Final Synthesis Project

Joe Sobeske

EDT5410 – Summer 1 2008

Final Synthesis Project

Target Learners

The target learners for this learning project are high school juniors and seniors in south-central Michigan. The students are tech savvy and have shown a strong desire to pursue a career in a computer technology related field. They are English speaking and generally come from middle to low income households. Ethnically, the student group is almost entirely Caucasian.

Context

This project will take place within the context of a Career and Technical Education (CTE) center’s Computer Systems Networking and Telecommunications curriculum (Michigan State Classification of Instructional Programs Code 11.0901). This project addresses some of the Information Technology foundation standards as well as several career and employability skills standards. (See http://mccte-fsu.org/csp.php?i=2#cluster_5 )

Learning objectives

The student will be able to use the internet to analyze his/her individual educational and experience requirements for a chosen career goal and create a web page which includes an embedded presentation describing the steps necessary to obtain the goal while earning at least 80% of the points available on the supplied rubric.

Description of Lesson

Online tools to be incorporated.

· Google Page Creator.

· Google Docs.

· Embedded Media.

Lesson description. The goals of this lesson are:

· To encourage students to crystallize a career goal and requisite education requirements that come with their career goal.

· To give students an opportunity to explore online applications.

· To practice presentation skills.

The student will be required to deliver to me a website which he/she has created that includes an embedded slide show presentation. The embedded presentation will state the goal and describe the steps that the student will need to take to accomplish the goal. The website will provide links to pages which describe the education/training requirements of the goal, the schools likely attended and resources which will describe the employment outlook for the chosen career. (See example page at http://jsobeske.googlepages.com/sobeske%27scareergoalexample .

To access prior knowledge, I will start this lesson with a discussion about goals and times students have either set and achieved a goal or heard of someone who has. I will then focus the discussion by asking about their knowledge of anyone who has set a goal to get a certain job and then did whatever it took to get the job they wanted. I will then get specific and share with them the process I went through to become a teacher after having been in a different career for many years. Once I have verbally described my process, I will present the slide show which I have created. Before I present, I will tell the students to notice that I will not simply be reading the slides, but rather will be presenting. I will describe what presenting means and what to look for in a presentation.

With the discussion about career goals and my career goal presentation complete, I will describe the requirements of the assignment. I will begin by telling them that they will be creating a website and I will show them my website. I will walk them through the links and describe why each part is there and what I want to see. At this point, I will be very specific about what is required by passing out the “Career Goal Website Rubric” and going over it in detail.

At this point, I will demonstrate to the students how to get started with Google Docs and Page Creator. I will also demonstrate how to embed the slideshow into a web page. Then I will give the students time to begin researching their career goals and creating their web sites and slide shows. I will make myself available to help any student having difficulty.

Artifact

I have created an example of a website similar to which I am requiring the students to create. The address is http://jsobeske.googlepages.com/sobeske%27scareergoalexample

JUSTIFICATION

The goals of this assignment could be accomplished with a lower-tech approach. I can imagine students could go to the library, look up the information they need about their chosen career, contact colleges and universities and study their bulletins and gather all the information and present it in a folder or portfolio. Having the students use the technology I described above has distinct advantages over lower-tech approaches. Here are some of these advantages:

· Consolidating the career goal and education requirements on one website synthesizes the material in a dynamic and understandable way that a low-tech approach could not do. This website gives the student a map to success and the ability to navigate the various aspects of a career goal.

· The fact that their website is actually published on the internet gives the students the opportunity to share their goals with their families in a way a low-tech approach could not do. The students’ career sites will be available anywhere there is internet connectivity which gives students’ families an opportunity to support and guide the student. Students would not have to wait until they happen to have a portfolio with them to share their plans with their mentor. This is a huge advantage because when a teenager is in the mood to talk about his/her life goals, this approach allows mentors to seize the moment.

· The information can be changed and updated easily thus allowing the potential for this to not only be a class assignment, but a tool to help students achieve a goal. If this was a paper and ink assignment it would be much less likely to be used as a tool to help crystallize their thoughts about their goals and how to achieve them. With this website continually available every time they are logged on, it is more likely to have the desired effect, which is to have students maintain focus.

· The technology allows this assignment to be completed in a much shorter time and allows the students to work on it at home if they desire. A multifaceted assignment such as this would be a huge project if done with traditional low-tech methods. This assignment does cover several state standards; however, there are several hundred more standards which must be addressed in a year. This use of technology allows more standards to be covered in a shorter amount of time, yet in a way that is meaningful to students.

