These are the book reviews for my final electives course.
Final Reflection
I have really enjoyed this course this semester.
I decided to teach myself Book Creator in order to complete this assignment.
Here are my reflections on this course:
Thank you for a great semester and for assignments that invigorated my love of educational technology!
Wakelet/Nearpod
For the group project, we originally chose to create the assignment using Canva video, since none of us had used it before. We then changed and ended up recreating the assignment using Nearpod.
As a group, we discussed having the students create a Podcast for their final project.
Some of the issues we came up with were:
Students not knowing how to create and edit the podcast or having access to the proper equipment.
School district technology/app limitations - some might not allow students to post to platforms for podcasts.
We also discussed how it might be hard for the students to remain on topic/be serious with their conversations.
If you have a class podcast series, allowing students to have access to create and post to the podcast site might cause issues.
Benefits:
You should be able to tell quickly if the students have actually learned the information/are knowledgeable in the content they are posting about.
You can learn so much more about your students and have positive interactions with them.
I know we did not need to create a blog post about this, but I felt it was needed.
Universal Design for Learning
Many years ago, Conroe ISD encouraged teachers to use Universal Design for Learning. However, their current trend is for teachers to use differentiated instruction and for every student to complete the exact same assessments. They do not want parents to complain or compare teachers. We all are supposed to use the same lessons, warm-ups, assessments and lectures on the same day, at the same time. Carbon copies of each others.
To enhance teaching practice with Universal Design for Learning
(UDL), I broke down the questions and goals:
Immediate Implementation:
From my current understanding and resources, I can immediately implement, or help other teachers implement, strategies that align with the principles of UDL, such as:
Multiple Means of Representation: Incorporate various formats of content delivery (text, audio, video) to cater to different learning preferences.
Multiple Means of Engagement: Offer choices in assignments or activities that allow students to demonstrate understanding in different ways (e.g., written response, oral presentation, multimedia project)
Multiple Means of Expression: Provide scaffolds and supports for students to express their knowledge and creativity effectively (e.g., graphic organizers, sentence starters, digital tools).
Need Help to Implement:
Some UDL practices might require me to have additional support or resources to implement effectively:
Accessible Educational Technology: Explore tools and platforms that support accessibility features (e.g., screen readers, closed captioning, adjustable fonts) to ensure inclusivity for all students.
Personalized Learning Paths: Develop methods to differentiate instruction based on student interests, readiness, and learning profiles, possibly through adaptive learning technologies or personalized learning platforms.
Exploring UDL Implementation Further:
To deepen my understanding and implementation of UDL, I am going to consider these resources and areas of exploration:
Books and Articles:
- Universal
Design for Learning: Theory and Practice by Anne
Meyer, David H. Rose, and David Gordon.
- Articles from CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) on UDL principles and practices.
- CAST's
official website (cast.org) for UDL guidelines, case studies, and
research.
- Edutopia's UDL resources section for practical tips and classroom examples.
- Connect with
colleagues or join professional networks focused on UDL implementation to
share ideas and strategies.
- Explore
specific educational technology tools that support UDL, such as Learning
Management Systems with accessibility features or adaptive learning
platforms.
- Delve into
research on neuroscience and cognitive psychology that underpin UDL
principles, understanding how the brain processes information and how
this can inform instructional design.
How to find information on Hamsters
For my latest LSSL/LMS class, I had to record a 1-3 minute video of how to teach someone how to search for information on the internet. Since my 2 kids are currently trying to con me and my husband into letting them get a hamster (to go with the hermit crab, guinea pig, fish and 2 dogs - one of which is a 5 month old puppy). Oy Vey! We're going to have a full zoo soon!
Since my district uses Canvas and I will be teaching other teachers, students and parents how to access information in Canvas, I chose to use the Studio function in Canvas. I have used this before during Covid to create online lesson videos for my students. Studio uses Studio Capture and Screencast-o-Matic for recording videos. I thought of my oldest daughter when I was talking in the video, so that I (hopefully) not talk over her head.
It is a rather quick video on how to complete a search, but here it is:
https://conroeisd.instructuremedia.com/embed/c44667af-de20-4c65-8187-1d0917e79c58
In the past, my videos on how to use Canvas or another program, typically ran about 7 minutes. I tried to talk quickly and not babble in this video. I hope I succeeded in completing the assignment in a concise manner.
AI Created Newsletter
For one of this week's assignments, we had to develop an AI created newsletter. I asked ChatGPT to create a newsletter for my new Elementary School about non-fiction historical picture book. (which is one of my favorite Youth Book genres)
Please read over the newsletter and let me know what you think! To me, it sounds really basic and simplified. I only changed one word - it said "we" and since I am the only person working in my new home library, I wanted it to say "I." I wanted to show the newsletter exactly how AI generated it.
