Uncategorized – Page 2 – My Journey with Digital Learning and Leading

Clarifying the Problem

In week two’s discussion post we were working on trying to narrow down our action research topic. We were given various tools to help us work on finding what topic we would like to research and how to focus in on adopting our question for our action research plan. Below is my discussion post.

I currently do not have an innovation plan because I have not yet taken that class, but I have come up with a topic, Inquiry-based learning and its effectiveness in an honors math classroom. I choose this topic because I am an honors math teacher and I have been teaching for fourteen years. Over the years I have noticed a push for more inquiry- based learning. I have been intrigued by this style of learning because it allows the students to think on a much deeper level and puts the power of learning in their hands, but I find myself scared to take the leap. Which leads me to my fundamental research question, “How effective is inquire-based learning in a high school math classroom in developing higher-order thinking skills?”

After reviewing over Table 4.1 Should I use a Qualitative or a Quantitative Approach, I found that the best method for me is to utilize the triangulation mixed-methods design. I will need both qualitative and quantitative research to help me answer my question. I will have three Honors Algebra 2 classes this coming up school year and I am planning to take two of those classes and perform the inquiry-based learning in those two classes and I am thinking to teach the third class just like I have over the past nine years. On the qualitative side, I will plan to use the constant comparative method, where I will be collecting data from all three classes, where I will compare the behavior of the students and even survey them to see how they are doing. For the quantitative research, I am planning to compare their test scores. The three classes will have learned the exact same material, just in different ways and I will be able to compare test scores to see who has performed at a higher level.

I am hoping I am on the right track with my action research plan and I would be ecstatic if any of you can make any recommendations for me.

I received from very good feedback from my peers on my topic that has helped me to even further develop my plan. Collaborating with my peers has proven to be a great tool for this class.

Recognizing the Misperceptions

After reading over the required reading and getting a better understanding of action research, I personally feel that the acting stage will be one of the most difficult parts in this process at this time due to the fact that we are currently out for the summer. I will not be around anyone to be able to collect the data that I will need to help address my question, on which learning strategy is better for students, inquiry-based learning, or traditional-based learning? I am really wanting to gather input from the students on this once I have had the chance to practice each of these with my students.

I will be leaning heavily on my previous classes to help me with my action research in this class. I feel that EDLD 5339, The Principalship, is the class that has helped me the most with identifying problems and creating an action plan to resolve the issues that were presented to us. I believe that this will be utilized a lot in this course.

Professional reflection makes someone a better educator by allowing the educator time to reflect on their own practices in their classroom and giving the educator time access and adjust. This process is also cyclical, meaning it never ends. We as teachers, have always done this. We do a lesson in our room and then either after a period or at the end of the day we reflect and make changes for the future. Even a veteran like myself, I do not believe that I have ever taught a lesson the same way, even after my fourteen years of teaching. I am constantly seeking ways to improve what I do to better serve my students and their needs.

5303 Final Reflection

I made it to week 5 in my class EDLD 5303 Applying Education Technology: ePortfolio! I had my doubts as to whether or not I believed that I could do it, but I persevered and made it! Reflecting back to the first couple of weeks, I struggled with creating this site. I am one of those people that once they start on something, I need to finish it. I finally came to the realization that this project will take shape as we go through our other classes. I will be able to change things up as I go along to fit the narrative that I need. Also, I had a hard time publishing my site. Not because I did not know how to do it, but because I was afraid to put myself out on the web. I am not the type of person that likes to talk about myself or likes to be in the spotlight. I was scared that someone would find it and start critiquing it and put it down. Then when I talked to my group, they brought to my attention the realization that we were posting our sites on the world wide web and the chances of someone finding it and bashing it, for a lack of a better word, was slim to none and honestly once I published my site, I felt a huge burden lifted off of my shoulders. I also found myself actually enjoying working with my site.

I will be honest; I had not bought in fully to COVA in the first couple of weeks. I was struggling with how to do everything and was thinking that I had made the wrong decision. As I moved through the course, and watched the videos and the read the required articles it all started to make sense to me. My ePortfolio started to evolve into what it was meant to be, a true reflection of my learning. I can see how this would be beneficial to my students and how by choosing the right platform, they will be able to keep their ePortfolio even after graduation.

Students want choice in their assignments and how to do them. They want ownership in their work. Just passing out a worksheet and having them answer questions, does not give them this opportunity. Students want their voices to be heard and they want authenticity in their learning. Students are wanting to demonstrate their creativity and use this in their learning. I saw this within the projects I gave them during the fifth six weeks. They were able to choose the picture they wanted to draw and they were able to draw it however they wanted to in the program and the majority of them thanked me for letting them have a choice. They told me it was much better than just being told what they had to do.

