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7/1/12 When I look back on the three week whirlwind that was this class I think the thing that really sticks out is the module. I was intimidated by websites in the past. I felt ok about maintaining and updating my class website or ePortfolios, but that’s a very different thing than building a website. That just wasn’t something I pictured myself doing, but I did and can see doing it again for my class. I think my big aha moment with that came while watching everyone’s module presentations. I now feel like I can’t send homework home without an accompanying module. It’s kind of a curse now that I know I can do it. For my class, it actually shouldn’t be that big of a deal since I usually have 4 big things that we repeat. It would obviously benefit the kids, but also their parents who want to help. Since I wouldn’t have to do the content analysis, it should be easy :) As much as I disliked that content analysis I can recognize that that was helpful. I think that process was well laid out and scaffolded with the IDA activities. It was also very helpful to have all the materials easily accessible through our class wiki. I knew that if I had a question or needed an example I would be able to find what I needed in our class documents. It was also very exciting to have such prominent guest speakers. After thinking about ePortfolios for the past two years, it was pretty amazing to be talking to Helen Barrett for an hour. I found those sessions to be helpful, but maybe there were too many in a row? It was almost overwhelming, especially because we were expected to not only listen, but ask questions as well. I didn’t feel like we did a very good job of taking advantage of their presence, but I definitely recognize how special it was. I am not sure if it was because this was my first class and I haven’t been to school in a long time, but I was pretty overwhelmed at the beginning of this class. The readings were difficult to get through by themselves, but combined with the other requirements it was hard to focus on any one thing. Though the other assignments (SMILE, Resource Collaboration, IDA’s, and Blogs) weren’t necessarily big in and of themselves, they were time-consuming, especially when in combination with other assignments. This definitely got better as the class continued and we shifted our focus to our final module. I felt like a had a place to focus. One of the other big bonuses of this class was that I really feel like I was able to practice and improve at using tools like Googledocs, GoodReader, weekly, my iPad, and wiki (I’m sure there are more).

6/24/12 I guess the most striking thought I have about the module designing process is that I can't believe people actually do this -not the module itself, but the content analysis. It seems very redundant. I understand the context in which one would write up a complete content analysis, and that isn't necessarily everyday teaching. I would only go through this process if I needed to convince someone else that my module was worth using or investing in. I get that this isn't something I need to do in order to incorporate online modules into my everyday teaching though there are pieces that I will definitely do. I found it very helpful to map out all the component skills. I will definitely continue to do that as part of my planning process, except I can't wrap my head around building that chart upside down (at least it's upside down in my head). I get why the entry-level skills are on the bottom, but I had the hardest time building the chart that way. Perhaps it was just my novice use of //Inspiration//. We actually found it helpful to build the bare-bones structure of the website at the same time that we built our skills chart. Once we had each of those skills identified it was really easy to figure out the structure or site map for our website. It was easy to look at each one of those skills as a page in the website with just a few exceptions. As far as the actual website building goes, I am just glad that my students are young and will be impressed with the fact that I created a website...because it's pretty basic. I thought it was going to be a little easier than it has been. I've been maintaining my classroom website and our ePortfolios, and I thought that gave me some experience. Wrong. Building a website from the ground up is a lot different than maintaining one which has already been designed for you. So this has been a good experience, but I repeat, I am glad my students are young and easily impressed.

6/21/12 The topic of motivation has been coming up a lot in our readings and discussions, specifically, the idea if people/children were left alone, would they want to learn? I think the answer is a definitive yes. That may not be the case if all of a sudden you pulled a student out of school and said, “go learn,” but I think we’re talking about a person who hasn’t been influenced by artificial rewards that may have tainted their idea of learning. I thought the animate of Daniel Pink’s lecture, //Drive//, illustrated (ha!ha! no pun intended) this idea very clearly. He spoke about an incentive study which tested whether monetary rewards positively influence performance on cognitive tasks. This study showed that it didn’t, it actually negatively influenced performance. Pink went on to say that there are three main motivators which lead to better performance; autonomy, mastery, and purpose. I know that this is true for myself. I consider myself lucky that I work for a principal that seems to agree with Pink. These motivators make a huge difference in my life. I can honestly say that I don’t think that I would be a good teacher if those motivators were not part of my work environment. My //purpose// is clear. I don’t think you can get a much stronger motivator or clear //purpose// than helping kids. I’m not sure you ever //master// being a good teacher, so that’s a constant motivator. Though I am not totally //autonomous//, I have a level of freedom that allows me to do what I think is best. I would also venture to say that these three motivators also work for my students... I had an interesting conversation with Sue this morning, which made me question that assumption a little. She had a big problem with one of our readings for PBL which made a sweeping statement about how children learn to read. Obviously, not all children learn to read the same way, just like not everyone learns the same way. That is not a revelation for me, and I like to think that I keep that in focus when I’m teaching. Where I do think I forget this is when I am talking about theory. I totally agree with Pink’s motivations because they work for me, but maybe that isn’t universal for all learners. It was a good reminder that I need to be more careful about the assumptions that I’m making. I am trying to keep that in mind when I think about Dr. Kim’s presentation today. I had a hard time with the idea of using competition as a motivator. I recognize that competition is a motivator, but should it be when we are talking about learning? If the idea is to “advance knowledge by inquiry” shouldn’t wanting to find out the answers be enough motivation? It almost seems counterproductive to assign an outside motivation to the process. If we feel like asking questions is the way to acquire knowledge then we should trust it to do that. Dr. Kim did say that //Smile// had a combination of competition and collaboration which could be addressed differently based on the needs of the classroom. I wish I had asked him about this, but I didn’t have it well-though out in my head at the time. I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe Dr. Kim would answer similarly to the way that he answered Mark’s question about how //Smile// would work in a less traditional or inquiry based classroom. He said that testing //Smile// out in more traditional classrooms was a strategic decision. He thought it would be easier to convince people that it can work if used in that setting. Maybe using competition as a motivator is a similar strategic decision to make //Smile// relevant and accessible in a traditional classroom setting where competition is often used as a motivator.

