Using Technology Effectively

Our school is piloting a 1:1 Chromebook program and everyone is excited! If you didn't already, you now have the opportunity to incorporate some really outstanding learning opportunities for your students. If you have had access to Chromebooks, you know there are many ways to incorporate this technology into your classroom. So now seems like the appropriate time to remind teachers (and myself) about how to effectively use technology your classroom. 

Stay Focused on the Teaching

Using technology in the classroom should not center around the technology, but rather, it should center around content, pedagogy, and best practices. For example, we should not approach a unit/project/lesson/activity (UPLA) thinking "I want to use "X" piece of technology or software, how can I fit it into this UPLA?" Instead we should approach any UPLA thinking "I need my students to learn "ABC" and demonstrate "XYZ", what is the best way for them to learn and demonstrate these? How and what technology can enhance this learning and demonstration?"

If we focus our planning around the second approach, we will find ourselves best utilizing technology in our classroom. And yes, this means that sometimes it might mean making the decision to NOT use technology in the UPLA.

What to Consider

Keep in mind our core focus; The BEST use of technology in the classroom. This happens when it enhances content, not just replaces previous non digital instruction. When you are deciding if you should update an activity with something digital you might take a second and ask yourself:

• Does the technology provide the opportunity for students to see/hear/share a different perspective?
• Does the technology increase interaction with the content
• Does the technology facilitate or enhance student collaboration?
• Does the technology bring the students into the real world, or bring the real world into the classroom?
  
  

If you find yourself answering yes to these types of questions then you should probably dive in and start stretching your teaching practices and give it a try.

If you are answering no to these questions, then you should determine if the technology makes the learning process easier for you or the students. Again, if it makes the process of learning easier (easier to grade, faster to give timely feedback, easier to collect work, etc...), then it is probably worth giving it a try.

However, if the technology neither enhances your content or makes life easier, then don't force the technology. Continue to use the teaching skills and practices you have developed over a career of teaching.

It's Not Just the Technology

A colleague of my once wrote an article that sticks with me when thinking about teachers and how they use technology in class. He wrote that,

"Any given piece of technology on its own isn’t effective or not effective. Whether technology is effective or not depends as much on its application as the technology itself. It depends on the teacher and the students and the class."  

He continued,

"Our focus should not be to use technology in a substitutive manner in which we are doing the same things in a somewhat better way. Instead we should focus first on doing better things, which will lead us to explore more transformative uses of technology."

Embrace Technology

This is an exciting time for us and our students can really benefit from our effort to best utilize this technology. If you don't feel ready to try some of the new technology applications that I share with you in the classroom, then let me know and I will be happy to work with you to get you going. In the meantime, I recommend trying any of the following to enhance your technology skills: 

• Attend professional development opportunities that increase your skill with these tools and applications.
• Apply these tools and applications in a limited manner as you gain experience and expertise.
• Participate on Twitter, start a blog, read a bunch of blogs, participate in online discussions and subscribe to email lists to accelerate your knowledge of these tools and applications.
• Observe skilled practitioners of these tools and techniques, find a coach to observe you, welcome feedback from everyone
  
  

I challenge you all to continue to grow as an educator by continuing to change your educational practices with a variety of new, innovative, and engaging learning strategies that Chromebooks afford us. As always, please reach out if you need any help at all.

JA

Sources and Further Reading:

Himmelsbach, V. (July, 2019) Technology in the Classroom in 2019. Retrieved from https://tophat.com/blog/6-pros-cons-technology-classroom/

Schmit, G. (October, 2011) The Danger of Misapplying Powerful Tools. Retrieved from http://pedagoguepadawan.net/152/dangerofmisapplyingpowerfultools/

Schmit, G. (August, 2013) We Don't Need a Technology Integration Team. Retrieved from http://pedagoguepadawan.net/289/we-dont-need-a-technology-integration-team/

Selway, M. (June, 2019) Tech Flop: When Not To Use Technology in the Classroom. Retrieved from https://ww2.kqed.org/education/2019/06/11/tech-flop-when-not-to-use-technology-in-the-classroom/

The Effect of Scratch and Lego Mindstorms Programming Activities on Problem Solving

The Effect of Scratch Programming Activities on Problem Solving Skills.

