Creativity Tools

Our Tech Play assignment for this week was to explore creativity tools and their affordances in the classroom.  The first thing I discovered is Android is not education friendly.  Don't get me wrong, I love my Android and have always avoided Apple on principal alone.  I use free apps and sync with Windows Media Player.  I still love my Android devices, but the apps are the pits.  I downloaded several that looked promising, but they were either too complicated (like AutoCAD 360) or too simplistic (Particles app that shows a nucleus and surrounding electrons).  I also downloaded a few that crashed or were nothing but advertisements.
I only found one Android app called Drawing the Math that was right on track with high school math.  This app allows students to enter equations and see the graphs of them.  It also allows users to stretch or skew graphs, changing the graph and seeing how that changes the equation.  We had a math teacher last year use a graphing app like this one to draw pictures and record the equations necessary to graph them. 
The other app I found for Android (also available on phones and Apple devices) is called Layar.  It is an augmented reality app.  I had never heard of this before but it is REALLY COOL!  Augmented reality basically works like a QR code for real life objects.  Your device scans your item or picture and anything recorded for that image pops up on the screen in an overlay.  In this way, a picture or article in a magazine could be scanned to bring up a related video.  A street view would overlay information about the types of businesses inside the buildings.  Your car can be tracked by holding up your device and moving around until you face the direction of your car.  In a classroom setting, you could us this to provide additional information about any object in your room.  President portraits could be augmented with videos, biographies, or presentations about their accomplishments.  Machine parts could be shown in motion or the physics could be explained with a pop up video.  The options are limitless.  I think kids would find this very engaging.
After failing miserably in the Android app department, I turned to the web.  I found several websites that are promising.  I have listed them individually below:

• Animoto - Found at animoto.com,  students can make quick and easy videos of book reviews or project outlines.  They pick a theme and background music and start adding pictures and text.  The videos can be downloaded and saved or set in to a running loop to be played back during open house.  Educators and students can get an upgraded account for free.
• floorplanner.com - As a future Technology Ed teacher, I am always looking for something I can use for an architecture or design class.   This website was easy to get started on and engaging.  I lost several hours designing my dream home, complete with furniture, porch and rosebushes.  The plans can be saved so students could return and work on a project several days in a row. Students could share and review each other's work and discuss why they chose materials and designs as they did, encouraging a Constructivist learning environment. 
• golemgame.com - This website is similar to the Fantastic Contraption game except it is a full sandbox, meaning students can create anything they want to perform any task they are given.  Teachers could give an assignment and restrict materials to inspire student's creativity and understanding of mechanics and physics.  The game allows students to explore and experiment with virtual parts quickly and easily.  Once they have a viable model, they could be tasked with building it for real and seeing if it would preform as expected.
• http://ldd.lego.com/en-us/ - This website hosts the Lego Digital Designer System.  Plans can be uploaded and shared or downloaded and built.  I am partial to building things and have always loved Legos.  This is a great way for students to build and share their creations.  As an educator, I would give students a limited number and sizes of blocks and then challenge them to build a unique object (maybe a vehicle or building) and then have them share them and peer review and pick a winner.  I think kids really love creating things and Legos are perfect to building tools.
• For every good website I found, I visited three that were glorified advertisements or scams, or cost money.  There are lots of good sites out there, but there are also lots of misleading information.  Teachers need to research before suggesting sites to students.

Creative tools are so important for kids.  Everyone wants to be able to hold something in their hand and say, "I made this!"  Kids are no different.  Even in high school, students want create something and take it home to show their parents.  I think it is also a great way to connect with parents - it touches a nerve reminiscent of the bean plant they sprouted in 1st grade.  Videos and digital content fulfills this need as well.  Unlike games and tutorials, creative tools give kids something to show off and share.  I think the sharing is important because it allows for peer review and design improvement.  Students are able to learn from their mistakes and others successes.   Its a two-fold learning process:  They learn while doing and again when considering others' work.
I look forward to using these apps and programs in my class. 

Rough Draft

I have spent this week creating the rough draft of my e-portfolio.  It seems lacking to me, but I know it will grow as my experience and my available artifacts grow.  You can view my e-portfolio here.

I have enjoyed this project and have learned a lot, not just about educational technology and teaching skills, but about building webpages and creating blogs.  It was a lot easier than I thought it would be and it has been fun.  I had never built a webpage, mostly because I never thought I had anything worth sharing with the world at large.

I look forward to others reading my e-portfolio and receiving some feedback.  I am sure others have better ideas and I look forward to seeing their e-portfolios.  The variety of student's backgrounds makes this course very interesting because we are all coming to this class with different life experiences and have different ideas about what technology means for education.

I will be posting more in the next weeks as I put some polish on my e-portfolio and lean more about technology in education.

Epiphany!

In reading this week's assigned reading, I think I finally got it!

