EDIM 514 Creative Commons Licensing Justification

I have learned about Creative Commons several times now in different graduate courses I have taken. Every time I am instructed to read up on it though, I learn so much more! I had to take a certification class to teach the engineering class that I teach. By getting certified to teach the course, I also was entered into a huge network of other teachers around the US that were certified to teach the same course. This network allows myself to post questions, resources, documents, etc. as well as download, edit, and use what I download with barely any restrictions. I also am a very active member of a website called Thingiverse.com, which is an awesome 3D modeling website where people upload 3D files for sharing use. The files are free to download and edit without a problem as well.

Since I do download, edit, and reuse materials all the time, I felt that it is only right to pass the favor on. That is why I chose the Creative Commons License that I did. By choosing the Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license, I am letting people use my work, make sure the credit is given where credit is due, but not make money off of my hard work.

• Side note: I do some freelance graphic designing on the side as a hobby. I didn't protect a few of my randomly made logos. There was a rather pricey restaurant that opened up near where I lived at the time, that decided to use my logo for above their bar with their name on it. Not having any money to back my argument or hard proof other than the computer files to prove I made it, they got to make money off of my logo. It literally was sold on shirts behind their bar. Nothing makes me more angry than when someone benefits from someone else's hard work and acts like they did it all.

EDIM 513 Week 7_Final Blog

Wow! I can't believe this amazing journey has come to an end. This course has been not only an eye opening experience, but also a time for reassurance and growth as a teacher. I have learned so much during this time. It was a pleasure hearing other teacher's experiences and seeing an Inquiry Lesson in action through a video. Before this class my only experience with Inquiry Based Learning was a training program that my school paid for several teachers to go through that was not that great. I ended the course not understanding the purpose, never seeing a lesson in action, and with a lot of weight on my shoulders to perform often and in excess. The students were unprepared and left in the dark with their learning. The lessons wound up being more of a waste of time than anything. Through this course, I was able to slowly break down the importance of inquiry, its different styles, and stages of learning.

Being a Technology Education teacher, I barely ever do not use technology in my lessons. After going through this course though, I have gotten the time and experience to reflect upon my practices enough to realize that yes I may have been using technology, but not as efficiently as I could have been for the sake of my student's learning. Understanding how and when to use different Web 2.0 tools to effectively allow my students to master concepts at each stage of the 5E's is key to their learning process.

In the near future, I foresee myself using inquiry often and in excess, but in an effective manner. Knowing when to use and mix up the different styles of inquiry will help aid me in this process. I will alter my current lessons and teaching practices to take less of the learning off of my shoulders and respectfully place the responsibility of learning in the students hands by providing them the opportunity to explore the content either guided, in groups, or on their own.

EDIM 513 Week 6_Thoughts of Inquiry After Week 6

It has only been a week since I last posted, so not much has changed. The main thing we focused our learning on this week was the 5E's of instruction. They consist of:

• Engage
• Explore
• Explain
• Elaborate
• Evaluate

Bybee, R., Taylor, J. A., Gardner, A., Van Scotter, P., Carlson, J., Westbrook, A., Landes, N. (2006). The BSCS 5E Instructional Model: Origins and Effectiveness. Colorado Springs, CO: BSCS.

Although it may seem obvious that every lesson should have all of these stages within it, it is easy for students and teachers to either look past one or not connect them together. So often students go through the motions of school and just getting things done, but don't ever stop to smell the roses. As teachers, it is our job to allow our students to understand that school and learning is a process. Yes at times it can be unfair, not that much fun, and involving topics not in our field of interest, but these are the moments that make us better. Using the 5E's to drive all of our lessons are key to breach this gap for students. If you can get them to be excited and engaged in what they are learning, then the exploration will come natural to them. Guiding them to connect their exploration to facts and then go beyond is the explain and elaborate stage. Finally, we must reflect, review, and evaluate our learning. I feel that this final stage is often lost in the lack of time the school day / year provides.

I look at the practices of reflection, review, and evaluation for the brain like a meadow of knee high grass. If we complete a task or learn something new, it is like walking through the meadow one time and one time only. When you stop walking through it and look back, your path is shortly covered back up or forgotten. If you walk back over that path again to the starting point and turn back to see what is left this time, some of the grass is matted down. Repeating your path over and over, each time going a little further, mats down all of the grass, making it a definite path. Now relate that to your brain and the process of learning. Without reflection, review, and evaluation we are only subject to learning bits of information (blades of grass) that we stored (matted down) during our first time we experienced it (the first walk across the meadow). 

