Reflections on Educational Technology

[kmusachiaeducator]

Implementation EdTech #5

Guiding Questions:

Did any of the NETS surprise you? Particularly social, ethical, and human issues or problem-solving and decision making skills?

Did any of the levels of technology integration (or evolution) as described by the ACOT, LoTi, NCES, TLC, or the Chicago Consortium studies bear any surprise to you?

As an instructional technology leader, where do you think your teaching practices would fall in any of the described levels of technology integration? Are you surprised to find yourself at a higher or lower level than you thought was "the norm"?

In the results of this study, did any school level or subject area differences surprise you?

How about the limitations or concluding remarks? Anything surprising there?

I know this is probably silly to admit, but I didn't realize that Texas had a requirement for a technology course in order for students to graduate. This course must be taught at the middle school or younger level, because my district doesn't offer any computer classes at the high school level (regardless of need). I'm wondering if Texas would be better off if they also had a computer-literacy test like some other states require in order for students to prove their proficiency in computer skills. I know that I have encountered a lot of students who cannot type very well or very quickly. A lot of students remark about how quickly they think I type, but I don't think it's very fast! I think that there is a generational shift, where my students are learning to type on phones or tablets, I learned to type on a keyboard. In order to learn to type quickly, you had to let your hands memorize the keys, but that is not the case with smartphones that have swiping keyboards! I have many most students who can type on a phone faster than on a chromebook. I'm thinking that maybe increasing the amount of computer-literacy classes or teaching we do might be beneficial as technology becomes more and more necessary in today's career fields.

As for the findings of this study, I was surprised by a few of them. First, I was a little surprised to find that elementary teachers are more likely to integrate technology into their curriculum. I had figured that secondary teachers would be more likely since computers can be a difficult and complicated skill, however I recognize the need to expose younger students to technology early in order to get them familiar and acquainted with their use. I also recognize that it is more customary now to give younger students technology like tablets, phones, and computers than it was when I was going through elementary school, so perhaps that caused a change. I was also a little shocked to find that high school teachers were not using the internet for problem-solving as much as elementary and middle school. I figured that most high school teachers were trying to use the internet for any tasks they could. The research use lined up with my expectations, but I hadn't considered measuring for any other factors beyond communication and research. I am curious about what the problem-solving really meant in terms of classroom use.

My last surprise was that the ELA teachers in the study, overall, used technology on a less than average basis. I think that this shocked me because I have been teaching at a school that really pushes technology to the point where we don't even get to make paper copies much anymore. In my case, I wanted to integrate technology into my classroom before I had a requirement, which made me feel like, as an ELA teacher, I was doing my best to integrate tech in the classroom or at least seek out opportunities to do so. I can understand why some teachers might be reluctant to pick it up since writing by hand is a time-honored tradition in a lot of ELA classrooms. I thought about the difficulty of annotating on a computer or of doing a quickwrite based on a prompt and realized that these were likely the practices that many ELA teachers were reluctant to give up in favor of using technology.

[kmusachiaeducator]

Final Reflection on Web 2.0 Tools in the Classroom

Parting is such sweet sorrow! 

I have certainly enjoyed my time in my Web 2.0 class and it is already making a big impact on my teaching. A lot of the tools I’ve discovered in this class have already made a showing in my classroom and in trainings I give around my district. I thought I knew a lot before, but it’s clear I only knew the tip of the iceberg. I gained a lot of great insight into how to improve my own skills when it comes to educational technology and how to work with others in order to evaluate that technology for my own classroom. 

I think that integrating web 2.0 tools into my classroom is a lot less difficult and scary due to some of the aspects we have learned in class. I like the idea of only tackling 1-2 new pieces of technology per year in order to really be able to explore the capabilities of each one. I have been looking at Google Classroom this year for the first time and I think that if I had been trying to integrate too many types of tech in my class, I wouldn’t have been able to really understand Google Classroom, especially considering Google Classroom changes from time to time over the course of the year. I think it is important to remember that tech tools need to change how learning happens, not just replace old practices. For example, to simply use Google Docs as a replacement for paper and pencil is a misuse of this technology. Google Docs is best used as a collaborative tool. The comment feature and feedback options are what make Google Docs an improvement on past teaching practices using pen and paper. With successful integration, web 2.0 tools can really change a classroom into an environment where students use each other’s expertise and the wide array of information on the internet in order to gain new insight into topics. 

I think that, after seeing so many tools through this class, I have a good idea of what a good web 2.0 tool should offer a classroom. With the help of the rubric we made and my ability to make a new rubric for my class, I can take a look at these new tools coming out and really see how useful they might be to my high school ELA classroom. I know that I value a tool that is collaborative, easy to learn, and visually appealing. I also value tools that integrate well with Google Classroom. These are just a few things that I’ll look for in future tools and I’m sure that will change as time goes by. 

Personally, I’d probably like to avoid any tools that are too curriculum-specific. For example, IXL began as a math program to help students, but recently added an ELA component. Until it added ELA, I definitely wouldn’t have used this technology in my classroom. I also put a much higher value on technology that allows for many different content-areas. I also probably will avoid any technology aimed towards younger students. However, I have found that some of these tools can be useful even for secondary education. For example, after seeing a demonstration of SeeSaw from another member of my class, I think it might be a great way of keeping in contact with parents at my school and in my district. Since we have a bit of a problem keeping parents engaged with school, I can see this tool really turning things around for us. 

I’m really excited to put some of these new tools to use and to learn even more about web 2.0 in the future!

[kmusachiaeducator]

Vanity Search 2.0 (Get it? Web 2.0?)

Okay, the second go-around with this activity might have spooked me more than the last one! My digital footprint changed a bit, but I also did a more extensive search than I had done my first time, so I found a lot more detail in public records of my life (including my ADDRESS!?) online. 

As last time, I started with a simple search of my own name in quotations. My name is very unique, so I don’t often find anything other than links related to me when I search it. This can be both a blessing and a curse. I know that I can be found online easily by just looking for my name. I know that people could access my phone number, emails, and now I’ve found my physical address. I’m unsure about HOW that information got online, since I don’t recognize the websites, but I know it’s there. That was definitely a scary feeling. Besides this, I was happy to see that my LinkedIn page is still the first item that comes up. 

I went through almost all of the pages that popped up for my name this time, as it didn’t seem too taxing to do so before moving on to another type of search. This time, since I have been in this class, I found my YouTube pages! This was exciting to me, because I hadn’t attached my name to any YouTube account before. Since I mostly liked educational videos and videos about growing peppers on my YouTube for this class, I’m comfortable with this being public information! I’m sure someone is selling it somewhere online...

The next new addition was my Padlet! I was also surprised to see this, but know that it wouldn’t do any harm. All of my pads on Padlet are private, so it simply shows that I have an account. This is another newer technology that I’ve begun using with the introduction of this class, so I’m happy to see it as part of my digital footprint. 

Next, I went to the pictures and video tabs. The pictures tab still had pictures from GoodReads and Etsy, but the video tab showed a couple of YouTube channels that I subscribed to when we did our YouTube adventure! I thought that was a neat new addition as well. 

I did two subsequent searches in order to see what would come up, which isn’t something I had done last time I did my Vanity Search. First, I searched along with my current location in Texas, then I did a teacher search. The location search didn’t show too much more, mostly just a website my sister uses since she is a graphic designer. The teacher search actually showed some results from my district when I went to board meetings to accept grant awards. 

Overall, there wasn’t TOO much added in this time, but I was mostly pleased by what I had found (except my address...). I know that, over time, my digital footprint will continue to change and grow as I continue to teach and hopefully become a librarian! I’m looking forward to those changes!

[kmusachiaeducator]

Reflection on Implementing Personal Professional Development in Web 2.0 and Learning

Hello again!

