CEP 810 Final Post: Michael Phelps, Flat Earthers, & Home Depot Employees

We have come to the end of CEP 810, Teaching Understanding with Technology. Along the way I have learned or reviewed a number of things:

• how to set up an RSS feed 
• how to edit in iMovie
• how to swim like a really slow Michael Phelps
• how Creative Commons licensing works
• how to be an insufferable Evernote user who takes photos of everything exclaiming, “It’s fully searchable!”
• how to cut a PB&J sandwich with a giant burger flipper
• what my Professional Learning Network is and how to use it

But more important than the concrete skills I learned, were the concepts that were opened to me in my first MAET course. As I reflect on these, I see implications all around me.

Learning, mastery, and experts

To start there was our study of how experts learn, which I related to as a musician who had to learn a lot in a short period of time, and how we can best teach for understanding. Going forward, I will continue to refer back to what we learned about mastery and how experts learn to design and implement the best possible practices. 

Navigating This Vast, Potentially Flat Earth

Next, we explored the pros, cons, and current deficiencies in the application of technology in education. We explored how 21st-century technology with its never ending library of unedited, uncurated content, demands a high degree of discernment from the user. In the past, education primarily depended on the learner’s ability to provide the right answer to a given question by drawing on predetermined sources.  21st-century learning, demands that the learner find the right information from a limitless pool and apply it to the right questions. Every day, we see the benefits, as well as the perils of this new model of obtaining information. Here I am tempted to open a discussion about the rise of certain political movements and the incident in Charlottesville, but I will instead point to another strange idea that has gained a lot of traction in recent years: the flat earth theory.

There is nothing new about the view that the earth is flat, but in recent years it seems that there has been an upswing in activity on the flat earth scene. Why is this? The fact is that the internet provides a network for people with a minuscule minority view to connect and share information. The result: today the Flat Earth Society’s twitter page has over 13,000 followers and videos debating whether or not the earth is flat rack up millions of views on Youtube. As a teacher, I need to be aware of the challenges this new media landscape provides and find ways to help teach students learn to navigate it.

Being a Subversive at Home Depot

We ended our exploration of Teaching Understanding with Technology by learning about Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK). Central to Dr. Mishra’s presentation of TPACK was the idea that effective educational technology is not always specifically designed for education. But when teachers with a depth of content knowledge and a working understanding of best pedagogical practice are able to apply a technological tool in a way that empowers students technology can be truly transformative.

At the same time that we were learning about subversive uses of technology in education, I was working on a project with my sons. We were building a backyard fort out of random materials and were looking for something to stabilize the frame. We had 50-pound sandbags, but the boys could not lift them. Looking for an alternative solution, we went to Home Depot. I asked the employee if they had fillable sandbags, she said “no”. I explained that we were trying to get some sort of containers that we could fill with sand to use as weights for a fort. She replied flatly, “we don’t have anything like that.” I thought, Really?! This is Home Depot. It is a place that literally sells anything you need to do millions of different projects. We perused the aisles and found some very sturdy, closable Tupperwares, that were fully stackable and thankfully inexpensive. Now the boys have modular sand bricks that they can carry.  

In the coming year, I will strive to continue finding innovative ways to adapt technology to my teaching needs.

Now What?

This class has been a wonderful introduction to the world of learning with technology. Going forward I hope to continue exploring the following questions:

• Given the breadth of research tools now available to students, how do we evaluate and teach literacy in the 21st century?
• Given that so much learning now takes place online with the learner choosing the time and location of their work, how do we create courses that allow students to still feel like they are part of a cohort?
• How do we take advantage of the scalability of online learning while still retaining the responsive differentiation and individualization we now know to be essential to deep and meaningful learning?

I look forward to exploring these ideas over the coming years.

Cooking with TPACK

This week in CEP 810 we had a cooking challenge. Drawing randomly from a hat, I was tasked with making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I had my son randomly select three tools for me to use: the bottom of a cake tin, a mortar, and a giant burger flipper.