The purpose of this Ed Tech class is not only to teach us the technology that is out there, but to teach us how to teach with it: what works and what doesn't work based on the affordances of that technology and based on what we going to teach.   The Alternative Certification program assumes I know my content and strives to teach me pedagogy to transform that knowledge in to teaching.  This class is designed to take those two together and add technology and help us be more efficient in our teaching.

This goes beyond traditional tech training and really embraces what we should be doing with teachers in schools.  We spend so many hours going to tech workshops, sending teachers to learn about Windows 8 or the latest I-pad apps, but not how to use that tech to teach or how it relates to their content.

This year, our district spent a day of tech training by providing one hour workshops and allowing teachers to pick what they wanted to learn.  In theory, this allowed teachers to train on specific items they felt they needed training in and allowed them to pick topics that apply specifically to their content. As the devil's advocate, I might say this was not enough training to really help teachers and I would venture to guess some teacher's don't know what they should be trained in for their content.  While it is better than forcing the entire staff to sit through grade book training, there still needs to be improvement. 

The technology gap between teachers poses a real problem to technology training.  Some of our teachers are very tech savvy and need only be pointed in the direction of new tech to grasp its content and its pedagogical uses.  Others need help turning on their computer or basic troubleshooting skills.  What is the solution?  I don't know.  Maybe I will figure it out.

This week we discovered e-portfolios.  We were tasked with learning and experimenting with e-portfolios and will use this post to reflect on all we have learned.  An e-portfolio is essentially a collection of artifacts that express your beliefs and shares your expertise with interested parties.  It is a resume and much more.  For me, I haven't had a resume in years because I haven't been looking for a job!

I considered using LinkedIn, because I had heard it was a job networking site where you could post your resume and make connections.  This seemed like a natural fit for an e-portfolio because your contacts and potential employers are in that one spot and it would be easy to draw traffic to yourself.  I did not find the resources necessary to use LinkedIn for what we are looking for in an e-portfolio.  While it asked me for my job history, it did not allow me to add documents like I wanted to and I was a little put off by all the extra stuff it kept trying to push me in to.

I briefly considered using a wiki because I know they are easy to build but I quickly discarded the notion because wiki's are too public and too easily edited by the public at large.  I want to be the one and only creator of my e-portfolio.

I considered Google Docs but discarded it for lack of easy of navigation and confusion.  I also had concerns about sharing some information without over sharing everything I had on Goggle Docs.

My husband tells me a Wordpress blog is the way to go and I found some themes designed for portfolios but I lack the necessary expertise to get that going.  It would require a registered website and then I would have to edit and set up my Wordpress blog to look more like an e-portfolio and less like a blog.  I think for end-use, this might be worth exploring because once it is set up, it would be great and would allow me to post additional items (I am considering adding) without making them public right away.

I finally created an e-portfolio on Weebly.  I heard some classmates discussing it today and I was just going to check it out.  I picked a silly theme - this is Tech PLAY afterall and changed the images out on each page with different character screenshots from different video games I play.  I added the content I have generated so far and I think it looks pretty good.  I will have to change my theme at some point and select something more professional, but for now, it makes me laugh when I see it.  Check it out and let me know what you think!  My E-Portfolio

This is my new blog for my Educational Technology class with Texas A&M, Commerce.  I am going to explore using blogs in an Engineering and Design Presentation class for high school students to meet the TEKS requirement of using an engineering notebook to explore engineering design methodologies including design components, concept presentations and to present prototypes and to make corrections to any design mistakes.   Student blogs would be shared through out the class to allow for peer review and input.  According to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy, creating an engineering notebook teaches students to create new ideas and evaluate their work supporting higher order thinking skills.  

I believe this pedagogy falls under Constructivism because students will be asked to make assimilations and accommodations while learning though questioning what they know and learning from their mistakes.  They will work as a community to help each other brainstorm, problem solve and evaluate the project. 

The blog will serve as a record of their journey from concept to completed project.  As a daily record of a student's thought process, blogs afford students an opportunity to record, review, and correct their thinking and help develop critical thinking and writing skills.  The teacher can guide blog posts with a prompt to keep students on the right track but give students the freedom to explore their thoughts independently.  Sharing blogs allow students to share their ideas and make recommendations for improvements.

 

A blog could also be used as a journal of daily activities, a journal for tracking any project start to finish, or as a record for parents to track a student's progress.  A blog could also be used to help brainstorm independently, then bring work together for group projects. 

I have considered several obstacles to using a blog as an educational tool.  Many students may not have the writing or vocabulary skills to adequately express themselves in a blog post (specifically special needs or 504 students).  Twenty students posting to a blog each period, each day would require a lot of reading or grading on the teacher's part.  A grading rubric for a blog would be more subjective and open to interpretation if questioned by parents or administration.  All these things considered, I believe a blog would be worth using because it would create a student-created learning record that could be saved forever.