Reflective Journal: Demonstrate Phase

As it turns out, actually creating a prototype is more difficult than planning for one.  I thought it would be the other way around.  You have all of these great ideas in your head, but I really do not have the technology "know how" to make everything work.  Rather than using Google Sites to create my website, I chose to go with iWeb.  From the online tutorials by GoDaddy, it seemed simple to set up the site.  Wrong!  I finally ended up sharing my site with DropBox because it was so much easier.  I will work on the hosting more at another date.  The only problem I have with iWeb is that you cannot customize the colors quite enough.  Everything is a little static.  Still, iWeb beat Google Sites, and is easier than DreamWeaver.  My question is this, as an instructional designer, would I physically be creating all of the elements, or would I have a skilled webmaster on my team?  As of this point, I think I would have to have someone skilled at creating websites, flash products, and video editors to do anything substantial. 

Evaluations have proven to be difficult as well.  Creating an evaluation form was easy in and of itself, but creating the questions was more difficult.  You want to word things in the right way, but at the same time you want honest answers.  Paragraph form would be easiest, but who has the time to sit and write detailed suggestions.  I chose to evaluate a few things at a time.  That way, I don't get overwhelmed by all of the issues.  I can focus on very specific things.  Once I feel I have those remedied, I will ask more questions.  The students will be the most honest test subjects in the long run, so I look forward to the pilot tests.

Reflection Journal: Design Documents

Sitting down and thinking how you are going to do something is tough!  I am the type of person that likes to just get in and get my hands dirty so to speak.  I like to try things out, make mistakes, then fix my errors.  Actually planning is proving to be quite difficult.  I think in the long run however, planning will be a good thing.  As I was working, I began thinking about what the students need to learn.  What is truly important?  I think they really need to know why a portfolio is important, who should create one, what should be included, and how to actually create the portfolio.  Those questions helped me to form the basic outline for my site map, and organizational chunks.  I had honestly never looked at the standards of practice for foreign language education until now (well at least Georgia's standards, I am quite familiar with Alabama's).  I thought about how useful these projects could be in showing the SACS board what our students are learning.  This also teaches the students organizational skills, and how to determine what is really important in each chapter.  I e-mailed the document to my client and she said everything looks really great.  I think for her, actually seeing the prototype will result in requests.  I teach Spanish 1 and 2, and I actually came up with the idea for the online portfolios.  I shared it with my co-teacher Shelley (my client), and together we took it to our department head.  They decided upon Google Sites, because it would be the easiest for the students to maintain.  Our kids all have iPod Touches and Macbooks, but they must turn them in every summer.  This will allow the students continuous access to the materials throughout the summer and even after they graduate.  Our hope is that the students will have a desire to continue their portfolio throughout their entire language career.  If I can make it easy enough for them to maintain, the likely hood of more teachers and students using it increases.  That is why my client wants a very easy to manipulate interface, that is clean, and embraces other technology (such as ePub materials).  If I could have done things differently, I would have worked a little more with Google Sites before the planning stages.  I would also have started this process at the beginning of the semester.  I have had to go back to my group assignments to help me jog my memory.  How great would it have been for me to do my group work, then directly after create my own materials for this project!  There just isn't enough time in the day!  As far as my testing of the product goes, that is where I am the most worried.  As of right now, I have the testers working on the tutorial at their own leisure, then completing an online survey.  By doing this, I would be setting myself up for people to not complete the survey on time.  My fear though is not having time for the students to take do the prototype lesson during the school hours.  My first thought would be give it to the kids I know would turn in a survey, but that would be skewing the data.  I need kids of all levels to test the product and take the survey to get a true representation of the products' usability.  That is what I will be thinking about, and hopefully I will have an answer by the next blog post.

