WEBLOG IV: Learning By Design: The Process is the ...uhm...Process...

Confronted with the problem of instructing educators to use a constantly evolving array of new technology and integrate it into their content area, authors Matthew Koehler and Punyashloke Mishra devised a simple paradigm, “Learning by Design”. They posit the theory that educators optimally learn new technology (especially in relation to what they teach) when they are tasked with designing (or re-designing) a project with high professional relevance, given only conceptual guidance and a minimum of dry, static instruction on using software and new media as a set of tools.

Tasking an educator to re-design an existing interface (a website for example) and letting them learn on their own what they need to accomplish the task (including how to fix problems) with a firm, unyielding deadline, is a good rudimentary way to bring a non-technologically adept student (in this case a teacher) up to speed.

As a pre-service teacher who has held at least a couple of jobs with the moniker “designer” in the title, I can appreciate the functionality and efficacy of this paradigm. Koehler and Mishra are definitely on to something in that “doing” is the best way of “learning”. Given the time demands faced by an educator during the school year, I believe that “Learning by Design” (maximum hands-on involvement, minimal lecture-based instruction on software) could be a rapid way of teaching someone how to utilize new technology in a practical way so he or she can integrate their new knowledge into the life of the classroom.

Shared Lessons: Analyzing the Supreme Court, Participating in Campaign Finance

Supreme Court exercise, adapted from That's Not Fair! Examining Civil Liberties With the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ohio Academic Content Standards: GR11 Benchmark A: 2 (See Objective below)

ISTE STANDARDS:

III. TEACHING, LEARNING, AND THE CURRICULUM.

1. facilitate technology-enhanced experiences that address content standards and student technology standards.

3. apply technology to develop students' higher order skills and creativity.

IV. ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION.

2. use technology resources to collect and analyze data, interpret results, and communicate findings to improve instructional practice and maximize student learning.

Subject: Social Studies

Topic: Trace Supreme Court decisions related to a provision of the Constitution.

Objective: Students will understand "patterns of historical continuity and change by challenging arguments of historical inevibility." by evaluating Supreme Court decisions and cases.

Procedure: Students organize in groups, chose a court case stemming from a challenge to a Constitutional amendment, or how “different choices would have led to different circumstances”.

1. Assign students “Rights of the Accused” from the Dept. of State website. Allow them to chose from a topic heading from one of the “Rights of the People” links on the page (Ch. 3, Freedom of Speech”, etc.), or one of the hot-button issues from the ACLU website as the basis of their assignment.

2. Students are to trace the evolution of a Supreme Court decision , or an issue currently in process first stating the Constitutional amendment at the core of the argument, then explaining both sides of the case, and finally examining the implications and ramifications of the conclusion (if there is one) and presenting their supposition of an alternate reality if the case had been decided in the opposite direction (or presenting both sides of a prospective conclusion).
   

Evaluation: Upon completion of the research, the students are then to compile individual papers on their assigned subjects and prepare a power-point presentation which they will then perform for the class in their groups.

Tools: Internet, Powerpoint.

LESSON II: Government: Campaign Finance Simulation (adapted from the “Campaign Finance Simulation” on the PBS By the People, Election 2004: For Kids, Parents and Teachers website.)

Gov’t: GR11-12: Benchmark A: Evaluate, take and defend positions about issues concerning the alignment of the characteristics of American Democracy with realities in the United States today. Benchmark A-2: Explain how individuals or groups, both governmental and non-governmental, influence domestic and foreign policy and evaluate how these actions reflect characteristics of American democracy.

ISTE STANDARDS:

III. TEACHING, LEARNING, AND THE CURRICULUM.

1. facilitate technology-enhanced experiences that address content standards and student technology standards.

3. apply technology to develop students' higher order skills and creativity.

4. manage student learning activities in a technology-enhanced environment.

IV. ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION.

2. use technology resources to collect and analyze data, interpret results, and communicate findings to improve instructional practice and maximize student learning.

Subject: Government

Topic: Campaign Finance.

Objective: Students will gain an understanding of how special interest groups interact with the democratic process by participating in a simulation which will allow them to personally experience the mechanics of campaign finance.

