Transliteracy is not a word that is found in the dictionary, however it has profound cultural relevance. Wikipedia defines transliteracy as “an ability to use diverse analog and digital technologies, techniques, modes, and protocols to search for and work with a variety of resources; to collaborate and participate in social networks; and to communicate meanings and new knowledge by using different tones, genres, modalities, and media. Transliteracy consists of skills, knowledge, thinking, and acting, which enable fluid "movement across" in a way that is defined by situational, social, cultural, and technological contexts.”
This word is new to me, and the concept is extremely intriguing. My current understanding of transliteracy as a teacher is using a variety of media and techniques to present information to my students. When I think about my classroom, I can think of many examples, as well as many non-examples of transliteracy. When I think about myself as a learner, in the present and the past- I can think of many ways in which transliteracy engages me, and keeps me interested and actively learning. I know that my students tend to get excited when we watch videos related to our content, however if the majority of the day was videos that would be neither an exciting nor effective learning experience. The same is true with all forms of media, technology based or otherwise. Finding a balance and incorporating many types of media into my teaching seems like the best practice in order to reach all students. Students tend to stay engaged when there are many ways of learning and practicing the same material, as their attention spans in my grade level are only around 15 minutes maximum. If I change up the media, or the way the content is presented more often, I have a better chance of keeping all or most students engaged. Media can also promote inclusion in the classroom, as varying media can reach groups of students that may not be otherwise reacher. For example, if I were teaching a lesson by lecture, my auditory learners would pick up some of what I were teaching, however if there were any processing difficulties or language learners in the classroom- this method would likely be highly ineffective for them. If I added visuals to my lecture, such as a power point, I would begin to reach a broader audience. My language learners and visual learners would have something to look at that would help them make connections between the words and what they were viewing. If I included a video in this power point, that would add another level of understanding and include more students in the learning process. Adding an interactive piece where students have to answer questions or partner talk about the content gives it even more meaning. As you can see, the more layers of media included in the presentation of material, the higher the level of inclusion, engagement and learning can be. Media adds value to teaching in any content area, with any group of students. I will evaluate how to use more varied forms of media appropriately in order to help my students learn.
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“Stop playing around and focus on your work!” is something you could probably imagine your teachers from your childhood saying to you or your classmates, but what if students could actually learn by playing? Today in 2018, it is a real possibility! Gamification involves taking content you’d regularly teach in your classroom and turning all of part of it into a game for your students. Alternately, game based learning is when students actually learn the content through the process of playing a game. Some of the games my students play at school include content from many different subject areas. My students sometimes play games from code.org, which is wonderful, because they learn about coding without me having to learn myself how to teach coding. Google’s Be Internet Awesome games teach the students digital citizenship values that we discuss in class, Prodigy Math teaches math concepts through multiplayer games where kids can connect with classmates. Sumdog,is similar, but my students tell me that Prodigy is more fun and has more challenging math questions. ST Math is a school adopted program used at my site, where students learn math concepts by solving math puzzles. There is no reading and no words involved which is great for language learners. Some of our other school adopted programs include games the students often play, such as Edutyping and Fastt math after they have completed their “lesson” for the day. We also use games within our district adopted math curriculum. These games allow students to practice skills we taught in class, and often implement the usage of manipulatives. With all of these great and varied games, my objective for my students is to have them enjoy learning and practicing skills across subject matter in a way that is engaging and interactive for them. The students enjoy playing these games. and many times they are also learning important computer skills such as typing, clicking and dragging, etc. Sometimes I consider these to be more programs than games, but as long as I feel that they are valuable learning experiences I’m happy to let my students play! Clearly, as great at all of these games may be- most of them are best suited for introduction, practice, or review of content taught and discussed in class. It’s possible to use the games in conjunction with other good teaching practices, either before or after- or even both, to give all types of learners the opportunity to access the material. It would not be good teaching practice to have learning be completely game based with no discussion or instruction of content, but at the same time, it would be hard to imagine teaching today without any games, digital or otherwise. Finding a balance within gamification and game based learning is important for a 21st century classroom, and can make for happy teachers and learners. Here is the video I created to highlight some of my favorite technology tools to use in the classroom! This class has helped me to make my research and ideas more applicable in my classroom, to my capstone project, and to a global community of teachers. I now have an audience in mind for my research and the projects I have been working on. I feel that my work now has more meaning and purpose beyond just myself and my classroom. I now feel empowered to share my ideas with my coworkers and other teachers around the world. I also feel equipped with more tools for sharing my ideas with teachers. Focusing on goal setting has helped my students over the past few years, and through this class I feel that it has become even more effective as I was able to make it more technology based, and the students are engaged and enjoying the process a lot more than they had been before.