EDIM 513 Week 5_Thoughts On Inquiry After Week 5

These past few weeks were like the icing on the cake. The course so far has built a great foundation for learning what inquiry is and why it is important. Now we have added how it can be used to engage and enhance student learning through questioning, facts / concepts, and technology tools. I am left wondering what is next?

Reflecting a bit more on the past two weeks, the course itself demonstrated student (me) - teacher sharing practices. The resources may have been provided for me to learn and find new things, but the opportunity to grasp those concepts and apply them to my own content area was all on me. I am enjoying the fact that we are building our own inquiry units that we can actually use within our classes that we teach. The requirements have not been restricting to the point that I am doing more for the grad course than actually helping myself and in turn my students. I have not found this too often with a content area like mine and the projects that have been assigned throughout my time within this masters program. It is refreshing.

Through our readings and reflection, I have realized that this is part of inquiry. In my understanding so far of inquiry, it doesn't matter so much of how you arrive upon your understanding and conclusion, just that you actually arrive with an understanding of the journey you have taken and why or why it was not beneficial in learning the content. I have also realized through experience that it can be frustrating to grasp this concept, especially for students who are extremely fixated on the importance of the numeric grade they achieve. I have a very hard time explaining that enjoying and reflecting upon an experience allows the good grades to come naturally.

I only have one burning question that I posted in week one and has not yet been answered in my learning. This question deals with the amount of time large inquiry lessons take / the lack of time provided for the year. Leaving me wondering how teachers and a district balance the time it takes to achieve what the states are now assessing their teachers on with the lack of time that we have to cover the amount of material that we need to? I think I may post this to the discussion board of the class soon to see others opinions.

EDIM 513 Week 3_Thoughts On IBL After 3 Weeks

So far this has been a great three weeks of class on Inquiry Based Learning. I previously stated in my last post that I went through an IBL training with an outside company my district hired and I didn't have that great of an experience with it. Within the first three weeks I have become much more excited and motivated to try new forms of inquiry. My previous training and administrators kept idolizing the idea of inquiry so much that they both made it a point for it to be used all the time, large projects, and making the lessons extremely student-directed. This was not only frustrating, but put a great deal of pressure on the students and teachers to perform well so it wasn't a waste of valuable class time. This pressure really disrupts trust and the community within your classroom. Inquiry lessons are hard enough at first for students to grasp not only the concept, but reason why the teacher is doing it this way as well. Not to mention the internal struggle it brings the teacher to hold back the answers from the students.

Last week's discussion about creating a sense of community within the classroom was a helpful discussion. Although I feel that I am fortunate enough to have pretty mature / respectful students for their age and a well establish sense of community within my classroom, I find it to always be beneficial to hear other teacher's methods, ideas, and experiences. I especially enjoy listening to more seasoned teacher's words of advice because they have experienced a great deal more than I have with all of the changes our society has gone through within the past decade or so. The technology boom has really changed schooling and can make or break the classroom environment. Just last week, my school went 1 to 1 with all of the freshman as a pilot. Within one week, so teachers were so stressed out from trying to manage the new environment that was created that they couldn't even teach a lesson. Last week's discussion also heavy touched upon the abilities and understanding of inquiry as well as backing inquiry with the importance of enhancing our student's processing skills. Although I already have been well versed on processing skills and their importance, it was refreshing to read up on more information regarding the necessity of acquiring them.

I think the best week of them all so far though was this week (week 3). This week entailed the reading and analyzing of three different case study classroom lessons. I found it intriguing and interesting to see the difference of opinions between myself and others within the class. It either means that both of us are correct with shades of grey, I am completely wrong or right, or that we all still have more learning to do to really understand inquiry. I have a feeling it is the last one of these three though...Besides the case studies, we were given a documentary style video of an IBL classroom activity. At first I was a little distraught that I had to sit through a 52 minute long video, but once I started to watch it, I loved it. I thought the lesson, the video, and how the students learned was the utmost best inquiry lesson I have witnessed yet. The physics teacher that I co-teach with is doing optics in a few weeks. He normally uses lasers and other things to teach it. He explained to me that most of the students are excited to do the experiments but have a hard time grasping the concepts. I think that instilling or replicating a similar conversation that the teacher in the video had at the beginning of the lesson with his students, would greatly increase the seriousness and synthesis of past knowledge to the experiments.

