EDIM 514 Week 7_My Final EDIM Blog Post Ever!

This is the final week of my final course in the EDIM program! I am excited to finally be done. This week's project couldn't have been any more perfect for the situation. We were tasked with making a digital portfolio to display our work from the EDIM classes we took. Creating this digital portfolio website gave me the chance to look back through all of the stuff I created in the different course. Work that I despise and work that I am so happy I took the time to create. Its also gave me the time to reflect upon my favorite courses. It just so happens that I started and ended with what I felt were the two most beneficial and enjoyable courses.

I chose to create my digital portfolio with a Google Site. Since I have created several sites and I do all of my work within Google Apps, making a Google Site for this made complete sense. Using Google Sites, I was able to insert my Google Drive folder for the individual classes (some are way more organized than others). I was also able to insert some of my favorite pieces of work that I have saved in my Google Drive.

Below is my Digital Portfolio. I hope you enjoy!

https://sites.google.com/site/jonjarrettedimportfolio/

EDIM 514 Week 6_Broadcast Yourself

In this week's big assignment we were to broadcast ourselves in a live webinar that we recruited people to days in advance. This is something I do all the time within my class. I truly "flip the classroom" in the honors course I teach. Quiet often, I either prerecord myself and upload it to Edpuzzle for my students to watch, or I offer a Sunday afternoon 15-20 minute webinar week review. Believe it or not, this was started last year when student athletes who were always missing class to leave for away games started asking me to do this. It turned out so well, that I continued to do it. Each week, I send out a survey on Friday to ask how many people would attend if it was run at 7 PM. If there is less than 8 people, I don't run the session and just ask the students to email me their questions.

I was planning on doing this same thing this week to fulfill the requirements of this assignment, but things could not have gone worse this week. Monday and Tuesday of this week we had no students because we had two days of in-service. I had to take off school Wednesday from being extremely sick. Thursday, I crawled back into school to only find that we ran a practice SAT test that 80% of my students went to, so I had no one to teach. Friday, I already had planned that I was attending a conference in another state (all day was spent traveling). Saturday I thought I would be able to get some work done in the hotel at night, but there was no Wifi available in the entire hotel. Sunday comes around finally, and I am left with writing this Blog on my phone at the hotel using my mobile data.

In a result of poor planning, unexpected circumstances, and being at a conference until late Monday, I had to resort to recording myself 3D modeling a project the students stored in my room from a few months ago. I uploaded the video to YouTube and sent it to my students to work on tomorrow in class. Since the conference will be done tomorrow before their class, I have already spoke with another teacher who is going to set up a video conference through Google Hangouts with me tomorrow while I am in the airport and my students are in their class working on the tutorial.

I understand completely that this isn't exactly the same thing as hosting a webinar, but I have recorded myself, posted myself teaching online, and am doing a video conference tomorrow with the students.

EDIM 514 Week 6_Attend A Webinar

In this week's small assignment, we were tasked with attending a webinar of our choice and then reflect upon it. The webinar I chose to attend was hosted on https://www.ice.org.uk/events?etypes=29. I found mention of this webinar on Twitter. I often use Twitter for resources that people post. I lucked out in finding this because it actually gave me talking points in my engineering class. The webinar took place today. Once I got in, I was surprised how many people (71) were actually in the session. The session was on "blockers and enablers of innovation in construction and the steps needed to transform UK engineering, and help the industry to meet the government’s Construction 2025 goals."

The webinar was mainly a lecture from the presenter, not a discussion with the crowd. Apparently someone from the company took participation questions, ideas, and points before the live webinar on Twitter to save time. I thought that was cool, but that also meant I could not participate in the discussion because I did not know about this beforehand. I guess depending on how you look at this, it could be a strength of the webinar or a weakness. In my eyes, it was a weakness because no one wants to listen to an hour long lecture that they cannot participate in. Especially when the lecture goes off on a tangent question that you have not interest about, but the speaker did.

On that note, I don't think I would really want to participate in a future webinar from this site. I can however use the majority of talking points about innovation, civil engineering, future building plans (forward thinking), etc. within my class as extra material to bring into our class discussions. On a positive and ending note though, I do think it would be a good idea to assign my students to attend a webinar of their engineering topic or choice to reflect upon the experience.

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.

EDIM 514 Photo-A-Day Review

Well the week of sharing is over. This was a fun activity. One of my friends who is a teacher and a professional photographer did this for an entire year. It was really cool to look through his photos for an entire year and watch his newborn grow. Since I only took photos for a week long, I decided to post pictures of what was a big focal point of the day. Some days that was a project that I personally did, what my student's did, or what I was a part of. Posting the pictures was an easy process. Each day I made a new Blog post, inserted the picture, wrote a small caption, and added the same label to each post. If I was to continue this challenge or do it again I would try to focus more on one topic. For instance, I would take pictures of my student's daily activities or projects to show their growth and engagement with the material.

EDIM 514 Photo-A-Day_Day 7

On Friday, I took my 3D printer home in hopes of fixing it over the weekend. After working on it for several hours Saturday and Sunday, I finally fixed my 3D printer! The above picture shows my large test print of the Moai Statues. If you are wondering, the weird plastic under the chin is support material so that the chin had something to start printing on.

EDIM 514 Photo-A-Day_Day 6

On Saturday my frustration of my trying to fix my 3D printer, driving an hour to and from work, and fighting off a cold caught up with me. With that being said, I decided to make something fun for my friend's wedding I am going to this weekend.