As my class starts to draw to a close, we have been tasked with reflecting on how we intend to continue this learning process with Web 2.0 as educators. This is a process that, for me, began before my ETEC527 class, and likely will continue after it ends. While being in this class, I have encountered and explored a few different tools that I likely wouldn’t have discovered, which I am grateful for! However, since I am at a technology-centric campus this year, I have been carefully exploring all types of tools aimed at Web 2.0 for my classroom all year.

One of the best ways that I’ve found for discovering new things is Twitter. I say “things” because, of course, Twitter can help you discover more than just Web 2.0 tools and resources. I certainly intend to keep following the ETEC527 hashtag in order to follow up with new posts, but I also subscribed to the search for “educational technology” on my TweetDeck and scroll through it regularly to look for new ideas. Twitter is one of the best places (besides, maybe, word of mouth) to find new resources for my classroom. Seeing other classes that use different technology is a great motivator for using these resources in my own. For example, after going to a workshop with Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher, I was inspired to use FlipGrid in my classroom. They used it for so many different assignments in their classrooms that I found my motivation and finally used it for a drama assignment in my own classroom. I’m looking forward to using it for revision and editing as well as book reviews next year. It was through Twitter that I initially discovered FlipGrid, but seeing other teachers use it successfully in their classrooms was what really convinced me of how great of a tool it could be. 

That brings me to another great way to continue the learning from this class: the evaluation tools. Since there are so many tools out there for Web 2.0, many people have trouble keeping up with and deciding which tools to actually use in their own classrooms. While it would be amazing to be able to use and test out every tool you encounter, the reality of that is not feasible. Instead, one of the best ideas I’ve gotten out of this class is to create an evaluation rubric for Web 2.0 tools and keep it handy when encountering and evaluating new tools for my classroom. I know that I can create my own rubric easily and cater it to the needs of my classroom as a high school ELA teacher since I’ve done so with others before. By using a rubric that I’ve created for my own needs, I can easily decipher which tools will be worth my time to really buy in to. I hope to continue encountering new tools throughout my teaching career and even altering my own rubric year to year as my profession changes and grows. 

Another tool from this class that I think has been incredibly helpful is Diigo. While, initially, I was hesitant to embrace Diigo as a tool that would be useful to me either in or out of the classroom, I’ve realized now just how amazing Diigo and social bookmarking can be. Simply through the ETEC527 group on Diigo, I’ve been connected to so many articles and tools that I’ve either heard of before and forgotten or never seen in my life. I think being a part of these social networking groups is vital in order to keep up with the tools that come out year to year. Being able to see what tools are worth bookmarking to other teachers and experts in Web 2.0 in education is such a great opportunity. I will keep checking in on these groups so that I can see new tools and what my colleagues have to say about them in the comment features on Diigo. 

Lastly, I intend to keep up with the growing amount of technology tools for the classroom by keeping up with my district’s professional development opportunities. This year, already, we have had teachers on our campus do PD on EdPuzzle and GooseChase, which I have now used in my own classroom for different lessons. I think that the best resource you can have is a group of teachers dedicated to learning more and testing out new tools in order to share their findings. This is what makes these district resources so helpful to me. Not only do I get PD hours that are necessary each year, but I also get to have a dialogue with other teachers who really care about this topic and are willing to share their findings. 

I hope that I am able to continue learning about new tools throughout my graduate school career and beyond! This class has been a great addition to my learning and has really opened my eyes to the amount of tools out there for my classroom! 

[kmusachiaeducator]

Diigo Social Bookmarking Adventure

Hello again! For ETEC527, we have been exploring new tools each week, and this week we were tasked with understanding social bookmarking through the tool, Diigo! I set up my Diigo account and got to exploring as soon as I could this week. While, initially, I was a little confused by some of the tools and how they were different from my Google account bookmarks, I found that Diigo offers quite a bit more utility than my Google bookmarks and folders. 

The first experiment I did with Diigo was in adding it as a Google Chrome extension. I was able to easily do this by downloading the extension from the web store. The beauty of this is that I can simply click the Diigo button when I’m on a page I want to save or share, and can add a description and tags for why I’ve saved it. Opposed to Google’s bookmarks, this ability to add descriptors to the bookmark is quite useful to a person who bookmarks so much that she forgets WHY she even bookmarked in the first place! I also thought of the utility for students to be able to save descriptions of the pages they find important information on. For example, when my students begin researching for a new paper, they could bookmark pages using Diigo and make sure they are public so that I can see them. Then, as they bookmark, they could write a quick sentence or two about how this article will help them on their paper, or even what parts are relevant. From this quick page, you can add tags (like which paper you’re using the link for), the description, and even share to a group, like our class group where we post relevant Web 2.0 articles and tools. I liked the ability to make a link public or private, but I wished that the default was public instead of private. With a little exploration, I was able to go and make all of my links public when I had initially not unchecked that “Private” box when saving links. 

I used the links from class in order to find some pages to link onto my Diigo. I found a lot of helpful tools, including some I’d heard of or used before. Even though I had used some tools before, I still bookmarked them in order to have them in one place. After I had exhausted the lists given for class, I decided to do some of my own digging and googled “Web 2.0 Education” and found a lot of interesting articles to link to the class about the top tools from different years. I only shared the 2018 ones with class, but I hope that they are useful! I got my first comment from a classmate, which I also thought was an interesting aspect of Diigo. I could definitely see where this would be relevant to some of my classes at Blanson. Since my students are all in a specific career program, I could share out articles to students and tag them with something like “welding” or “machining” or “EMT” for the different programs and then students could comment on them when they read them! Such a neat tool! I was happy to get a comment at all, because it felt like my link had at least gotten looked at! 

Another aspect of Diigo that I wanted to play with is the annotation feature. I’ve played with a tool called Kami, which links with Google Classroom and allows students to make their own annotations on PDF pages. While my co-teacher and I ended up abandoning the program since it was a little difficult to use with students, we noticed that they have made a lot of changes since we looked at it in August 2018. I wanted to see if Diigo had a similar capability to Kami, since I’ve been looking for a good annotation tool since I abandoned Kami. We’ve tried using the comment feature on Google Docs, but it tends to get cluttered quickly. 

I picked one of the articles that I had linked to the group and clicked the “Annotate Article” button to the right of the article in Diigo and it opened up an easy-to-use page where I could highlight and make comments on different parts of the article. I made a few notations, but couldn’t figure out how to make them public (yet!). I liked that I could share my annotations on Twitter or Facebook, something I tried out immediately. I really would love to use this with the class hashtag in order to point out interesting web pages with classmates! I think it could also be used well in my classroom to show students how to pick specific lines out of articles that would be relevant to their papers. The more I played with this feature, the more useful I found it to be for our research papers in the 4th 9 weeks at school. If students can bookmark pages and tag them as well as add descriptors, it would be easy to later go to those pages and make annotations when they want to use a line in their essay! By sharing their Diigo pages with me, I could check that they have actually done research and read through their articles to find good sources of quotes. I was excited that this tool was already so easy to integrate in to my research paper process. 

After going back to my Diigo page, I realized that the annotations were view-able from the main bookmarks screen! This was even more encouraging, as it meant I could ask students to make a certain amount of notations on each of their sources. Or I could tell students to make annotations on figurative language in pink and annotations on tone in yellow and so forth. My only concern was how students could turn this work in to me. Since I’m so integrated with Google Classroom, that’s how I normally ask students to submit work to me. Maybe with links to their pages, they could share their work with me? But having to individually look at 150+ students would take a long time. 

Overall, Diigo quickly became a tool that I could see myself using in the classroom. I’m impressed with how useful it seems and I’m sorry for not having noticed it or thought about it before! Like any new Web 2.0 tool, I suppose I had to discover it in my own time. With all of this new utility, I’m thinking that Diigo is going to become a regular feature in my classroom and I’m eager to start using it both personally and professionally!

Thanks for reading!

[kmusachiaeducator]

Aggrava... I mean Aggregating Site Exploration

Here is a link to my current Aggregating Site with Protopage! 

