Module #1: Educational Research

How can we teach with technology?

Preface:

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Diverting students from the virtual gingerbread house

Today's youth are often more skilled with computers than us, their teachers. Within the fickle, flickering attentions of the adept tweenster, "everybody has MySpace." As "digital natives," our youth are easily enticed into gingerbread homepages, aglaze with hypertext, rife with meaningless content. Our job as educators is to create opportunities in the virtual world that enhance learning. For example, we can give students permission to read and write their own questions, organize events with other students, live a Second Life, even use avatars to define their own identity. To many of us, born before the net generation, the classroom was a grid of students sitting in rows and columns, reading the next chapter out of a book written by educational authorities. Today's student reads in a completely different manner, using non-linear hypertext to make the reading experience more pleasurable. * Hence the dilemma: designing lessons in the future will be radically different than the lessons our teachers created, requiring today's teachers to integrate current technology into the classroom, like email, if we want pique our students' curiosities.

Too often, students are left to their own plugins in the digital classroom. Many teachers prefer to apply research techniques they used when they were students: walking up a library's marble steps, drifting down dusty bookshelves, the "shushers" behind the desk not so hip as they are today. Some educators, as "digital immigrants," can offer little more guidance than how to log on, or print out a page, adrift in a digital sea of online research. We all know the result, schools fine students for cell phone use in class, place "filters" which shut out everyone except the kids who were misusing the computers in the first place, or even banning computers altogether from the classroom.

Upgrading our educational toolbars

Even if educators are relegated from the "sage on the stage," to the "guide on the side," we cannot abandon our fundamental imperative: framing inquiry in the digital classroom. Without an overarching, organizing pedagogy, students will be tempted to do what you're probably thinking about, or doing right now: check your email while I'm delivering today's lesson, chat on AIM, shop on eBay. How can we divert students from virtual gingerbread houses? We could wave our hands in frustration, moan that learning is dead, and accept more and more command-and-control ("don't do that") procedures limiting students' Internet access. Or we can create our own "educational toolbars," allowing us to connect with students, helping to ensure students don't paddle down the datastreams of misinformation, mind-numbing waste, and obscenity so common on the Internet.

Interactive Writing

Let's jump "write" in to a common educational technology: the educational blog, or edublog. Do you sometimes wonder if your submitted modules just end up in a stack of unread papers somewhere? Even if your suspicions are unfounded, it's difficult to know if anyone's actually reading and appreciating the hard work you invested into producing a well written paper. The term paper will always be a important component of course evaluations, but interactive writing, the kind that gets created quickly, and read by your peers and instructors almost as quickly, offers an immediacy to written communication unrivaled by more formal term papers. Blog postings are instantaneously uploaded to the Internet, in full view for anyone to look at. Knowing your writing will be exposed to anyone's eyes can enhance a student's accountability for his or her writing – knowing that your peers will be reviewing your writing, and not just your teacher at some unknown future date, may make you write more carefully.

You're reading an edublog right now. My blog. My rantings on online educational technologies. And others. If you click on the blue words in my writing, you will be wisked away to other web pages that offer more information on the word. Remember to click on your browser's 'Back' arrow (the green left arrow at the top left of the screen if you're using the Firefox browser) when you're done reading to return to my blog. Click on the blue 'edublog' word in the previous paragraph, and an eyegrabbing three page magazine excerpt will load into your browser.

So the edublog allows the learner to read and investigate at his or her own pace. If you want to learn more about something I wrote, click on the blue words. If not, read the next paragraph. The edublog is also interactive, allowing readers to post comments and feedback that the instructor can apply to improving his delivery of the lesson.

So let's get interactive...

Remember the commonly used, commonly abused KWL chart? Can you remember a Professional Development session where they weren't discussed? Using the same teaching device over and over again, uninspiredly, defeats their purpose: to enhance learning in the classroom. Let's use the KWL chart in a new way.

Now that you've read my introduction to using educational technologies in the classroom, I'd like each of you to write down your thoughts to the following questions:

1. What do you Know about educational technologies? (Don't say "nothing," you must have experienced some sort of electronic device in the classroom at some time.)
2. What do you Want to know about educational technologies? (Imagine yourself teaching five years from now. What devices will help you keep your students actively engaged?)
3. What have you Learned about educational technologies from reading this introduction so far? (What's the problem stated in the previous paragraphs? What are edublogs?)

Answer these questions by creating a comment to this blog posting. To post a comment, follow these instructions:

• Open a new tab (Ctrl-t) and load this page a second time. By clicking back and forth on the tabs, you can read the instructions in one tab, and execute the commands in the other.
  
• Scroll to the end of this posting, on the line that starts, "posted by terminus," and click on the 'comments' link.
  
• On the right side of the screen, type your name in the text box.
  
• Answer the questions listed above, under your name.
  
• Below the text box, click on the 'Anonymous' radio button.
• Once you're happy with your answers (remember we're all going to read them in a few minutes) click on the orange 'Publish Your Comment' button below the text box.
  

Building a Lesson Plan:

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Researching Through Internet Resources

Every student who has passed through this colloquium has produced online educational resources. These resources grow and evolve with each class. Online writing should never be a complete process – as soon as you stop revising it, the links grow dusty, break, and produce the dreaded '404 File Not Found' message. Through this class, we, as teachers and students, will collectively experience a pedagogical process that moves beyond the "textbook brick."

Let's start by getting into groups of 2-3 and choosing a content area for a lesson plant that your group will create. Post a comment to this blog that includes:

1. The names of everyone in your group
2. Your content area
   

The group that posts first gets that content area. No two groups will have the same content area.