The challenges I had throughout this course were actually with making sense of information, especially with the more dense or abstract readings such as Dervin and Clark. The readings I enjoyed most were the articles, and even more the videos. Reading Baggio was very eye opening and helped me to understand a lot of why certain things we did in class did or did not make sense to me. It helped me to understand why I like getting information from videos, as I found out auditory is one of the ways I learned best, along with visual. Also reading November for my book review and having an interactive project to create helped me to really process the information- and in the spirit of the book- own my learning in regard to the information presented in the book. At the end of this semester, I am feeling more confident about my capstone project- but still a bit nervous about how much work it is going to be to accomplish it. I am hoping that a lot of what we have already done in this semester and the previous, it will just fall into place. I’m excited to have that ready to share with coworkers, friends and family to highlight the work I’ve been doing throughout this program.I also hope that I can take my work further and share it globally. I’d love to see goal setting integrated into more K-12 classrooms to give students agency and lifelong learning skills. This week we were tasked with trying out 2 new tools that could be used in a flipped classroom setting. I tried out Adobe Spark, I remember seeing some really nice presentations some of my cohort members made with the tool in the past, but I hadn’t realized that this was a web based tool with a free version. I thought it was something that required software, downloads, or a paid subscription. I was excited to try it out, and immediately was able to download and import slides from a presentation I’m working on in my other class. What I appreciate about Adobe Spark is how visually appealing the videos it creates are, and how you can add narration to the individual slides. One major problem I’ve been having with screencasting is that I tend to misread or misspeak mid presentation and it’s extremely difficult to edit the sound without starting all over. Since the current presentation has a 10 minute limit, I’ve been concerned about getting to minute 8 or 9 and then having an issue. It’s nice that they have stock background music and images you can plug in to make your presentation more pleasant.
The next tool I tried was Edpuzzle, I like how it is connected with google classroom and I can import my students from there. I am currently almost in shock about the fact that I’ve never heard of Edpuzzle. It’s such an interesting tool with a lot of possibilities for use. This seems like it might be the best tool for a flipped classroom because you can easily pull in resources that were already created and add or subtract content from them to meet your learner’s needs. I am now hoping to use this tool for an upcoming animal unit with my second graders. It’s really pretty advanced and impressive, and user friendly enough for most tech savvy teachers to use. I could see this being a bit of a time consuming task to stitch together videos and add voice, but at the same time extremely useful for certain units I teach that could be saved for the following years. It’s also so nice to be able to collaborate in a sense with teachers from around the world by borrowing their content and creating and sharing their own. That saves on time since you don’t have to recreate your own videos! Vocaroo was the final tool I tested out this week. It is a super simple voice recording website where you can record audio and save it. It’s all online and they give you many share/download options. I could see this being used to insert audio into presentations, google forms, etc.It seems like the most simplistic and user friendly tool out of the bunch, but it isn’t extremely versatile. You can just record and share audio, plus it’s hosted on their website for you. It’s nice that there is a free and easy tool to do this, as finding one can sometimes be an issue! It does say an improved version of vocaroo is coming out, so I wonder what new capabilities that might have, as I could see a login being useful so that users could log in to view and share their past recordings. I have really enjoyed having the opportunity to try out new tech tools this semester. I have integrated a lot of them into my classroom routine and I am excited about that. My second and third grade students really seem to appreciate using these new tools, and have been working on Google Classroom, Google Forms, Google Slides with Slides Carnival, and more lately. I appreciate the task of testing out new things that I can actually use in my classroom that make learning more engaging, make it easier for me to teach or to share info with other teachers, or allow my students to share their work with a broader audience. I am now in the process of creating a prototype to address my driving question with audience of learners (which I have selected as other teachers, beginning teachers or student teachers). My driving question is: How can technology be used to implement goal setting procedures with elementary school students? I wasn’t sure what level to write my guide at because, knowing the variance in my audience there are going to be teachers on all sides of the technology spectrum. I am going to try to address this by creating parts that explain my technology tool for those who aren’t there yet, but that won’t contain any important info about goal setting so that teachers who already understand the tool can skip ahead and still learn how to use the tool in the way I am recommending. I am excited about this project because it now has a purpose for me- to help other educators understand how to use goal setting practices with their students online, and to inspire them to try it by helping them to understand why it can be important and what the benefits are.