Well, here is a concept that I was anxious to explore. I’ve heard of and seen some pages that aggregate information, but I definitely haven’t tried to use one since high school (probably). I started out my adventure with NetVibes, which I abandoned after about an hour or two of confusion. Originally, I picked NetVibes after seeing their homepage. Between NetVives and ProtoPage, NetVibes definitely looked more professional, however the learning curve was a little steeper than I anticipated. I also was drawn in by the examples on the home page of NetVibes, but I’m at a loss for how to get my own page to look like theirs! Maybe the examples are from paid accounts? I abandoned it, so I guess I won’t find out any time soon. 

Not knowing where to turn next, I did a quick Google search of aggregating sites and found a few articles with lists of different sites to try. After reading a few of these articles, I still felt uncertain about where to begin, so I turned back to the class website. There were a lot of interesting reads, though! And it seems like a lot of people use WordPress as both a blog and an aggregating site, which definitely makes me think about using WordPress in the future as my blogging platform! 

After exploring the discussion for this week, I decided that ProtoPage was probably the easier to learn of the two (and maybe I’m better suited to it since I’m new to aggregating pages). I signed up with ProtoPage and started playing with the different Widgets that you can add. I pretty quickly deleted a lot of the ones that were on the initial page, like Fox News (not my preferred news source), and NPR (which I almost kept!). I changed the name of my page and added it as a chrome extension as well. I didn’t like that it set my actual starter page to ProtoPage, because I like to initially have access to my Google tools since that’s what we have on our campus, so I had to reset that feature. I can understand why that is a feature of ProtoPage, though. If I was using my computer for more personal business, I would probably want ProtoPage to show up first since it has bookmarks and information that I normally get from my Google Home in the morning. 

I added quite a bit to my page on the first day. The first item of business was changing the weather widget to my actual home instead of California! I tried to do this two different ways: first, by putting in my zip code (which I felt was too personal), then by putting in my home town. Both showed the same weather, so I stuck with home town! 

Next, I wanted to change some of the really basic looking colors and background. I knew that I wasn’t experienced with changing them on a coding level, but that the website would allow me to probably change the background. I picked an old dimly-lit library, since I love books! Then, I changed the colors of the widgets and the text inside them. I found all of this very simple on ProtoPage! 

I wasn’t sure, at first, how to add more widgets in, so I tried to search for “Twitter” in the search box, which actually brought me to a new tab with a Google search for Twitter! Whoops! I went back to ProtoPage and clicked “Add Widget” and felt a little silly for my mistake! After looking through my options, I added the time and a countdown timer. I use countdown timers in class very frequently, because my students will drag their feet on their assignments since we have 90 minute periods. I get around this by timing them for everything. We also don’t have bells that sound during the day, so the timers help us know when class ends. 

Next, I tried clicking a few of the different terms that came up under “Add Widget” like Protopuppy. I added in my little virtual pal in less than a second. I know that Protopuppy probably doesn’t have any use beyond making me smile, but it was nice to see a playful element of ProtoPage! As such, I put Fido at the bottom of the page, since he wasn’t super useful! Here’s Fido the dog for your viewing pleasure! 

I also saw a button to add my Google Calendar to my Protopage, which was a great addition. I use Google Calendar for both my personal life and my work life to keep myself organized and remember events. I had a lot of items scheduled this week, so adding in my calendar was a given. It was a little small, but after dragging on the bottom right corner, I was able to make it a bit bigger! 

Now that I was done playing around, I decided to get down to adding the widgets that we are required to have for class. This mostly proved easy. I had a bit of a hiccup when I tried to add a Twitter feed versus a Twitter search term, but I eventually was able to add my own Twitter feed and the search #etec527. I’m thinking of also adding in some of the terms from my TweetDeck, which could make my Protopage more like my TweetDeck, but without the capability of actually tweeting from the page. I ended up editing these widgets so that they didn’t show the top 10, but instead the top 4-5, because the length of the widget made it almost pointless to put anything beneath it. I tried to keep my class-related widgets to the right of my page, and my personal widgets on the left. In the middle, I kept the clock, timer, calendar, and Fido! 

As you can see, my tumblr blog did not want to pop up at first. I added a website URL widget, and started to see an error every time I opened up my blog. Then, I opened up Tumblr and tried to open my blog from there to see that it also wasn’t working. After a bit of panic, I realized that our district firewall was blocking Tumblr, and, after looking at the page on my phone with my LTE data, noticed that the link does, in fact, work! It’s not a great way of looking at my blog, but it works nonetheless. 

Up next was the Youtube Channel playlists. I tried to first link my actual YouTube channel to Protopage with little success. I realized that YouTube doesn’t let you link a full channel to Protopage, but it will do a video. I posted a question to my class in order to try to figure out how other people linked their playlists, but then investigated further by looking at other Protopages from members of the class in the discussion. What I ended up doing, after a bit of Google, Youtube, and Virtual Office research, was to add a “Bookmarks” widget and then link to each of my playlists from there. This worked pretty nicely, so I stuck with it! I did also embed a video, in case I wanted to listen to some music in the morning. I got a little stuck since I only posted one, so I’m just going to enjoy that song every day!

After looking at the example Protopage from our assignment, I wanted to try out making a new tab on Protopage, so I made one for Educational Technology. I used the News and Podcast search features in order to add a few interesting news websites and podcasts that I can listen to when looking into this subject further. 

I liked this feature because it meant that I could organize by subject so that I didn’t have to clutter up my main page. It seems like a good feature to be able to use certain tabs for certain activities. For example, my home page would consist of items I want to look at daily. I could have a Reading tab with items related to our reading lessons and a Writing tab, etc. I could even organize it by genre so that I have a tab for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama! I could have a STAAR related tab, to focus on testing. The possibilities seem endless! But, I also see the issue of having too many tabs. On the page for the fourth grade teacher that was linked to us in class, the teacher had many tabs that didn’t have anything in them. It was a bit of a let-down to see these tabs (like the Reading tab!) with not much in it. I would think that you’d probably want to go one at a time and add as much as you could to those tabs before adding more. That might just be my style of organization, though. 

As I reflected on my time with aggregating sites, I thought about some of the different uses for this in my classroom and maybe for my students. Since all of my students use Google Classroom in all of their classes, but a different device in each class, I could see a site like Protopages being very useful for them. Similarly to Google Classroom, a Protopage is accessible from many different devices, including mobile devices! I checked on my phone, and while not quite as easy to manipulate, Protopages still works fine from an iPhone browser. They could link searches that are useful to them for different classes and create different tabs for different classes. They could create a bookmarks widget for different classes instead of just bookmarking ALL pages of relevance to them. My students, for example, have to write 4 major papers per year (one per 9 weeks), and they all end up being on different topics. By having a different widget for their bookmarks, they could organize their research for each paper by simply creating a new widget. Students often try to bookmark pages in the browser when they find what they like, but those bookmarks get lost in a sea of links once we get to the 4th paper! 

Personally, I still like going to the Google page and accessing my Google tools as my home page. I don’t think I’m ready to make a switch to Protopages for that use, but I could see it being a tab open on my already tab-filled computer! I’ll have to keep investigating further in order to come to a different conclusion! 

Thanks for reading!

[kmusachiaeducator]

YouTube Adventure & Twitter Extended Blog Post

I’ve had an interesting week with Youtube, a resource I’ve used before both for teaching and for personal use. My roommate and I have often remarked about how so many activities that once required a professional are achievable with a Youtube video. For example, I’ve begun an indoor garden to grow peppers in our garage, solely by using Youtube videos to do research! I started a new Youtube account with a new email in order to do some research this week, as I didn’t want all of my past searches for music videos or other content to color what I was researching for class. Youtube is amazing in that it will keep suggesting new videos to you until (what seems like) the end of time. Many students and adults alike remark that the “Youtube hole” is almost inescapable once it catches you. 