Procedures:

Preparation

1. For homework the students will research a PAC and a political issue of “special interest” within a certain range of choices.
2. The class will vote on the issue to be used for the simulation. (A bill to be passed)
3. The class will be divided into roles of real candidates and voters. Those assigned politician roles will prepare brief bios on real politicians on both sides of an issue (Politician role-players will be informed that they are not bound to their real life counterparts in how they will vote on the issue.)
4. Voters will prepare brief bios on the PACS on each side of an issue. Research is internet based.
5. Voters will be assigned to take one side or the other of an argument.

Simulation

Round I

Politicians and PAC members will be split up into opposing forces (for and against a certain issue).

1. Teacher restates the issue to be voted on.
2. Voters are tasked with voting to get the bill passed for their assigned “side”.
3. Voters are issued a “voting record” template (will vote in favor of, probably will, maybe, maybe not, definitely not). Voting records will be kept on Excel spreadsheets. Each Voter is responsible for maintaining their own individual record through all phases of the exercise.
4. Voters are organized into groups of mixed positions, and are given 5 minutes each with the candidate to try and convince him to vote their way.
5. Voting records will be scored and averaged so students will see how they might judge whether a candidate might or might not vote on a certain issue.

Round II

1. Candidates are informed that the acceptance of a donation implies they will vote a certain way. The total amounts of donations in specific camps will determine how they vote on the issue.

2. Voters are issued $2000 (in $100 denominations) in “Monopoly” money each.

1. Voters are told they can only give $1000 maximum to each political candidate.
2. Voters and Candidates meet again. Candidates are instructed that they are trying to raise as much money for their campaign as possible.
3. Candidates are again assessed for how they will vote on a particular issue as promised when they receive money from Voters.
4. All students assess the voting records to see if the introduction of money changed any of the voting records.
5. Candidates will record how much money they acquired through donations on Excel.

Round III

1. Voters can now form groups up to 3 to canvass Candidates for support of their issues and donate money. Same $1000 limit/voter applies. Some voters should be instructed to act individually. Voting records are kept again.
2. Voting records are then assessed to see if groups of students had any more influence the candidates than when they were in individual groups.
3. A winner will be declared
4. Candidates who had the best voting record will explain their strategies for accruing the most money.

Evaluation: Students will then briefly examine the dynamics of the process in a paper, relate their experiences and include a segment on how a real PAC influenced a certain issue (through using internet research.)

Tools: Internet, Excel, "Monopoly" money.

WEBLOG III: The Brave "New" World of Technology in the Classroom: Detractors and Champions...

The central message of Tierny, Bond and Bresler’s Examining Literate Lives as Students Engage with Multiple Literacies is that new technologies are at once expanding possibilities in the classroom, are easily being assimilated by young students and are also meeting resistance from teachers who find these new opportunities to be nonessential to the mission of education. Literate Lives ends with an exhortation to educators not to eschew the potential of new technologies in the classroom.

The impression I got from the Tierny article was that the resistance among certain teachers evolves from the feeling that the integration of multi-media implements in the learning process are just “bells and whistles”. Colin Mulberg in his article ("Just Don't Ask Me to Define It': Perceptions of Technology in the National Curriculum") counters that judgement by proposing that “new” technology has always been a part of education, and that it has always been controversial. Mulberg rejects the idea that technology is simply a superfluous element, but is interwoven in all facets of the human experience, and therefore should have a rightful place in the world of education.

I tend to agree with Mulberg’s viewpoint, but understand the response of traditionally trained teachers who must feel overwhelmed with the perceived difficulty of mastering new media.

*'Just Don't Ask Me to Define It': Perceptions of Technology in the National Curriculum, by Colin MulbergPublished by Oxford University Press

Date accessed 060407

Spreadsheets on FIRE: How I would integrate Excel into the Classroom

In accordance with the ISTE NETS guidance for integrating technology into the classroom with a student centered approach, I've identified a couple of novel ways to use spreadsheets in a Social Studies/History Class context. Both exercises are statistically based. The first exercise would need substantial refitting to be compatible for the Ohio DOE Social Studies Academic Content Standards.

First off is the interesting exercise called "An Unusual Incident", from the Queensland public school system. The exercise entails the study of data organized on a spreadsheet to discern what patterns are evident in the data that would identify the specific incident.

While this exercise doesn't entail the explicit usage of Excel but rather a pre-made spreadsheet, it could be adapted to be an "example", before allowing the students (in groups, or individually) to create their own data sets surrounding an incident they've studied recently (a Civil War battle, population patterns in the first year after the implementation of the Homestead Act, etc.). Upon completion, the groups could exchange their data sets (created with Excel) with each other, in order to try and guess the event.