Creating my prototype is currently a little ambiguous because I am unclear on exactly what my implementation and outcome will look like. I know that I will be creating a website that other teachers can access that will house all of my research and information on the topics I have been researching and studying. Some of the things that I hope to do in my capstone project are to videotape myself and my students in the goal setting process at school on Google Classroom. I am hoping to get parent permission for at least a few students so that I can use their videos of them either explaining Google classroom and how we use it for goal setting, demonstrating it, or answering interview questions about it. I also would like to get a clip of myself teaching a goal setting lesson so that teachers can see the types of discussions we have in my classroom regarding goals. I’m both excited and overwhelmed by this project at this point it time. I know that I have a lot to do, but I hope that it is going to be an effective and useful tool for other teachers. I’m looking forward to having the project complete, but also looking forward to all the possibilities for where this could take me and other teachers. Google Forms is a useful tool for many situations. Our school district uses forms to get feedback from teachers about curriculum, meetings, technology concerns and more. This year, I sent out a google form survey to parents regarding the homework projects I have been assigning to students this year. I had not considered how I could use forms with my students until this course- but I have since created and given my students a form so that I could get feedback from them on my goal setting procedures, which is what I am focusing my research on this year.
Related to using google forms in the classroom, I will be collecting data from these forms to use in my capstone project for Touro. My capstone is related to student agency and goal setting using technology. I have already used google forms to collect my baseline data on student thoughts and feelings regarding goal setting on paper, and now I plan to use the tool to collect information on their thoughts and feelings regarding goal setting using technology. After that, I plan to collect data from my student’s parents. I want to do this to see whether the students are talking about and working on their goals at home, and taking responsibility for their work, and how families feel about the activities related to goal setting and student agency that their students participated in this year. This will help me in my research, as well as my future planning for goal setting with students. I have been familiar with Google Forms since attending University for my bachelors degree, but I haven’t found tons of uses for it in the classroom. One issue with implementation being that my students are not 1:1 with devices, which can make it more challenging to use the tool to quickly collect data. However, after giving the students just one survey on google forms and seeing the data in Google Sheets- I am seeing a huge benefit here in the time saving aspect of the tool. Especially in comparison with the way I collected data in my previous semester and put it into sheets myself- creating titles and sorting data took some time that was saved with the use of the tool. I am also finding more innovative ways to apply the tool in relation to my student’s learning, parent feedback and my research project. I will definitely continue to explore with Google Add ons and use Google Forms in the future. Research Round 1
My learning throughout this semester has inspired me to adjust my driving question to make it more specific. My initial DQ was: What is the relationship between growth mindset and goal setting? Exploring this question was a great experience, but also a challenge because of the broad scope of the question. Measuring student mindset and goal setting was a little bit abstract, but I did manage to get some qualitative and quantitative data. Although my results did not show a strong correlation, the study helped me to understand the students in my class and how they viewed goal setting and growth mindset. Research Round 2 Now that I’m hoping to narrow the study, my driving question is going to focus more closely on goal setting and student agency. Having learned this semester about how to effectively integrate technology into teaching and learning, as well as having a better understanding of how students learn through visuals and how they make sense of their world, I am in the process of adjusting my question to be something like: Does student agency increase with the use of goal setting technologies? Why? In exploring this question, what I am hoping to be able to do is to use technology to help make the goal setting process easier and more accessible to students. I am also hoping to be able to create tutorials and compile resources for teachers in order to enable other teachers to easily implement goal setting strategies with their classes of all different ages. Implementing goal setting in the classroom can be a challenge with limited time and lots of standards to cover, but if I can show teachers an easy and effective way for it to be done- I will feel accomplished in my research. How? My first step is to try integrating more technology into the goal setting that I do with my students in