This week, I made playlists for the different categories and learned a lot about quite a few subjects. I’m going to detail them by playlist here. 

As you can see from the first playlist, I’ve been doing some exploration into ASMR videos. Wikipedia defines it by saying, “Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is an experience characterized by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine.” ASMR videos were suggested to me by a friend based on a complaint I had about not being able to fall asleep some nights. In ASMR videos, a content producer whispers into a microphone or makes noises akin to nails tapping on a table lightly. These sounds create the response in some people described as ASMR. A lot of people find these videos to be relaxing and helpful for falling asleep. I tried them out this week and definitely fell asleep quickly most nights! I found that there are a lot of content producers for ASMR videos, but I liked one in particular. The channel “ASMR Requests” makes storytelling videos where the woman pretends she is a space voyage tour guide and has some very interesting content. Her videos are very popular and come up instantly when searching for ASMR. I thought that it was really interesting how Youtube could be helping many people relax and get to sleep each night without much more than a click of a button. I’m sure a recording of the sounds would work too, but the videos add a visual element that makes the sounds more understandable. It was also interesting how many people are making ASMR videos. Anyone can make them and anyone can view them. There were some content producers that were obviously more equipped to record than others, but the quality of the videos was always relaxing. 

Next, I chose to do a second playlist of my choosing by researching how to grow peppers from seeds. I’ve been researching this with my roommates since I’ve wanted to start gardening after we got some trees pulled out of our yard. It turns out that I didn’t have any knowledge on how to grow much of anything! After watching a lot of videos of the pepper-growing process, we bought a grow light and a tent and a heating mat for our garage and are going to start by trying to grow seeds in our garage. It’s still cold and wet in Houston, so the weather isn’t good for outdoor growing. We watched 7-10 videos from a user called “Khang Starr” who grows many different types of peppers, some even for competitions! We used his suggestions for what to buy for our indoor garden. We will be setting it up this weekend in order to give it a try and have already bought our seeds. We’re going to grow jalapenos, chilies, and pepperocinis at least. What I noticed while trying to research this topic was that there weren’t as many videos about this idea as there were about ASMR. The videos I did find were definitely more amateurishly made than the ASMR videos. This didn’t take away from their value for me, but I could understand why some people might not enjoy the videos as much because they seem unprofessional. For me, the fact that there were any videos on this topic made it much more approachable, especially considering the fact that no one at Home Depot was interested in helping me with my gardening adventure when I went to get some basic supplies. 

For my teaching-related videos, I chose to create a Slam Poetry playlist. I had already found a few videos that I had shown students in class as warm-ups during our poetry unit, but I wanted to find more to send them for both personal enjoyment and studying purposes. I found that a lot of students in class were able to identify shift and tone from a slam poem easier than when I presented them with a text version (which is understandable). This helped me teach this concept to students. For example, the video for the slam poem “To the boys who may one day date my daughter” has a very funny and interesting tone shift. When the speaker is describing his daughter, he sounds loving, but when he describes the potential suitor for his daughter, he sounds terrifying. The shift between these two tones was much easier and more noticeable to students than in any of the poems I had presented earlier. I had a lot of students asking me for the link to this and other slam poetry videos I showed in class. I sent out a few of them in our Google Classroom and put some on our study guide for this unit. Youtube really helped me out in my classroom with these videos. A concept that might be difficult for students to understand became immediately recognizable after showing students these videos. If this is true of poetry, I’m sure it’s even more useful for concepts in science and history. 

At first, I thought that the videos about teaching and learning with technology and the videos about web 2.0 tools for learning would be so similar that the playlists would have many of the same videos on them. I ended up being very wrong about this!  For one, a lot of videos seemed to use a website called PowToon, which seems like an animator of some sort. I found a video that had some testimonials from students about using web 2.0 tools in the classroom, which were interesting to view. A few of them were a little dated, similarly to the ones we have viewed in the past for our class, and some seemed like they were made by school districts in an attempt to encourage teachers to use web 2.0 tools in their classrooms. I was reminded of how my admin team at work tried to teach us about TPACK after I had learned about it in my first ETEC course. Seems like we’re all catching up! On the other side of things, the videos about teaching and learning with technology offered a larger array of options. Many Ted Talk videos popped up, and even an Ellen Show video appeared! This video was a lot more humorous, but still educational since Ellen spoke with younger kids. I thought about how Youtube can really help us as educators in learning the value of these teaching tools and the opportunities we have with them. It can also help us with different methods of teaching concepts in addition to being a how-to guide for new technologies. 

As for my Twitter playlist, I found a fair amount of how-to guides, but not much that I wasn’t already aware of. There were a few videos that I saved about how to promote yourself through Twitter, but that isn’t much of an interest of mine. Most of the tutorials were repetitive information for me, so I focused most of my Twitter time actually on Twitter, or rather TweetDeck, which I much prefer. This week, I kept my home page up on Twitter in addition to the Trending page and Notification page. I changed up some of my search term sections, however. I had the #etec527 term opened as well as the #BlackOutPoetry term. My classes have been covering poetry for the past few weeks and I gave students the opportunity to create their own blackout poetry this week in order to step into the role of the author. This was useful because I was able to show students a lot more examples in real time. This helped inspire them in making their own poems. I also opened up a search for #Allin4Aldine, which is my district’s hashtag. I’ve been trying to retweet anything of relevance to our class from there as well. This week at work, my partner and I planned a lot of hands-on activities for our students. For example, we played a bingo game with figurative language on Monday and Tuesday, created blackout poems on Wednesday and Thursday, and did a scavenger hunt using the website/app called GooseChase and (unsuccessfully) QR codes. I enjoyed this use of a new technology in my classroom (or rather, outside my classroom and in the hallways of our building), but it involved a lot of troubleshooting, which I ended up going to YouTube for! It all comes full circle! Because of this involved week, I’ve been tweeting quite a bit! I tweet student products so that their parents can see as well as other teachers in the district. I also tweet pictures of students participating in these activities so that others within and outside of our district can see the fun ways we are teaching content in our new school. Everyone at my school and in my district is very Twitter-happy, so they encourage tweeting as much as we are able. 

I am glad I was able to add to my knowledge of these two tools this week and learn to incorporate new aspects of them into both my teaching practice and personal life. They have both had a very significant impact on my life and likely will for years to come! 

Thanks for reading!

[kmusachiaeducator]

Twitter Exploration Blog Post

What apps do you have installed on your phones, tablets and computers that can be used with Twitter?

Some apps I have on my phone are GoodReads, Spotify, Tumblr, Amazon, and Yelp (after checking in on my phone apps!). I found it interesting that I don’t really use anything besides the Twitter website on my computer in order to access this site, but I am working with TweetDeck currently and love it! It seems like Twitter is a lot bigger of a face on my phone than on any tablet or computer. I’m thinking this has something to do with my age and with my personal familiarity with tech use on my phone. When I tweet from my classroom, I like to add pictures of what we are working on so that people can see and my phone makes that easiest.

What websites do you frequent that have a button that allows you to easily post a Tweet from that page?

A lot of websites I use have a button that links to Twitter, including most notably, YouTube. Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of poetry slam videos as warm-ups for my students during our poetry unit, and a lot of students ask for the links (which I try to post on Twitter). Another is GoodReads, which I’ve been using to update on my reading goal progress from 2018 and now, 2019. I like sharing this information on Twitter so that both friends and students can keep up with my reading goals! I also like sending Tumblr posts to Twitter, though I haven’t done it with this blog yet. I’ll have to start forwarding my posts from Tumblr to Twitter. I know they interface easily.

As you start to explore, you will begin to see the power of Twitter and how it as a Web 2.0 tool links with so many other tools. Your blog post for this adventure should detail your adventure in Twitter this week and its possible place in your world as an educator and learner.