All in all, I am excited to learn more and be able to expand my current lessons. The only burning question that I still have is the same that I posted about in my first blog. I stated earlier in this posting the podium that my administration has sometimes put on our inquiry lessons. I also mentioned in my previous blog the amount of time large inquiry lessons take / the lack of time provided for the year. This still leaves me with the burning question of how can teachers and a district balance the time it takes to achieve what the states are now assessing their teachers on with the lack of time that we have to cover the amount of material that we need to?

EDIM 513 Week 1_ Inquiry Based Learning

This past year, a select few of us at my High School were chosen to go through a training on Inquiry Based Learning. The training in my opinion was a primarily a large waste of time. I'm not trying to say that what we learned wasn't valuable, but how the training itself was run was very counter productive. 75% of it consisted of us being in small groups and writing on large paper tablets describing what we thought was Inquiry. We even did a 3 hour long experiment that ended with the instructors telling us that the project we just did wasn't actually Inquiry (well then why did we do it?). In just a few hours of reading about what it truly is, obstacles that the students and teachers will have to overcome, and how to effective carry out an Inquiry lesson, I feel so thankful that I took this course.

I currently teach an Honors level Introduction To Engineering and Design course that consists of several math, problem solving, and 3D computer modeling units. Through my past experiences of Inquiry training, I have altered the majority of the curriculum's projects into guided Inquiry Based Learning projects. Before, my lessons and assignments were very straight forward with what needs to be taught and accomplished. The majority of thinking was based on reading directions. Now my lessons rely more on applying and expanding upon past knowledge or demonstrations. My assignments have become more student based with them learning the content on their own prior to demonstrations, working at their own pace, and searching the answers to their own questions.

Introducing Inquiry Based Learning for the first time though is new for all. I will definitely have to agree with this week's readings though when it discusses the feeling of being uncomfortable for both the students and teachers. What the reading doesn't mention though is the discomfort and lack of understanding it brings the parents and guardians of the students. Not only did I feel this discomfort because of the constant push back from the students, but also the non-stop emails and complaint calls I received from the parents and guardians. With the correct amount of preparation and understanding on the teacher's side of where the students are at in their learning, expectations of the students for the assignment, and what the benefit of Inquiry Based Learning will bring the assignment, the results will speak for themselves.

My main concern though is a mixture of assessment and time. The new teacher effectiveness model heavily relies on a teacher teaching his or her lesson in Inquiry Based Learning format. We all as teachers have curriculum that we must get through. Teaching in this style takes time, sometimes a lot more than it would if the content was taught in a straightforward fashion. How can we as teachers and a district balance the time it takes to achieve what the states are now assessing their teachers on with the lack of time that we have to cover the amount of material that we need to?

EDIM 502 Week 5_Students Meeting the NETS-S

The era of strictly pencil and paper classrooms has changed. The Internet, handheld devices, and free educational applications have changed the way of teaching. Although 21st Century Learning has been and continues to be a major struggle for many teachers, it has become extremely efficient and beneficial towards not only gaining the interest of students, but also furthering the student's understanding. Helping with this transition, the International Society for Technology in Education created standards for teachers and students to follow call the National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS-S). These standards consist of the following 6 categories:

1. Creativity and Innovation
2. Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Fluency
4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts

These standards can easily be met through a mixture of 21st century learning and inquiry based learning. For instance, students may be probed with solving a task or presenting a product of his or her work. Through the Internet and Web 2.0 applications, soon to be 3.0, students can learn technology operations and concepts to more efficiently research solutions or information needed. The students can also collaborate with others via Web 2.0 tools, such as through Google Docs or a Linoit board. From a teacher's standpoint, this may seem frightening that students can easily share work. The reassuring aspect of Google and many other Web 2.0 collaborative applications, are their revision history. Making the students aware of this tool within the application, creates a sense of accountability and digital citizenship. 

Students can also become more critical thinkers and problem solvers through these Web 2.0 applications. For example, a student may be asked to solve a task such as designing a wall speaker mount that allows the speaker to rotate or re-position itself in three different ways. Through online research consisting of videos, animations, online discussion board, etc., the students can formulate an idea of how he or she would solve the problem. The student could then take that idea a step further and use a Web 2.0 application like Google Sketchup to digitally design the product. The student's entire process of researching, designing, and then displaying his or her product via a Web 2.0 application like Prezi, Voice Thread, Podcast, etc., would bring the student's creativity and innovation full circle.

References:

National Educational Technology Standards for Students. (n.d.). NETS For Students 2007. Retrieved November 19, 2012, from www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-students/nets-student-standards-2007