the classroom. I am going to try out the newer tools on Seesaw, where teachers can actually post activities for students to work on, including a google docs integration. I’m curious to see if this increases my student’s motivation and engagement with the academic goal setting process. In my former research question, I studied specifically math goals. I may choose to study math again to make the results more concise for interpretation, however my ultimate goal is to get students taking responsibility for their own learning. That will happen through goal setting with technologies in my classroom, and hopefully in classrooms around the world once I am able to compile all of my strategies, knowledge and information into my capstone website. I’m excited to continue this journey into goal setting and towards completing this program with a plan in mind that I am passionate about. Any level of learner, from kindergarten to students earning their PHD requires context to make the learning meaningful. When students learn something they don’t connect with or aren’t able to apply to their lives, it loses meaning. Think about a time when you were at school (any grade or university level) and you had to learn something you would be tested on. Imagine you took the test and passed. Now it’s 3 months later, how much of the information do you recall? Chances are, if the information was made relevant to your life, given context, purpose and reason, you will remember much of it. You may even be using that information today in your career. However, you can probably also think of a time when you recall none of the information you could recall 3 months prior. When we look at the SITE model- we find a way to connect learning to students more permanently, because we give them the foundational skills they need for understanding that content, the context in which they need to apply it, and
Now that I have a student teacher in my classroom and I am giving feedback to her, it's easy for me to identify good teaching practices. I noticed last week when she was teaching small group reading, she made a connection with the students and asked them if they had watched the olympics, and noted how it was related to the part of the story they were reading. The students were then engaged and had a new meaning and purpose for reading a story that otherwise might not have been relevant to their lives at all. Making learning come to life for students by giving it context is such an important teaching skill that I think can often overlooked or forgotten about by educators, because we don't have time or we have so many other things on our plates. Looking at the recent curriculum adaptations for the elementary level by my school district, I think that I see teaching and learning moving in a more relevant directions. The math content is taught in a way that requires students to apply it to more than one problem or example. It is often given a real world context using hands on tools and games in which students apply their knowledge. The language arts teaching encourages students to inquire and make connections of their own to the text. They are given a writing prompt each week that requires them to think deeply about themes in the text and either develop opinions, imagine they are a part of the context, persuade someone of their beliefs, and more. If you ask the students in my class about the reading, they will be able to give you a re-tell of the text, but in addition to that they will have formulated their own ideas thoughts connections and questions related to what they have read. When I compare learning that occurs in my classroom on a daily basis to some of the learning that occured in my elementary school 20 years ago, I see dramatic differences. I am happy to see teaching practice and content being made available to students of all backgrounds, teachers equipping students with skills for the future rather than just facts for them to recall, and students being given more opportunities to apply their knowledge and find ways that learning is relevant to their current lives and their future. Overall, I think the SITE model is very learner centered and useful for both teachers and students. As a 21st century teacher, I am usually so focused on the tech tools that my students will be using in the classroom that I often forget what a great resource social media can be for teachers. Social media can provide us with quick, simple and innovative professional development. Teachers can go online to get ideas for classroom management, support for particular groups of students, projects and crafts to support their units, get feedback on a lesson or idea, and learn about what other educators are up to. This is really an invaluable concept that, at least for me, has been largely untapped. In the past, the only form of social media I have effectively used for only myself would be Pinterest. I have gotten many great ideas (but also some useless time consuming ones, and some pinterest fails) from other educators sharing pictures of their projects, bulletin boards, worksheets, management techniques, classroom arrangements, etc. The great ideas I have recieved make me wonder how much I have missed over the years on teacher social media. Having just learned about ed chats on twitter, I am looking forward to exploring more of what other educators are offering online.