Here are some lists of familiar "online educational resources" -- links to other webpages of interest, usually unchanging, very similar to a stack of books in a library. These links offer access to New York State educational standards, national standards, and some of the online educational publications on the Internet. It is helpful to cluster educational information that we eternally refer to when writing lesson plans all on one webpage, like the standards codes that align to a lesson.

Evolving away from the recipe page: Search engines

I've been in professional development sessions where the above example is about as far as today's question was developed: a static page of information, reflecting all of the work done in the session, but as soon as the class is over, the page grows old, neither updated or revised, an electronic dusty book. A lot of teachers' web pages are very similar, listing outlines of content, sample exams, student rankings, but never showing what is most important in education: how learning new concepts can reshape our understandings and perceptions of the world around us.

We're all familiar with the ubiquitous term, "Google," or its energy efficient companion, "Blackle." But there are many Web-based search engines available to help you find information that can enhance your lesson plans. More importantly, there are several educational search engines that are gold mines of information for curriculum development. The best, by far, is the Education Resources Information Center, so important that I'm giving the link its own line.

ERIC

Let see how I have used the ERIC resource to help develop a unit on environmental education.

I am interested in creating "self-guiding walking tours" of the local neighborhood adjacent to the campus where I teach science lab classes. Of course, I set up a blog for the class, but to really fine-tune what I wanted to achieve with the environmental education, and how to assess student learning, I had to begin with the foundation of any good lesson plan, reading educational literature on the subject of instruction.

So I went to the ERIC search engine, typed, "environmental education" in the first box, and, (very important!) checked on the 'Full Text Availability' box, so that I could download the entire document in .pdf format. I clicked on the 'Search' box, and voila! — on the first page of search results was an EPA document titled, "The ABC's of Environmental Education." Besides showing me how to apply for grant funding to get paid for my research, pages 10-12 provided a checklist of step to help me develop my environmental education unit. 3,127 results also appears, so I narrowed the search by adding another term, "urban," to the second box. Now I only had 197 results, still too many for my tired, bleary eyes to sort through, so I added the term, "mapping," since I wanted to develop a community mapping project as part of the unit, and clicked on all of the boxes for post-secondary education in the 'Education Level(s)' box. I now found two articles, narrowly tailored to what I wanted to do in my environmental educational unit.

APA Citation Format

As a first year teacher, I often grabbed whatever information I could find for a lesson, chunked it all together, and once the week was over, forgot about it in collective cloud of oblivion shared by my colleages at the local pub. A year later, I found myself asking the following question many times:

"Where did I find that article?"

Knowing that I had to do it all over again added to the normal "second year darkness," that many teachers experience. To avoid reinventing the wheel, creating a citation for any educational materials we find valuable is an imperative part of curriculum design. Citations include the author's name, the article's title, date of publication, page numbers, name of publisher, and any other relevant information, such as a URL link, that will help us find the article in the future.

Educators usually use the APA Citation Format to memorialize helpful educational articles. Here are some common examples to help create the correct citation format.

Article in Journal Paginated by Issue

Journals paginated by issue begin with page one every issue; therefore, the issue number gets indicated in parentheses after the volume. The parentheses and issue number are not italicized or underlined.

Scruton, R. (1996). The eclipse of listening. The New Criterion, 15(30), 5-13.

Article in a Magazine

Henry, W. A., III. (1990, April 9). Making the grade in today's schools. Time, 135, 28-31.

Article in a Newspaper

Unlike other periodicals, p. or pp. precedes page numbers for a newspaper reference in APA style. Single pages take p., e.g., p. B2; multiple pages take pp., e.g., pp. B2, B4 or pp. C1, C3-C4.

Schultz, S. (2005, December 28). Calls made to strengthen state energy policies. The Country Today, pp. 1A, 2A.

APA Citation Format

Once I began accumulating articles (and citations), I was ready to begin creating what would eventually become my environmental educational unit plan. The first step was to summarize in one or two paragraphs what I learned from each article, and include the APA citation at the top of the summary. By compiling a list of summaries, I was ready to begin the next step, the actual writing of lesson plans. Notice that I included the six digit ERIC code for each citation.

Evaluation

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Homework #1

Before leaving this class, each student will complete the following:

Deliverable #1: Students will form groups of no less than two and no more than three students. Each group will decide which content area (math, science, social science, art, or language arts) they will research for their lesson plans, etc.

Deliverable #2: Each group will choose an Aim for a lesson plan appropriate to the chosen content area.

Deliverable #3: Each group will post a comment to this posting, listing their names, content area, and Aim.

To post a comment, follow these instructions:

• Scroll to the end of this posting, on the line that starts, "posted by terminus," and clicking on the 'comments' link. On the right side of the screen, type your information in the text box. Below the text box, click on the 'Anonymous' radio button.
  
• Make sure your name is at the top of your entry to ensure receiving credit. Also make sure to include:
• Each person's name,
  
• the content area
• the Aim
  

Note: Once a group has posted their choice for a content area, no other group may choose that content area.

Before next class, each group will complete the following:

Deliverable #4: Each group will identify the New York State and New York City standards that align to the Aim, using the Educational Standards listed on the class wiki.

Deliverable #5: Each student will use the ERIC search engine to locate 2-3 articles that pertain instruction and delivery of that Aim.

Deliverable #6: Each group will post a comment that includes their names, their Aim, the NYS and NYC standards, and the APA citations of all of research articles to this blog.

Deliverable #7: Each group will produce a 150 word essay that summarizes

1. the lesson plan Aim chosen
2. how the ERIC research articles helped shape the design of your lesson plan
3. the NYS standards that are applicable to your lesson plan, and
4. how you plan to implement this lesson plan