Capstone Video (Final Assignment)

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Section 7

The Internet provides educators with endless opportunities to enhance student learning. I teach World History, and for so long this subject has been taught in the classic sit and get format. Perhaps the notion is that history has happened and the teacher is there to teach the students what happened, why it happened, when it happened, etc. E-Learning provides an outlet in which students can apply their knowledge, and more importantly, expand on what they are being taught. As I have mentioned so many times before, we live in an age in which the information is easily assessable without the need of a teacher. Educators are now encouraged to be facilitators. Some teachers refuse to honor this because they feel the need to teach in a traditional manner. Whether it be arrogance or fear, the fact of the matter is that educators are not meeting the needs of their students. In my classroom, I can teach about the French Revolution. I can tell them the causes and effects, and even have them analyze the cause and effect relationships to other revolutions they are to learn. What E-Learning can do for my students, is allow them to connect with the French Revolution. They don’t have to stick with other revolutions from the textbook such as the Russian Revolution or the American Revolution. They can actually compare the French Revolution to modern day revolutions. For example, the Arab Spring has emerged in the last few years. Although some of my students have never really heard of the revolutions taking place, they can learn about them and visualize what an actual revolution looks like because of the Internet. They can understand the ideas of indoctrination and totalitarianism whenever they watch a youtube video provided my Lisa Ling (sp?) as she snuck into North Korea and gave us a glimpse of this sort of dictatorship first hand. This not only makes the content relatable, it ignites passion within my students. They want to KNOW why and how, and they DESIRE to learn more. It’s amazing to watch their minds race and their eyebrows lifted in amazement.

Reusable design is a great way to have our students interact with the course content. A program that was introduced to my department, and that I have not yet used, is called stratelogica. It is a program that provides maps from every era in history and can be as detailed as showing every battlefield in history. The students can interactively participate in this program and it gives them the opportunity to become a part of the learning process. For example, they can take a portion of the map and create their own legends and essentially design their own maps with the use of their new and old knowledge.  We no longer need to pass out copies of maps (what a waste of paper!) and we can instead give the students a digital means in which to learn essential geography skills. I plan to take some courses provided by our district that will give me a thorough lesson in how to facilitate learning through this fantastic program.

As I read this chapter, I immediately thought of Virgin Airlines. I have only flown Virgin once, but what an experience it was for me. As I have flown many times before, I cannot think of one time I actually paid attention to or listened to what happens if the plane were to encounter trouble. It was boring, and my thought was if we are going down then we are going down and there is not a thing I can do about it and I would probably have heart attack and die immediately anyway. But Virgin Airlines did it right, and for the first time ever, I paid attention and knew exactly what to do in case of an emergency. This airline used a video (not flight attendants) to explain what to do in case of an emergency and how to act on a plane. It was hilarious, innovative, and I literally wanted to watch it again after. In fact, whenever I got home I searched the web for the video so I could watch it again and share it with my husband. Now that is rich media! Here is the link:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyygn8HFTCo) . As I began this course, media instruction began to weigh heavily on my mind. I began to scan the Internet for innovative videos to use in order to grasp the attention of my students. I found a guy, John Green, who has created a series of World History crash courses that are 8-12 minutes long and cover various periods of history. It is hilarious, relevant, and very innovative, much like the video I fell in love with on Virgin Airlines. Next semester I plan to start using these videos to introduce or conclude ( I have not decided yet) each remaining unit. I cannot wait to see the impact it will have in my classroom. 

Section 6

I teach World History at the 10^th grade level. I am currently in my 12^th year, and have witnessed the evolution from direct instruction to and IT classroom. I feel as though my undergraduate experiences did not prepare me for the current state of education. Whenever To put things into perspective, when I was in college, we used only Library books in order to complete research papers. In addition to meeting various criteria in obtaining my Masters Degree, it is my hope that I gain an understanding of how to implement technology into my daily lesson cycle. I also desire to continue my education in the field of technology in order to maintain the proper knowledge and motivation in order to ensure a successful learning environment for all my students.

I decided early on that I was not looking for an economic income, but rather physiological fulfillment. While I do enjoy the finer things in life, such as travel and food, I do not believe I will be happy working a job in which I am unable to serve others. There are career paths I could have chosen that provide both economic and psychological satisfaction, however, I love teaching young people. I absolutely believe everyone is capable of learning, and I know that everyone has the desire to learn; they just have to find that spark that will ignite what is already inside of their soul.

Even in education, there are ways to move up the professional ladder and even earn more money. As of now, I have little interest in any supervising role. I much prefer to remain in the classroom with the goal of inspiring young people to develop a love of learning, in addition to critical thinking skills.