Now that I have and will be going through these technology classes for my master degree, I am leaning towards having my students create an ePortfolio themselves to track their learning. I believe that this will be a major asset for them for after graduation.

E-Portfolios- The art of learning and growing

This week our discussion post had us reviewing over several e-Portfolios that have already been compiled. I looked through several examples in hopes of them helping me develop my e-Portfolio better. I really enjoyed looking at each of the portfolios. It showed each person’s way of thinking through their own learning process. I believe that this is important to not only us, but to our students. Our students do not all learn the same and we are expected to differentiate our lessons to accommodate all of our students, and this would be amazing for them to not only showcase their learnings but their talents. Each of the portfolios that I looked through showed the persons own creative learning style and I love this! There were many differences among the portfolios, but that is the best thing when using COVA, it brings out each person’s creativity and individuality because it puts the learning in the hands of the student.

I also dug into a few of these portfolios a little deeper to explore their sites and I liked how they were easy to navigate, and I saw a few things that I am hoping to incorporate into my portfolio. There are some amazing portfolios!

Who Owns the E-Portfolio?

Towards the end of the school year, I generally ask for my students to fill out a survey for my class on how they feel the school year went. I will have generic questions like, “Did you enjoy my class” and “Do you feel like you learned enough for you to be successful in future math classes?” Probably one of the most important questions I ask them is “What is the one thing that you enjoyed the most this past year and why?” The answers generally come back stating that they enjoyed the six weeks’ project that I have them do during the fifth six weeks, and their reason for why it was the most enjoyable is because they were able to have ownership in their project. Before taking this class, I picked up on how important ownership is, but never really understood just how important it is and now that I just wrapped up this project, I see how impactful ownership is to the students’ education. As Harapnuik (2019) suggest, ownership of ideas and making meaningful connections both lead to deeper learning.

My students learned! They were able to build this project the way they wanted and they were able to make their own connections with little help from me. They were also allowed the time to write a reflection over what they learned, which we have learned is a major component to ownership. When one is given the time to reflect on their own work, they are involved in a learning cycle that never stops.

The one thing that I struggle with is the rubric for this project. Rikard (2015), article discusses if the student truly owns the domain, is the ownership lost if the teacher is grading it, are the students only giving the teacher what they want? For my rubric, I have five columns with a numeric grade at the top of each column ranging from 75 to 100. Under each grade is the criteria that the student must meet in order to receive that grade. Most students strive for the 100, but I do have some that are happy with a 75 or a 70 in some instances. My battle comes when a student turns in a project and I know how hard they worked, but because they did not meet the rubric criteria for a 100, I cannot give them that. In the past, before the rubric, I gave everyone a 100, most deserved it, and some did not, but all-in-all, the projects were good. I only created the rubric to stay fair and consistent with grading since it is a Pre-AP class. I want to be more like Opra and give everyone a 100, but I also feel like if I do this, quality of the work will go down. I am open to suggestions to this dilemma, if anyone has any.

Resources

Harapnuik, D. (n.d.). Who Owns the ePortfolio. Retrieved April 26, 2021, from http://www.harapnuik.org/?page_id=6050

Rikard, A. (2015). Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It? Retrieved April 26, 2021, from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-08-10-do-i-own-my-domain-if-you-grade-it

Why an E-Portfolio?

I believe that using an e-Portfolio will be beneficial for us. Having these e-Portfolios will allow us to present our knowledge of the course in a unique way which will open doors for collaboration with our peers. I feel that creating these e-Portfolios is a small piece of the big picture. I feel that the big takeaways are going to be the collaboration and reflections. By collaborating with our peers, we will be able to gain insight on our work, which in turn will allow us to reflect on how we can improve, and then fix it.

E-Portfolios is a way for us to take control of our learning. Just like Dwayne Harapnuik (2019) outlines in his article, we are able to learn on a much deeper level when we are actively engaged. I also like the part about the teacher sees the learning through the student’s eyes. This will be beneficial for our students as well. There are many different types of learners out there and I feel that if a student can display their learning by creating an e-Portfolio, their creativity shines.