I’m happy to report that I have been pretty familiar with Twitter due to a push from my district to start posting more often. We recently got a new superintendent who is very fond of Twitter, so she created a hashtag called #Allin4Aldine that she encourages us to use. I try to use that and tag her (and other ELA teachers/skills specialists/program directors) when I do, so that we can promote our district and our school. Also, since my school is newly opened this year and requires students to apply to certain programs within it, our admin team encourages us to tweet and retweet each other’s posts so we can promote our school. For these purposes, I try to get on Twitter at least once a week to either post something, myself, or to retweet others from my school and district.

As for my week thus far, I’ve been checking up on the #etec527 to try and interact with other people. Sometimes, I just comment on another person’s tweet, but other times I try to retweet with comment in order to make the hashtag more robust. I love having conversations over Twitter with other educators! I really learn a lot. I’ve used it in the past to promote my own Donor’s Choose page with a lot of success as well! 

I ended up spending a lot of time on TweetDeck at the beginning of the week. I had only ever used the main Twitter site, which seems so constricting now. Here’s what I’m loving about it currently:

I can look at my notifications, home screen, trending hashtags, and (best of all) a specific searched term ALL AT ONCE! This is amazing! 

In addition to looking at these pages all at once, you can post from this site and retweet! 

I’ve kept this page open with some search terms like “poetry” or our hashtag for this course in order to keep up with posts. It’s helped immensely with our current poetry unit in class!

I noticed this week that there are some teachers on my campus doing a book study group together via Twitter! They all post about the book called “Educated: a Memoir” by Tara Westover and respond to each other. I’m really interested in trying this in the future!

I noticed a lot of posts from the author of “The Hate U Give” whose name is Angie Thomas. She is very active on Twitter and I’ve started talking to students about how they can communicate with their favorite authors over Twitter. They got really excited by that!

I remembered that I used Twitter not too long ago to participate in a daily hashtag on promoting mentoring of newer teachers by posting some reflections. I got my Skills Specialist to participate with me and was able to tweet with one of my favorite educator websites, Eduphoria! What a great connection to make!

I also remembered that, this past year, students from my last campus tweeted with artist, Travis Scott, and ended up getting him to allow use of his album cover for free for their class t-shirts. He also donated the shirts, themselves!

I hope to continue use of Twitter both personally and for educational use. I know that I’d like to continue use of it as I go from teacher to librarian for sure, especially as librarians tend to be more isolated in the library. I realized that I don’t really use Twitter much for personal use, but that I’d like to do so. I want to stay aware of the fact that teachers and students and parents will be looking at my Twitter and judging my effectiveness based on the content on it. I keep that in mind when I post always. It is, of course, great that Twitter links with so many other websites, but I think its greatest strength is in linking people together. 

[kmusachiaeducator]

Vanity Search Blog Post

In my Google web search, I started with my name in the quotation marks as the assignment specified and started to click on some of the links that appeared. I’ve done a search like this every year since I began teaching and have addressed some concerns that I’ve encountered in past searches. For example, my personal Google account used to have my name associated with it, but upon seeing the Google page that came up with it (Google has a social media type website that they tried to make popular a few years ago), I decided to change my name on my personal accounts. I didn’t, admittedly, do an amazing job of changing my name (I changed it to Aaaa in a moment of panic), but it did to the trick of getting that page to disappear from a Google search of my name. 

Now, when I Google my name or any variation of it, I find my LinkedIn page. Because I know this is what tends to pop up first, I’ve been trying to keep my LinkedIn updated with current work information. For example, when I moved campuses in my district or when I became a trainer for other teachers in our district. I figured that this was an important website to keep updated in order to get a good job in Library Science in the future. 

Beneath my LinkedIn, there are some pictures that mostly are from LinkedIn. I didn’t move to the image search quite yet at this point. I saw and checked out a couple of Whitepages searches for my name that had a scary amount of information on them. Whitepages somehow knew my age, where I’ve lived in the past and where I live now, and my family members. I’m not sure how that information was public, but it definitely surprised me. 

The next page was a facebook page that didn’t belong to me. The person’s name was spelled differently (Christina vs. Kristina), but I understand why it came up in my search. I have my personal facebook set to not appear in Google Searches due to student mischief. What does link to me eventually is a giveaway I won in College from a convention in College Station. Since they used my name and are a public page, you can find my Facebook via that link (another thing I’m not excited about). 

The last actual website that I found of note was an interview I did for KBTX-TV in College Station (a local news station) on government surveillance via cell phones. Thinking about it, I remember being stopped outside a Verizon store in College Station one day and being asked for information. It’s crazy to me that it’s still so easy to find by searching for my name. 

I like to go back and search for myself at least once a year in case a parent or student decides to do the same thing. I wouldn’t want students or parents to perceive me a certain way because of my digital footprint, at least not in a bad way.  I’ve tried to look at the websites with that in mind. 

Other websites that showed up were my GoodReads account, which I am perfectly comfortable sharing, and my Etsy buyer account, which I’m less excited is public information. The GoodReads account helps me share what I’m reading with students but my Etsy account is personal and shows which products I’ve been interested in or bought. Thinking of people judging me based on my purchases doesn’t sit super well with me. 

Under the image search, I also got linked to Etsy often, in addition to LinkedIn pictures. A picture of my dad and my uncle came up due to my unique last name, I believe. One of my Donor’s Choose images appeared of a couple of students doing a project at my old campus. Overall, none of the images were very troublesome, but I started to feel a bit uncomfortable with all of the information that was available. 

For videos, I didn’t find anything linked to me. I don’t have a YouTube account linked to my name anywhere. Although, it seems like someone with my last name is very fond of piercings since there are many videos that relate to that when I went to that tab. 

All in all, I wasn’t surprised by most of what I found since I’ve done searches in the past, but I grew more wary of what I have put on the web. Particularly, I’m not happy with Etsy and WhitePages. I also thought about the fact that I’ve had a facebook profile for 11 years and how that leaves a lasting digital footprint, especially after everything I’ve heard in the news over the years. I’m curious about how this will affect me in the future, but wary. 

[kmusachiaeducator]

Reflection on Information Literacy

First explain why you selected this option over the Content Objects option

I decided to choose this option over the Content Objects option because I intend to pursue a librarianship job in my district when I have completed my Master’s degree. In my district, the official title for Librarians is “Information Technology Specialist” and I felt that Information Literacy would fit best into that. Other than that, I also find the idea of Information Literacy interesting because I know it is one of the most valuable skills in our era and it continues to grow in value for the job market. I want to be able to prepare my students to research topics in an effective way and to not let their research be bogged down by fake reports. 

Identify 4-5 tools you found to support learning information literacy skills. Describe where they fit into the NFIL infographic and how you found the tool.

Evaluate the tools. Why did you include them in your list? What is particularly useful about the tool? Looking at the NFIL infographic, what areas do these tools neglect, and how can you justify leaving those areas out of any information literacy learning for your students.

I focused a lot of my research on Research and Library Skills because I am pursuing a Librarian job in the future. I also tried to focus a bit on Information Ethics (and the rise of fake news) because I feel it is a growing topic in our society. 

First, I looked at the CRAAP test for determining whether a source was worth using in research. While I really understood and enjoyed the Prezi, I wondered if this was a tool that would get a few raised eyebrows from my administrators. The CRAAP test analyzes a source for its currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose. By asking yourself some key questions in each of these categories, you can determine if the source is a waste (thus making the acronym fitting) or a useful place to find information. Similarly, I found a more classroom-friendly version of this method called CARS when searching online. CARS, similarly, is an acronym for credibility, accuracy, reasonableness, and support. The questions do not vary too much between the two, but I imagine this one was made so that admin do not question teachers. I included both of these tools together on this list because I think that both of them are very useful for showing students how to reevaluate their sources. I imagined students in my class asking themselves these questions during their research paper process and deciding that a blog, for example, might not be the most credible source compared to a site like Wikipedia. A lot of my students love to talk about conspiracies and will credit sites that are clearly biased of full of typing incosistencies. I know that a tool like CRAAP or CARS would really benefit them in finding the truth for any issue/topic they might have to pursue. I think that this tool actually does hit all of the topics in the infographic of Information Literacy. It fits with the research skills most predominantly, but it also allows users to evaluate the ethics of the sites used. Users would be on computers, analyzing data in a critical way in order to find information. 

