their homework and practice their learning.
Cues, questions, and advance organizers: The productivity tools, the virtual classroom, the visual tools, and the screencasting could all contribute to this strategy.
Cooperative learning: The virtual classroom is an obvious method to address cooperative learning. However, I can see opportunities for cooperative learning to happen within most of the activities. Group research, group projects requiring screencasting as an outcome, etc... are examples of how these other “things” could also contribute to cooperative learning.
Nonlinguistic Representations: The visual tools (Wordle, Tagxedo, etc...) and the screencasting are wonderful examples of nonlinguistic representations. I find that sometimes I spend way too much time trying to write out directions for how to complete something on the computer. However, if I just took a quick 5 minutes to screencast the thing that I’m trying to explain, I would spend less time with it and students would understand it right away.
Choose one of the seven things and describe an activity or lesson you could use in your classroom. Include in the description how the lesson meets either a Michigan curriculum standard or another Educational Technology standard.
Since I was so excited about the screencast that I made and how I could actually use that right away in my classroom, I’m going to describe the activity that I will use that for (although, this may sound very similar to the posting I made for Thing #21...oh well...). As a part of our cell division unit (which leads right into our genetics unit), One of the activities that I've had students do is to look at an onion root tip under the microscope and identify the stages of the cell cycle/mitosis each of the cells is in. Students do okay with this, but not all students always understand what they are looking at. So, in addition to actually manipulating the microscope to look at cells, I found an interactive web site that shows images of cells in various stages of the cell cycle/mitosis, asks students to pick which stage the cell is in, and then provides feedback for students on whether or not their choice was correct. I find that even though I think that the directions I’ve included for how to navigate through the site are very clear (obviously, I wrote them!), I have lots and lots of questions every year about simple navigation tasks. Therefore, I made a screencast describing the simple steps of navigating through the site. I hope that this will make things more clear for my students and cut back on my frustration level regarding having to answer “the same question” over and over :)
Michigan Curriculum Standard Covered:
B4.3A: Compare and contrast the processes of cell division (mitosis and meiosis), particularly as those processes relate to production of new cells and to passing on genetic information between generations.
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