While I do believe this class has offered me some important tools in continuing my goal of creating a student-centered classroom with the use of Instructional Technology, there is still a lot for me to learn. There are so many tools available through the web and I need to continue to reshape my lesson cycle in such a way that it reflects the technological revolution of the last decade.  More than anything, I believe this class has given me the motivation to spend more time lesson planning and researching how my students learn, rather than focus on how I am going to teach them. I need to learn to be more creative in my lesson cycle and give the students the opportunity to take control of his or her learning and apply the knowledge that I have in the past spent too much time giving them from in front of the classroom.

I am greatly inspired by people such as Kimone Gooden, who was able to quickly reach low-income middle school students through the use of technology. She was a part of a nonprofit organization called Citizen Teacher, whose aim is to give to lower income students what students in higher income districts receive – high quality education. Gooden explained, “Over the course of a semester I witnessed the students' level of interest and excitement increase. I saw a new awareness develop around what was possible that they did not envision before. Engineering, marketing, and IT were now added to the list of careers our students wanted to pursue when they grew up.” In just a few short weeks, this woman, through the ideas and goals of a few volunteers, changed the course of young peoples’ lives; and much of this was teaching them how to blog! (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kimone-gooden/cisco-it-doesnt-take-a-teacher_b_3998540.html).

I am also inspired by people such as Cullen White, who teaches IP classes and is frustrated that the classes he teaches are viewed in education as electives, rather than core or AP classes. He is teaching young people applicable and interesting ideas, and the administration in secondary education is falling short in its commitment to excellence. Cullen writes, “The things we explore together are far too interesting, too important. In one class, we're learning how data moves from device to device, and how to build our own networks. In another, we're building Web apps while learning how to obtain feedback from users and analyze data. There is never a dull moment. Students are constantly engaged by the meaningful, hands-on experiences that my classroom provides. Why wouldn't they be? They know that what we learn matters, because my courses mimic the same online, tech-enabled world that they grew up in. What we do is immediately relevant to them” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cullen-white/cisco-our-future-depends-on-put_b_3962330.html).  Cullen believes that if we do not adequately prepare our students for the IT boom in the job industry, we could likely face an economic crisis. Just like the beginning of this section discuses, history has proven that many technological advancements have had huge impact on societies – good and bad; but technology isn’t going away – so as much as we grumble about the negative impact and disservice it does to our youth, we need to realize it is here and moving fast, and we owe it to our young people to prepare them properly.

For me, I will continue to take classes that will better prepare me for the rapidity of this technological revolution. I have one more class to take before graduating, and it is an ETEC course. Furthermore, I plan to take advantage of the many continuing educational opportunities that my school district provides in the way of technology. 

Section 5

For section 5, I chose to look at P-12 Education, post-Secondary Education, and Health Education. I found many similarities and differences in these three components. All three of these fields are constantly searching for new and better ways to promote efficient learning. They also tend to lean toward the notion that students learn best when directly involved in their learning. This includes the need for all three components to ensure that its faculty is staying up-to-date with the changes that constantly occur, which results in an increase in knowledge on behalf of the students. Furthermore, all three components receive government funding to research data and introduce new technologies to the fields.

Some of the differences I noted were the motivation and participation in faculty members, level of expectation and accountability for faculty members, how government money is used, and the pressure placed on the faculty involving risks and multiple task objectives.  In post-Secondary education, the administration has a tough time getting its faculty members to attend workshop trainings and stay up to date on the technological advancement, which take place from year to year. In P-12 education, it is require that teachers attend various workshops, and I assume that teachers in elementary through the high school level are held to a much higher standard. In Health Care Education, much of the time faculty members are required to be professors/teachers/ mentors as well as continue to actively practice medicine. This of course makes it difficult for the faculty to divide their time evenly, as well as participate in workshops and lectures related to their fields.  Money is given to all three types of these educational fields, but how the three components use the money is different. In P-12 education, the money is not as freely used and has more restrictions. In the university level, how the money is allocated depends on the University, which is much different than P-12 education. In P-12 and post-Secondary education, there are risks involved, to a degree. In P-12 there are end of course exams and standardized tests that place a lot of pressure on the teacher and gives them less freedom. Post-Secondary does not have these types of tests; therefore, professors do not face these types of pressures. Health care education is perhaps the riskiest of all three components. Many times, the decisions faced by the faculty have a life and death outcome. This is very frightening, and with regulations and standards in place (HIPPA laws and such) berries are placed in front of the faculty in regards to teaching effectively.

