EDIM 514 Week 5_Integrating Social Networking

I teach a high school honors course called Introduction To Engineering and Design. This class is actually a Project Lead The Way course that thousands upon thousands of teachers teach across the nation. The curriculum is provided, but we are able to change anything we want, which I do for most everything. Since it is an introductory course, I spend a week going over the what the term of engineering means, the different fields of engineering, an engineer's role in society, and the design process. In the past years, I just taught this information how the curriculum written, involving student participation as normal. After seeing how boring this has become to me, I have decided that I need to change it up for next year. The portion of it that I am going to focus on changing is the part where I teach about different engineering fields.

How The Curriculum Is Written For It To Be Taught

I as the teacher, would open a pre-made PowerPoint presentation that consists of tons of text an a small handful of pictures. The presentation would typically take me as a teacher about 25-30 minutes to discuss all of the slides. I then would have the students open a Word document that has a large introduction section explaining what I just taught the students. The document or activity would require the students to answer a few questions about what they think engineering is. The students would then look at several websites to find information on the four main engineering fields. Next the students were required to view a provided website and reflect upon how they might approach one of the engineering challenges on the website. Finally, they would answer several conclusion questions. 

Overall, there is nothing wrong with this assignment. It briefs the students on information, has them researching, brainstorming, and reflecting through writing. The curriculum states that this should take 1-2 class periods of 45 minutes to do all of this. Before I edit or change anything from the curriculum, I try it myself and with a class. It took me about 2 hours to do everything at the level I expect. My school's periods are 52 minutes. Keep in mind, I need to review the material from the day before, wait for the students to be prepared, quite, etc.. When I tired this with a class of students it took them 5 school days to get done with everything, and at the end the only person who saw their work was me. The curriculum doesn't include any way for the students to share their hard work and great ideas. To fix that problem, I had to devote another class period to allow them to present / talk about their ideas.

Considering the curriculum is written to already take up more school days than there actually are in a year, activities that take way longer than they are planned to take cannot happen.

How I Plan To Change The Curriculum

Since all of my students now have Google Chromebooks, I have worked over the past year to change all of my class material to being user friendly for the students. Like all of the rest of the curriculum, I plan to create my own Google presentation of the engineering fields that includes the majority of the more important questions from the activity. This will allow the students to make a copy of the presentation, participate during class, and write their own ideas, answers, and the class discussion to the questions in the presentation that they can study from.The presentation would also cut down on the text and just provide the engineering field and a few pictures. As a class, I am going to go through the researching of the provided websites to discover a better understanding what the different engineering fields are responsible for doing. With all of that in mind, I feel that this will take about 1 full class period.

Exit Ticket / Homework: Students will fill out this Google form 

For the second day or period (Tuesday) of this, I plan to change the activity into more of an informal activity that lets the students take the chance to go as far as they would like to. Based off of the form results, I will assign partners and engineering fields. I will then explain to the students that they are tasked with further researching the engineering field. They will be required to follow, pose questions, and communicate with a minimum of 5 engineers and / or engineering firms on Twitter. They also would be required to interview a local engineer / engineering firm via phone, email, or social media. This shouldn't be too difficult because there are 6-7 large engineering firms around our school in Berks county PA. During the interview, the students should ask the their contact the below questions and anything else they feel would be interesting to tell the class.

• What do you feel the role of a     (insert engineering field)     is in society?
• What made you go into your field of engineering?
• What do you enjoy about your profession?
• What is a current hot topic of interest / concern in your field?
• What is a current project you are privileged to share with us?

I also would explain to the students that they will be provided that day's (Tuesday) period, half of tomorrow's (Wednesday), the rest of the week outside of class to complete the assignment, and the second half of Friday's class. Friday would be provided for the students to assemble a presentation that they will give on Monday in front of the class. Since this is an informal assignment, I would only be assessing them on completion, not the presentation quality or depth of their information. This wouldn't be the first presentation that the students would be doing in class, so I would have already lectured them on what my expectations of a presentation are.

I feel that this change would not only gain me more class time to continue to teach other material, it would also engage the students much more than filling out a Word doc and handing it in. The infusion of social media also brings a "non school" feel to the assignment, which means they most likely will like it more. The one thing that gets cut out of the original assignment is the brainstorming of how they would approach an engineering challenge from the provided website. I do a year long research assignment with these students anyways that is along the same lines as the challenges. Its always a task to come up with new topics and requirements. Using the challenges from the website instead pushes that work off onto someone else, saving me time.