· Using this technology teaches technology. If this assignment were to be completed using a low-tech approach, students may not be exposed to the utility of free services such as Google Docs and Google’s Page Creator. This has the potential auxiliary benefit of saving students money. Also, this project exposes students to Web 2.0 concepts such as cloud- delivered applications and embedding media which is hosted non-locally.

Online Application Review

I will start by saying “Google Docs rocks!” Until this assignment I never spent much time working with this suite of applications because I have Microsoft Office. Google Docs has advantages Office doesn’t. Probably the greatest advantage is that all files are online and can be accessed anywhere. While this is neat, it is pretty much what we Web 2.0 crowd take for advantage. Online storage aside, I’m blown away by the functionality these applications have for free! The spreadsheet application has all the features I use most frequently from Excel like speed fill and formulas. It also has really cool gadgets you can put on your spreadsheet to jazz it up. The word processor has what you would expect but more such as the innate ability to create PDF files and the ability to open PDFs and copy from them. This feature is very cool but you cannot directly edit PDFs yet. They’re working on that. The presentation software can embed video and animations and, the part I like best, can be embedded into websites. Some people would say that a big feature the Google Docs has is the ability to collaborate in real time. I personally do not do a lot of collaborating so it’s not a big deal to me. I did see that it will email you when someone you are collaborating with has made changes. I barely scratched the surface describing all the functionality of Google Docs. If you haven’t tried it out, you need to. If you were, like me, thinking you already have what you need because you have Office, you need to invest an hour or two checking Google Docs out. You just might convert. Oh yeah…for the record, I would recommend Google Docs to my district.

I like photo editing though I really don’t have time to do it much. I went ahead and played with Phixr, FotoFlexer and Picnic. I have a fair amount of experience with Adobe’s Photoshop so I was ready to be under whelmed and in some cases I was. Surprisingly to me, in some cases I was impressed.

Of the three photo editing sites I checked out, I rank Picnik the best followed closely by FotoFlexer. Both had very similar interfaces. So similar, in fact, that at first I thought I was the two were one. Once I started using them the differences became more clear. Both fix red-eye pretty well. I liked the way Picnik gave you a choice between fixing human and animal eyes. Apparently there is a difference however I didn’t happen to have a red-eyed animal photo to check it out with. Picnik worked faster on my machine and had lots of very nice effects. Unlike FotoFlexer, Picnik let you see a preview of the changes before you submitted them thus eliminating the need to find a back button. I was able to create a nice picture of my wife and son with a fuzzy circular mask around their faces that faded to black and white in no time. FotoFlexer has me save the pictures on their site by default where Picnic assumes you want to save on your local machine which I prefer. FotoFlexer is well worth checking out because of the extra artsy effects it allows you to add to your pictures.

I feel like I’m rambling on a bit here so let me cut to the chase about Phixr. It’s slow and doesn’t have near the functionality of the other two. Don’t bother going there. I would recommend FotoFlexer and Picnic to my school district. They’re fun.

Week 7 - R/D 13

The ideas that I thought were the neatest were advanced performance tracking, nanotechnology and cybernetics.

I understand that there is no crystal ball which will help us see what form emerging technologies will take. That being said, in the realm of education and training, advanced performance tracking combined with nanotechnology and artificial intelligence holds enormous promise. I can imagine this technology going far beyond the tennis example the author gives. In the medical field, physicians in training wearing special gloves could perhaps be taught advanced surgical techniques with greater efficiency. Chiropractors in training could be evaluated for their technique. The techniques of savant practitioners could be fed into computers and these techniques could be disseminated with much greater speed. Physical therapy could be enhanced with the use of clothing that could train injury patients how to walk again.

I can only imagine the implications for regular education as artificial intelligence technology matures. Truly individualized instruction could be created in ways not even conceived of yet. I was amazed at the authors’ speculation about automatically matching learning styles and preferences to learners.

Who doesn’t think the idea of cybernetics is cool? The authors talk about “carrying our knowledge with us” and “control computers directly from our nervous system.” Combining these two concepts leads me to wonder how long it will be before we can create and interface into our brain where we can simply plug information in. Perhaps we can all be doctors, or lawyers, or multilingual dependant upon what knowledge bank we have installed. Admittedly, this would be several steps beyond simply controlling computers with our minds but it is what the logical next step would be. I wouldn’t be surprised if these ideas have been around for years but now we find ourselves in an age where it can be realistically imagined, even planned for. Wow.

