Cognitive Learning and Technology

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. As teachers we are brain builders trying to make memories for our students. We must use every avenue available to get learning into their long term memories. From humor to images and from rhymes to actual hands on objects, our goal is to get students to hang new learning on the existing branches of their cognition. Students in our high school classrooms create and interpret concept maps making connections between concepts with pencil lines which we hope will be connections in their minds.
How we ever did this without today's technology tools is a wonder. I began teaching in the age before the internet was available and now I use it daily to access images, lab simulations, models of molecules, even songs and poems. My best lessons start by tapping into students cognition by asking for prior knowledge to be written into their notes or by asking their ideas and questions about a visual image on the smartboard or a video from YouTube. I can remember tearing out pre-made blackline masters of concept maps from text workbooks to turn into overhead acetates and now online concept map creators like www.bubbl.us make a professional product out of my own connected ideas for a lesson and, even better, my students' ideas. As a class we can even take virtual field trips to another part of the globe or to a far away science research project through the internet and then post our responses on our own class webpage.

Teaching Science with Technology and a Behaviorist Approach

Teachers study all types of education philosophies to prepare for working with students. One popular, although perhaps old-fashioned, philosophy is Behaviorism [a great tutorial on what behaviorism is from the University of Georgia Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology can be found at http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Behaviorism]. Decades ago psychologists began to explore stimulus – response behaviors in animals and people. Both respond to positive reinforcement like attention and rewards and negative reinforcement like punishment. Education today is a complex process involving addressing different learning styles, implementing a more thorough understanding of how the brain thinks and stores memories , and the creation of meaningful learning environments for all students. I believe that behaviorist approaches still can be valuable in the high school science classroom.
In secondary science education, we face challenges with our students that come from years of conditioning. Many students enter our rooms believing they are no good at science, or that they are not smart enough to excel in science, or even that science is too hard. It is difficult to coax out of students the effort it takes to learn ideas, practice skills, and persist because effort pays off. Pitler, Hibbell, Kuhn, and Malenoski in their book Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works reassured me that “(s)tudents can learn to operate from a belief that effort pays off even if they do not initially have this belief.” (2007, p155) Technology can provide terrific tools to reinforce student effort. From Behaviorism we know that students need to feel success to know that their effort paid off. Using a rubric and a spreadsheet program available to most computer users, teachers can direct students to enter their effort in various categories and compare it to their weekly quiz or test results. The computer can chart their effort next to their achievement in a side by side bar graph – a wonderful visual reinforcement for students. (Pitler, Hibbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007, pp 157-160). This application of technology and the time it takes to implement in class teaches students the value of effort. It is data driven – perfect for science classes. I am excited to try this approach this year.

Reflection on Technology in the Classroom

I took the online course Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society eager to learn all I can about the web tools and other technologies involved in preparing a 21st century citizenry. I explored blogs, created one myself, and contributed to a group wiki. I even prepared my first podcast. As a professional educator, I know these technology skills will be useful and one day essential. I also know that I must keep learning and training in this area to keep confident and current and to refine my practice.

My perception of the learners in my classes has also changed. I have come to realize, nine years into this century, that we educators need to do more to help our students create successful futures. We are now in what Bernie Trilling in his article “Towards learning societies and the global challenges for learning with ICT” calls the “Knowledge Age.”(2005,1) Thinking critically and creatively are more important than content knowledge. Working collaboratively will be essential in the near and distant future. But this is different from the cooperative learning of the past. My savvy science students are focused on their cell phones, sending creative text messages, and collaborating through social networking pages. My new classroom tool--an interactive smartboard-- will help me teach creatively using technology and bring the resources of the world wide web onto a screen at the front of the room. But am I effectively teaching my students? Do my lessons match their skill sets? Am I fighting their learning preferences when I constantly fight against cell phone use during class or internet browsing in the computer lab?