Here is the video of my attempt.

The primary technology that I used was the giant burger flipper. The handle worked for scooping things out of jars. The bottom edge worked well for spreading. And, once I had mastered the technique, the side worked for cutting.

This was my introduction to the world of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). In the TPACK framework, technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge each exist in partially overlapping circles. It is at the intersection of all three that the real magic happens. A central argument to Mishra and Koehler’s (2006) work is that new technology must be introduced with an understanding of pedagogical practice and deepknowledge of content.

However, this does not mean that only technology intentionally designed by education experts is useful in learning. In fact, some of the most powerful applications for technology come from using tech tools the way I used a burger flipper to make a PB&J. This repurposing of technology can result in engaging, project-based learning that pushes students to greater depths of understanding. Take for example, the teacher who has students correct the grammar of celebrity Tweets (Brodrick 2013). While Jack Dorsey may have envisioned many things when creating Twitter, raising a squad of 9-year-old grammar police was likely not one of them.

This was a fun exercise that challenged me to think differently about the tools around me. Now the question is what tech tools can be the burger flippers of my teaching.

Resources

Brodrick, R. (2013, July 3).Brazilian School Kids have been Learning English by Correcting Celebrities’ Grammer On Twitter. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/brazilian-school-kids-have-been-learning-english-by-correcti?utm_term=.ypbvJpmbOJ#.mskr8PvAD8
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054. Retrieved from http://punya.educ.msu.edu/publications/journal_articles/mishra-koehler-tcr2006.pdf download .pdf

Making a Human Community on Mars

My first 21st-century lesson plan had students reviewing 3D shapes by make monsters with TinkerCad (a 3D design tool).

But when I shared it with my 8 and 9-year-old boys, they thought it sounded boring. They wanted to build real things: cityscapes, buildings, mountains, and caves. So after some more thinking, I asked them if it would be cool to design a colony on Mars; They said yes.

We watched some videos about living on Mars, then talked about what people would need to live there. I realized that this thought exercise of building a community on Mars can teach children a lot about what are true necessities, how different people live in different parts of the world, and where the things we need to survive come from. I also realized that designing a community in TinkerCad would be a fun way to stretch their spatial reasoning and initiate them into the world of 3D design.

We start with a simple question: If we were going to start a new civilization on Mars, what would we need? After some discussion of this and related questions, we watch this video to see that living on Mars may be a reality before the students turn 30 years old.

From here students brainstorm twenty things they can’t live without.

The next day, with a partner they watch three videos like this one from Kids in Other Countries.

The partners come up with a list of no more than ten things they cannot live without. These are labeled needs; anything else is labeled a want. We spend time reflecting on the needs and how they are obtained in different communities and environments. For example: how did James get food in the video? How do you get food in your house? How could we get food on Mars?

Once the students have a clear idea what they will need and how they are going to get it on Mars, they start designing their communities in TinkerCAD and write up the Key to the Community: a document that outlines the needs they have identified and how the people in the human community on Mars will obtain it.

Throughout the process, the students are taught to use TinkerCAD using the learn, explore, create, and share model, you can see how here.

The lesson draws on the three of the five core competencies discussed in Hobbs (2011).

1. Access. Students will actually have to look up answers to questions like where does our power come from and where do we get our water?
2. Create. Students will be writing a document that outlines the things they cannot live without and building a model of a community that provides them.
3. Act. They will have to work individually and collaboratively to identify what our real needs are and design a community that can sustain people.

In reaching out for feedback, a 3rd-grade teacher I work with pointed out that the lesson could be woven into the discussion of the natural resources and early settlement of Michigan. This lesson could also fit well within the Montessori Culture curriculum (provided the school has progressive attitudes towards technology). I am also exploring the possibility of teaching this lesson at the Cook Humanities Library in Grand Rapids.

