Tag Archives: #edtech501

School Evaluation

School Evaluation Survey

School Evaluation Report

Sacramento Valley Technology High School is an advanced school with widespread technology integration. I look forward to seeing how the school can develop in the future as a high tech environment. Students use iPad extensively throughout the school day and teacher use devices to deliver content. Each year the school revises its technology plan and incoming freshmen receive training on how to properly use their devices.

This assignment encouraged me to do some research on the background and history of my school. I have no idea that the school was founded well over a hundred years ago. The current campus has existed since 1956, however, it has received many updates and great many of them have had to do with technology. The technology lab, projection screens in ever classroom, the technology lab and iPad help desk has all encourage students and teacher to be tech savvy and take advantage of the wealth of technology resources at the school.

Tech Trends

Resources and Artifacts:

Tech Trends Lesson Plan 

Student Start Page

Personal Analysis/Experience:

 For this assignment I chose to focus on the Horizon Report concerning creativity in the classroom. Consumption in the classroom and society is ubiquitous. Certain adults grow into lives of unhappiness and dissatisfaction because too few of us have a meaningful creative outlet. There is documentation of a rise in depression in America and an increase in abuse of medication.  I believe that the arts contribute to a happier, more well rounded individual and society and science backs this up. Throughout the Horizon Report, there are references to project-based, creative learning reinventing education experiences into organic, multidisciplinary learning environments, (See, “Rethinking How Schools Work”). In my experience, it is often found that primary school education is very passive. I was happy to find in the Horizon Report this title, “Shift From Consumers to Creators,” (Johnson, 2009). This has been a goal of mine for some time in the past few years. Strangely, it is met with mixed results and reactions from parents and students. Some students are on board and relish the opportunity to work hands-on with a subject-matter in a new and interesting way. Other students are not so creative with their own creative potential and see arts integration as anti-academic. I strongly oppose this view and see art as a cathartic and meaning way to express one’s ideas, especially on a topic that is challenging to grasp. 

“We want to get more people making music and push music forward as an artform.” (auxy.co)

I chose to create a lesson plan that integrates technology, theology, musical arts and written analysis. The project was quite simple and produced some great results.  As a 1:1 iPad school where all students are required to bring a device by the first day of instruction, there are many possibilities available to me as an educator. Being also a hobbyist musician, I like to explore different apps that tailored to my musical curiosities. I found a very user friendly step sequencer with a geometric interface that students could learn to use in a matter minutes called, Auxy. Thanks to the Auxy app, students were able to dive into music composition and recording in a very short period of time. Then, I began thinking of ways that students can explore different subject matter from an arts integration mindset.

While creating this activity, I understood that many students are not comfortable expressing  themselves in a purely musical way. The app, Auxy, removes barriers. Once I had figured out a foolproof way for music creation, I had to backup the work that students would be doing with some skills that they are already practicing in other classes. So I decided that they should have a writing component where they should describe why the sounds, tempos and feelings associated with their music connects to the Paschal Mystery.

The final component of this lesson is to have students play their recorded piece of work for the class and read their written component aloud to the class. Students were nervous about showcasing their work, but after everyone had made their presentations, I felt that students enjoy hearing each other compositions. Once everyone had submitted and presented their works, I compiled the musical pieces into a file that could be shared with the students and burned the tracks onto a CD.  
Conclusion:

I think that this lesson was a fun and engaging way to interact with a subject that can be very difficult to discuss, express and intellectualize. The Paschal Mystery is the central theological mystery of the church surrounding Christ’s sacrifice, death and resurrection. It really can only be expressed through metaphors and symbols. I feel that music has been a powerful way over the centuries for people to express the wide variety of emotions associated with the Passion. Now students can engage with this subject through music using technology in a way that is very accessible.  Creativity in any form is the new currency of the marketplace, value by CEOs above integrity and global thinking (Briggs, 2014). The challenge with successful arts integration is implementing it in a meaningful way for students. Scholars have identified these criteria for successful implementation:

“1. Students should see connections and walk away with bigger ideas.