My goal at the end of the course is to adapt to the learning styles of this generation of students. I have playfully added Instant Messages into a few of my lesson presentations – a simple trick on the smartboard to “distract” students with pertinent information on the topic. I have modified lessons to provide a visual image first, followed by text or calculation and quickened the pace of media followed by repetition that appears new or different . Within the next two years I hope to have successfully implemented lessons involving both a class wiki and a podcast in my high school chemistry course that are meaningful resources for students and result in improvement in student understanding of the science of chemistry. Overcoming the implied objections that come with a required high stakes state test covering 17 units of content in ten months of study has been and will be my biggest hurdle. I’ll also need training and experience in directing and managing filters for internet based lessons to keep students directed and on task. (I’ve asked to be included in school in-service training on this topic.) Rather than closure, I find I am just beginning to explore the impact of technology in my own classroom and am even more eager to learn.

LINK TO ARTICLE MENTIONED: http://www.techlearning.com/techlearning/pdf/events/techforum/ny05/Toward_Learning_Societies.pdf

Digital Natives in My Classroom

Here's my first ever podcast! Check it out and let me know what you think-
http://podcastmachine.com/podcasts/1020/episodes/4538/media_files/13671/download/3/file_128kb.m4a

PARTNERSHIP FOR 21st CENTURY SKILLS

"Preparing students for the 21st century" is a phrase on the lips of school administrators everywhere. Our own suburban New York high school principal has asked study groups of staff members to form to study the question - Are we preparing our students for the 21st century? As an assignment for my Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society grad. school class, I visited the website: http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/. They are the self described "...leading advocacy organization infusing 21st century skills into education."
I watched an interesting YouTube video link to a speech by president Ken Kay expressing ideas every teacher would agree with, specifically that all students deserve both "world class content and world class skills." I agree with their basic premise and many of their ideas appear to be sound ones. Weaving curricula together through interdisciplinary themes and adding global awareness into the core curricula should be features of all schools today. More lessons on Learning and Innovation, and Information, Media and Technology Skills seem in order to prepare our students for a different future than we were prepared for.
I was inspired and intrigued to read what they had to say yet found myself frustrated by the web site they had created. As I navigated the site I was constantly redirected to the colorful logo any business executive would love. Called the "framework for 21st century teaching and learning", it is a bit obscure -- a rainbow on a pedestal labelled with terms that need defining and complex ideas that deserve elaboration. Browsing Resources I consistently hit walls - The link 21st Century Information Fluency/Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy took me to a page explaining how the info is now proprietary. The link 21st Century Skills and ePortfolio High School Curriculum took me to a page that linked me to a sakai to join. But I perservered and found the link -http://www.cellt.org/diglib titled "For Immediate Download" and there were pdf files of interesting lessons to try.
This project shows that important work is underway studying and exploring how we can best prepare students for this centiry of innovation and comminucation and could be a useful resource for contemporary educators. The biggest change I would appreciate and advocate for is the focus on Life and Career skills of flexibility, adaptation, initiative, self-direction, productivity and accountability. These skills are highly prized and lacking in many high school students in my classes. Interestingly, they are not skills that require high tech tools to teach either.

Found a cool website for seeing the art in science - great for providing visual stimulation and prompts for conversations about science
www.princeton.edu/artofscience/2009

Using Blogs in Chemistry Class

I enter my classroom each morning, ask each 10th or 11th grade student to put their cell phone away. By 7:30 atleast one student has received a text message too tempting to ignore and slyly reads it under their desk. These are the students of the "communication age" a term developed by Dr. David Thornburg.
Instead of fighting their technical prowess on a cell phone, laptop or desktop, I could enter the communication age and invite them to apply their interest in social networking to the learning of the subject at hand -- NY State Regents' Chemistry. Designing a blog for my chemistry classes to read and post to would serve several purposes. If we use our classroom blog to collaborate, each student could post a chemistry problem, solve it, and explain how they solved it. This would allow all students to:
- Practice defining and explaining their problem solving strategies.
- Explore and work through their own thinking and put it into wordsin their posting, improving their metacognition in the process.
- Examine how their peers are solving the same problems, possibly seeing different problem strategies for the same or similar problems.
- Interact with other problem solvers.
- Use the collection of problems as review before tests or the final exam.
- Post links to online chemistry resources.