Reflection Journal: Design Decisions

The design process is way more involved than I ever thought it would be.  You really have to pay attention to detail, and everything must be very deliberate.  Constant communication with your client is key as well.  I have never thought about the costs involved in the design process until this lesson.  Although my current project is very low budget, with time (and a lot of practice) I could very well be working on a much larger project with a much larger budget.  At first I thought this project would be very simple.  I would make a couple of video tutorials, put them on a website, no big deal.  Wrong!  Everything has to be planned out down to the font size and color!  Daily steps must be made to get the project done in time.  The next steps in my project will be determining outcomes and doing a subskill analysis.  I will need to gain a true grasp of what my client desires, and begin setting up interviews with Spanish 2 students.  I will also need to determine the learners current skills, and begin defining content.  I will begin writing a design document that includes an overall goal and vision for the product.  I will also want to begin looking at a syllabus.  My biggest question right now is how to deliver the content.  Would it be best to actually create a Google Site or use a product like Dreamweaver or iWeb to design an actual website.  Although, I have been looking at all of the above options, I have yet to settle on a final method of delivery. 

Individual vs. Team

Compare your individual and team experiences this semester.  What did you gain or lose from collaboration?

Honestly there has not been too much in the way of collaboration with my group this semester.  I am really having trouble having never met my group members face to face.  Only knowing them in an "online" sense has been difficult to me for some reason.  Maybe from the beginning we should have utilized Skype so we at least would have had one synchronous discussion.  We used our AUM e-mail (which truthfully, I am terrible at checking) and communication was rare.  I felt more alone in my learning for this class especially since we did not use Voicethread at all.  In our last class I would listen to all of the responses of the class and could gauge where I was at in my understanding.  

With all of that being said, I prefer to work alone.  Typically in a group setting (not in this particular one) I end up doing the bulk of the work just so I make sure it gets done.  Maybe that is a flaw on my own end but I have had one too many projects go wrong because someone did not pull their own weight. 

Due to the lack of collaboration I lost the gauge of understanding that I mentioned previously.  I really only have my grades to go on.  I also feel as though we cheated ourselves by not making an effort to truly discuss the assignments.  By talking things out with our peers, we learn from one another and are better able to organize our assignments.  We would have been able to make sure that we were not missing anything and that we had covered all of our bases.  Collaboration would have been very helpful during the ALICE 2.2 project.  If nothing else to show one another the little tricks we had learned about the programming software.  Luckily I was able to e-mail one of my group members with a problem.  He had the same issue and already knew the fix.  That was super helpful.  I will definitely be more diligent in my next course to collaborate more effectively with my group members.  We would all benefit.

ALICE 2.2

Problem solving skills would be the correct terminology for Alice 2.2.  Let me just say this has by far been one of the most frustrating projects I have worked on thus far in my Instructional Technology program.  I began working with Alice early on because I had a feeling (due to the prompting of my professor) that this project would be a little more frustrating/confusing than others I had previously attempted.  Good thing I did.  Even so, I lost my work numerous times, changed things around, and had to search the Internet continuously for prompts.  Although this has been difficult, I would like to be able to have my students use it in small amounts to create short videos.  I think it would be really neat to have them create a short conversation and record their own voices to go along with the video.

I started first by looking at all of the available props.  I found the spooky Halloween type gallery.  Since Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year, I choose to go with a cemetery world.  I started looking for people.  I found a "jock" so I thought he could be turned into a werewolf.  I wanted to incorporate a little music so I though, "why not use Thriller?" The hardest movements were having the werewolf "attack" the jock and making the jock fall down.  

After working for two weeks off and on, I sat down today to complete the project and realized my video would not work.  Luckily I had saved it in my Dropbox and a previous version was still there.  I didn't have to start over per say, but the previous version was far from finished.  I will just count that as extra practice.  Of course it went quicker this time, but still I have been working on it all day.

Another difficult part was actually exporting the video.  When it exported, some of the timing was off.  After exporting and changing things about ten times, I finally got it as close to the original as possible.  I used iMovie to finish up the project by putting a title page and credits.  I figured this was important considering I was using a short clip of music and I wanted to give the artist credit.  