6/19/12 I really enjoyed listening to Helen Barrett today. I was wondering if it would have helped to have her as a resource before we went through our process. My inclination is that it probably wouldn’t have. I think we needed to go through that process ourselves first and create our own model before we were ready to hear about others. Now that we established what we wanted it was really helpful to hear her talk about process vs. product portfolios being separate yet connected pieces. I think deciding what we wanted for our e Portfolios was hard because we see the value in a process portfolio. We recognize that it is important for real time reflections and documentation of learning as it is happening. We have built this into our projects using paper, but it would make so much sense to do it digitally. Imbedded into our research investigation we have the kids start with a hypothesis then as we investigate we periodically have the stop and reflect on what they’ve learned on a “Now I think...” page. That could be so much more powerful if it was done digitally. It could include pictures of their work or a diagram. It could also include audio, which would really help learners who aren’t as good at expressing themselves in writing. As the important thing is to record where they are in their thinking, not to improve their writing skills, I don’t think the medium matters. I also really like her model of a reflection journal which is done on a daily or frequent basis. I think that timely reflection is really important in itself, but the fact that those reflections can be used as a resource for a product portfolio later on is a huge benefit. As much as we tried to have students reflect in a timely manner on projects as they finished them they were still reflections after a project. Those reflections could have been so much richer had they had those reflection journals to look at. On the technology side it would make it so much easier for the students to have those artifacts of learning archived and available to them. When you are working with third and fourth graders the management of paper becomes a much bigger deal than it seems like it should be. Very important artifacts of their learning can easily disappear. Hopefully, already having them archived and at their fingertips will alleviate some of this. With the addition of iPads for every child in the classroom, this is actually possible. I’m excited about what this could look like in my classroom. Don’t get me wrong, I have some very real fears about how this all plays out. For instance, I wanted to cry today when Mark told me that we probably wouldn’t be able to use Evernote for archiving student work because the cost will be prohibitive. I know that there are other tools and the tool is not the important thing, but for some reason this was the boot out of my “change comfort zon e.” Some of my colleagues reached that when they found out that we wouldn’t be able to use wikis anymore for our ePortfolios. I guess the good news is, and I know this from our e Portfolio experiences in the past, we will all get over it and adjust.

6/17/12 “Is the promise of mobile learning technologies a trigger to generate learning cultures realistic? (Kristine Peters)”

I found this question to be really interesting in the context of our “Google it” culture. I know there is a lot of fear that goes along with the massive amounts of information that are available to us almost instantaneously. This is obviously very different from when I was in school, and it is healthy to question it. I know people are concerned that students do not have the same ability to remember things. From the little I know about brain research, I don’t think that’s true, but I was curious about the idea of students losing their ability to solve problems or to be curious when it is so easy to “google it.”

I think that the ease of being able to find out the answers to something actually increases curiosity and problem solving. If I look at my own informal learning, in the past there were things that I didn't understand and I left to the experts to know. If I really needed to know I could go see someone else and they would tell me about it. I don't need to do that anymore. Instead of my taxes being a mystery to me an best left in the hands of an accountant, I could learn how to use Turbotax and do it myself. Instead of relying on my “Where” magazine (who’s recommendations are paid for) I can go on Yelp and hear from hundreds of people about the best place to get Mexican food in Sonoma. When I'm reading books in iBooks I double click on a word I don’t know to find out what it means. I can guarantee that I did not pull out my dictionary when I was reading paper books. The ease of being able to access this kind of information has definitely empowered me to be more proactive, to question what in the past I would have happily classified as a mystery, or to find out facts that I was just to lazy to investigate before. I imagine that my experience is not unique, and translates to students’ informal learning, but also their formal learning in school. When I think about this idea in my classroom I see its impact most clearly in my students’ ability to question. These questions become the root of my students’ investigations. At the elementary level we talk a lot about what a good question looks like. We use the terminology of “Quick Find” questions (borrowed from the Burley School in Chicago) and “Juicy” questions. “Quick Find” questions are questions that you can find the answer quickly, hence the name. “Juicy” questions are questions that require much deeper thought and connection making. There is nothing wrong with a “Quick Find” question, and this is usually where students start thinking about a topic. If I’m studying Monk seals I want to know what they eat or where they live. Those are good questions, but because it is so easy for me to find the answers to those questions it gives me room to ask bigger questions like, why they are on the endangered species list or why people are killing them? We can’t get to those questions without answering their first questions, so we “Google it” and get on with forming and thinking about “juicy” questions. I will close with another example of how Google has influenced my thinking and learning. I will admit, because I never really bought into it I don’t pay much attention to people’s concerns about how technology is ruining our lives, so I “Googled it.” I found that article written by Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” which was fascinating. Despite its provocative title there were actually some points I may agree with, which I will not go into here. One of the things reading this article led me to do was question whether what I had just written in my blog was still valid. I also had to make connections to what I know about how humans learn to read. That made me really want to talk to Sue (because she is a reading expert) about what she thinks about this idea. All in all, it was a rigor filled trip to Google.