     According to the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), computational thinking not only helps uncover the possible ways to solve a problem, but also uses human creativity and critical thinking to enable computers to enhance human problem solving capacity (ISTE, 2015). In other words, computational thinking helps students develop problem solving skills. In the article written by Ozgen Korkmaz, a study was completed to determine exactly how much of an impact Scratch and Lego Mindstorms programming activities had on increasing a students problem solving skills.
     Scratch was developed within the scope of a project conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Korkmaz, 2016). Scratch is a media rich digital environment that utilizes a building block command structure to manipulate graphic, audio, and video aspects. Students essentially drag and drop tiles of commands to control, or program, different elements they have placed within their program. This allows individuals, who are beginning programming, to understand and acquire programming logic and algorithm thinking skills more easily (Korkmaz, 2016). According to the article, there have been many studies on Scratch that prove students find the program fun and easy to use. Many other studies have shown that Scratch has a positive impact on improving a students problem solving and critical thinking skills.
     The aim of this article's study was to determine how well scratch helped improve problem solving skills compared to traditional mathematical teaching methods of programming. The students in this study entered with what was defined as medium level problem solving skills (Korkmaz, 2016). According to the results the Scratch related game activities made a more positive contribution to logical mathematical problem solving skills of students than the traditional education program did (Korkmaz, 2016). It was also determined that the Scratch environment was suitable for learning and helped develop problem solving creativity in students (Korkmaz, 2016).

References

ISTE. (2015). CT Leadership toolkit. Available at
     http://www.iste.org/docs/ct-documents/ct-   leadershipt-toolkit.pdf?sfvrsn=4

Korkmaz, O. (2016). The Effect of Scratch and Lego Mindstorms Ev3- Based
     Programming Activities on Academic Achievement, Problem-Solving Skills and Logical
     Mathematical Thinking Skills of Students. Malaysian Online Journal of Educational Sciences,
     (3), 73-88.

Scaffolding in Programming to Reduce Cognitive Load in a PBL Environment

     Computer programming is a course that many students find challenging and struggle to perform well in. According to Stuart Garner, one of the reasons for this is that students experience a very high cognitive load during their learning (2002). Specifically, Computer programming has a high intrinsic load and it is, therefore, necessary to reduce the extraneous load as much as possible by using scaffolding techniques (Garner, 2002). Intrinsic cognitive load is the load that is determined by the mental demands of a particular task. In computer programming this demand is fairly high for novice learners. The extraneous cognitive load consists of the learning format and style that is used in the teaching process. Teachers have control over how they structure the learning process and thus have an impact on the extraneous cognitive load of the learning.
     Many programming teachers will try the innovative approach of problem based learning to engage and instruct novice programming students. This approach can prove very effective when appropriately and correctly applied in the programming classroom. Programming is by it's nature a problem oriented task. Students must identify problems and then construct solutions in a coded language to solve the problem. This lends itself to a very hands on approach and fits directly with the constructivist learning theory that stresses the importance of learners being engaged in constructing their own knowledge (Hmelo-Silver et al, 2007). However, this problem based approach "requires scaffolding to help students engage in sense making, managing their investigations and problem-solving processes" (Hmelo-Silver et al, 2007).
     Garner makes the point that in programming this scaffolding can take shape and he recommends two ways in which to accomplish it to reduce the cognitive load of the learning. First, he suggests "that students should annotate worked examples with information about what they do or what they illustrate (2002). This process forces the students to interact with previously written code and extract meaning from the work that they can carry forward into other problem based situations. Secondly, he suggests to "use incomplete, well-structured and understandable program examples that require students to generate the missing code to complete the examples" (2002). This forces students to study incomplete examples and draw conclusions about what is missing and carry that forward to future problems.