There are still many aspects of Alice I do not understand.  I did create my own movements but they were not very fluid.  I would like to know more about creating movements.  Also, I attempted using a billboard to create a title page.  It would have worked, but it would have also messed up my timing on my music, as the title page was an afterthought.  My biggest and most exciting success was figuring out how to make the music play during the entire video.  Believe me, this took me hours to figure out.  As a side note, I created the mix in Garage Band.  I just received a new Macbook and I am learning how to use all of the software available to me.  

Although the project was incredibly frustrating, I pressed on.  I wanted to conquer the assignment.  I wouldn't say this is wonderful by any means, but I did try very hard.  I constantly tweaked and worked to find the best movement possible and tried to add in little details to show care with the video.  

TPACK Defined

TPACK or TPCK could most simply be defined as the correlation of content, pedagogical, and technical knowledge.  TPACK calls for teachers to structure activities that are appropriate to content, support proper pedagogical practices, and incorporate fitting technology.  In order for an educator to truly incorporate the suggestions of TPACK in the classroom, they must plan.  Knowledge of content, pedagogy, and technology are a must, and classroom activities should be approached as a whole, rather than individual activities.  The key word here is appropriate.  What is proper in a math class may not be fitting in Spanish classroom.  An educator must approach his or her content with the thought of how to best help students construct knowledge and attain the necessary proficiencies.  We must understand content, pedagogy, and technology individually and how they are intertwined with one another.  Harris, Mishra, & Koehler, 2009 say the following regarding how technologies should be integrated during planning. “Technologies can be used to build on existing understanding to help students develop new epistemologies or strengthen old ones.”  We should not be using technology just for the sake of saying we are tech savvy in the classroom.  Rather technologies utilized should have specific purpose and should be course specific. 

In my own classroom I would like to take more time to look at the big picture rather than just work week to week.  I get so bogged down in what are the individual activities we will be doing so I can turn in my weekly lesson plans that I forget what the purpose of each activity is and how they work together throughout the course.  I liked how the authors of the article explained TPK.  They said “TPK must be forward-looking, creative, and open-minded seeking of technological application, not for its own sake, but for the sake of advancing student learning and understanding.” (Harris, Mishra, & Koehler, 2009) I think I will make print this out and put it in view of my workspace.  TPACK requires time and thought.  This is something I will begin incorporating in my planning for next semester.  I believe it will make a huge difference in the lives of my students by giving our classroom activities true practical purpose that will be engaging.

Harris, J, Mishra, P, & Koehler, M. (2009). Teachers’ technological pedagogicalcontent knowledge and learningactivity types:curriculum-based technologyintegration reframed. Journal of Reasearch on Technology in Education, 41(4), 1-25.

Blooms' Taxonomy

According to the Blooms' Taxonomy cognitive domain, our group worked at a level of comprehension.  Our assignment called for us to analyze the information then compare and contrast the two standards models.  Comparison is a crucial aspect of the comprehension level.  Not only were we able to regurgitate facts of the tables, rather we looked critically at the models in order to gain understanding.  We stated main ideas as well as interpreted the tables.  The reason I would not go any further in the taxonomy is simply because we were not required to do anything more than comparison with the information.  Had we have been asked to apply the information in some way then that would possibly have put us in a higher level of cognitive domain. 

Considering the affective domain, I can only speak for myself.  I believe I achieved the valuing level of the domain.  Not only did I receive and respond to the information, I valued the information being given and will begin with the organizing process.  There was a good deal of information within the tables so I will now begin working to organize the information into my own schemata.

Honestly Blooms' Taxonomy is new to me.  I am probably only in the comprhension level when it comes to this subject.  I haven't had Psychology of Learning in a while.  Even then, I don't think I really understood how the taxonomy worked.  I was probably at the very basic knowledge level.  I do find this subject interesting and will work to incorporate the taxonomy in my own classroom.  I think all to often as teachers we teach to the test requiring students to simply spit back out details.  I would like for my students to obtain a higher level of thinking through critical thinking skills.