It seems to me that all three components realize the need to amend the current institution and evolve as the world around us changes. The difficulty for all three of these fields,  is that they each have berries in place that make it difficult to implement Instructional Design – some of these berries are outside influences the other issue is the difficulty creating an atmosphere of motivated faculty members. My field of study is P-12 education, and I greatful to not have the risk involved in Health Care education. Although I get frustrated with all that is required of secondary educators, I see the consequenes (post-secondary education) for not having supportive faculty. 

Section 4

Chapter 14

One issue I have grappled with over the years is time management within my school year. Each class period my students are required to take a twenty-question short answer quiz. While this is effective in preparing them for Unit exams and ensuring they are keeping up with the rigorous workload, it is very time consuming for me. I spend so much time grading these quizzes that I feel as though I could make better use of that time lesson planning. One solution I came up with very recently is that I have my students grade their own quiz the same day they take the quiz. I have them use different color ink then they used while taking the quiz, and I go over the entire quiz aloud as they check their answers. Not only has the greatly impacted the amount of time I have to plan lessons, it has also been very beneficial to their learning. They hear, almost immediately, the correct answers to the quiz, instead of just waiting on me to grade them and hand them back. Furthermore, I no longer rely on them to check their wrong answers to see what the correct answer is; this ensures they are learning from their mistakes and will be less likely to make the same mistake whenever it is time for their unit test.

Chapter 15

I like how the text refers to Performance Support as “band aids” that are in place in order to assist and prepare an employee for situations that might arise which can hinder his or her work performance. As I stated in the section above, deep into my teaching career I noticed an issue with time management. I think that this is not an issue that is isolated to my classroom, but is an ongoing issue for many educators. We have so many responsibilities that are required of us, whenever our main objective is to ensure a quality education for the learner. I believe a good performance support system would be that educators are taught early on about the importance of time management, and how to properly delegate the time we spend on various tasks. Throughout an educator’s career, we are required to take part in many staff development trainings. These trainings are required, in addition to the extensive training we are require to have a the beginning of our career. I cannot think of training that I have had in my 12-year career that touched on time management. Perhaps a good Performance Support method for this issue would be staff development support and training sessions specifically designed to assist teachers in managing their time and numerous responsibilities in a more efficient and effective manner.

Chapter 16

After reading chapter 16, I realized that Tactic Knowledge would probably be the most useful type of knowledge that can be used during a collaboration process. Often times, schools divide their teachers into teams according to their grade and content area. This is an effective way for teachers to share their prior knowledge, frustrations, concerns, and ideas with one another. Veteran teachers are probably most equipped in discussing time management. If I had been able to collaborate more with a veteran teacher during my early years, perhaps they could have given me some advice as to how to effectively allocate my time. In fact, the resolution I came up with, was not 100 % my idea. I remembered a former teacher, now retired, who used to have his students, grade his or her own tests. He would brag that his workload was lessoned and he truly believed that the students learned from that grading process. This teacher and I never collaborated, but if we had, perhaps he would have encouraged me to do this a long time ago. I also like the idea of Partner-supplier relationships. To me, this could mean that evaluate myself more through my students. Perhaps I could find out if they feel they learn better through grading their own quiz.

Chapter 17

 I am in informal learning advocate. Since the beginning of my career I have heard experts and read studies that consistently point out that students learn more from one another than they do their teacher. I feel that this is obvious; they can memorize a song in a few short minutes, and hey gravitate towards certain music, art, and activities that they experiment with on their own and with their friends. People learn when they are in love with whatever it is they are learning. As a teacher, this has been a struggle. Although I realize these aforementioned facts, it is still very difficult to create these types of learning environments. Furthermore, all the staff development trainings are extremely educator-centered and speak very little about informal learning. It is not an easy to task to teach this type of learning, and you have to constantly be thinking of new ideas and way to facilitate this type of “instruction”.

Last year I gave an assignment in which students were to create fictitious blogs of various enlightenment thinkers. They are very into social media and I thought this would be a good way for them to get involved in their own learning process and research. It turned out to be very enjoyable and successful for most students, and I will definitely initiate this assignment again. The thing I will do differently is managing their progress more effectively. I allowed so much freedom that it became difficult for me to ensure accountability is met. Perhaps the next time I will give better guidelines as to exactly what I want for them to research, post about, and in their commenting section, what they needed to include.