  1. Students should take their work seriously.
  2. The expressions and activities in the arts should genuinely speak to important areas of the academic curriculum. This also means that the content is seen through more than one form, for example, beyond the traditional written and spoken word.
  3. The content lesson and the artistic lesson should be of equal importance.
  4. The experience should have a planned assessment with rubrics and scoring guides.
  5. The lesson plan should grow from state curriculum standards in both content areas and the arts.” (Catterall and Waldorf 1999, 58)

In my lesson, I believe that I prepared students in a way that made the lesson authentically meaningful. There may be room for improvement on connecting larger ideas to this subject matter. In the start page for the lesson, I included several references to music that was inspired by the Paschal Mystery, which I hope helped student to connect what they were doing to the larger world and the legacy of inspired works of art associated with the subject matter.

iPADIt was very important to me that my students leave my classroom realizing that they can be creative even if they have been told (tell themselves that they are not skilled at art). I also appreciate the ability to have students explore difficult concepts through art, I think that it helps students exercise parts of the brain that we do not often have the opportunity to use.

 

Resources:

Briggs, S. (2014, September 20). Students as creators: How to drive your students to be   more than just consumers – InformED. Retrieved April 08, 2016, from http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/students-as-creators/

Catterall, James S., and Lynn Waldorf. (1999). The Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education: Summary evaluation. In Champions of change: The impact of arts on learning, ed. Edward B. Fiske, 47–62. Washington, DC: Council of Chief State School Officers.

Johnson, L., Levine, A., & Smith, R. (2009).  The 2009 Horizon Report.  Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

 

 

 

Code of Professional Ethics in Educational Technology

Link to Document

I am extremely grateful to Catholic education not only for providing me with a wonderful education, but then employing me to teach in its schools. However, it has been a source of internal struggle, because private schools tend to be a service accessible only to the wealthy.  My parents weren’t wealth, but at the time Catholic schools were somewhat affordable.  At my current school the annual tuition is $12, 387, which is an increase of 217% over a ten year period. This is huge.

The school does provide generous financial support. There is almost 3 million dollars annually that goes to tuition assistance. The most in the area. And several students attend the school tuition free due to academic promise and economic hardship. If I were send my children to the school, their tuition would be nearly paid for.

Concerning this assignment, it was fascinating to start looking at the school from the lens of an administrator. The costs and logistics of implementing a high level technology program are great. Yet, as it states in the text, institutions are driven by competition. In order to succeed one must compete. Education technology is driving force in the cost education at the school and it creates many ethical dilemmas in terms of access. Yet, the strength of enrollment is due to the high quality of 21st Century learning that is occurring on the campus. I think that as long as the school continues to provide assistance to families in need they can say they are living up to their call to ethical standards.

 

Research in Education Technology

Julian Elorduy Research in Education Technology for 501

This was a great assignment. I feel like I was able to finish the project with a lot of useful information and a helpful new perspective on 1:1 computing in the classroom. I decided to research 1:1 computing because it is fairly new in the field and I am at the center of an 1:1 test facility. I have really enjoyed using iPads at school to deliver content through AppleTV Airplay and for students to use to complete various activities in the classroom. However, recently I feel my methods are becoming a bit stale. Combined with other teacher’s complaints about the program I was beginning to lose a little faith in the program.

After doing this research, I have realize that it isn’t the iPads that is causing problems. The iPads are a tool and like other tools they need to be used for specific academic purposes and guidelines for their use in the classroom need to be specific and geared toward productivity and innovation. I look forward to applying this new enthusiasm and direction in my classroom this week. I am grateful to have the opportunity to use this technology in my classrooms. I feel, however, that by this year in the program students are taking the devices for granted. I hope that I can be more innovative with a variety of apps rather than just cameras, word processing and presentation building.

RSS in Education

Relevant Links:

Lesson Plan: RSS in Education

Rubric: RSS in Education – Current Events

Directions: Evaluating Current Events

This assignment really work well to combine with something I was already doing in class without the use of an RSS Reader.  I really wish I could go back and use the lesson plan I created for this assignment in class. But I think that there is definitely still a chance for that to happen.

In my Sophomore religion class, we are discussing images of the Church within the scripture, church doctrine and in the media and popular culture. The assignment is a way for students to see how the media depicts aspects of the church or many of the church’s efforts in ways that can be positive or negative. We used this lesson to explore some techniques of persuasion used in marketing and also definitions of the word bias.

Students were intrigued to learn that they could find many negative examples. We took this as an opportunity to recognize that not everything the Church does is widely accepted and many students in the class had the opportunity to express things about their church life that frustrate them as they are getting older and more comfortable with their own opinions on where or not their faith experience within the Church is very meaningful to them.

In redesigning the lesson, I relied heavily upon one of the examples Professor Saba linked to the instructions. It was a great idea and structure for delivery. However, I tweaked it significantly to suit my needs within my classroom. I hope everyone in this class has success implementing their RSS feeds into a class lesson.

Thanks for reading and good luck with the rest of the lessons!