References:

Garner, S. (2002). Reducing the Cognitive Load on Novice Programmers.

Hmelo-Silver, C., Duncan, R., & Chinn, C. (2007). Scaffolding and achievement in problem

based and inquiry learning: a response to Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006). Educational
Psychologist, 42(2), 99-107

Digital Collaboration in Programmng 2

Programming 2 Students Collaborate with Etherpad

Programming 2 students are currently learning how to define functions in Python. This is a perfect opportunity for them to both work independently and collaborate together on a project. In this project each person in a team of 3 is assigned one section (function) of code that they are responsible for writing individually, and another section that they must write together. They are allowed to collaborate with each other and help each other while still having their individual jobs to accomplish.

To accomplish this the students write their program in an Etherpad Document. Etherpad is an online software that lets all three users simultaneously write their code in one single document, while highlighting who is writing what parts of the code. It auto saves like a Google doc in addition to saving a recording of the entire progress from beginning to end. Also, it gives the students a private chat window to collaborate in while archiving the entire discussion.

Students love the challenge of this project, and are highly engaged during the course of the program. As a teacher I like that I can go back and revisit the chat room of their collaboration and track through their program from start to finish. It really helps paint a picture of their thought process and how they approach problem solving.

Screen Captures

 

Video Timeline 

 

Students are also given 5 Minutes of "Face Time" at the beginning of each period to discuss the problem together. Here are some images from one of the periods today during that time.

Lynda.com for differentiation

I have a student in my Programming 1 course who is doing phenomenally well. So well in fact, that I struggle at times to find ways to challenge and engage him up to his fullest potential. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to find things above and beyond for him to do, but haven't really found anything that really worked and engaged him.

At least until now.

I was showing our new Web Design teacher some resources they could use to help prepare for the class next semester, and one of the resources I showed them was Lynda.com. Our district provides all teachers and students access to this amazing library of resources and tutorials. As I was showing all the great things that Lynda.com provided, I realized that I was failing to use this great resource with my students. Especially some of my advanced students that really want to do and learn more.

Today, the student that I sometimes struggle to find advanced work for, is learning to do statistical analysis of data from a website through python. The best part is that his learning today, while advanced and challenging, is supported through tutorial and file resources.

I was so happy with his work today, I took some time to really dig through all that Lynda.com has to offer. I was impressed with the wide range of topics that were covered by the site. There were courses on Accounting, Marketing, Business, Architecture, Interior Design, Education, and many more.

I would urge all SD203 teachers to, at a minimum, sign in and check out some of the great resources you or your students may be missing out on.

Below are a couple of screen shots I took from the site.

Changing the Programming Gender Gap at NNHS

This year, my colleagues and I are focusing our efforts on addressing the gender gap that exists in our programming classes in our school. Our curriculum consists of Programming 1, Programming 2 (each a semester course) and AP Computer Science (2 semesters).

THE DATA

Before developing a plan for how we would attempt to address this issue, we looked at our enrollments over the past four years. The numbers confirmed to us some positive things, and gave us some data so that we can evaluate if our efforts are paying off.

Without going into great detail, here is a brief view of our enrollment numbers over the past four years.

 

THE PLAN

We know that this will not be an easy, or immediate change we can affect. However, over the course of the last year we began to make plans for how we could start to close this gender gap in our programming courses. Here is an overview of some of the things we have done, and are planning to do in the future.

