As I mentioned in my previous blog post, my teaching partner Sarah Long and I decided to collaborate to create some of the coding and computational thinking assignments for this week. Together, we worked to create a mini-coding unit to give our students an introductory walk through of coding and computational thinking. We created our lessons to align with the 3rd grade course on code.org. Our students have used code.org in small amounts during their STEAM class. However, this year the course was not an option for our students as it was not offered as one of the art related curriculum (ARC) classes. Because of this, Sarah and I thought that the mini-unit would be a way to not only fulfill the requirements of our course products, but a way to bring meaningful and relevant coding content back into the classroom for our remote students this year.
We started the unit by creating an introductory lesson to procedural thinking, coding, and computational thinking (Intro Lesson). Sarah and I used this as our bonus assignment and thought it would be a fun way to give students an opportunity to explore the unit through videos, online resources, links, and online books related to the topic. In addition to exploring, students will also have to write their own step-by-step procedure about “How to Draw a House” and test it with another student (or member of their house in the case of our remote students). Then, Sarah created the next lesson (Coding Lesson 2) which aligns with Code.org Lesson 2 about online puzzles. My lesson (Coding Lesson 4), the third in our sequence aligns with Code.org Lesson 4 about debugging and problem solving. The lesson I made also has students reviewing and reflecting upon their tech experience by completing a vocabulary exercise as well as answering some discussion/reflection questions related to their learning goals. Finally, we collaborated to create a final assessment for our mini-unit (Final Assessment). For this assessment we worked to meet the requirements of our Week 8 assessment task. The students can choose from 4 different modes of assessment to reflect and showcase their learning about coding and computational thinking. Each of the options that Sarah and I created for this assessment are methods that were outside of our comfort zone and challenged us to think outside the box. We used a combination of Flipgirds, forms, and other PBL prompts for our students to choose from. While creating the lessons and assessments for this mini-unit, I kept Mayer’s design principles in mind and considered how my presentation of information is just as important as the content itself. The redundancy principle and the signaling principle are two specific goals that I kept in mind when creating this lesson. I wanted to limit the amount of text I was including on screen and focus on highlighting the important information and links and creating visual cues for my young learners. I also think that the use of my bitmoji adds a touch of personalization to the assignment. Lastly, I think the lesson does a great job of segmenting the information that my students will access through having them travel through different links and slides at their own pace. Overall, I have loved being able to collaborate with my partner on the coding mini-unit and I am excited to implement our lessons into our remote classrooms. I am so thankful for all of the amazing tools and resources that this course has exposed me to. My students will surely benefit from them!
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This week, I really enjoyed diving deeper into the ideas of computational thinking and evaluating how different technologies could/should be incorporated into my teaching. Computational thinking is the step-by-step process that a learner experiences as they learn new information or approach problem solving. A lot of the time, computational thinking is used in regards to computer science or coding, but it can be applied in almost any subject. The four components of computational thinking are decomposition (breaking down a complex problem into manageable steps), pattern recognition (looking for similarities or patterns), abstraction (focusing on the important information only), and algorithms (following step-by-step solutions or rules to solve a problem).
