Summary of Learning

Just finished my reflection on the things that I have learned throughout the course in the form of a Google Slideshow! You can find it here! Thanks to anyone who has followed my journey so far!

Major Digital Project Update #7 - Completed WebQuest

I have finished my WebQuest on perspective in Colonial America! You can view my final product here. 

A few ideas shifted between my last post and the actual completion of the project. I realized in the development phase of my WebQuest that instead of having my students research multiple perspectives within the course of the week, I would prefer them to fully grasp and develop a single perspective. I also wanted to incorporate a different form of expression into my WebQuest, so instead of having students complete two different RAFT writing exercises, I had them complete one comic strip and one RAFT writing activity. Both the digital comic and the RAFT writing activity focus on developing an understanding of Colonial American perspective leading up to the Revolution. I ultimately wanted students to understand the frustrations that Colonial Americans faced during the lead up to the Revolution, and I wanted them to be able to express and defend those positions thoughtfully and in their own words.

Additionally, I was able to find more video resources for my students to access, so that they had a combination of picture, written and video media to learn from when conducting their resource. Ultimately, I think that this combination of material will best suit my students as they guide their own research on the topics provided.

Since I incorporated the Comic into my WebQuest, I was able to access another form of technology as well! I decided to use the Make Beliefs Comic creator that I wrote about in my Cool Tool Review section a couple weeks ago. I was glad that I was able to use a resource that I learned about during class into my final project!

At the end of the day, I was able to utilize multiple technologies to create a unique learning experiece for my students. I was able to utilize:

• Internet
• Social Media: Twitter
• YouTube 
• Make Beliefs Comic Creator
• Google Docs
• Google Slides
• Email

I am proud of the final product I was able to come up with throughout the duration of this course, and I hope that my WebQuest will be a useful resource in other classrooms as well! Thanks for reading!

Major Project Update #6 Incorporating Tech

Now that I have hammered out the direction of my WebQuest and shown how it aligns to various 8th grade content standards, I would like to try and incorporate more technologies into my students WebQuest assignment.

I thought that it might be a good idea to have my students use Google Docs as their word processor for the WebQuest. Google Docs is an essential resource for many professionals, myself included, and I think it would be a wonderful resource for my students to become acquainted with.

There is an excellent how-to guide located here for Google Docs. Throughout the course of the WebQuest, I will make sure to direct my students to this guide in order to get them started with their own Google Docs account incase they don't already have one. Once my students become familiar with Google Docs, they will be able to store their writing in Google Docs so that they can work on it across multiple days until they complete their work.

So far, that means that they will be using the computer to perform research on the internet, and Google Docs to process and save their writing.

Finally, I would like my students to share their writing when they are finished on social media via Twitter. I will show them this guide on how to create and use a Twitter account if they do not already have one. The point of sharing on Twitter is so that my students can read and respond to other students work! There is an excellent piece on the importance of students publishing and sharing their work online here.

Major Project Update #5 - Incorporating Standards

I have decided that my project will be developed for an 8th grade classroom and incorporate 8th grade US History content standards into the lessons. I actually decided this much longer ago mentally, but I am finally committing it to writing in order to show my process in developing the WebQuest. In order to view the 8th grade Ohio content standards, I headed to the ODE website here.

As you can see, the study of colonial America fits in perfectly with the 8th grade US History course description as seen below.

"The historical focus continues in the eighth grade with the study of European exploration and the early years of the United States. This study incorporates all four social studies strands into a chronologic view of the development of the United States. Students examine how historic events are shaped by geographic, social, cultural, economic and political factors."

There are at least 4 8th Grade US History content standards that will relate directly to my WebQuest. 

1. Primary and secondary sources are used to examine events from multiple perspectives and to present and defend a position. 
2. The ideas of the Enlightenment and dissatisfaction with colonial rule led English colonist to write the Declaration of Independence and launch the American Revolution. 
3. Informed citizens understand how media and communication technology influence public opinion. 
4. Americans began to develop a common national identity among its diverse regional and cultural populations based on democratic ideals. 

Since my students will be writing during their WebQuest, the WebQuest also touches on 8th grade Language Arts standards for writing narratives, which can be found here. I've written the narrative content standard for 8th grade language arts below. 

W.8.3 Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well- structured event sequences.

• Engage and orient the reader by establishing a context and point of view and introducing a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally and logically.
• Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, description, and reflection, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.
• Use a variety of transition words, phrases, and clauses to convey sequence, signal shifts from one time frame or setting to another, and show the relationships among experiences and events.
• Use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language to capture the action and convey experiences and events. 
• Provide a conclusion that follows from and reflects on the narrated experiences or events. 

There is even an 8th grade language arts content standard for using the internet to produce writing!

W.8.6 Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and present the relationships between information and ideas efficiently, as well as to interact and collaborate with others

And finally, this WebQuest supports the 8th grade language arts content standard that asks students to draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis and reflection. 

W.8.9 Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. 

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Major Project Update #4 - RAFT Writing

Hello again! Finally back from Thanksgiving break and ready to turn the corner for the final stretch of the semester. Picking up where I left off earlier in November, I would like to narrow down the focus of the WebQuest I am developing. The potential avenues I listed last time included:

1. Choose a historical figure and complete a character study
2. Raft writing activity - Students put themselves in the shoes of a historical figure and write from their perspective
3. Analyze historical cause and effect relationships
4. Compare and contrast the perspective of the British with the perspective of the American Colonists
5. Assess the validity of various resources
6. Analyze primary source documents such as posters, newspaper clippings and letters.

