Week 6 Reflection

Week 6 Reflection

EDET 637 Differentiated Instruction Through Technology

            This week I enjoyed looking at how games can bring differentiation to the classroom. Many of my classmates found that games provide motivation and engagement to the classroom and that games can connect to various subjects. The games or game-like materials that were mentioned or researched this week are code.org, coolmath-games.com, Get the Math, coolmath.com, Minecraft, Pokémon Go, and other games. After reading my peers’ thoughts and ideas, I think that adding games into the classroom can be more fluid and easy to do than I originally thought. At first, students need to be introduced to the game and given time to play it to learn the rules or process of the game. I will seek out time to put games in my classroom and I would like to focus on coding in my school to help students learn about the languages they might need in the future. I am going to look more into what resources are available for teaching coding in the classroom especially game-like type of curriculum. My long-term goal is to have my students code their own games to play in my future classrooms.

            This week I learned quite a bit from my classmates and I added to their learning also. I provided my classmates with a new resource called Swift Playgrounds and made a much-needed point that computer programming and coding is a very important skill for our students to have. To aksharos (not sure exactly who this is), I helped explain how coding is connected to mathematics in my comments of my blog. For Jule, I encouraged her and reminded myself how important Minecraft can be for students who need a creative outlet. Gerald presented many great resources that I can use in my classroom. I focused on coolmath-games.com, which had lots of great games, but I commented on that it would be more helpful if the games were organized by skill. Lastly, I commented on Jim’s blog in hopes of encouraging him to add not only games to his classes if that is what he desires but also game-like qualities to the classroom.

Week 6 Blog: Games providing differentiation in the classroom

Week 6 EDET S637 Differentiated Instruction Through Technology

Essential question: How are games providing new opportunities for differentiation in the classroom?

        Gamification, adding game-like qualities to a setting, creates motivation and interest for all ages. Gamification provides ways to teach to the individual students’ desires and needs. For example, in Mario Kart the character in last place gets the strongest boosts versus the character who is winning in the race gets a minor support/help in the game. Ultimately, in the classroom this is exactly what differentiation is by providing the low students an opportunity to catch up with their peers. According to Oprescu, Jones, and Katsikitis, gamification can influence the work environment (for us school environment) by “increasing personal satisfaction and enhanced wellbeing”, “develop professional and organizational capabilities”, and “enhance productivity.” (2014) The elements of games that enhance the classroom by motivating students that Matera has explained are theme, setting, characters, and action. More specifically the elements include experience points, levels, leaderboards, guilds, onboarding (familiarizing students to the game), badges, power ups, quests, items, skills, currency, micro-challenges, life jackets, trade, etc. (2015)

        Get the Math is a resource for teachers to bring games into the classroom for Algebra classes put together by THIRTEEN Productions LLC (2017). The website has students looking at math in in music, fashion, basketball, videogames, restaurants, and special effects. By having this website in my resources, students can discover math concepts in various interests that may have creating a differentiated learning environment towards students’ interests in a game format. The Restaurant Challenge has students using past data points of cost of the avocado in the last few years to help make an accurate estimate of what the meals with avocado should cost for the next menu. Then students can use this process to do the same for other meals. I like this website because students learn math through a medium that they are used to and are interested in: videos. How many videos do you watch on Facebook per day? I counted how many I watched today and it was 7 videos (this is trying to mindful of my data). This is differentiating the classroom by making it a challenge and using technology to bring it to the students.

        Another part of mathematics that can be easily put into a game is coding. This weekend I went to ASTE (Alaska Society for Technology in Education) in Anchorage and there were many resources of how to teach coding in the classroom. The one that I found most helpful was made by Apple as an application on the iPad called Swift Playgrounds. The app teaches students to learn the Swift coding language by leveling up to a new playground. The first playground starts with students writing the code to move the character forward and to collect a gem. Right away students are learning the main concepts of coding such as parentheses after a function, for example moveForward() or collectGem(). After each learned concept of coding, the student levels up. There are also opportunities for students to challenge themselves such as doing the course in a shorter amount of steps. I have made a video of the app and the process that the students take which take on a game like quality.

References

Apple. Swift Playgrounds. http://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

Matera, M. (2015). Explore like a pirate. San Diego, CA: Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.

Oprescu, F., Jones, C., & Katsikitis, M. (2014). I PLAY AT WORK—ten principles for transforming work processes through gamification. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 14. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.

THIRTEEN Productions LLC. (2017). Get The Math. Funded by The Next Generation Learning Challenges and The Moody’s Foundation. http://www.thirteen.org/get-the-math/the-challenges/math-in-restaurants/see-how-the-teams-solved-the-challenge/180/

Week 5 Reflection

Essential question: Which technologies are best to assist differently abled learners in my classroom?