Here is the newsletter I created:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N4QW_aqE7fflHsj3_SfH9DMSkTp5MXCK/view?usp=sharing
I can see where AI could be helpful with posting on Social Media or creating parent communications. But always, always, always proofread it before you post or send the information out.
I had played with AI a little bit this past Spring at work. It started with HotpotAi (Hotpot.ai: AI image generator). My next door neighbor and I started making AI images and adding them to our daily Warm-Up slide. We would get a huge laugh out of trying to add Santa Anna to images, since we taught 7th grade Texas History. The Hotpot Art Generator AI did not understand who Santa Anna was and would add misrepresentations of him to the images. For example, in one image, we tried to make an image of Santa Anna on the beach and ended up with an image of an Arabic looking man, riding a reindeer on the beach. When we tried again, we ended up with Santa Claus eating fried chicken on the beach. I asked Hotpot Art Generator AI to create images of Sam Houston riding through the jungle on a unicorn. Sadly, a couple of my students thought it was a real image of Sam Houston.
"Sam Houston riding a unicorn through a jungle"
"Santa Anna relaxing on the beach"
Our district introduced some teachers to Magic School AI. However, how the district did it was really shady. Those of us who wanted to attend the workshop was given a one week all access account and showed all the wonderful things it could do for us. After the 7 days, our account kicked down to the basic free account. If we wanted to use the features the district Technology Instructional Coach showed us, we had to buy the upgraded account ourselves.
I used ChatGPT AI created lesson plans for the last six weeks of school. After not writing lesson plans for over 15 years, the AP that took over our department decided we had to turn in detailed lesson plans - down to the minute - the last six weeks of school. Talk about a micromanager and a half! I noticed that you always had to read over the lesson plan and make some changes to it so it would best fit my style of teaching. I also used ChatGPT to create emails home to parents, since I tend to be "wordy" and "long winded" according to some people.
I have noticed, along with my chat partners, Barbara Jean and Meghan, that while AI has its place and is a good starting point, it has to be tweaked and changed to fit the user's needs. A lot of times, the verb tense or nouns/pronouns are off. Plus, you have to look for "fill in the blank here" spots. You can never use AI and take it immediately to be used/published. The more specific you can be, the better the AI generated item will be.
"a rat terroir dog wearing sunglasses riding a motorcycle on a road through the mountains"
With Pearson using AI to grade the STAAR test and Meghan sharing how many sessions were on AI at TCEA this year, you definitely need to be familiar with AI as a teacher. Students WILL try to use AI as the "easy way" to write an essay or project for a class. As a Librarian, especially if you are in on a secondary campus, you will need to teach teachers how to use and detect AL written assignments. We also will need to teach students the PROPER use of AI.
You also need to be careful of the program you chose to use. My coworker from above, chose to use JustDone AI to detect student AI usage and to make his lesson plans undetectable in AI sites and ended up with a mess. The original cost was advertised as 99 cents. Once he paid the 99 cents, in order to use the basic features, the fee jumped to $20. At this point, he was in for a $21 flat fee. But no. Every time he looked at the features, the prices went up. The AI "rewrite" feature tweaked his lesson plan from talking about the Roaring 1920's to mentioning robots(?) and it went from sounding like an educated person wrote the lesson plan to sounding like my 5-year-old wrote his lesson plan. He tried to cancel his subscription and saw where after one month; he would be charged over $45 a month to have a really unusable AI program. He cannot cancel his subscription, only postpone it for 6 weeks. He has emailed and emailed and emailed their Customer Service about cancelling their program and has yet to receive a response. Be careful of who you use! (I personally like ChatGPT and Hotpot AI the best)
"A hippo on Mars wearing glasses reading a book while eating tacos"
Environmental Scan
This is going to be an odd post. WHY? BECAUSE I WAS JUST HIRED TO BE AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL LIBRAIAN!!! Thursday of last week. I am so excited!!
So, I am going to kind of compare my 2 old campuses to my new campus.
The district I work for has both WiFi and ethernet. The Ethernet is provided by Cisco. That is all of the information I was able to find out over the last 20 years. When I first started with the district, we only had Ethernet. I was the first teacher on my campus to have a W.O.W Cart - Wireless on Wheels. It had 32 Chromebooks in it and it's own WiFi port. It was so cool for the kids. Eventually the district added Wifi to all of the campuses.
For my students at my past 2 Junior High campuses I worked at over the last 20 years, the majority of them have Iphones and whatever internet that comes with their phones. Some have had limited plans, so once they run out of minutes, they are done for the month. The first junior high I worked at was a Title 1 school. The junior high I just left was not a Title 1 campus. Many of those students had their own laptops, Ipads, kindles and a lot more technology and internet access in their hands. The elementary school I am going to work at is a Title 1 campus. I am going to assume that it will be a lot like my first campus. The students will have some access, depending more on their parents' financial situation.
