Month: April 2020

My future son-in-law is in the military, and he says our current self-isolating situation is very similar to being deployed. When deployed, you have limits to who you can interact with and many rules in how you can interact. It is a way to keep everyone safe in uncontrollable situations. That has been my way of running my classroom, particularly in the middle school years. I direct students to resources and people, though they are allowed to do research online while supervised. The goal is to avoid them encountering information or situations that are too mature for them to understand and thereby try to keep them safe in an uncontrollable situation. For middle school students, our security limits some of their search ability, and we hope that at home, their parents monitor their computer usage. Yes, they are taught digital literacy, but their maturity in employing their lessons are sometimes less than required. Older students have had years of digital literacy pounded into them and are also not as gullible, so my ‘dictates’ become more open. It is similar to the graphic displayed in the class blog, but a little more closed.

Roberts (2019) Open Learning Continuum

I recognize that increasing my Personal Learning Network has led to me interesting viewpoints and resources, but there is also a lot of crap out there that I have had to try remove from my feeds. I am not convinced social media is a safe space for our students. Not just about the crap, but there are those online looking to prey on young people. I am not comfortable being the person who encouraged my students to participate in social media because I would feel responsible if they encountered something inappropriate or scary because of my recommendation. Google classroom has a controlled ‘social media’ type of interaction, though Google’s privacy when not within Google Suite for Education (formerly Google Apps for Education or GAFE) is questionable. (Actually, I am leery of them on behalf of my students even within G Suite.) So as much as I would like to embrace the idea of students interacting with others in social media, I am going to control my students’ situation by directing them to appropriate resources and keep them in self-isolation in terms of social media.

“Scales” by FlukierJupiter is licensed under CC BY 4.0

We had two main readings to choose from this week: one by Regan and Jesse on ethical challenges in edtech and the other was by Kral and Schwab on designing from an indigenous perspective. I chose the first as the use of data was the focus of the social distancing exercise I created. I do plan on reading the second once this course is over, as it has equal importance.

Regan and Jesse stated there were basically two types of big data – administrative (demographics, achievement and behavioural) and learning process. Anonymity becomes impossible with the amount of data points. This therefore affects autonomy. I personally do not support the collecting and analysis of this data by a huge company. The interpretation of data is just that – interpretation. If we do not agree with the algorithms used to interpret the big data, then how is that interpretation of use to us as teachers or learners? Personalized learning should not be automated, but should be based on a small data set interpreted by a knowledgeable teacher within their context instead of an impersonal mathematician/computer program. There is a balance of fact and interpretation that is missing if it is just mathematical calculations.

Are there places for big data? Yes. But is it ethical to collect it? In a provocative blog post, Maciej Cegłowski wrote about collecting data on individuals to support tracking the coronavirus. Interesting. I can see the reasoning, but it is creepy. I still used some of this type of information in the ‘Explore’ part of my social distancing inquiry (see below) because it is so provocative. Hopefully, a teacher would be helping a student talk about the ethics of this type of information gathering and whether the good outweighs the bad.

Our whole final project for EDCI 572 addresses the ethical challenges of using digital resources and applications for student learning. Very timely, since we are in this strange time of emergency online presentation for education because of the coronavirus pandemic. The applications we explored for our final project were aimed at creating opportunities for students to inquire on their own through a controlled inquiry followed by a guided or free inquiry. Yet the digital resource is not totally necessary for our creations – most can be done with paper resources only. The projects would take longer and the students would miss out on some of the more creative or inspiring portions of the inquiry project, but the balance would be they would have more time to think through how to be creative. In our project, we considered the privacy concerns of each of the platforms explored. Some of the decisions made by an individual teacher would be limited based on the choices made by their district. There were openware options for most of the types of applications explored. Teachers may want to consider having students provide fake information to some of the applications so students are not tracked through the application. They would need to read the privacy policy to decide whether it meets the level required by their province/state/district.

Since our project was aimed more generally, looking at applications and assessing their ability to work with different grade levels and subjects, most applications had potential for differentiation. The differentiation could apply to specific learning needs of a student as well as individual cultures and perspectives.

Many of our cohort are attempting to teach synchronously and/or asynchronously with varied success due to the unusual circumstances, including lack of access to tech or lack of sufficient tech within a household for everyone to have access for parental work and student education. Some of our cohort have dropped off packets of work to students, or just spoken on the phone with their students. All are trying to balance the need for education with the needs of the students – some of who need the stimulation of the normalcy of learning and others who are needing to take care of family members or are in other conditions because of our strange current world position. The ministry has loosened their privacy requirements because of everyone needing to change from in school education. They have balanced the need for privacy with the need for expediting educational tools. Have we all made the correct choices? We will have to wait and see what the data tells us. 😛

Resources not linked in Blog

Kral, I. & Schwab, R.G. (2012). Chapter 4: Design Principles for Indigenous Learning Spaces. Safe Learning Spaces. Youth, Literacy and New Media in Remote Indigenous Australia. ANU Press.http://doi.org/10.22459/LS.08.2012  Retrieved from: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/learning-spaces%EF%BB%BF

Regan, P., & Jesse, J. (2019). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(3), 167-179. DOI: 10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2

What?