Going forward, I will be focusing the development of the WebQuest on exploring the differences in perspective in colonial America, focusing primarily on the differences between the British and the Americans. In order for students to display their understanding of colonial perspective, they will be completing two raft writing exercises, one from the perspective of the British, and the other from the Perspective of the Americans. 

Raft writing, as described here, is a "writing strategy that helps students understand their role as a writer and how to communicate their ideas so that the audience understands what is written. 
By using this strategy, teachers encourage students to write creatively, to consider a topic from multiple perspectives, and to gain the ability to write for different audiences.RAFT assignments encourage students to uncover their own voices and formats for presenting their ideas about content information they are studying."

Raft Writing stands for: 

• Role of the Writer: Who are you as the writer? A movie star? The President? A plant?

• Audience: To whom are you writing? A senator?  Yourself? A company?

• Format: In what format are you writing? A diary entry? A newspaper?  A love letter?

• Topic: What are you writing about?

The students that I work with at the YMCA Phoenix program do not usually love writing assignments, but they do respond fairly well to RAFT writing. They enjoy thinking creatively and making up their own narratives, so I think that the RAFT writing activity will work well in the context of developing historical colonial perspectives for my WebQuest. 

Week 12 Reflection - Blended Learning

According to the Blended Learning Toolkit, an open source resource for educators, blended learning is "where a portion of the traditional face-to-face instruction is replaced by web-based online learning." I have taken a few classes at the University of Akron that utilized blended learning as a part of their curriculum, so I have some personal experience with blended learning to reflect on.

I, personally, have never been a fan of blended learning. I get much more out of a classroom setting with a professor and classmates to feed off of. Simply put, when no one is watching me, I have an extremely difficult time staying on task and doing things the way I am supposed to do them. It is pretty funny for a teacher to have this personality quality, but I do. I don't operate well by myself in front of a computer. I do much better when I am surrounded by people in a real life social scenario. 

I also work in the field of special education, where most of my students will need one to one attention, and few will be able to navigate an online learning scenario independently. That being said, I do think that blended learning does offer some more independent students with disabilities increased access to learning environments - which is great. All in all, I am very skeptical of blended learning.  I think it can be useful for some people in some scenarios, but I am going to stick to my guns here and say that I think most of the time, face to face learning, when possible, is a superior option to learning online. 

This article on eschool news does a great job of illustrating why some blended learning situations don't work out very well. I think it is true that sometimes the staff doesn't feel invested in a blended learning situation, so it falls through. Likewise, students may not feel invested in a blending learning situation, which can also cause it to fall through. In addition to motivation issues, sometimes technology just gets in the way and causes problems for the whole thing, halting learning in the process. 

Honestly, I have not enjoyed any of the blending learning class situations I have been a part of so far, so it is hard for me to imagine a scenario where I would feel invested in one. I have also had an extraordinarily difficult time investing myself fully into the online classes I have been required to take for my major here at the University of Akron. Whenever I think of blended learning or online classes, I think of my students that have conditions like ADD or ADHD and try to imagine them applying themselves to a blended learning environment. I think that one of my biggest issues is that attending class within the realm of a computer screen feels extremely limiting to me. I hate having to stare into a computer screen to learn. I am much more of an experiential learner myself, and I know that many of my children are as well. Perhaps my feelings on blended learning will change when one day blended learning classes can be attended using virtual reality, so that the online sessions feel more immersive. I could actually imagine that being pretty cool, but for now, I am simply not a fan. 

Major Project Update #3 - Historical Thinking

I am still the process of developing my WebQuest for my major digital project. I have collected a multitude of online resources for my WebQuest and have now started brainstorming various activities that I can have my students complete to direct their own learning. I am planning the WebQuest to last a week, and I have a lot of ideas for potential assignments, so it has occurred to me that I will need to pair down my ideas into a more concise task that students can realistically work through in a weeks time. According to WebQuest.org, "a real WebQuest....

• is wrapped around a doable and interesting task that is ideally a scaled down version of things that adults do as citizens or workers.

• requires higher level thinking, not simply summarizing. This includes synthesis, analysis, problem-solving, creativity and judgment. 

• makes good use of the web. A WebQuest that isn't based on real resources from the web is probably just a traditional lesson in disguise. (Of course, books and other media can be used within a WebQuest, but if the web isn't at the heart of the lesson, it's not a WebQuest.) 

• isn't a research report or a step-by-step science or math procedure. Having learners simply distilling web sites and making a presentation about them isn't enough. 

• isn't just a series of web-based experiences. Having learners go look at this page, then go play this game, then go here and turn your name into hieroglyphs doesn't require higher level thinking skills and so, by definition, isn't a WebQuest."

I think that it is important that I take these qualifications into consideration when crafting my own WebQuest. I liked the emphasis that WebQuest.org places on developing "realistic tasks" or scaled down versions of adult tasks for students to complete. So I asked myself, what kind of tasks should I be preparing for my students in order for them to emulate the thinking of a historian? This got me researching the idea of developing students to be historical thinkers. Hitsory.org states that, "Historical thinking is complex and multi-faceted; we focus on five key aspects particularly relevant to the K-12 classroom." These are, understanding multiple accounts &perspectives, analyzing primary sources, sourcing, understanding historical context, and connecting claim and evidence. Using these foundations of historical thinking as a springboard, I have brainstormed various assignments that could be a good fit for my WebQuest. 

1. Choose a historical figure and complete a character study
2. Raft writing activity - Students put themselves in the shoes of a historical figure and write from their perspective
3. Analyze historical cause and effect relationships
4. Compare and contrast the perspective of the British with the perspective of the American Colonists
5. Assess the validity of various resources
6. Analyze primary source documents such as posters, newspaper clippings and letters.