Second, is an interesting exercise called the Amazing Autobiography, and is brought to us by the Microsoft Corporation. Though the Amazing Autobiography is meant to be a language arts exercise, if adapted, it could help address Ohio Benchmark Standards that require comparative thinking, such as the guidance set forth in Benchmark/Indicator C (Gr. 9-10) ("Analyze the connections between World War II, the Cold War and contemporary conflicts").

The Amazing Autobiography is originally intended to help students understand narrative writing, first by examining the autobiographies of famous personages, and then following suit using Excel and Powerpoint as media for a similar presentation.

The Excel component requires students to map out their own lives, with a timeline composed of Milestones from their own lives.

This could be adapted into a Social Studies history (for example) by having the students map out the lives of John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and Ho Chi Minh- to see what types of milestones occurred in each of their lives, providing perhaps some type of basis for a further discussion on how formative events shaped their personalities and leadership styles.

Furthermore, Excel timeline mapping could track the shape of conflicts, and be "superimposed" on the governmental policy decisions of the Superpowers to show how future conflicts are shaped. For example, regarding Kennedy, The Bay of Pigs failure could be linked to a weakening of the relationship between the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the President (POTUS). This could then be coupled with a timeline measurement of the strengthening between the relationship of the POTUS the Secretary of Defense (SecDef)...and could also be used as a basis for comparison to examine how decision making processes occurred between the JCS, SecDef and POTUS in regards to the planning of tail end, and post-Cold War conflicts, such as the Operation Eagle Claw (Iranian hostage rescue attempt), Grenada, the American intervention in the Kosovo conflict, and the planning of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom I.

P.S.(Not to mention tracking how Soviet policy in Afghanistan from the Cold War on up, partially created the conditions for the accession of the Taliban.)

P.P.S.! (Also! You could track milestones of diplomatic engagement between the USA, USSR and the Middle East from WWII through to right now! Tengo el entusiasmo! )




OK. It's a bit of a stretch, but I'm sure with some planning, it could work.

See you in class,
H

Down in the Deep, Dark, Mines: Technology among the Classrooms of St. Pancake High

(St. Pancake High is a pseudonym for the inner-city Catholic high school where I had my pre-pre-student teaching placement last semester. I gave it a pseudonym so I could use constructive criticism without restraint. I call it "St. Pancake High", because My father's second wife grew up in that neighborhood, and during the 1980's, we often joined her father there for the school's annual pancake breakfast.)

This post will examine and address the integration of technology at St. Pancake High School, in the light of the National Education Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS-T).

By the time I'd started pre-pre-student teaching at St. Pancake High, I had only visited one school- an affluent private school for girls- that had any significant infusion of technology within the classroom. Obviously, the parents, alumni, administration and staff of The Plaid Skirt School for Girls (another pseudonym) were enthusiastically onboard with technology. Suffice to say, computer labs and laptops were abundant. Unfortunately I didn't get much of a chance to observe how they were integrated into the academic life of the school.

The other schools I'd observed were an urban/suburban school with absolutely no apparent technological integration in the classroom, save a VCR and a television for video viewing, and an inner-city school with at least a smattering of desktop computers scattered throughout the school, and one (small) dedicated lab.

Therefore you can imagine my shock when on my first day at St. Pancake, where I observed a class on the Jazz-Age, interactively taught to them by video-conference by a professor at a nearby music conservatory. WOW. Did I mention the interactivity? Despite some of the technical glitches the conservatory professor was leading a regular class- she was asking "guided inquiry" types of questions trying to provoke the students to apply what they'd been taught about the era, and fielded questions with a depth commensurate with her academic pedigree.

All of the classrooms at St. Pancake had at least one desktop computer per teacher, a Smartboard and laptops available for class projects, of which I only witnessed the class conduct two projects.

The laptops were kept in a rolling, locked cabinet in the hallway. While I am not sure how computer-time was allotted to the teachers, I assume there must have been a sign-up sheet or something to allow for the deconfliction of scheduling problems.

The first assignment I witnessed was a research project. The students were tasked with finding information in order to augment a multi-class inter-disciplinary project combining theological and historical information. I admit I was not paying too much attention at how the teacher managed the experience; however I did help a one particular student conduct his research by asking him a series of questions on how to re-frame his search criteria after his initial queries were unsuccessful in unearthing information relevant to his task.