When my 3rd grade students are working on a problem (math is what comes to mind), I can actively see the components of computational thinking take place. It is really important to help students get into the habit of decomposing complex problems or information. This will not only help them become more confident in their ability to solve multi-step problems, but it will improve their ability to think algorithmically and approach a problem one step at a time. I love when I can turn the teaching over to my students and have them explain step-by-step how they found an answer to a problem or came up with a thought regarding a complex prompt. Another cool aspect of this is when a student shares their thinking, and then other students can recognize that their thinking process was different, yet they still landed on the same solution. Again, math is the subject that I have seen this in action the most, but I also have seen my students be problem solvers when they read, write, or explore science and social studies topics. Not only do I think computational thinking builds confidence in my students, but I also think it lets them have ownership of their learning and thinking. My goal is to keep finding ways to teach computational thinking across the curriculum to help my students become better problem solvers. Overall, this week’s products have pushed me to work outside of my comfort zone. I have explored AR and VR learning explorations but I have never thought about how I could incorporate them into my classroom. Similarly, QR codes have been a great resource that I have seen and used in several different settings but I have not yet used them in an educational setting. I ended up creating a few different resources using QR codes. The first is a set of three QR codes that will take my students to three different online libraries (Epic! Books, NC Kids, and Tumble Books). The second is an example of a postcard that contains a QR that would link to a virtual copy of our classroom newsletter. I typically send home a bi-weekly newsletter for my families, but I have not done that this year because of virtual learning. I linked an old newsletter to the product that I created but I am excited at the thought of creating QR postcards in the future. The third is a QR link to a virtual calm space that I share with my students for some calming and mindfulness moments. I would like to print the poster and have it hanging in my classroom in the future, but right now it is posted in my Google Classroom under the topic “TLC” and my students absolutely love using it. My teaching partner, Sarah Long, and I have decided to team together to create a mini coding unit for our coding product, bonus product, and final evaluation product. Our students used to have a S.T.E.A.M. class as a part of their academic related curriculum (arts classes), but unfortunately this year that class was put on hold because of teacher shortages. I am looking forward to collaborating with my partner to create this mini-unit that we will apply with our current students to give them some exposure and experience with coding! For this week’s projects, I decided to submit three of my own video creations and one video evaluation. I chose to submit more of my own video creations in hopes to get some feedback about how I have been creating my content and how I can improve my teaching through instructional media. The three videos that I made teach parts of our Reading Street curriculum: vocabulary, word work, and main selection with comprehension skill and strategy. I found it somewhat of a challenge to apply the principles and learning from this course while still strictly following our core curriculum that our district uses. Mainly, I focused on the signaling, coherence, pre-training, and personalization principles.
In my vocabulary video, I kept each slide very simple and only included the word, the definition, a picture, and a sentence using the word. I used colors and bolded text to signal the important information on each slide. I also only put one word per slide to help students focus on one word at a time and not feel overwhelmed with too much drawing their attention. In my word work video, I focused a lot on personalization and pre-training. I began the video by introducing the skill and learning target and doing lots of modeling for students. I also tried to incorporate segmenting into this video by asking students to pause the video at different points and practice their word work skill on their own. For the main selection video, I also relied heavily on the personalization and pre-training principles. After introducing the learning targets at the beginning of the video, I did a lot of modeling and walking the students through their comprehension skills and strategies and I am hoping that by adding more personalized examples, students will feel more comfortable practicing the skills on their own. I also included my Bitmoji throughout the slides to help students feel as though they are following me through the learning process. For all of my videos I used Loom.com for recording myself and my screen. There are so many things that I have loved learning about Loom and I look forward to using it more throughout remote teaching. I really enjoyed the fact that Loom will allow you to turn student commenting on or off for each video and the links are easy to share. I also really like the way that you can “snip” and edit your videos after you make them. This made it feel a little less stressful knowing that if I messed up, I could just pick my teaching back up in the same recording and later go back and snip the parts that I didn’t like. Honestly, thinking back to March, I dreaded the fact that I would have to record myself teaching remote instruction. I tend to avoid the camera like the plague and I never thought that I would reach a comfort level with recording videos of my teaching. It was the most daunting task in my mind. After many months of practice and starting the MALDT program, I am beginning to gain confidence in the content that I am creating. Although this class has challenged a lot of my thinking, I am seeing the benefit of looking at instructional media through a new lens, and I hope to keep growing as a teacher. When videos are one of the only modes of learning that students have, I want to feel confident in what I am giving them! This week’s assignments have pushed me to do something new. Throughout the course of teaching online, I have either used my own videos or videos that my colleagues have created. The only “outside” source for videos that I have used are Mystery Science videos that I have either added my own narration too, or carefully selected clips that are relevant to the assignments my students are doing. Up until this point, I have not explored resources like YouTube, SchoolTube, or EdPuzzle for videos in my classroom. I have really enjoyed exploring these sites this week and watching educational videos with a new lens. From an evaluation standpoint, I have tried to use both Mayer’s design principles and the Educator’s Podcast Guide to steer my thinking about how videos can be used effectively and appropriately in my classroom. Something that I enjoy about videos on EdPuzzle, is that many of their videos include stopping points with questions that make students reflect and check their comprehension.