This week, we discussed MakerSpaces, starting with Resnick’s (2007) research into how children learn. Dr. Sandra Becker based her dissertation on exploring the possibilities of making use of MakerSpaces in current middle school classes. Before we listened to Becker and Jacobsen during class, I listened to an Education Canada Live podcast where Becker discussed her research. Becker and Jacobsen based their use of makerspaces in three different subjects in Jacobsen’s class in the 2018-2019 school year. Student enjoyment and deeper understanding of subject materials were the results. The Reggio Emilia approach is also based in the philosophy that students are capable learners and can create and teach themselves and is one big makerspace in an atelier.

So What?

Making is a wonderful tool to engage students. When I taught design, we were always making something – that was the goal. In arts classes, you are making art or music and creating together. In high school math, not so much. Yet the idea of thinking creatively and as well as critically is EXTREMELY important in math! All those theories and rules that students are supposed to know and use, well, they were all ‘made’ at some point in time in the past! Seeing (or reading) Hidden Figures really was eye-opening for my middle school students in more than one way, but for my math classroom, the most important point was that the computers were looking at the math and trying to combine it in ways that had not been done yet!

The International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Programme (MYP) has 4 criteria/rubrics for each subject (found here under subject briefs) against which you can assess tasks. Criterion B in Mathematics is Investigating Patterns. The task needs to be designed so students explore patterns with numbers and, at a Grade 9 or 10 level, can generalize a rule using algebra. So instead of memorizing something like the steps in how to factorize a trinomial (for example x²-5x+6) into two binomials (and the answer is (x-3)(x-2)), they actually work through and try find it themselves. Before becoming an IB teacher, it took me three classes to get students to memorize the pattern of how to factorize a trinomial, but after students take one class to try investigate the pattern themselves (successfully or unsuccessfully), it only takes ¼ of a second class for them to internalize the steps. The excitement of those that ‘make’ the formula in the first class and the realization of the rest that they were so close to ‘making’ the formula changes attitudes towards mathematics. Of course, it is difficult to start ‘making’ with this Grade 9 level concept. Luckily, most of the students have been ‘making’ mathematical pattern rules since elementary school and those new to the school buy in to the excitement after a few experiences.

Designing these types of tasks takes time and experimentation. Because of their experience, our students knew that some of the tasks we were using as formative assessment were in development stage and they were very interested in collaborating to make the task more accessible without compromising the rigour. They enjoyed this engagement in making, but were leery of it as summative assessment because of the limited time given – if you didn’t have the creative ideas fast enough, you might not complete the assessment. With this strong engagement evident even in a high school level, I think makerspaces is not a fad in education but a tool that helps us develop skills in our students. I recently consulted with a Reggio Emilio school in San Francisco who were extending the Reggio philosophy into their middle school and hopefully up into a senior school, using the IB MYP as a framework as it fit well.

Now What?

As teachers, it is important to realize we are not teaching subjects, but we are teaching students. We are not teaching mathematics, sciences, language arts, design or arts – – we are teaching mathematicians, scientists, readers, writers, designers, artists, musicians . . . . Finding ways to ‘make’ that suit your subject is a way of encouraging authentic experiences in the subject matter we want students to explore.

Resources

Becker, S. (May, 2019). “Make to Learn: Can makerspaces be more than a fad in education?” EdCan Network. Retrieved from : https://www.edcan.ca/articles/make-to-learn/

Becker, S., & Jacobsen, M. (2019). “How Can I Build a Model if I Don’t Know the Answer to the Question?”: Developing Student and Teacher Sky Scientist Ontologies Through Making. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 17(Supplement 1), 31-48.

Education Canada Live podcast featuring Dr. Sandra Becker

Newitz, A. (January, 2017). “Hidden Figures is the perfect space race movie”. ArsTechnica. Retrieved from https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/hidden-figures-is-the-perfect-space-race-movie/

Resnick, M. (2007). All I really need to know (about creative thinking) I learned (by studying how children learn) in kindergarten. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & Cognition (pp. 1–6). New York, NY, USA: ACM. http://dor.org/10.1145/1254960.1254961 

Reflective Framework: What? So What? Now What?:  Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., Jasper, M. (2001). Critical Reflection in Nursing and the Helping Professions: a User’s Guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.