The second project involved the students working through an interactive interface on a history website about the Industrial Revolution. The students were given a handout, and were tasked with navigating through the multimedia interface in small groups, to discover the meaning of certain terms and historical facts. The page itself "simulated" a descent into a mine, and was perhaps very instructive in that the students learned (through coupling information with imagery) about the limits and capabilities of Industrial Revolution-era technology in raw material extraction. The teacher's involvement was "minimal" during the class-period- allowing the students to go about the task with light guidance- but all of his pedagogical work was mostly in his pre-evaluation of the website and the development of the handout to guide the students through the project. The handout of course, was the assessment tool through which he could gauge the efficacy of the how the website provided information relevant to the curriculum he was tasked with teaching.

For me personally, the availability of technology in the classroom was indispensable. I created a series of power-point presentations which I utilized during lessons. On the negative side, I believe I may have become too dependent on their usage, but on the positive side, I've found that coupling information with imagery was a highly successful way of getting a complex point across (however, I don't have any "control group" information to compare it to). For example, during a lesson on Imperialism, I had the students analyze and assess a Kipling poem, and two cartoons from Punch contemporary to the era. Though I have no way of evaluating this statement, I believe that had they not had a series of visuals and snippets of information flashing away on the Smartboard, they may not have internalized as much information as quickly if I had been droning away without it. During the seatwork which I integrated into the lesson, they certainly demonstrated they had processed what I'd presented.

Though scant, I believe "my" students and I had a positive experience with integrating technology and curriculum. I dread having to go out into the real world and running the risk of not being able to work at a school with a minimal amount of technology in the classroom.

I used the cartoon above- from Punch, 21 April, 1894, to encourage the students at St. Pancake to look for evidence of paternalism evident in the popular mind of Britain, in its acquisition of new colonies.

PSYOPS and InfoWar: Beyond Tactical Leafleting.

We all know that the center of gravity for any irregular conflict is the effort to seperate the population from the terrorists...

In this threat environment that's an extremely tall order given that the opposing force(s) have demands that are diametrically opposed to our foreign policies (the existence of Israel, energy security) and fundamentals of our society (personal freedom) how do we seperate an Islamic world largely hostile to American behavior, and firmly entrenched in their belief systems, from even tacit support of terrorism?

Is there any prescription for success? Can we adress any of the issues of the Islamic world that fuel terrorism?

Are we even trying?

Early in the GWOT, the Dept. of State attempted to push public diplomacy initiatives that would spread education in the Islamic world, but the effort was underfunded and it lingers in obscurity.

I guess the big question is, are there any success stories with Islamic world countries "de-radicalizing" adherents to Jihadist philosophies?

Do you have any ideas? Discuss!

M-16 /M4 v. the 416

Any of you folks up on the M-16 vs. HK416 debate?

Essentially, the firing mechanism for the M4 (designed originally for the M-16) has been reviled since it's inception. At bottom, the mechanism enables significant carbon fouling in the barrel, which promotes frequent jamming. One Silver Star winner (OIF I) had to surrender to Iraqi Troops because his M-16 kept jamming at critical moments, and eventually became inoperable.

Recently a US Army Special Forces battalion caused a huge brouhaha because it announced it's intentions to procure upper receiver assemblies (designed for the HK416) to modify their M4's that are infinitely more reliable than the M-16's 40 year old technology. Trials show that these 416 assemblies can pump out thousands and thousands more rounds before failure.

Shouldn't regular grunts be afforded the same luxury?

Should we balk at spending $1BLN on something extremely practical, while we pump funding into fighter aircraft for dogfights that aren't happening right now?

I'm all for staying a generation ahead of any peer competitor in air combat...but I think we could sacrifice a jump in air-to-air combat capability, to switch out our fleet of crappy rifle upper receiver assemblies. (It's not even a new gun! It's just the freakin' assembly!)

Discuss.

Remember, I heard it first in The Danger Room.

The 416 in action...(I think the "functionality issues" one of the evaluators was discussing regarded the trade-off of range and muzzle velocity that was lost with the transition from the long-barrel M-16 to the short-barrel M4. If I remember correctly, that was the big reason the Marines retained the M-16 as their service rifle...if the 416 could redress that issue...wow...)