My favorite activity in this course was the group collaboration PBWiki project. I must say I’m surprised to be saying this because my previous experiences with collaborative projects have not been great. The thing I liked about the activity was that it was an authentic activity and it brought home the functionality of WIKIs . I had learned academically of WIKIs and even created one but I had never actually used one to collaborate. I found it more enjoyable than I anticipated and I felt the three of us, who will probably never meet face-to-face, produced a good product.

Week 7: R/D12

In my opinion, Chapter 30 is the most useful chapter we have read from Reisner and Dempsey and I can easily discuss two ways I can apply the ideas in my classroom.

I have always been fascinated by brain studies so the section titled “How Humans Learn” caught my attention. I remember learning about the concept of activating prior knowledge from my education classes but the importance was never explained to me as well as the authors did on pages 314 and 315. They effectively articulated the importance of activating prior knowledge when they succinctly say “this related prior knowledge must be activate to make it available in working memory for learning.” That word “must” jumped out at me. What a strong word. I can use this imperative statement in my classroom by spending more time introducing lessons. I find myself excited to jump right into the topic of the day and often forget to prime the pump, so to speak, by getting the students thinking about related information or concepts they already know. I will now make an attempt before every lesson to either:
• ask students about prior knowledge of the subject of the day,
• create analogies that relate to what we will be learning.
• review what we have already covered in class.

On page 315 the authors point to recent studies that reinforce what we already know: “Students learn better from words and pictures that from words alone.” The surprising thing the authors point out is that students do not learn any better from animations than they do from a series of still visuals. This is useful to know. I’m all about efficiency when it comes to teaching effectively. The more time saved on creating one effective lesson means more time available making another lesson stronger. Creating and showing animations is time consuming and, according to studies, not necessarily any more effective. In fact, the authors point out that sometimes pictures with words are more effective because the learner can refer back to the still visual more easily. In my classroom I’m not going to sweat that my PowerPoints are not flashy and moving. Pictures, yes; time-consuming animations...well…I guess I can’t bring myself to totally ditch them but I’m going to cut way back.

I know we were supposed to only talk about two “tangible take-aways” but this chapter was so rich I have to mention two more.

Visuals with Audio narration, especially in the context of web delivery, I already knew was more fun but now I know studies show it is more effective…a lot more. I am getting Camtasia for my classroom and I will be doing screencasts with audio for my absent students. In the past, I might have simply gave my notes to the students who were absent.

The last item from this chapter I want to mention (I promise, this is the last) is the idea of seductive information or what I might call, going off on a tangent. The author stated that in six different studies, lessons that omitted “seductive vignettes” (read: didn’t go off on interesting, related, but off focus stories) had significantly increased learning as compared to lessons which included the seductive information. I will use this information in my classroom by remembering that just because I have a related story or information to share, it is not necessarily enhancing learning. I will keep focused more on the narrow topic of the lesson and not succumb to the temptation to beguile students with information which, though perhaps interesting and useful at another time, is off focus on the lesson being taught.

Week 6 : Screencasting

This is actually a screencast that I did originally for a different course and I ended up using it in my classroom. The students liked it so I will probably use it next year. I used the opportunity of this course to enhance the editing a bit. Camtasia does a pretty good job auto zooming on the active window and on your cursor but sometimes it does more zooming than I want. For what I am demonstrating, I felt I needed to be closer so the students can read the code better so I adjusted some of the edit points on the Camtasia timeline and I bodly deleted some of them. I feel the flow is better without all the in and out. I also added a couple more titles into this version. Addin titles is not difficult to do and I feel that it enhances the demonstration quite a bit. I just needed to be careful to get them to come in and go out at the right time. There's a bit of a learning curve for ading titles and call-outs but it is short and worth the effort.

Week 6 Google Page Creator

I have taught HTML and Dreamweaver. I have also used the GooglePages before for a website to teach basics of HTML. I'm no expert but I want you to know I'm not a newbie to web page creation.

The web site I created for this class is a work in progress. As with many projects, my website suffered from mission creep long after the original requirements were met. My idea is to have my students each create a site that will help them as they prepare for the A+ exam. Each week they would add a page to the site which will consist of pictures, notes or whatever they need to keep the information for the week fresh. I got the site roughed in and got a good start to the "connectors" area. The rest of the links are dead for now but it will give you an Idea of what I'm after. Here's the site. http://bacccomputerparts.googlepages.com/

Incase you are really bored, here's a link the site I created that teaches the basics of spreadsheets: http://jsobeske.googlepages.com/