From I have seen, Chromebook or Ipad usage at the 2 junior high campuses really depends on the teacher and the principal. If the principal is supportive, the teachers are actively using them. My older daughter use Ipads and Chromebooks more elementary school than she did in intermediate school. It seems that they are 1:1 or 2:1 on devices. Once you hit 5th grade, the usage drops. As the elementary schools combine and secondary schools grow, the usage drops. The 2 junior highs have had no where near 1:1 nor 2:1 devices for students use. It's more like 3:1 or 4:1. I was lucky and received a Chromebook cart and VR cart through district funded grants, so my classes were 1:1 and I did not have to share my cart. Other teachers had to share carts, which made it hard to plan and awful for testing. If the principal was anti-tech, like my last principal, it really tied your hands. Once I was pulled into the office and told within 5 minutes that 1) I was using too much technology in the classroom and 2) I was handing out too many packets. This was the year after Covid. But seriously, how could I be doing BOTH - too many packets and too much tech?? I just shook my head over this meeting. I was perplexed. Then when it came time for my evaluation, I had designed in interactive powerpoint over the mid-1800 Reformers and Reform Movements. It was a linked Google Slide, Harry Potter based, presentation, that had hyper-links to videos and assignments I had created via TeacherMade and Canvas quizzes. The students had to check in with me as the finished going through certain stores in Diagon Alley, so I could make sure they were on task. I also had a student who chose to work remotely on my headset the entire class. It was an a lesson I was so proud of and had worked 2 weeks on... only to receive "proficient" on technology in Ttess. I was gutted. It his score cut me to my core. Then I realized he gave the teachers who lectured all day, everyday higher Ttess scores and bragged about who great teachers they were. The students were bored as hell in those classrooms.
At my first campus, I was allowed to host WOW Wednesdays. On my own time, once a month, I hosted a class for other teachers who wanted to learn about and use technology and websites in their classrooms. I had at least 9 teachers who would attend. It was great to see other teachers using tech in their classrooms! The last junior high, I was not allowed to do this. I know at my new elementary school, I will be back to teaching other teachers how to use tech in their lessons. I am so excited to be back in a campus that wants to learn and use technology!! Neither of the librarians at the junior high campuses taught technology to teachers nor students. Their belief was "That's what the Technology Dept for the district is for." I believe that teachers need to see other teachers using the technology successfully and be available to ask/answer questions as soon as they come up. I always created a "How To" or "FAQ" handout for the technology I taught. I know as a students in a tech workshop, I had to take detailed notes or I would forget steps and tidbits by the time I made it back to my classroom to use it.
The area I will be librarian in is lower middle class. Most of the families live in apartments or rent their homes. The parents are going to working class in lower jobs, not the oil companies executives from the last campus. They are going to be your gas station attendants, Walmart employees, grocery store employees, custodial type jobs. Spring is a suburban area with a lot of heat and humidity. The students all attend their local neighborhood elementary schools. My district does not have magnet academies until high school. Most of the teachers at the elementary school are limited in their technology usage. They think using the projector is using technology. Some teachers use Apps such as Dreambox, Boost, Epic! and PebbleGO! I think the students in the elementary school will be using Iphones or tablets at home for any "homework" they might have.
I am so excited for the opportunities I have to come and feeling helpful once again!
Pedagogy before Technology
This assignment is for LSSL 5391, Digital Technology for School Librarians, with Dr .Gross at SHSU. I read through the resources listed at the bottom before writing this post.
I am an older Graduate School student. I belong to one of the generations who has seen the most changes in technology over our lives. When have had to accept the changes and learn to function while the world literally changed around us. When I was in elementary school, we had "Computer Class" once a month, starting in 4th grade. The screens were black and the letters were made of green blocks. We did not use computers in class to complete assignments in middle school. The only class in high school I ever used computers for was in Newspaper production. We used the program Word Perfect to type up the news stories into 3 columns, but we still actually laid out the newspaper, the stories and the borders by hand. One issue took weeks to produce, so we only published it once a month. I loved the smell of the rubber cement we used to create the paper, using rulers to make sure the columns of the layout were spaced correctly and the time I spent literally hunched over the counter and tables creating the newspaper by hand. I was in college as the internet became popular and cell phones became affordable and common... for PHONE CALLS or texts only! Cells phones had limits on the number of minutes you talk in a month, and you were charged per text you wrote, plus the "airtime" it took to send the text. Not only was the sender of the text charged, but the receiver of the text was charged too. Phones did not have keyboards. You had to spell out words by hitting a number multiple times until the letter popped up. Texts took a long time to write. Now we carry can entire computer in our hands, like what The Jetsons had.