Thinking about my own video creation, my main focus will be on Mayer’s principles of modality, multimedia, and personalization. In my videos I want my graphics and narration to highlight what is most important for students without being too much information or “extra fluff” that will overwhelm students or give them too much content that is distracting from the main learning targets. I also am focusing on providing pictures and words together instead of using them both in independently of one another. Lastly, I want to focus on making my videos personal by including myself in the picture when it’s appropriate and making my narrations more conversational style. I think creativity is so important for young learners, and it’s my goal to open creative avenues for my students both as individuals and collaborators. In the online environment, I’ve found this a bit challenging, but I am hoping to keep growing in this area. As my main areas of focus have been science, writing, and reading, I have been thinking of ways that the tasks that I give my students can be more open-ended and require a bit of creative “risk-taking”. One of the videos that I am in the process of making for this week is a science lesson called “The Candy Cane Experiment”. In this lesson, students will walk through the scientific process while discovering how candy canes dissolve in different liquids (water, milk, and vegetable oil). The lesson that I am creating with this video will allow students to get creative with their hypothesis, and reflection, where I will ask students to create their own candy cane experiment at home. I want to know which three NEW liquids that my students would want to test with their candy canes and I am hoping that this can help students get creative with their thinking, as there are no right or wrong answers. In the article “A Proposed Model to Increase Creativity, Collaboration and Accountability in the Online Classroom”, Joy Kutaka-Kennedy also talks about having students complete reflective analysis for their creative projects. I would love to have students practice higher order thinking by creating these self assessment opportunities more often. Another great way that I hope to foster creativity in my classroom will be to show my students how to create their own videos. One tool that I hope to use more in my classroom is Flipgrid. When giving students choices about how to present their learning, I think video responses are a great way to help students grow with self-expression, communication, and creative presentation. There’s a lot more learning and creating to be done, but I am really proud of how far I have come over the past few weeks! While making my projects for class this week, I thought back to several of Mayer's design principles and tried to focus on the WHAT and the HOW of my lessons for my students. The principles that I found myself using most were the signaling, personalization, and pre-training principle. When creating my infographic, I wanted to focus on something that could be incorporated into a lesson that I already teach. I created an infographic for science that aligns with the Mystery Science: Power of Flowers lesson about seed dispersal. The title of my creation is called ‘How Do Seeds Travel” and is a visual representation of the 4 main modes of seed dispersal. The lines that are included in the infographic signal the students and guide them through the information that is being presented. I also tried to keep the design elements simple and not overwhelming.
For the visual directions assignment, I used Canva to create a visual representation of the steps in the scientific method. Again, with this assignment I tried to keep in mind how my learners will perceive the design elements. I used personalization and coherence to show the scientific method in 5 steps without using too many words for their explanation. It is my goal that my students could use this visualization as a reference to guide them through the process of observing, creating wondering, hypothesizing, experimenting, and finally analyzing and reflecting on their learning. I mentioned my synchronous lesson in my last blog post, but over the past week I was able to finalize it and put it all together using what I’ve learned about the design process. Like I previously mentioned, my lesson is designed for reading instruction and the learning targets are finding the main idea and summarizing using sequencing words. I modeled the frame of my lesson around the “I do, We do, You do” teaching method. The lesson is made on a series of slides in which students will listen to me read a story and model the reading strategies, then we will practice them together using the same text, and finally it leads them right into their independent reading assignment where they will demonstrate their understanding and find the main idea/summarize their own book. When creating this lesson, I focused a lot on the personalization and pre-training principles. I also focused on the redundancy principle because even though it is designed as an asynchronous lesson, I will be able to teach the principles while presenting them visually on multiple slides. Lastly, the visual presentation was a more challenging assignment for me to create. With online teaching, especially to 3rd graders, I typically don’t give them power point instructions without at least some form of video aspect (screencast) or narration. This week I have been trying to apply the design principles for all of the remote science lessons that I am creating. I created a visual presentation that will walk students through an exploration about Lizard traits, adaptations, and survival. It is the third lesson in a series about this topic, and I wanted to incorporate lots of visuals to help learners truly observe the lizard traits as best they can. I also included “stopping” points for students to pause their learning and “think like a scientist”. By letting the learner stop and pause to think, I was trying to incorporate segmenting into the structure of the lesson. This allows the learner to process all of the information at their own pace. This course has continually challenged the way I think about designing materials for my students and I am starting to become more cognizant and mindful of the way that I am presenting information. I am slowly becoming more confident about applying Mayer’s design principles in my teaching and I look forward to growing even more as I continue to create lessons and teach remotely. I am so glad that I can apply this knowledge to my current role as a remote teacher and actually feel as though I am creating effective content and learning opportunities for my students. Already, I have found myself being more intentional about incorporating the design principles in the materials that I am using in my virtual classroom. I have been more mindful about the different platforms that I am using to create resources for my students and more specifically, I've tried to focus more on pre-training and personalization with my lesson creations. Although I think I've been applying many of Mayer's principles already, I've been looking deeper to find ways to present my information with more of a focus on the important materials without all of the "fluff" or useless material that isn't beneficial to student growth. An example of this can be seen in my vocabulary lessons. Instead of using several images, decorations, and examples of each word, I've tried to focus my slides on only including the crucial information needed for students to grasp the meaning of their words (the vocab word, the definition, one clear picture, and a sentence example).