The full lesson plan is here. Below are some images from the human community on Mars that my son built. He identified shelter, separate bathrooms (hence the shape of the pods), building materials, food, water, transportation and a social area (the meeting henge) as necessary for a community to live. We plan on 3D printing it next week.

Resources

Hobbs, R. (2011). Digital and media literacy: Connecting culture and classroom. Thousand, Oaks, CA: Corwin/Sage.

Kids in Other Countries. (2017, June) James in the Phillippeans Preview Retieved from https://vimeo.com/220877896

UCode Videos (2013, September 20). TinkerCad- What is TinkerDad. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMe22tYVisI

Thought Cafe. (2016, February 12). Could We Live on Mars. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQqHDEYpIvI

NLP: Network Learning in the Pool FINAL POST

For our Teaching Understanding with Technology course at Michigan State this summer, we had to learn a new skill using only Youtube and internet help forums. I chose learning to swim with a proper front crawl. This is the final post for this project (click on these links to see the original post, an update post, and my practice log). Below are a video of my journey and some reflections on the process.

This experience reminded me of what we read in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins et al., 2006). In the paper, Jenkins (2006) proposes eleven new competencies which constitute literacy in the new media world (pp. 22-55). I found two of Jenkins eleven competencies key to unlocking this project:

“Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 43).

Throughout this process, I had to evaluate the quality of the information that I was getting. In the case of Youtube videos, I tried to rely on reputational clues: who made the video, why did they make it, and what are commenters saying. Of course, once you start looking at commenters, you have to question their motivations and credentials as well.

“Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 49).

The point at which I really started to gather momentum in my practice was when I started participating in the dialog. After a week of practice sessions and Youtube binges, I developed a core concept of what I thought swimming was about. Remembering what we had read in Gee (2013) about the importance of the learner getting feedback on their thinking from teachers as they learn (pp. 3-5), I decided to write my own Reddit post. I tried to identify some key principles of the crawl and move myself more towards the expert mindset that we discussed in our reading of Bransford, et al (2000, pp. 31-50).

While my post did not skyrocket to the top of the Reddit charts, the responses I got were substantive and full of great resources. More importantly, post responders were framing information in a way that comported my thinking. This is not to say that they all agreed with my observations (although I did get some assurances that I was on the right track), but when they provided corrections or suggestions it was done through the context of my mental model. For example, one responder, PenguinAscot, pointed out that part of the reason for torso rotation was to fully engage the lat muscles in the catch (Kjorness 2017). Thinking of extension as part of rotation with the aim being more power made it feel much more natural to me than having the fragmented commands: extend, rotate, pull.

I chose swimming because I knew it would be hard to learn this way. There is so much information to process and coordinate. My thinking: if I can learn to swim better this way, I can learn just about anything this way. But it took a particular mindset and active engagement. It is true that there are videos and help threads about anything on the internet, but you can’t simply go to one, follow the instructions word-for-word, and hope for the best. To really learn in a new media environment you have to be an active participant. You must constantly evaluate the veracity and quality of the information you are taking in. Then you have to be willing to construct your own models and open them to critique by those more knowledgeable than you.

Sources Cited

Bransford, J., Brown, A.L. & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.), (2000), How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school (pp. 3-27). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368.

 

Gee, J. P. (2013). Digital Media and Learning: A Prospective Retrospective. Retrieved July 15, 2017, from http://jamespaulgee.com/pdfs/Digital%20Media%20and%20Learning.pdf

 

Jenkins, Henry. (2013). New Media Literacies: Learning in a Participatory Culture. Retrieved from http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/NMLWhitePaper.pdf/
Kjorness, Chris. (2017). Swim Masters: Are these the 3 keys to a good crawl stroke. Retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/r/Swimming/comments/6p14ft/swim_masters_are_these_the_3_keys_to_a_good_crawl/?st=j5ntxraf&sh=abd49784