Capstone & Final Post

This class has been the best professional development I have done over my last eleven years of teaching. I feel like I'm a kid in a candy store and I don't know where to start, so I'll just dive into everything. My students have even shown their appreciation of me taking this course and have commented that the things I'm now using in class and having them do is helpful for them and I'm seeing quiz scores increase here in the last month. Thanks for the great course and I'll certainly be marketing this class to my colleagues.

Thing 15-21 Capstone

Thing 21 - Screencasting

Video to show how to upload content to our school's sharepoint site:



I've been trying to use screencasting for nearly a year now. I started to apply for a grant to Camstasia and went to our computer teachers and they told me that they had a site license that I could use. The software was installed at the end of the school year last spring so I never had a chance to use it.

This fall I went to use it and due to a changing of the guard in our technology department, I was unable to load it. I've tried several times to get this changed but to no avail. But, then this class introduced me to Jing and I started using it in class right away. I did a series of videos detailing the requirements of the big project we do in biology class as well as a few videos to show some other things. The video above is a 2nd generation of one I already used in biology, but am now gearing for my physical science class. In fact, I'll be posting it to my physical science blog as soon as I'm done with this posting :)

Screencasting is great for giving students an opportunity to watch a presentation multiple times. I also have students who are absent watch the screencast videos I have made to help get them caught up. If I had the Camstasia suite setup up like it is supposed to be in my room, I'd be recording every presentation that I do and posting it publicly so parents can also see what is going on in their child's class.

I've had multiple students tell me that this is a nice feature to have and that it helped them out at times when they didn't think they could get help.

I'm our district "expert" on ExamView and I present PD several times a year to staff in our district and I will be using screencasting to record a series of short videos that walks people through a task in ExamView. I recently was able to send a video from home to a colleague showing him how to import his classes from Powerschool into Examview Manager.

Thing 20 - Visual Learning

All of the visual learning things available online now are great! With our district placing heavy focus on Marzano's content literacy strategies and Doug Fisher's work, these things lend themselves well to our district initiative. My IDP this year has two focus areas - improved technology usage and more use of word/concept mapping and similar tools so this is the jackpot for me. I've already used cmap and have had students do so as well, but the brainstorming maps would have been helpful several weeks ago when we started our formal lab writeups in biology class. I will also show mywebspiration.com to my students as they all learned how to use inspiration software in middle school and unfortunately we did not renew our license. I'm hoping the students will be able to effectively use it based on their prior knowledge.

Thing 19 - Virual Classroom

Plan for extending the classroom:
I am currently using blogging and sharepoint on a regular basis in my classroom and the students are using this on a regular basis (1300 hits since early October). I plan to continue using this, but am considering going to a more wiki heavy delivery so its easier for me to organize.

I am currently in the process of evaluating dimdim with a math colleague of mine and we are piloting this to see if it might be a worthwhile thing for us to invest in. Those of us more tech savvy individuals are also talking about (with our administrators) setting up some classes through teleconferencing and using a hybrid concept (similar to this class) for some elective courses. I am one of the people helping with this.

I am also planning on taking the moodle course by the end of the summer so I can start using a true learning management system for my classroom. The same colleague I referred to above uses this and I'm intrigued to do so as well. Due to my various commitments in my district, I am absent often for this meeting and that meeting, so having a learning management system would decrease the need for me to assign obligatory busy work on days when I am gone.

Extending my classroom will increase the availability of the resources in my classroom outside of the walls of my school which is a big step ahead of where I am now. Using this style of learning will help make it easier for every student to fulfill the MDE requirement of an online course requirement without it having to be a traditional computers class.

What is necessary to be successful as an online student:
Based on my visiting of the Navigating the Land of Online Learning, I feel a student needs to have the following skills to be successful in an online learning environment:

• Highly productive w/out the need of somebody continuously "thumbing" you (self motivated)
• Ability to both learn collaboratively & independently
• Ability to communicate through written medium in a clear, unemotional manner
• Ability to take responsibility for ones own actions and learning
• Patience
• Ability to use reading strategies to learn material printed online

Thing 18 - RSS

I've been interested in this for a long time, but have been tentative to do so due to my personality. I am the type of person who can easily get addicted to things like TV & video games & computer things, so I've stayed away thus far, but now I'm in. I see this being a great thing both personally and professionally. I'm a huge sports nut so now instead of scouring all the big sports sites, I can just check this one place. Professionally, it will make it easier for me to follow people's blogs and keep up with their posts. I also subscribed to the Advance newspaper that is written in my school district as I often miss articles that are about my students. Let the addiction begin!