The next tool I liked was The News Literacy Project and their Checkology lessons. This tool allows students to take a self-paced lesson on different types of research and shows them how to spot fake news stories (or verify the validity of stories). I included this tool because (as I’ve mentioned) the idea of fake news in our society has only continued to become more relevant as arguements are made in politics. As younger people get involved in policies that affect them, it is important that they are able to research the topics that are changing daily. Checkology allows students to evaluate the way reporters find and check their sources, making it fit into the research and information ethics section of the Information Literacy infographic. I think it spends a little less time on media literacy (though it does use videos and online discussions with reporters) and in critical thinking skills. I feel that this tool is breaking into the critical thinking sphere, but is really focus on the accuracy part of the CRAAP test. I think this tool could be used in conjunction with another to create a more balanced lesson. 

Another tool that I found very handy for teaching research is The Big 6. The Big 6 is a website tool that is similar to the CRAAP test in that it gives students stages to follow in order to complete a task. Unlike the CRAAP test, the Big 6 leads students through the stages of research. The 6 stages they define are: task definition, information seeking strategies, location and access, use of information, synthesis, and evaluation. The CRAAP or CARS test mostly fits into the evaluation stage of The Big 6. What I found useful about this site was its ease of understanding. Oftentimes, my students will ask me where to start when it comes to researching. The idea of research, itself, can be a gray area for students, and this model really helps to clear it up by defining the actions a researcher goes through when trying to learn about at topic. I believe that this tool fits the research and critical thinking sections of the infographic the most, but still touches on media literacy and information ethics (the evaluation section). 

A last tool that I stumbled upon while researching information literacy was Blue Feed, Red Feed by The Washington Post. This website shows news posts from politicians or other news sources that are from Facebook (one of the main places that a lot of people get their information) in a side-by-side format. On this website, the posts are grouped by topic (for example, abortion or President Trump) and split between liberal views (blue) or conservative views (red). In this way, students and other users can see how stories can have bias attached to them, beginning with the title and subheading! I really liked this website, even though I think that it mostly covers the critical thinking and information ethics section of the infographic, because it seems like one that is culturally relevant. I think that this is another source that would need to be complimented with a lesson that focuses on the areas of the Information Litearcy infographic that this one neglects, but it is very useful nonetheless. 

Reflect on how these resources or your exploration/thinking about information literacy could transform your teaching (i.e. your pedagogical stance/approach) and your students’ learning (i.e. support their acquisition and construction of content knowledge). Describe and evaluate that transformation.

I believe that these sources would really help with my teaching. In the past, I have mostly focused on citations and plagiarism when trying to teach students to research. I would give them a document to fill out and have spaces for them to cite their sources, but I didn’t really teach them HOW to research a topic. I think that The Big 6 will be a great way of demonstrating how any person starts the task of researching online. I can imagine giving my students a modeling lesson for how to go through the 6 stages of research and using some of the other tools during these stages. For example, the CRAAP/CARS test is a great tool for evaluating whether a source is worth using and I think that I’d like to use that in order to allow students to verify that their soruces for their research papers are good enough to include quotes from in their papers. This tool could fit into the “Evaluation” stage of The Big Six. I liked Checkology for teaching students how to research in an ethical and responsible way (though this site has paid-for components that I’m not sure I’d like to purchase). I think that the Checkology website is nice because it could be self-paced for students (maybe for students who are absent or need extra help). The video format makes it interactive and engaging for students to participate in. The Blue Feed/Red Feed tool was really interesting because it capitalizes on social media posts and shows how stories can have bias, something most of my students know but don’t get to see laid out so clearly. I think this tool could work well in a persuasive unit as well as a research unit. I think that my teaching on research could really be transformed through the use of these tools because they allows students to see how people get their information on a daily basis (mainly social media), go through the stages of research and critical thinking, and then determine what they believe to be truth and worth spreading to others. 

[kmusachiaeducator]

Reflection on Creativity Tools

Describe and discuss the various tools you explored: what you liked or disliked about each one. Consider whether you liked or disliked it for your own personal use or for your students’ use. Select one tool from those you explored to continue to reflect on.

The tools I chose to explore were Google Slides, Google Docs, Prezi, VoiceThread, iMovie, FlipGrid, and NearPod. 

Google Slides is a presentation-making program that allows users to add slides much like in Microsoft’s Powerpoint. The difference between Powerpoint and Google Slides is that Google Slides are hosted online and, therefore, do not take up space on your computer when you make them. You can add music, transitions, videos (from Youtube or other areas), pictures, and more. I’ve used Google Slides frequently in my own classroom to go through and pace lessons with students as well as for students to use to give presentations in class. I really like this program because I can access the presentation from any computer and collaborate with other teachers on making a slideshow. I can also share it to other teachers who can modify for themselves and grow the slideshow. 

Google Docs is a tool much like Microsoft Word where students can word process. This tool is supplemented by the fact that Google tools are hosted online by adding in a commenting feature and sharing feature (which my students use very often in my classroom). Much like Microsoft Word, students can highlight, bold, italicize, etc their documents and even organize them into sections. I like this tool for my students and for me personally, because I can access the documents from any computer. 

Prezi is another presentation tool that I’ve used a bit in the past but that I’ve had hesitation devoting time to after experimentation. Much like Google Slides and Powerpoint, Prezi allows users to organize the information they want to present into sub-sections and add different media like videos and pictures. Prezi is unique in that it will create a map or a diagram of the ideas you are presenting for the viewer to see before and after the presentation, which could be useful for tying information together. I’m not certain about using this tool with my students because they might find it less intuitive, but I think it is an “okay” alternative presentation tool to Google Slides. All of my students have Google emails via the school, so they find Google tools most useful. 

Voice Thread was a new tool I hadn’t looked at before that looked like it had a lot of neat new possibilities for me in my classroom as well as for my students. I’ve had students create their own movies with iMovie (more on that later) but what I really liked about Voice Thread was its ability to let users comment on certain parts of a media presentation and also highlight (or draw) during the video. I’d really like to try this tool out in my classroom and see about having students do a speaking component to a presentation in the future. Basically, Voice Thread allows users to upload some video or media component and then add comments and drawings to the media (either via a microphone, video, or just text). What an interesting tool!

iMovie is a video organizing and presenting app that many of my students have used in the past when I’ve assigned a video presentation component to their research modules. iMovie is very easy and intuitive to use, making it a favorite among students I’ve taught in the past. iMovie has a lot of pre-set formats that make movie-making easy so long as users have the videos they need. It is also very easy to use via the phone to create interesting transitions from video clip to video clip and then to send those videos off to other users. 

FlipGrid is a tool that I haven’t yet used in my classroom but that was mentioned to me in a presentation by Penny Kittle that I was able to attend last year. FlipGrid allows users to record short videos and post them to a board for others to see and comment on. They can be used for students to record a short verbal response to a question or to do (as I’d like to in my classroom) a video Book Review. What is nice about FlipGrid is that it limits the amount of time that the videos can be (similarly to the app, SnapChat, which is so popular with students), so the teacher can make sure that students focus on the most important parts of what they want to say. FlipGrid allows them to re-record if they do not like their initial video. 

NearPod is another presentation program, though it seems to be aimed more at educators than student users. The difference between NearPod and the other presentation tools I explored was that NearPod has some built-in engagement strategies such as quizzes and notepads. For example, in one of my presentations on NearPod, I added in an area for students to post “sticky notes” to tell me how their first day of school was. Because students can join a NearPod and follow along with you on their phones, they were able to answer in real time and their “sticky notes” posted to my Promethean board during class for all of class to see. What I didn’t like much about NearPod was the difficulty in making a simple slide with information (like text or a picture) posted on it. Since I’m used to making presentations easily with Google Slides, NearPod’s downfall in this area eventually made me abandon it. Something I might play with in the future is the feature to add my presentations from Google Slides into a NearPod. It would be really interesting to just upload my Google Slides presentations (that I’ve already made) into NearPod and use just the engagement strategies with my students so that they can follow along with me. 