I have lived through reel to reel, 8 track tapes, cassette tapes, Cds (came out my senior year in high school), downloaded music and now streaming. I have lived through only having 4 TV stations that stopped broadcasting at midnight, not having cable in my neighborhood, going to the movies being a special occasion, VHS tape and VCRs (Top Gun was the first VHS tape my parents bought and it cost over $100), Laser Disks, DVDs and Blue-Ray, Cable in college, renting DVDs through Netflix, Ipads and Kindles, and now streaming services that run 24 hours, 7days a week for 365 days a year. I have seen grocery and retail stores move from the cashier having to enter every item code and price by hand into a register, people, to flat panel scanners, to computers and scanning guns to self-check out. From writing checks or paying cash, to credit cards or debit cards to digital banking and Card/digital Payments Only.
However, I am the odd duck on my campus. I have always embraced the technological changes in education. I have always stayed current on the trends, apps and programs and am one of the most Tech-confident teachers on my campus. I have many coworkers who are younger than I am, who are afraid to use anything except PowerPoint presentations for their lessons. The teacher will read from the PowerPoint as the student fill in blanks on a worksheet and the teachers feel this is "interactive" learning. It is not. This is only meeting the lowest levels on Bloom's and is nowhere near the expectations of the digital Blooms taxonomy (Churches 2008).
My current junior high students have never not had a cell phone or iPad in their hands. Many teachers think students now days are born "Tech Literate." My experience is my students are not truly "Tech Literate" as they are "Google Literate" and "Gaming Literate." Where I see technology as a tool for my job, they see it as entertainment. The average 13 to 14-year-old I teach knows how to text, use Facetime and other communication apps, and how to Google for answers. We still need to teach the students how to use the apps and programs as a tool for learning. It is our responsibility to teach students how to tell the validity of a website and how to check for "Fake News." We must teach students that not everything they see online is true, that they need to research and learn what is correct and what is wrong. The students must be taught that Wikipedia is not the gospel and the information can be edited by users. We must teach the students how to write a professional email and how to function in the real digital world. I have heard numerous teachers complain they assigned their classes an assignment and only received web pages copied, pasted into a word document and turned in as their own work ... but were the students taught that plagiarism was illegal and how to actually complete that assignment when it was handed out? If the teachers are not taking the time to teach the students how to properly use technology, then it is the librarian's duty to. Librarians can bridge the gap and help students learn the necessary skills and programs they will need to function in society. Librarians can also be the connection for teachers and technology. Librarians need to lead by example.
We have to be Future Ready campuses. Technology has a place in the classroom as a tool for learning and as a foundation to build learning. We have to be able to meet our students where the technology is and how to function properly using technology as it changes around us. However, I think there should be traditional "Pencil and Paper" assignments as well. Students need to know how to continue with work if the power goes out for 2 weeks due to a hurricane or other issue. Students will also need to understand that the world should not stop if the internet goes down. They need to know how to be "Old School" as well as "Cutting Edge" as they grow up and enter into the workforce.
References:
Bloom’s digital taxonomy. Common Sense Education. (n.d.). https://www.commonsense.org/education/videos/blooms-digital-taxonomynw
Clarity Innovations. (n.d.). Toolkits. K-12 Blueprint. https://www.k12blueprint.com/toolkits
Churches, A. (2008, May 26). Colorado Community College Online - Finding Opportunities. https://www.ccconline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Churches_2008_DigitalBloomsTaxonomyGuide.pdf
Marist College. (2019, August 21). The first marist mindset list if released. https://www.marist.edu/w/marist-news-the-first-marist-mindset-list-is-released
Schrock, K. (2022, October 20). Bloomin’ apps. Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything. Retrieved June 5, 2024 from https://www.schrockguide.net/boomin-apps.html
Clarity Innovations. (n.d.). Toolkits. K-12 Blueprint. https://www.k12blueprint.com/toolkits
Churches, A. (2008, May 26). Colorado Community College Online - Finding Opportunities. https://www.ccconline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Churches_2008_DigitalBloomsTaxonomyGuide.pdf
Marist College. (2019, August 21). The first marist mindset list if released. https://www.marist.edu/w/marist-news-the-first-marist-mindset-list-is-released
Schrock, K. (2022, October 20). Bloomin’ apps. Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything. Retrieved June 5, 2024 from https://www.schrockguide.net/boomin-apps.html
Welcome to my Library Blog
This blog is for my LSSL classes.
I will be updating it with book reviews and other assignments for my classes. I was using a different blog format, but will be moving everything over to blogger in the next week or so.
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