Please check out my group’s presentation on prezi at  https://prezi.com/u7wzsjtuju8q/new-your-big-idea2/# . A beautiful presentation was put together with my team that included the other classmates, Rachelle, Josie, and Jim. Last week a few of us in the group felt like there was a disconnect in communication. This helped us shape what this week’s goals and priorities are and of the priorities is having some meaningful participation in the group by forming roles.

Three of us met after our Twitter session for about 30 minutes last Monday. The reason of meeting was to re-create and formalize roles for the second half of the presentation. Josie was not able to meet because of the time zone. I took notes to communicate to her what we talked about. These are the notes and labeled roles of the teachers.

Establishing Roles:

Mariah- Leader; research 3 pieces of technology: live scribe pens, readability, myHomework

Jim- Researcher; 3 pieces of technology: translation app, assisted hearing

Josie- Tech Person 2 pieces of technology: ???

Rachelle- Editor 2 pieces of technology: staying awake while reading (watch, color overlay)

Timeline:

Friday- Write up the 6 pieces of information for each of the Assistive Technologies and send this to Rachelle (or the whole group).

Saturday- Rachelle will create a slide for an AT and enter all 10 AT’s information into 10 similar slides with help from Josie if needed. Josie will animate the slides into Prezi.

Note: It is my understanding that we will be adding on to what we already prepared last week.

Josie responded with that she would like to look into BeeReader and Dragon. We decided everyone would do some research and a bit more for Jim and I because we would not be working on the tech side of the presentation. The goal was for each one of us to research AT that would help students with disabilities in our own classroom. A few of the group changed exactly what they researched in attempt to stay true to Assistive Technology being for students with disabilities.

I focused my research in looking for Assistive Technology that could be provided for a student of mine that is Autistic. He is a senior so I decided to look into what colleges are willing to provide and then search out farther from that. My goal was to have a list of suggestions for him and his parents on what they can ask for when he gets to college especially because he must advocate for himself more frequently.

I have decided to asking my coworker, Special Ed director, to look into getting my student a Live Scribe pen so that he can learn and get used to the process before he leaves a supportive learning environment. I forget how important technology can be to our students with disabilities because it can get them to the content that they are learning. 

Week 4 Reflection

My groups share space is https://prezi.com/u7wzsjtuju8q/new-your-big-idea2/# (final product)

and

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-UGQEykBkB-BtXhLNSM_6vA3hIi3BfXXlUYepbudDzQ/edit?usp=sharing (working space).

Originally my group talked about working in a Wiki or a Google Slides. I suggested Google Slides because I enjoy working with Google applications and how easy it is to edit and have conversation through instant messaging if multiple people are working on it at once. As a group we decided to work in Google Slides with me taking the role of the Technology Specialist. Jim took on the role of Editor to make sure all of work flowed together. Rachelle as the Visual Artist which included her pumping up the Google Slides to have visuals that represent the information. To tackle the essential question, I suggested splitting up the question in three parts and of each of us researching that part and inserting it into the Google Slides.

Then all of sudden, we discovered that Josie joined our group. Therefore, we had to be flexible as a group and figure out what role and part of the Google Slides she will be responsible for. As far as my understanding the roles stayed about the same other than Josie taking over editing and a bit of technology by putting the Google Slides in a bit more visually pleasing manner by using Prezi.

All in all this is how the work was split.

Mariah- technology support, create Google Slides, help manipulate slides (Jim needed assistance so I did some editing remotely and then helped him when we were both working on the presentation at the same time using instant message in Google Slides), and researched and wrote one part of the essential question’s answer (explaining assistive technology). Informally, I felt like I was the leader by contacting everyone first and making sure that we had a set plan and a deadline for everyone to complete their role/part of the group work.

Jim- researched and wrote one part of the essential question’s answer (assistive technology in various places/settings), organizer of the information, and communicated with the group.

Rachelle- researched and wrote one part of the essential question’s answer (connecting assistive technology to differentiated instruction), researcher of the main core of the essential question, and checked on the assignment’s goals and intentions by contacting professor.

Josie- edited everyone’s work, checked for fluency or clarity, added visual effect to presentation and information by using Prezi, and lead production of the information.

As a group, we contacted each other using email. I individually worked with Jim through instant message of Google Slides. We did not meet at specific times but new that our (Jim’s, Rachelle’s, and my) part of the group work must be done by Saturday so that Josie could input and edit into Prezi by Sunday morning.

The process that my group went through included making sense of the assignment, creating a plan on how to complete the assignment, splitting into roles that each person felt comfortable with, completing our roles, and continuously checking in with each other throughout this process. My group was great with encouraging each other and helping each other clarify the content and roles. I felt my role was a bit undermined when Josie was added into the group but I know that I helped at least one of my classmates with technology.

It was nice to work with others and get their thoughts in what direction to take when tackling an essential question.