Analyze how the creativity tool that you selected might support learning, using the TPACK model. Specifically, describe the content goals/objectives, pedagogical approach(es), and technological affordances of some student work that you might design using the creativity tool you selected.

The tool that I’d like to focus on for this section of my reflection is Voice Thread, the tool that allows users to upload a video or media presentation and then insert comments (audio, video, or text) and drawings into the media. I could see using this creativity tool in order to allow students to create an analysis of a narrative or informational text. There are a lot of videos on YouTube or online of a text being read aloud. For example, my students recently annotated and answered analysis questions on the story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe. We listened to audio of this story and I posted some video versions I found of this story. Students could have made a Video Thread of the reading and inserted comments (audio to practice speaking skills, which is in our TEKS, or text to practice writing skills, which are also in our TEKS). They also could have made a Video Thread comparing one of the video versions to the text of the story, itself. As far as content goals, analysis of a literary fiction text is one that would definitely be accomplished here. We analyze stories for diction, tone, figurative language, structure, and theme. Students could stop and make a comment at each of the structural sections of the story (Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Resolution), proving they know how to identify and analyze a narrative for these elements. Pedagogically, this approach to analysis would be great for students because it would allow them to work together to create something they could show others. They would be engaged because they could practice verbal skills, writing skills, and reading skills. Students could practice using this tool to utilize each of these skills to prove content knowledge. This technology affords for students to not only create their own media but also to analyze their media in a multitude of ways. It affords them the ability to use text to insert comments, use audio to record comments, and use video to showcase comments. 

Identify other ways that students could use the creativity tool you selected.

Other ways that student could use this tool is to create their own video as a project and then review each other’s videos. Foe example, at the end of our research paper unit, I normally have students record a video as part of their performance-based assessment. In order to make their videos as good as they can be, we could use Video Thread to allow groups to critique each other’s videos and then allow time for revisions. 

Explain why it might be important to know about and use creativity tools? What do they offer that other tools (i.e., drill and practice, tutorials, instructional games, etc.) do not offer? Reflect on any tools that you did not like for your own personal use. Can you find any value in using, learning to use, or allowing your students to use tools that you don’t care for personally?

Creativity tools are very important because they allow for users to take ownership of their own learning to use the product they are creating in order to learn by design (a concept in one of our previous readings by Mishra & Koehler). When users are focused on the activity of creation, they can flex their minds and push themselves into problem-solving mode. Other tools like drill and practice do not engage students in the same way. When students just practice, they are doing the same actions over and over again, and lose engagement. Instructional games, while good for engagement, do not offer the type of problem-solving mindset that creation does. As far as my own personal use, I did not really enjoy NearPod as much (as I mentioned earlier, because of its frustrating slide-creating feature), though I could see myself learning more about it and integrating my Google Slides creations into it and adding in engagment activities. I don’t see this being a good creation tool for students, however. In the past, students have used movie-making or video-making tools that I haven’t been a huge fan of, but I’ve allowed their use because students liked them. I can see allowing students to use tools I don’t like for the sake of creation because part of the act of creating means exploring and playing on your own. I can see how learning to use some of these tools would be useful for me, though if students can use them without me, I’m a bit happier that way! I’m always happy to learn to use a tool that students think is useful, because then they will be invested in my using it. 

[kmusachiaeducator]

Reflection on E-Portfolios in Education

REFLECT: Portfolios, in general, seem to be a more meaningful way of assessing learning that all of the mentioned alternatives, although similar maybe to student presentations. 

Quizzes and tests assess how much a learner can retain the information they have studied and limit the way the learner can regurgitate that information back to the teacher/evaluator. They also limit the learner’s ability to access information during the assessment period (in most cases). This is growing more and more unrealistic in an age where most information is a few clicks away via an online search engine like Google. Portfolios do not have many/any of these limitations. While an evaluator might have a time limit on when certain components of a portfolio are due, the access to resources is never limited, nor the ability to reflect. Also, portfolios do not have limitations on the way the learner can present the information learned back to the evaluator. In this sense, portfolios are more relevant sources of evaluation. 

Essays and research papers allow a student to reflect on certain information and use creative thinking to show an evaluator their learning. While these are fair assessments of learning, I believe that they often limit the reflection on the actual process of writing. When students write an essay or research paper, they often do not reflect on the actual process of writing the essay. Instead, they reflect on the content of the essay. They might not ever compare/contrast how they evolved from one essay to the next, which is a vital process in improving writing skills. A portfolio would allow for this kind of comparison, making it a better assessment tool for both the evaluator and the student. Essays and research papers are necessary, I believe, but not complete enough to constitute stopping there. 

Similarly, student presentations, homework, and worksheets pose equal problems. These assessment tools, while popular, limit the amount of reflection from the learner, thus making them inferior tools of learning. When the bulk of the evaluation is on the evaluator’s end, the learner is limiting their ability to grow in that they often do not care about where they came from vs where they are now in the learning process. 

I believe it would be a much more relevant and meaningful experience to articulate what I know and have learned about educational technology from my academic, professional, and other experiences and providing evidence of that learning with a collection of artifacts I’ve created. This is because connections are a way that most people are able to provide meaningful reflection. While a beginner to some of the educational technology might lack some of the experiences needed in order to connect, most meaningful learning happens when the learner is able to connect what they are learning about to what they already know in order to build upon their experiences. During reading this week, I was able to connect with the texts by thinking about the types of eporfolios used in my district already. By thinking about what I already knew and had tried when it came to eportfolios, I was able to think of ways that I already did many of the things in the texts as well as ways to improve in that area. That experience while reading allows me to remember and use the information that I read about to actually improve as a teacher and student much more than answering relevant questions assigned by an evaluator (no offense intended!). 

As far as which I would prefer, I think my answer is probably the same as which I find more meaningful to my learning. I enjoy making those connections between my own previous learning and my current learning. I’m able to have conversations with my peers at work and even my friends at home in order to show mastery of learning and an interest in further learning. When students are able to take their learning outside the classroom (or outside of the e-school course), I think it shows a devotion to learning that only comes from personal connections. 

Compared to digital portfolios, physical portfolios have a lot of limitations that make them difficult for anyone to keep track of. I’ll use an example from my district to illustrate my point. My students keep a portfolio of their writing work throughout the year. These portfolios are (ideally) supposed to travel from their middle school to their high school and then from their freshman to sophomore to junior to senior years. In the past, many students have come to my room without a previous portfolio file (it was either thrown away by a previous teacher or never created). In this case, I made a new portfolio for them, but was unable to see any previous writing samples from other years of learning. I was missing a vital piece to understanding them as learners. At the end of the year, I was required to give the students’ portfolios to the next year’s teachers, but this was a gigantic process that required a classroom full of alphabetized bins and a lot of man hours. Often, the portfolios weren’t collected by the next year’s teachers and thus the same gap was created year after year in a teacher’s understanding of their student populations. Alternatively, when we switched to eportfolios, students had the works in their Google Drive which did not require any teacher to keep track of them. They were able to reference their own previous works and do their own reflection from year to year, no matter what campus they hailed from or went to. Physical portfolios, while allowing for creativity often, limit the abilities of the learner and evaluator in that they have to physically keep track of the works, unlike online portfolios. Eportfolios afford for a learner and evaluator to access them regardless of geographical location, which has grown in importance yearly as we grow into a global community of learners. 