Thing 14 - Capstone

Capstone Things 8-14

Thing 17 - Research

InfoTrac Junior v. InfoTrac Student Database

Venn Diagram made at http://www.gliffy.com/

I chose to evaluate the Educator's Reference database at http://mel.org. I found it interesting that the database is meant for teachers and parents (which makes sense). I liked seeing the lesson plan portion of the class and can see this to be helpful for both audiences, but the research piece appears pretty difficult to sift through unless you are knowledgable in that particular content area. This would be a good source for getting more technical information about science topics I teach, but its pretty boring at the same time. My search of genetics turned up 1758 academic journal results alone, thus credible sources. I once again like having the lexile reading level available in the short citation to help if I were to have students sifting through this.

Citation Pieces:
MeL:
I looked at an article titled "Teaching literacy in context: choosing and using instructional strategies: to help students become proficient with expository text, educators need to focus on how to choose and use the most appropriate instructional strategies for their students"

Citation:
Miller, Mimi, and Nancy Veatch. "Teaching literacy in context: choosing and using instructional strategies: to help students become proficient with expository text, educators need to focus on how to choose and use the most appropriate instructional strategies for their students." The Reading Teacher 64.3 (Nov 2010): 154(12). Educator's Reference Complete. Gale. Library of Michigan. 13 Dec. 2010
http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/start.do?prodId=PROF&userGroupName=lom_accessmich

Other:

Hofstein, A, & Lunetta, V. (2004). The laboratory in science education: foundations for the twenty-first century. Science Education, 88(1), doi: 10.1002/sce.10106

Thing 16 - Professional Learning

After checking out the learnport site, I was amazed at what was available. I found little video classes on most of the biology & chemistry units that I teach. This could certainly help keep me up to date on what happening in the world of science. I also saw that there are a vast number of courses available on a wide range of topics, so this certainly is a one size fits all type of resource.

Sites like twitter & facebook I can see being a help in the classroom since a large number of students are already connected to them, so adding a classroom friend would be pretty simple. Using these for the classroom can help make things more accessible to students and parents, but there are some negatives as well. I really don't want updates on everything my students are doing all the time - sometimes its best to not know what they are doing or thinking. Also, for a person who does not have the best filter in the world, these sites may not be the best. I am more likely to use twitter due to the limitations it places on its users. I've used facebook for personal things in the past, but last year one of my personal posts ended up on my superintendent's desk, so I have stayed away from it (I was defending the actions of our school in my posting and told a friend of mine who is also a parent in our district to move her kids to another school if she felt her kids were unsafe at the school they currently go to).

I've been a member of the Michigan Science Teacher's Association (MSTA) and National Building a Presence in Science (BaP) group for many years. Both groups have placed a high emphasis on using technology to help better educate our students about science. The cost for MSTA is relatively low and you get a quarterly journal be being a member that has many ready to use classroom activities and lesson plans in them. Being a member of these also has helped me in terms of social networking with other science colleagues in other districts.

I'm also currently waiting to hear back on whether or not our school gets a grant that will provide us the means of training some of our more tech savvy teachers to be trainers of teachers in effectively using technology in the classroom. Part of this grant will include membership to MACUL

Thing 15 - Productivity

I found Zamzar to be pretty nice and easy to use. I don't like the idea of having word files out on the web for others to "steal" without my permission, so I like to idea of converting all my files to pdf and at least making it more difficult for other to "steal" without my permission. This will make me more willing to publicly post some of the assignments that we do in class so students can access it from anywhere.

At this point I find media-convert.com difficult to use as it is not working :)

I love google calendar. My students in physical science get confused as it is a team taught course so the students spend half the semester with me and half the semester with another teacher. I intend to upload my outlook calendar to my google calendar so I can share it. Our office staff also gets confused at times about where my students are so I will share this calendar with them as well.

Thing 14 - Online video & audio resources

I already use a ton of online audio and video in my class. Most of my teacher led presentations have links to YouTube or TeacherTube videos or animations. This is a great resource for science teachers as it allows us to show things in our classroom that the students can see in a textbook or in the lab. I think utilizing video & audio is the easiest starting step for educators to begin integrating technology into their classroom.

I stumbled upon TeacherTube a year ago and like using that one whenever possible as I know there are not as many licensing and/or copyright risks involved in it. I like the idea of having small clips and being able to use those as they fit, rather than the old method of having to watch a 30 minute VHS video all at once (or being the person who fast forwarded through pieces).