As I've started the creation of my artifacts, I've enjoyed spending extra time to find creative ways to present information. Instead of putting all of my information on slides like I've been doing for the past 10 weeks of remote learning, it's been great to challenge myself and explore new ways to make lessons. Most of the artifacts that I will create for this class will be for 3rd grade science or ELA. My remote teaching partner, Sarah Long, will be creating materials for 3rd grade social studies and math. Together, our goal is to create a bank of resources that can be used for both remote instruction and for face to face instruction once we return with our students. So far, the artifact that has been the most challenging yet enjoyable to create is the Synchronous Learning Lesson. I greatly miss all of the interactions and collaborations that go on with teaching students face to face and it has been a challenge this year trying to come up with and create lessons that will open up that same opportunity when we are online. So much of the learning that happens when we are online happens behind the scenes, so when creating synchronous lessons, I think it is so important to create avenues for students to show evidence of their thinking and learning. I've created an ELA lesson that focuses on two comprehension skills: finding the main idea and summarizing. When creating this lesson, I wanted to find a way to model (I do), practice all together (We do), and observe the students practicing their skills independently (You do). I think creating this lesson has helped me grow as an educator by helping me think about the approaches I am taking to help my students reach their goals. I also love working on the Infographic. I think that infographics are a fabulous way to present information in visually appealing ways for young learners. I like using Canva for creating infographics, but I also enjoyed exploring more resources such as Piktochart and Venngage. Throughout the first two weeks of this course, I have already learned of several more platforms that I enjoy using and look forward to creating with. I also am excited to learn more about Padelt and how I can incorporate mood boards into my lessons. I think this course is a great opportunity for educators to learn from one another and grow with one another. I am looking forward to sharing my artifacts as well as seeing what my classmates create! As a learner-centered teacher, it's important to think about the learning process and what experiences the students will have in regards to their own learning. Teaching with multimedia can be effective as long as it is focused on the desired outcome for student learning. Using Mayer's Principles of Multimedia Design can help a teacher develop instruction that is student-centered. For example, the Coherence Principle focuses on excluding any images or media that could be distracting and is not directly related to the desired learning goals and targets. Next, the Spatial Contiguity Principle reminds us that learning can be improved when text and graphics are placed in close proximity to one another, instead of far apart. Lastly, the Segmenting Principle states that learners can better process information when it is segmented into portions with time in-between. This let's learners advance at their own pace.
As a 3rd grade teacher planning for remote instruction, I try to implement many of these design principles for my learners. For example, most or our videos follow the Modality Principle and Voice Principle by narrating all of our instructional videos and assignment instructions instead of relying on student's ability to read directions and captioning. Also, I apply the Personalization Principle with the hope that using more informal, conversational, and learner-centered language can help students better relate and connect with the media that they are using for their learnings. My main areas of instruction this year are ELA and Science. My teaching partner created instruction for Math and Social Studies and we both create content for Writing. When thinking about the specific challenges that my students face in regards to these principles, my mind immediately goes to the vast amount of screen time that our students are experiencing daily. When we create multimedia for our students we want it to spark the learning process and get students to activate the thinking process, however, we don't want them to watch videos that are too long and overloaded with information. Using these principles will be a key aspect in the way that I present learning to my students. Moving forward, I hope to apply these ideas and principles to my instruction design to create media that is engaging for students and effective in helping my students learn. |
Libbey Jones-3rd grade teacher at Explorer Elementary School in Williamston, MI ArchivesCategories |