While I have used Google Drive as a way of creating an eportfolio before, I realized that it posed some difficulties now as an assessment tool for both myself and an evaluator. The major difficulties I discovered were that organization would be confusing for me as I am not yet completely sure what components are necessary for my own eportfolio. I also know that I will have some choice on which components are necessary. Unlike my INVEST evaluation, where there are 4 domains and examples of what might be included in these folders, my own teacher eportfolio didn’t have as many restrictions and thus less direction (at least for now). Because of this, I decided to abandon Google Drive and pursue Google Sites due to some conversation with peers at work. I enjoy using Google programs because they are so intuitive and this was true of Google Sites. I was able to create my own sub pages in a way that reminded me of the blog site I chose, Tumblr. I was even able to link my Tumblr for reflections to my Google Site in a way that was seamless! That excited me! 

I’m surprised that I never considered using Google Sites with my students but I think it is because my district requires that our students use Google Drive to keep track of their writing. I like a lot of parts of Google Drive for creating an eportfolio with students. I can tell students which folders to create and why. I can help them learn to organize their information. I can instruct them on reflection and allow them to look at previous work from either previous years or from the current year. With high school students, a lot of them are preparing to enter college or the work force and need instruction on how to organize their thoughts and work in order to be marketable to colleges or companies. I think that Google Drive allows for some personal freedom there based on what they intend for their future as well as allows for different types of media to be included (Google Docs, pictures of writings, annotations or comments on different works, etc.). While this is a useful tool for my students, as a working professional I think that Google Sites works better for me as I attempt to market myself to both in-district evaluators and out-of-district employers. On Google Drive, only the people who have access to the Google Folders are allowed to see them. You can limit editing privileges or viewership privileges easily based on who you have shared any folder or document with. This can be at times limiting while also protecting privacy. On Google Sites, I am the only one (so far) that I have allowed to edit the website yet anyone with the link can view it and browse my documents and reflections. I am unsure about whether this is a tool that is necessary for my students, though I’d like to try using it this year to see how it works with them. I think that it is more useful for a student presentation than for an eportfolio, at least for now.   

Website ePortfolio Link

[kmusachiaeducator]

Reflection of Blogs in Education

While exploring blogs and blogging, I found a lot of really neat features connected to different blogging sites used today. A blog is like an online diary. It allows users to post text (and nowadays videos, gifs, links, pictures, and more!) easily in post format to get out ideas or thoughts on a topic. Blogs can be posted online or linked to in order to share these ideas with a larger audience. For example, a teacher could post a blog that details different learning experiences/struggles from her classroom daily and then allow other users on that platform to comment with suggestions or ideas to improve her teaching abilities. Another example is many cooking blogs or makeup blogs found on various platforms. In these blogs, author’s post recipes or tutorials and other users comment on their experiences or their feedback to these posts. In this way, blogs afford the user the ability to post thoughts (images, videos, etc) to a massive audience for reception at various times (since it stays online until the author deletes it). 

I arrived at this definition through exploring different blogging websites, although primarily through my prior knowledge of the website, Tumblr, in my personal life. Other websites I played with for blogging were WordPresss (which my roommates utilize frequently) and Blogger (which I saw used in the examples). These websites shared a lot of abilities for posting with Tumblr. They all have the ability to customize their appearance and for users to post content online that they do not have to host themselves. They all allow users to share their content with other users and for those users to them respond in some fashion (comment, feedback, etc). One of the reasons I choose Tumblr was due to my prior knowledge of utilization of the website when it came to blogging about a popular trading card game, Magic: the Gathering. I knew from my time blogging that blogs didn’t only allow users to create and share content, but also to participate in a global community centered around a certain topic. In posting and sharing posts about Magic: the Gathering, I was connected (via the stream or feed on Tumblr) with other users who were interested in the same topic. We were able to share ideas and even meet in person at different events I traveled to throughout the US. 

In this sense, blogging is very different from a traditional website. While a traditional website might have a sub-page of informational content or a link to other content, most are not used to express feelings or thoughts with others. Blogs allow for users to be the primary voice of their page but also to have a sort of “fanbase” of viewership, not dissimilar to a vlog. 

Blogs afford learners the ability to explore a topic through their own writing. A learner might decide to post journal entries as they read a novel or a textbook and then go back and reflect upon their learning after reading the entire book. They might get connected with other users who are doing something similar or who are reading the same book. They could converse with other users who have read the book or plan to read the book. Blogs allow learners to engage in a community based around a certain topic of interest and, in turn, learn more about that topic from others who do not have to share a geographic location. 

As I explored this technology through the lens of a teacher, I started to get some ideas of how to use blogging in my own classroom. In my class, currently, my students have an out-of-class reading assignment that I gave them to complete over the course of the 1st 9 week period. This is my first time experimenting with out-of-class reading due to the financial constraints of my district in the past. Due to technology, I was able to assign online copies of the novels to my students so that they could read and complete an analysis project on one of the 4 novels given to me by the district. I assigned them this project on the first week of school but realized quickly that students might need something to motivate them to read a little bit each week instead of leaving this project until the end of the 9 weeks or forgetting about it entirely. I think that a blog would be a great place for them to chronicle their reading and that it probably could have taken the place of the project that I compiled. I think I might change the assignment for the subsequent 9 week periods and ask students to create and post in the blog weekly and then compile those posts into a reflection to count as a major grade at the end of the semester. By blogging and engaging in an online community, students could learn from each other and from others in the online community, creating a learning environment online. 

So, as a TPACK recap:

Content: My students are required to do a lot of writing in my class (English) and must master both expository and persuasive writing. They also must be able to answer analysis questions based on works they read in class that span through multiple genres. Their main goals are to be able to create these types of writing and to analyze others’ writing for author’s purpose. By reflecting on the reading they do outside of class, they can bring their ideas about author’s purpose into the classroom and meet with others after blogging or comment on other’s blog posts. They can also bring in outsider opinions. 

Pedagogy: The idea of reflecting on reading and posting your ideas is one that I was taught in as well. Many of my teachers in high school and college required that we do a version of blogging that didn’t involved an online community (basically, we did reading responses in a reading journal). The idea of blogging online as a way of responding to reading and reflecting on learning is one that I’ve picked up from learning in different professional development opportunities in my district. I conduct a training session one Saturday a month where we teach other teachers in my district how to construct writing portfolios for our students by modeling it ourselves. We have discussed doing pre-writing activities and reading responses via an online platform like a blog. I’m sure that these ideas have other experts behind them, but most of my learning and ideas come from professional development opportunities, my reading on teaching from author’s like Penny Kittle, Donalyn Miller, and Kelly Gallagher, and other teachers in my district who I speak with frequently. 

Technology: The affordances of a blog that I identified were the ability to share content with a massive audience and participate in an online community of idea sharers while also maintaining an authoritative space. The pedagogical strategy of reading responses and reflections matches well with this technology because it allows for an expansion on the idea of diary-writing or private journaling to include other users and possibly experts on a subject from outside the classroom. The content of analysis of author’s purpose of a text aligns well with blogging technology because a lot of the understanding of the author comes from reflection on the text. By pulling out text evidence and spending time exploring the subject-matter of the text, readers can identify with and understand the author even better than before. 

As exciting as blogging is, I know that there are some obstacles when it comes to journaling online and participating in that online community. I know from my experiences blogging that the ability for users to anonymously comment on and leave feedback for author’s can be problematic. There isn’t a lot of good technology to keep users from participating in online bullying or from trolling. My students in secondary education have this sort of barrier sometimes to posting their thoughts online. Another obstacle is the spread of misinformation. A majority of posts or users might have the wrong information and continue posting about it without knowing it’s wrong (or even knowing it is false), creating a false narrative on a topic which students could then investigate and assume is true. 

Despite these obstacles, I believe that blogging’s ability to connect users and audiences via a shared interest is overwhelmingly useful. As technology improves to decrease the chances of bullying and trolling, learners can really benefit from feeling they are sharing their thoughts in a safe space and connecting with others in a safe way.