Room Remodel

Our first step was to redesign the programming room to be a more collaborative and inviting space. This was a major change and the work was completed over the summer. We removed the old "rows" of computers that students used to sit in and created team pods of 4. We painted the walls to soften the room up. We purchased new comfortable chairs for each computer and four new couches for collaboration.  We installed a white board the size of one of the walls, and repositioned the two projectors to provide large presentation areas on the white board so that there would not be a "bad" seat in the room during instruction. We added a new teaching station, closer to the center of the room. We purchased a class set of I-PADS with keyboards, to both increase learning opportunities and opportunity for collaboration.

We still have a few items left to check off of our list before we consider this project complete. We will be printing and hanging examples of student created Turtle Art, Fractal Trees, Media Computation Collages, and other visual examples from class and hanging them in frames around the room. We are designing some large visual pieces that will visually reinforce that all students can succeed in the class to hang on our windows and walls.

Here is a look at our room before, and its progress to date:

 BEFORE

AFTER

Curriculum Changes

We also began making curriculum changes. Changes in both how we teach, and what types of activities we do.

We looked at ways we could increase student collaboration in our instruction.This included an increase in use of strategies like Pair Programming, Peer Instruction, and Team Discussions. The goal is to create more opportunities for our females to collaborate and work as a member of a team.

We also evaluated our activities to see if they were biased or skewed in anyway against our female programmers. Many of our activities were good, but some needed to be updated. Here are a couple examples of what I mean. 

In the programming 2 class, the final capstone project had been that students made a 2D video game. While many students enjoyed the activity, there was no opportunity for choice to explore something else. The programming 2 capstone project is now a menu of choices that students can select from, including 2D video games, Turtle Art, Media Computation, GUI programs, or I-PAD apps. The idea is that now our female programmers have something to choose from that better represents their interests. Indeed, this seems to hold as a positive change, as most of my female students chose something that was not a game last semester.

In Our AP Computer Science Course the students do a unit with the LEGO MINDSTORMS. Their final activity with these used to be a "Sumo" battle of sorts in which one team had to push the other team out of the circle. Now, instead of a combative battle, the students work together as a team to solve a series of problems, like getting out of a box that has only one opening. This increases the collaboration of the team and is a better way of engaging our girls in problem solving.

Outreach

We are planning several ways to reach out to female students during the year to attract them to our courses. Last year we did a Code Week where we set up in our cafeteria and showed off some the student created work and activities that students have done in our courses. This year we will do something similar, but also with other classes in our department hoping to draw a wider variety of students over.

We will also be airing a promotional video throughout the semester across our schools growing video communication system. The video below will air in our cafeterias and building hallways throughout the semester to let our females know that they have an opportunity to be great in our programming courses. The video can be seen below:

Personal Invitation

One of the new things we will be trying this year, and that we believe could be very powerful, is to send out personal invitations to some of the freshman female students we believe could benefit from, and have success, in our courses. We are going to identify freshmen females in a variety of math and science courses who's teachers feel they have an aptitude for continuing on in their fields or show early signs of success in the class. We are going to write personal invitations to these ladies to come visit us and learn how computer science can benefit them in their future pursuits and to personally tell them that we believe they will have success in our computer science course if they are willing to give it a try.

Moving Forward

Moving forward we will continue to evaluate the success of our initiatives, and to plan other ways in which we can address the lack of female students in our programming classes. I'll share in the future what does and does not work for us in the hopes that others might be able to implement change in their area and continue to help our young female students become a bigger part of our community.

Early Programming 1 Activity - Personal World Lab

LAB 2 - Personal World

In Programming 1 we start by introducing students to what programming is. We start this process by using "Alice", a visual drag and drop program that lets students focus on the principle's of programming in a way that let's them explore without having to worry about the details of code syntax.

Early in this process, we start by teaching the students how to simply use the Alice program and make it do simple things like add objects and methods to their program. After the students have completed a simple formative lab in which they demonstrate they can accomplish simple things in the program, we assign the students the Personal World Lab to let them explore the program.

This assignment is formative in nature, and is intended to let the students explore, learn, and share amongst their peers the things they find out. In essence, the students are asked to use Alice to program the scene of a world in which two people interact. One of the characters has to be a representation of the student. They are asked to share information about their personalities and their interests in the scene they are creating.