6/14/12 These readings have been sort of a journey for me. I started off with kind of a bad attitude about online learning. It turns out that I had some serious misconceptions about it. When offered the choice of taking these courses online or in person, I actually laughed at the prospect of doing them online. Why would I ever want to be stuck alone with my computer when I could go to class and work with other people? I envisioned myself stuck at my computer (with the sun shining in and taunting me from outside) reading article after article struggling, and failing, to make sense of what I was reading. I realize now that what I feared was poorly designed online learning, not online learning in itself. What seems obvious to me now, but I didn’t think about before was that an online learning course or system is designed by educators. Those educators have theories about how students learn, just like I do, and they will design their course or system accordingly. Duh. I think the thing that surprises me the most about my new perspective on online learning is how big a role collaboration plays. That was one of the things I worried about, that you were stuck on an island trying to figure things out for yourself. From what I’m reading, online learning actually opens up a new worlds of collaboration. Collaborating online can even give you the opportunity to connect with people with very different perspectives, who maybe can’t be in the same place at the same time as I can. That could only help your thinking. When I hear from friends who have finished graduate school talk about their experiences of sitting in the back row of their lectures i-chatting with their friends or watching ESPN it becomes really clear that there is no magic to going to class in a classroom. Just because you are sitting in a classroom it doesn’t mean that you’ll be collaborating with all those other minds in the room. Patrick Fahy talked about this in his chapter about Characteristics of Interactive Online Learning Media. He said, “Interactive media support communities, based on what people do together, not where or when (Rovai & Barnum, 2003). Community becomes a process, not merely a place (Canell, 1999), in which ‘structured and systematic’ social interaction, using media, is essential to significant learning (Fulford & Ahang, 1993; Ragan, 1999; Dilworth & Willis, 2003; Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005; Conrad, 2005).” It’s true, community doesn’t just happen because you’re in the same place. Community in a classroom, physical or virtual, is designed and actively supported by teachers. This is something that Fahy talked about as well, teaching presence. I heard two great quotes today which reminded about how important this idea of teaching presence is in any learning setting, but especially in an online one. Jeff Piontek talked about the idea that people are afraid that technology will replace teachers, but he said that instead, teachers who use technology will replace teachers who don’t. The next was from the Sugata Mitra Ted Talk that we watched today in our PBL class. He quoted, “A teacher who can be replaced by a computer should be.” I am a little embarrassed that these ideas about collaboration and teacher presence in online learning were such a breakthrough for me, but they kind of were. Luckily, I have worked through my bad attitude and misconceptions just in time for my first online class this coming semester.

6/12/12 This year we are adopting a one to one program using iPads. Some of my colleagues are nervous about this prospect, but I was just excited. After reading the chapter in __Mobile Learning__ about FRAME (Framework for the Rational Analysis of Mobile Eduction), I am not just excited, I am confident. I instinctually knew that my students having an iPad to work with everyday would benefit their learning, but it’s immensely reassuring to have a framework rooted in constructivist theory to base that assumption on. As I read through this chapter I had many “a ha” and “Ooh, we could do this” moments, but I also had a lot of “Why am I not doing that?” moments. It made me reflect on how I have been presenting information to my students in a pretty limited way and how the iPad can and will completely change that. Instead of thinking of how I could incorporate the iPad into what I am already doing, which is what I expected, I found myself wanting to change what I am already doing. When we developed our ePortfolios two years ago we started by trying to create a digital version of the paper portfolios that we had been using and loving for 10 years. We tried, but couldn’t do it. As we put it together we started to question every aspect of our old portfolios. Eventually we decided to scrap what we had and create an entirely new portfolio from scratch. That is not something that we would have ever done, or at least not for a long time, had it not been for the introduction of e Portfolio technology. Introducing that new technology provided us the opportunity to look at what we were doing and rethink our practice. I still firmly believe that technology is a tool, maybe even a Swiss Army knife with lots of different functions. We use that tool and all its functions to help us teach the way we believe that we should teach. I am starting to think that one of those functions, maybe the most important one, is a mirror to help us look at our practice. I have no doubt that introducing iPads into our instruction will enable that mirror function. It already has for me. Now when I reflect on my practice and look at how I can improve using the iPad I have a framework like FRAME to reference.