Too many loose ends.......+ TPACK, Language Learning, Survey Monkey and Doodle!

My idea for class tonight was to take time to tie up some loose ends from the first few weeks: technology and process writing, digital stories in the classroom, Logo and problem solving and TPACK (technological pedagogical content knowledge).  Though this seemed like a good idea to me, I think the evening turned into a series of somewhat unrelated topics.  If I had it to do over again, I would have presented the topics in a variety of ways and worked for more student involvement.

Highlights of the evening included Dou Dou and Mike's resource presentations.  Both presentations were well-organized and each presenter was clear in his/her description of the resource. 

I was also pleased with our Logo and problem solving small group discussions---each group added some specifics to our knowledge of how Logo can assist in the teaching/learning of problem solving.  Most groups agreed that Logo is a valuable tool for teaching students to solve problems through learning from mistakes.  I added the idea that Logo can help students learn to define problems and to divide problems into small pieces.

We will meet online next week and we will also be using the new class wiki to record ideas on pros and cons in the 505 experience.  I look forward to learning from student comments.

Content Area Tools + Digital Story Progress

We welcomed Daniel Tillman from the University of Virginia and Daniel's expertise fit right into our evening's activities.  Daniel demonstrated the Craft Robo, an emerging technology that shows promise for creating engineering and design activities for K-8 learners.  He also shared his expertise in documentary film making with us and provided some guidance for our work with digital story telling.  Evrim followed up with an activity designed to encourage planning and story boarding for digital stories.  She made a strong case for the fact that storyboarding will save time in the long run.

Both resource reviews were from content areas---Amber reviewed a soil evaluation package and Stefan reviewed TI resources (usually for math, but Stefan demonstrated applications across content areas).  Both presenters did a good job relating their specialized applications to the class as a whole.  Amber handled a minor technology glitch well---all of us who work with technology have to develop the ability to keep on going if the technology does not do exactly what we have in mind.  Amber modeled this ability effectively.

I will be changing our schedule a bit for next week, substituting wikis (a simple, yet powerful application) for podcasting.  I don't want students trying to produce podcasts and digital stories at the same time.  We will then introduce podcasting on March 10, the day we share digital stories.

Next week we will focus upon readings, wikis and setting up our online class for the following week.

Building Knowledge Together

Both Bransford and Papert write about knowledge building activities for students.  I try to design 505 as a knowledge building environment for students (and for me and Evrim too).  Last night we had several examples of this knowledge building.

In groups, students defined some specific similarities in the thinking of Bransford and Papert and when the groups reported back, the shared information sparked interesting, informed discussion.  Collin's point about Bransford's discussion of misconceptions relating to feedback in the Logo environment provided a new connection between the two for me-----and I am sure for others in the class.  As evidenced in the picture, students in each of the groups were truly using the readings to make their points.

Diana provided more new knowledge with her well-organized presentation on Google Docs.  She shared several capabilities of Google Docs that go beyond sharing documents and interest in the presentation was high.  Her enthusiasm for Google Docs made her presentation especially effective.  Quote Diana: "Google Docs Rocks".

Our "What is Learning" adventure revealed that we have several skilled photographers in our class, as well as students who can share knowledge about IMovie and Movie Maker.  This shared expertise will help support our digital story assignment.

I forgot to suggest that students begin to collect images for their digital stories, so I am hoping that students reading this blog will get the message.  We would like to do a little preliminary storyboarding in class next week, so bringing a few images will help students get started on their digital story.

Success + Winer in Iowa!

We tried a new approach to our discussions this week.  Evrim suggested having students share their delicious pieces (sounds like a candy bar) in pairs and then having each pair report back to the whole class on one of the pieces.  From my perspective, this approach worked very well--almost all the delicious pieces provoked thoughtful, informed discussion.  Next week we will again work on beginning discussions in small groups and we will change the class furniture arrangement, as suggested in blog comments.  In any case, I am pleased with our progress.

Our new topic this week was technology in the teaching of writing and we focused upon ideas for pre-writing activities.  Evrim introduced the group to Webspiration and we played with Webspiration's capabilities by doing a pre-writing task centered upon explaining Iowa winters to people who have never lived here.  Most of the groups were writing for an international audience and several of the products demonstrated the power of using a graphic organizer to encourage and arrange pre-writing ideas.  And the activity was fun!

Lei introduced the group to Hot Potatoes and did a good job of introducing all the features of this useful tool  All of our resource reviews thus far have covered interesting, useful applications.

Next week we will begin our work with digital images.

Fabulous Logo Assignments

I had some fun grading Logo assignments this morning, and I was quite impressed with the creative approach that many students took to this assignment.  Assignments included a replica of a picture in a parent's home, a school model, interesting flowers and even two peas in a pod.

Grading the assignments also made it clear to me that I did not emphasize the idea of super procedure or calling procedure enough in class.  I will explain that idea tonight and allow students to resubmit----using a calling procedure is a trivial process in the programming sequence, but an important and powerful idea.