Another informal type learning that I believe to be effective is the National History Day presentations in which I require my students to become participants. National History Day is a lot like Science Fair, in that the students can basically create any type of presentation they desire, such as a documentary, essay, theatrical performance, website, etc. At first, I thought the students were going to hate the assignment, but they actually loved participating; and incoming students actually look forward to participating. They have such freedom in this presentation, get to work alone or with peers, and I am simply a coach or guide. I actually do very little if any work leading up to the day of presentation. I have had quite a few students advance to regional competitions as well as state level competitions. The first year I did this, I did not manage them as the year progressed. However, I found that the students were not as motivated and at times lacked focused, so I set some guidelines, and due dates and this seemed to me all they needed in regards to management. 

Section 3 #'s 1,2, & 3

Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Method is a more specialized model. It delves into the specifics of finding out if a certain program worked. There are 5 steps in this model: 1) plan a case study, 2) build an impact model, 3) conduct a survey, 4) schedule in-depth interviews, 5) Write up and communicate findings. I have actually used this model before, and although, time consuming, it really gave me an idea as to what impact I was having communicating with my students’ parents. Basically, I followed this model in order to find out if certain ways of communicating to my parents was successful. I used three classes in my research, and overall, I figured out what was working and what was not working. Furthermore, just by using this model, I found myself more focused on the needs of my students. Since there was such a detailed process, I stayed focused on communicating with my parents – more so than if I were to have conducted no evaluation whatsoever.

Evaluation is important for both the student and the teacher. The text talks about all the reasons education is important for the learner. It allows the teacher to design better quality lessons, learn where the competency levels of his or her students, and allows the teacher to assess what it is he or she needs to reteach. But I think it is important to point out that evaluation has really great benefits for the students as well. It teachers students a sense of accomplishment, how to manage their time and study effectively (various study skills, etc.), and also gives them motivation. 

During an economic downtime, I would make sure to recruit a team in order to prepare for this task. I would make the primary theme of the staff development team be something to the tune of…”we have people and time but no money”, and go from there. I do feel that in education we are fortunate in that we are usually prepared for dips in the economy and can plan ahead – I know that in my school district we know the summer before the school year is to begin, how our financial situation will be during the upcoming school year. I do believe that as a leader, it is important to assess “the current situation and plan what can be done to solve the problem.” As a leader of this team, I will need to create a few goals that we want to achieve. One of these goals would be to create an online source through our school online document system (called eduphoria), which allows all the teachers in the school to upload a technological lesson plan that does not require a lot of resources. For example, in years past, I have created a blog assignment much like this class is designed, and the students were to blog about a specific topic a few days a weeks. They could do this from home or even at their local or school library. The only resource needed for this assignment was access to a computer. I did not come up with this lesson plan on my own, I enlisted the help of a college who depends heavily on technology in her classroom. I feel as though there are many teachers out there that have great ideas and we need to learn that sharing our lesson plans and ideas can only benefit our students. 

Section II #3

Differing epistemic stances lead to differing approaches to learning and instruction, and ultimately to problem-solving. Explain differences in problem-solving when approached from behaviorist and constructivist perspectives. How do the approaches differ in both the nature of the problem to be solved and in facilitating the problem solving process? Finally, what effect might these differences have on learner motivation?


When one solves a problem, he or she needs to be involved in the problem-solving process. I understand the Behaviorists view that the teacher can provide the reinforcement needed in order to achieve motivation in the classroom, but I tend to lean more towards the constuctivists view, that real motivation is obtained when the students are at the center of their learning. Since the beginning of my career, it was very evident to me that I had to make the subjet I teach relavant to the students. Otherwise, I would lose most of them - even the AP student needs to have motivation to achieve success in my classroom. And the only way I can ever get the motivation, is to make the content relavant to the student. For example, I recently taught my pre-AP World History class about the crisis in Syria. They are very bright students, but thier eyes would gaze over as the very mention of "Arab Spring" or even "Chemical Warfare". I mean, come on! Chemical  Warfare? How is that not interesting? Well, to 15 year old, pubescent teenagers, it just isn't. So, instead of me teaching them from the front of the classroom, I had them research certain aspects of what is going on, teach each other, and then as a group figure out how to solve the problem in Syria without United States intervention. I even went as far as to have the students think of ways to be an international superpower without the use of weapons. The students were very engaged and empassioned. Furthermore, the situation in Syria became more real to them. I also think that they got more involved in the learning because they didn't feel like the students getting information from the teacher - they were teaching each other - they owned thier learning. To me, that is more meaningful than any speech or powerpoint lesson. I think that if we do not meet our students to where they are today (people who do not need for us to give them all the information since it is right there at their computer), the we could possibly lose the motivation of an entire generation.