Some issues that could arise with social media and teachers are, likely a student will try to add you on social media. Teachers need to make sure their privacy settings are on so that students need to be approved or denied by the teacher. Teachers also need to be aware that even when their profiles are on a private setting, friends are able to share out their content to additional people via screenshots, etc. If teachers are planning to use social media for education I agree with the notion of creating two separate accounts and allowing the work account to be solely used for topics related to education. Stating opinions on education or political issues, or posting inappropriate content has gotten many teachers in trouble. I think it’s important for us to remember that we’re in the public eye as teachers, and sometimes more so than we are aware of. At the grade level I teach (2nd/3rd) I would definitely alert the parents first if I noticed an inappropriate post somewhere from a student. I would also have a conversation with the student about social media and their choices, since there is probably a lack of understanding of the tool and audience if a young student is posting inappropriate content online. This may also be an appropriate course of action for older students as well, depending on the post and the family situation. I understand where the author was coming from in the article: What do you do When you See Inappropriate Social Media Posts? however, it seems a bit extreme to go straight to a principal or administrator when the student simply used inappropriate language for school, and made what I interpreted as an inappropriate joke. I would start with the student, or maybe a teacher the student has a good relationship with. I think it’s important that students understand the implications of what they do online, how it causes others to view them, and how it can affect their future, but ultimately it comes down to freedom of speech- and if a high school student chooses to post something online, that is acceptable. If it involved illegal activity or something else of concern, there would be a different course of action as well, possibly involving parents and administrators. At this point in time both my students and my colleagues are the audience for my learning. Since I have my students as a constant audience, and they really have no choice but to listen to me and are constantly subjected to my ideas- I am planning to aim my attention on influencing other educators. I am also considering the perspective of future teachers, as I am going to be taking on a student teacher in my classroom, and am excited to see where this journey will take the two of us. I find that a lot of teachers who have been in the classroom for many years are a little less open to new ideas, technologies, ways of teaching- and understandably so, they have been through countless changes in curriculum, standards, methods and systems and have seen some of them fail. I hope to help these teachers see how easy it can be to try out new things in the classroom, even when those things are unknown and optional.
For students who are becoming teachers, I hope to point them in the direction of being a lifelong learner. I want them to understand what I’ve learned in the short time I’ve been in the classroom- which is to embrace change, to try new things often and to be constantly learning yourself. It is easy to come in as a new teacher feeling unprepared for the task ahead of you, but I have found that out of every year of my 5 years in teaching- no two have been even remotely similar. I have not yet taught the same curriculum to the same grade level once, and while I look forward to that day I understand that I will never be able to master something or perfect the teaching of something, because even if I had been in the same grade level with the same curriculum all these years- I would always be learning new techniques, new strategies, new plates on which to serve the curriculum. This isn’t even taking into consideration the fact that each group of students is so unique that the teaching changes for that reason as well. Overall, what I’m hoping to share with the world of education is that innovating involves taking risks, trying out lots of new things and keeping only what works for this class at this time with this curriculum- and then trying out even more new things, knowing that next year you’ll have to start all over again. Not to say that you throw out what is tried and true, but to say that we can always find a way to make our teaching better- more interesting, more current, more applicable. |
AuthorKayla Bryant is an elementary school teacher in Napa, CA. This year she teaches a 2/3 combo class. She keeps a journal with funny quotes from her students, and enjoys learning and laughing alongside them. Some of her main educational interests are related to goal setting, growth mindset, and creativity. Archives
July 2018
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