Students get so involved with trying to make "their" scene the best it can be, they both deeply explore the program and what programming can do, as well as sharing a lot of information about themselves. We learn so much more about our students by letting them explore and share, then by just engaging them in discussion. It is by far one of my favorite assignments of the year.

Below are some sample scenes that students have programmed for you to explore:

Early Thoughts on Using Tech for Formative Assessment

As my third year of teaching Programming 1 and Programming 2 gets started, I continue to focus on ways I can improve my use of formative assessment to identify how well the students are understanding the concepts as we progress through them. While, we are currently only into our second week of school, I am focused on continuing to grow my use of the tech tools Socrative and Infuse Learning to help me this year with this process.

I recently read an article through the @nbea twitter account about formative assessment ideas. The article likened formative assessment to a chef who is constantly tasting the food they make as they make it. Constantly checking to see if everything is just right, and if it is not, making minor (or major) adjustments to correct the problems. From this perspective, summative assessment is likened to the chef serving the food to a customer for their final approval.

As a husband and father of 2 who does most of the cooking at home, I related to this example. I found myself asking how I could, like a chef, constantly check to see if everything is just right in my classroom.

I have used Socrative before in my classroom, but never Infuse Learning. My goal is to use these tools to better track my students learning during daily lessons. I currently use a variety of formative assessment tools, like exit quizzes through Canvas, practice assignments, and classroom discussions. However, I am specifically looking for ways to track student learning during the initial teaching of a new concept, during the students initial knowledge acquisition stages. I think these two tech tools can help me accomplish this and will help my students learn better.

My initial thoughts on the use of these tools for this purpose are very promising. I like Socrative and the simplicity that is built in. I especially like that I can have the students type a short answer question and then narrow the results down and rebroadcast the smaller set as a multiple choice question for the class. It gives me the ability to both initially engage all students as thinkers, and then focus their thought and team discussions (collaboration) in a more focused direction.

While I do like Socrative's possibilities in the short answer and multiple choice catagories, I am thoroughly impressed with Infuse Learning's option of a sort and order question. When used in the right way, this allows students to problem solve and think through a variety of questions and then apply their answer to some data set that must be sorted. For my class today, it was identifying the smallest unit of computer measurement and sorting through the largest unit of measurement. When the students had a chance to answer the question themselves, I was able to see a very interesting thing in the data provided to me by the tool in the very moment it was happening. In all of my classes, there was a 50/50 split on what the students thought was a correct sort. This immediate data, let me have the students collaborate in groups to try and narrow in on the correct answer. In all classes, the teams were able to discuss, teach, and work through misunderstandings and problems to come up with the correct results. I could not have been happier. Even in the class that did not come to a perfect outcome, it gave us the opportunity to work through the problem as a class to identify why the correct sort was correct (below).

At the end of both days of class using these tools, I walked away feeling good as an educator and empowerment for my students. It is a good day in class when I can lead my students to solve the problem and get to the right answer without ever actually having to tell them "the answer". In my mind, this is formative assessment. Knowing that my students know the concept, without ever actually having to ask them if they do.

Computer Science Literacy

My colleague, Geoff Schmit, teaches the AP Computer Science Course in our school, and shared a very insightful post about his thoughts on how his class is about more than just programming. (You can view the post here) In it he shared how he engages his students to "read, think, write and debate issues at the intersection of technology, society and ethics." He shared his assignments with the hopes that other CS teachers would find them useful.

For this reason, I thought it might be helpful to share how I help get students prepared for this type of writing and thinking. It is always a pleasure to see that the learning activities I do in my introductory programming classes (programming 1 & 2) prepare the students for learning activities that they will encounter in latter sections of computer science.

