I have always known that we should give authors the credit they deserve, but little did I know about all the laws, the terminology, or in general how complicated the process is! After taking time this week and learning about copyright laws, creative commons, and the remix culture, I have realized how beneficial it is to have this knowledge when we are in a society where exploring and making things are applauded! I now know how to go through the process and do it correctly. I was able to take all the information that I learned about legal media use and create a remix video while abiding by all the laws. At a young age, I learned about plagiarizing and eventually copyright but I didn't learn a lot about actually giving artists or authors the acknowledgement they deserve in our papers or our remixed work. That is why I chose the concept of attribution to highlight in my remix video. Other educators could easily use this when teaching students about remix culture and copyright. Makers could even utilize my video to make their own remix because of the creative commons license that I decided to use! Check out my video below to learn how to give credit where credit is due. References:
Wiersma, C. (2020, March 28). Attribution Remix. Retrieved From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9ehCD0mhtM
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Think about the last time that you just sat down and your mind would not stop. You're probably thinking that happened just a couple of minutes ago. Now think about the last time when you brainstormed as many questions as you could in a couple of minutes.That is a lot more challenging to recall. Questioning has always been difficult for me because it requires me to be more analytical which is something I have not been required to do for such a long time. I decided to sit down for five minutes and let my stream of consciousness unleash all the questions that it could think of about personalized learning in the classroom. It was not as challenging as I thought it would be. Take a look of what I came up with: It took a little bit of time to ask that first question but after that, I was off to the races! It also did not help that I doubted myself when I started the timer, thinking "I have never been good at this" but once I realized it's not that hard to do, I did a lot better. Once I was finished, I was astonished by how many questions that I came up with and read them all over again. It came to me that I have asked all of these questions before as the second grade team was learning and developing plans for personalized learning but I never verbalized my questions because I believed they were unimportant. I wonder if my colleagues have the same questions or concerns about how we are achieving personalized learning in the classroom... oh look another question! Now that I have wrote down all of these lingering questions, I would love to act upon them and learn how to solve these wicked problems (or try to nonetheless). After reading Warren Berger's (2014) book A More Beautiful Question, it was clear that during this activity I had to "...rediscover the tool that kids use so well in those early years: the question" (p. 24) and it was so much fun and eye opening! It has finally clicked as to why my students have so much fun making questions in the classroom. Part of prepping my second grade students to be successful with project based learning, we took a lot of time practicing how to develop worthy questions in the beginning of the school year. An exercise that we would partake in as a class was looking at a picture of three different animals morphed into one. Students brainstormed so many questions to learn about this obscure animal. In the beginning, they were typical questions that could be answered with a "yes" or "no" which we learned that we can't learn a lot from those type of questions. We had to change what our questions were asking to get more information. We needed to ask questions that would give us a lot of answers, we have to use phrases like "Why", "What" "How" and so on. No these questions are not actionable or could bring about change like Berger (2014) would like, but it got students brains jumpstarted for our personalized learning and project based learning units where later their beautiful questions could bring change to their community. My students and I had a reflection conversation after one of those activities on why asking questions is so important and they all seemed to grasp the answer of it helps us learn. As I was reading Berger's book, I realized asking questions is more than just learning, Berger (2014) explains that when children "...raise and explore their own questions, through various forms of experimentation, and without being burdened with instructions - they exhibit signs of more creativity and curiosity" (p. 43). Giving the students a chance to ask questions in an open environment gives back so much more to their brain than I could have imagined. References:
Berger, W. (2014). A More Beautiful Question; The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas . New York, NY: Bloomsbury. There are many different kinds of students that will come into your classroom, each one of them with different learning needs. Having 25 different needs in the classroom, it is very hard to ensure that every one of them gets exactly what they need. This includes students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Students with ASD have "...social communication deficits and repetitive and unusual sensory–motor behaviors..." (Lord, Elsabbagh, Baird, Veenstra-Vanderweele, 2018, p. 508) which may require a lot of additional support. There are a plethora of different approaches, tips, and tricks that help support ASD students in the classroom and we can add technology applications to that long list of resources. Such as the application ChoiceWorks. ChoiceWorks meets the needs of ASD students by helping them regulate their emotions and having a visual schedule on their iPads for reference. According to Lindsay, Proulx, Scott, and Thomson (2014), "Having a visual display of the schedule and a structured routine was helpful for teachers to minimize distress among all children in the classroom, especially with children with ASD." (p. 110). Many classrooms already have visual schedules on the board, but giving ASD students that extra visual that comes with specific times helps them regulate even more. Another strategy that teachers and specialists utilize is a feelings chart to help students regulate their emotions. Where I teach, I have only seen this done with paper and it is not the most beneficial. Boser, Goodwin, and Wayland (2014) give an alternative idea of using paper stating that "One student may use mobile electronics to quickly pull up a feelings chart with appropriate coping strategies to foster an environment of self-recognition of feelings." (p. 50). ChoiceWorks gives those students the tools to regulate right from the iPad which could lead to less disruption. I do not believe that any one tactic, tip, or trick will help us solve this ill-structured problem, but technology with different approaches will help teachers draw closer to meeting all students needs. References:
Boser, K. I., Goodwin, M. S., & Wayland, S. C. (2014). Technology Tools for Students with Autism: Innovations that Enhance Independence and Learning (pp. 47-55). Baltimore, MD: Paul H Brookes Publishing Co. Lindsay, S., Proulx, M., Scott, H., & Thomson, N. (2013). Exploring teachers strategies for including children with autism spectrum disorder in mainstream classrooms. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 18(2), 101–122. doi: 10.1080/13603116.2012.758320 Lord, C., Elsabbagh, M., Baird, G., & Veenstra-Vanderweele, J. (2018). Autism spectrum disorder. The Lancet. 392, 508- 520. doi: 10.1016/ S0140-6736(18)31129-2 Failure as a TeacherI have always valued learning and expanding my horizons and I was fortunate enough to start my first year teaching in a district that shares those same values. We are encouraged to learn new approaches in the classroom, create new lessons to engage students more, and to reflect on the failures along the journey. Our second grade team is piloting Personalized Learning (PL) and Project Based Learning (PBL) at our elementary school. This experience has learning, making and failing all intertwined as our journey takes off and we are supported by our principal, instructional specialist, and our fellow colleagues. We have taken the extra time to learn about the two new instructional approaches and how they would best fit into our classrooms. Our goal is for students to learn the material but also learn from themselves and the people around them. Bransford, Brown, & Cocking (2000) states that "A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them" (p. 18). Project based learning does just that. The team has built four complete PBL units where our creativity has shined through and there are places where our students creativity can shine too. It felt perfect! I would not be honest with you if I have said I didn't want to give up because at points failure was very hard to accept and giving up was not an option or even supported. We got through our first PBL unit and it took three months and hardly went as planned. The team felt discouraged and we hit rock bottom, we did not want to continue with another unit. But then it dawned on us, our students actually know more about urban, suburban, and rural communities than we thought and were bringing the knowledge into other areas of work. They actually took away information from the unit! Our eyes were opened once again and we took our failure, learned from our mistakes, and re-designed our next unit to become a better success. Teachers experience failure on a daily basis, but it's how they react to it that makes a difference in their students' learning. Failure as a classSince we are incorporating Personalized Learning and Project Based Learning into our classrooms for the first time, we are very transparent with the students about what are the goals and expectations for them as learners. We explain to them what personalized means and that every student learns at a different speed and that is completely okay. We also talk about the different habits of mind, specifically striving for accuracy and having persistence as we learn. For the students in my classroom, we celebrate failures and mistakes. We have read countless books and watched a multitude of videos about children that experience failure and how they overcome it. Whenever we try something new in the classroom that could be a little challenging, I always reiterate the phrase "we learn from our mistakes" and usually the students help me finish my phrase. When my lessons go astray and don't work as I would like them to, I model being reflective of my failure with the students and get feedback from them on what should have changed. I model this because the more they see me reflect, the more they will do it with their own work and individual goals. This idea of Constructionism and the "...learner being in the center of their learning and having them actively construct an understanding..." (Udacity, 2016) is cherished in my room through being reflective and the PL/PBL lessons where they get to create and have fun. References:
Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R.R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. National Academies Press. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368. Udacity (2016, June 6). Constructionism. [Video File]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qsiqetMlCg Learner profiles are essential when trying to master the new educational approach of Personalized Learning, but what is the best way to conquer these learner profiles? Learner profiles is just a fancy term for a document that student's fill out about how they best learn and teacher's use it as a reference to best inform their teaching. The questions can range from how students like to sit in the classroom, how do students like to access, engage, and express their learning. The possibilities could be endless! The beginning of the learning profile journey started out beautifully. We had students and parents fill out this learning profile on curriculum night and the turn out was SPECTACULAR! Witnessing the in depth conversations the families were having with one another about how their child likes to learn was eye opening. Now six months later, we have not touched those learner profiles again. Our second grade team has been wracking our brains on why we haven't looked at it more. Is it because of time constraints? Maybe a little. Is it because there are way too many questions for a second grader? Most likely. Is it because there is a lack of conversation with the students on why learner profiles are important? Definitely. But I believe the biggest problem is accessibility. These learner profiles are on their iPads, shoved into some Google Drive folder, lost and forgotten. I strongly believe that if these profiles were paper based and in a binder with their monthly goals, students would look back at the learning profiles and see how much they have changed on a regular basis. With this push to be more technology driven, the idea of going back to a paper is immediately shut down, and there lies an even bigger problem... technology is not the answer for every approach. |
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