Audio is nice, when the video isn't available. Audio at least stimulates the auditory modalities and helps students learn, but video stimulates the visual and auditory modalities, thus making it more effective. Its easier to learn content when you have visual evidence in addition to auditory information. Even if the video is just of a person talking, much can be learned from the mannerisms of the presenter that would otherwise be lost if the video was available.

Thing 13 - Quizlet

This site is awesome! Great study tool for students to use and even if they don't have online access at home, they can print the cards out - that's great. Very user friendly and I especially liked the auto-define feature which saved me from having to type all the definitions. I will be using this with my students later this week to study the vocabulary associated w/ our DNA & protein synthesis unit. This goes very well w/ Marzano's content literacy strategies and can be used for steps 4-6 all in one.

Thing 13 - google earth

Street Level Image, Disney World Magic Kingdom in Google Earth

My daughter loved this one :)

Google Earth image of my house. The date feature is pretty neat, because the first image date shows a bunch of empty home sites. 

Thing 12 - Data Tools

I currently use ExamView Manager as my primary data tools source for my classroom. All of the quizzes and tests that I give are in ExamView and I have been tracking multiple choice question responses for three years. I primarily use the item analysis to assess where instruction may have been lacking for the whole class and I also use it to help pinpoint where specific students need remediation and use the data to determine where retesting is needed.

Our district uses Powerschool and imports some of this information into IGOR. I am vaguely familiar with IGOR and use it to access PLAN & ACT & MME info. However the amount of info available at the high school level for science on these assessments is pretty limited and does not help to drive classroom specific instruction. Unfortunately, our school has not started putting classroom specific info into IGOR, but once they do I foresee myself using this data on a regular basis.

FERPA & HIPPA are certainly limitations to using this as permission is necessary for students information to be shared outside of the internal school records. Since the data management tools that our school often uses are collected outside the walls of our school, both of these laws need to be considered and followed.

Thing 12 - Rubrics

I use rubrics on a regular basis in all of my classes, so this can certainly be a useful tool. I spend countless hours creating, formatting, tweeking, etc. my rubrics. Therefore, this could certainly help save me time in setting up my rubrics, and makes it easier for me to share them with students, parents, and other staff members who might use the same rubric. I really like to large selection of rubric types that are available, but as a science teacher will use the science lab report default.

The specific rubric I created will be used in grading our plant study formal labs. Groups of students are given the opportunity in October & November to complete their own scientific investigation on plant germination and growth. Time is given in class to record data adn give treatments three days per week. Upon the conclusion of the data collections, students are expected to write a detailed college style formal lab report detailing everything they did from start to finish. This rubric will then be used to assess their lab reports. The only thing I don't like about this is that is setup for holistic scoring and much of the grading I do on this lab is more of a checklist style. I will need to play around more with the editting features in rubistar to figure this out.

Thing 12 - Survey Tools

Please complete the following survey:


Summary of results:

Thing 11 - Prezi

Here's my prezi presentation on properties of matter

Properties of Matter on Prezi

Below is a screenshot of my prezi zoomed out

I see prezi being a great alternative to powerpoint for several reasons. Reason number one is that Microsoft Office is not necessary to make one of these, so a greater number of students would be able to do this from home. At the beginning of each semester, I poll the kids on their technology availability outside of school and more kids have internet access than kids that have Microsoft Office.

The other big advantage I see to Prezi is that it forces students to make connections between topics in order to link it properly.

I see this as being a great presentation tool for the career project I do in my physical science class.

I did struggle with the part of getting a screen capture while using zoomit. What I did instead was use picasa to resize the image and zoom into a certain piece of it. I see zoomit as being extremely helpful for taking text & images from the web that I project on the screen and making them bigger and easier for students in the back and students w/ sight disabilities to see the screen.

Image Before:

Image after:

Thing 10 - Digital Storyboard

For my story, instead of doing something school related, I put together a video detailing my son's evolution into becoming a MSU fan.

I can see this being a helpful tool for students to catalog their learning and it certainly can be incorporated with Marzano's 6 steps of literacy instruction. I like the idea of students having creative rights to this, thus helping to personalize their learning. I would potentially use this to have students create a story of the unit we've covered from start to finish.

I can also see this being a good opening of the year assignment where students create a story about something they are interested in and then sharing it with the class as an icebreaker (similar to one of the suggestions from the Capturing Kids Hearts series)

Below you will find several screenshots as well as the mostly completed video. All pics used in the video are either royalty free or shot from my own personal camera.

Storyboard:

 Photo Editting:

Final Video