We share in the idea that computer science courses are about more than just programming. So in programming 1 I engage students in near daily discussion boards that get the students to think about the concepts they are learning in class and share those thoughts in writing. These writing assignments are less about composing long detailed pieces of writing, but rather, to get the students to practice focusing on facts and providing evidence to support them. They are short and very regular, so the students get a lot of practice with this.

In programming 2, students move from short regular writings, to a little bit longer writings, in which they have to reflect on a reading or video that we will do together in class. This both helps them get practice with technical writings, and introduces them to some of the technological and ethical situations that exist. Many times the concepts are new to the students, and they really have to think about their view on what the reading or video presented.

In the same hopes of my colleague, I will share the programming 2 writing assignments, with the hopes that these may help other CS teachers.

Current Event Articles (2)

During the course of the semester you must submit 2 current event articles. The articles can come from any reputable news source or magazine. The content of the article may be anything computing related, but at least 1 of your articles must be internet related.
                Article Directions:

1. Find an appropriate article.
2. In your paper, create a heading that identifies the following information:
   1. The article source
   2. The article title
   3. The article author
   4. The date the article was written/published
   5. A link to find the digital copy of the article (note if you do not have a link to a digital copy, you will have to post/paste a copy of the actual article. I can help you with this if necessary.
3. Section 1 (this section can be as long as you need it to be): Summary of Article
   1. Write an objective summary of the article
   2. You must be sure to include all of these items about the article
      i.      Who, what, when, where, why and how
   3. You should not answer these in list format, rather these are things to keep in mind when writing your summary section
4. Section 2 (this section can be as long as you need it to be): Reflection on Article
   1. This is the section that you should provide your own thought and opinion in to. Be sure to explain why you selected the article, what your thoughts on the article were, and if necessary, whether you agree or disagree with the author. Part of your reflection should also be about how the content in the article affects society as a whole, or if necessary, how you think it will affect society. Be thorough and detailed with support about this section. Students who reflect with something like “This technology sounds cool.” will not score well.
   
   
     
   Technology Research Assignment
   
   
   You must pick one aspect of technology and research it and its impact on society thoroughly. You may write this research paper in one of two different ways.

You may identify an aspect of technology and simply present its impact on society and give both the pro's and con's for or against the technology.

1. EXAMPLE - Cell Phones and Cancer: Cell phones are a common technology in our lives, but they may be linked to cancer. (then i would present both the good and bad of cell phone use and present research that proved or disproved a connection between cancer)

Identify an aspect of technology by asking a question and using your research to argue for or against the question to answer it.

1. EXAMPLE - Cell Phones and Cancer: Are cell phones causing cancer? (Then I would write my paper by choosing a side based on my research to argue that the research proved they were or weren't causing cancer.)

Your research must be written in MLA style format with citations at the end. You must include a minimum of two different sources for your research. I expect this paper to be a minimum of 5 paragraphs but it does not have to be a lot longer. (about a 1 1/2 to 2 pages) You must get your topic approved before you begin research.

Hackers Wanted Video Reflection

Based on the information you viewed in the Documentary "Hackers Wanted", write a 2 paragraph reflection that argues for or against "Gray Hat" hackers.

Algorithms Video Reflection

Kevin Slavin (In his TED Talk on Algorithms) argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this video he shows how these complex computer programs determine espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. Slavin also warns that we are writing code we can't understand with implications we can't control.
For your video reflection, please respond to only one of the following two prompts:

Option A:
Give some specific examples of how you believe computer algorithms affect your daily life. Be sure to explain why and how you think these algorithms affect your life, and whether you believe that they are positively or negatively affecting your life.

Option B:
Assume that Slavin is correct, that the world is becoming increasingly controlled by algorithms. Do you believe this is a positive or negative thing? If you believe it is positive, be sure to provide specific examples of why it is good, and how it can benefit society. If you believe this is a negative thing, give specific examples that explain why and give some ideas of how you believe it could be changed.