I just finished up a six-week project with my Pre AP-Algebra 2 students where they had to draw a picture in a computer program by using nothing but equations. Some of their creativity shined. I would never have known some of them were artistic if it was not for this project. I also have them write me a half page reflection over the project and a lot of them stated the reason why they enjoyed doing their project was because they had control over which picture they drew and how they could draw it. It was the ownership that they liked. I guess, by reading these articles and reflecting over the project, I can see where e-Portfolios would be a huge benefit for us but for our students as well.

Reference

Harapnuik, D. (2019). Why use an ePortfolio. Retrieved April 22, 2021, from http://www.harapnuik.org/?page_id=6063

EPortfolios- Getting Started

At this point in time, I am feeling overwhelmed, because like many, I have not yet had the 5302 course and I feel that I am light-years behind. I found myself reading each of the above articles and then clicking on the links to see where they would bring me. I enjoyed exploring all of these articles, but a few of them caught my eye. The first article, “Love of learning is the key to success in the jobless future” made me think about jobs in the future. I just mentioned in my Introduction post that as educators, we are preparing kids for jobs that have not yet been created. This article made mention that in the past, careers were something that lasted twenty plus years and now with the way everything is evolving, a career will last an average of ten years and in the future this number will decrease to five years to eventually being no careers (Harapnuik, 2015). This is crazy and shows just how fast things are evolving.

Another article I enjoyed was “New study highlights the benefits of ePortfolios in engineering education.” This article, done at the University of Notre Dame, focuses on how ePortfolios can help professors see if a student is going to be successful or not in their intro courses by gauging how much the student is engaged in the class (Harapnuik, 2015). It also talked about since these ePortfolios are the students’ creations, that giving a numeric grade would not be right. Instead, it would either be a “Pass” or “Needs to Improve.” As a teacher, I particularly do not like giving out numeric grades. I do not think this grade is a true reflection of the true level of a student. I want to explore this topic more to see how I can utilize this in my classroom and bring out COVA for my students.

References

Harapnuik D., EDLD 5303 Getting Started Tips, 2015

Digital Learning and Leading: My Self Assessment

Over the past several years I have found myself wanting to integrate technology into my classroom. Since I am a high school math teacher, I always find myself navigating towards the latest and greatest in technology. My problem is with all of these great innovative ways to incorporate digital learning, I feel like I am drowning. I have many tools in my toolbox, I just do not have the time nor the energy to get them going.

How can I fix this? I decided at the beginning of this school year to go back to school to get my Master’s degree. I know, crazy, right? I picked a Master of Education in Technology Leadership. I guess since the word Technology was in the name, that is why I gravitated to it. I am currently in my sixth class, which just so happens to be the first technology class. What I envisioned and what I am currently doing are two completely different things. Our assignment is to design an ePortfolio where I have to document my learning through blogging. I will be honest, all of this is extremely new to me. For starters, I have never developed a website and two, I have never thought about blogging. I can definitely say that I am in uncharted territories right now.

Developing this site has been a struggle. I worry about how this will be perceived by others and what they will think. I need to keep reminding myself that this site is ultimately for me and it is my creation. I am charting my course and I do not need to worry about what others will think. So here is to clicking the launch button and hoping everything comes together alright.

Collaboration, Good or Bad

Do you like collaborating, do your students like collaborating? Have you been in a meeting with your peers, to have one person do all of the talking and not listen to anyone else’s point of view? If you said yes to the above questions, then you are with me. If done right, the collaboration process works well, but if done wrong, people tend to not like it and will not enjoy the process.

We watched a video that was provided to us by our professor and I will say this, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it. Margaret Heffernan talked about why it is important to forget the pecking order at work. MIT performed a study that groups volunteers together and gave them extremely hard problems to solve. They found that the best performing groups were not the groups that had the highest IQ’s. They found that three characteristics were prominent throughout the groups that performed superior. The first thing is that the groups showed a high degree of social sensitivity to each other. Second, the successful groups gave equal time for each member to contribute to the discussion. In my classroom, I have grouped my students according to ability level. I have paired an above-average student with an average and a below average student. The hopes were for the above average student to help pull up the below average student, but what I witnessed was not this. In fact, it was the average student that helped the below average student out more. I saw that the above average student was only worried about themselves, and did not show empathy towards the other two students. Often times, the above average student will ask to work by themselves. I use this as a teaching moment and try to get the above average student to understand the bigger picture. The third was that the more successful groups had more women in them. I chuckled at this, honestly. They were not sure if it was due to the fact that women show more empathy or if the women bring more diversity.

For collaboration to work well, remember all persons have a voice. No one dominates the conversation and no one is a passenger. Everyone contributes equally. Groups must have social cohesion. Let me hear from you about your thoughts on collaboration.