BlendSpace is an online tool for teachers I was fortunate on stumbling upon. With many teachers today trying to integrate technology into the classroom, and make their lessons engaging, this tool could not exist at a better time.
This is an online tool that leverages the huge amount of educational content available online and makes it easy for teachers to create lessons. I especially liked the bar on the right side, where teachers can choose to search for something in a variety of different search engines including YouTube, Google, and Flickr. This makes it so easy for a teacher to find exactly what they need all in one window, without navigating through a myriad of tabs. Blendspace also introduced me to some search engines I was not even aware of, like Guroo. This tool is also perfect for a teacher to see what lessons other teachers have developed for that specific topic, making BlendSpace collaborative. In fact, the account can be upgraded to allow actual teacher collaboration in creating lesson plans, enhancing its versatility further.
Privacy is always something of an issue when minors are involved. However, BlendSpace allows teachers to keep their lessons private, and provide their students with a class code that allows them to add the specific class. This keeps any comments students make on the lessons private, and maintains a safe space for this lesson (similar to a real classroom), away from the cyberbullies.
Overall, BlendSpace is another tool that expands what a teacher can do. Best of all, BlendSpace makes it easy, so give it a shot! What have you got to lose?
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Lure of The Labyrinth Math Game
Games in education are all the new fad. Everyone is talking about how games are a new revolutionary way of teaching students in engaging, self-paced learning. However, are games really all that they are hyped up to be? Do all educational games provide an engaging way to learn? James Paul Gee discusses the characteristics of a good game in his article "Good Video Games and Good Learning". Gee studied several games and came to the conclusion that good games incorporate good gaming principles. I found the article intriguing and used it to explore Lure of The Labyrinth, an online math educational game to see how many good game qualities it has.
Gee discusses many qualities of a good game. Some of the positive characteristics that Lure of the Labyrinth has is a strong identity the player embodies, it can be customized in some ways, is interactive, and encourages risk taking.. The protagonist is a young boy whose pet is taken by a monster. The young boy follows his pet's sounds and ends up in a secret factory full of monsters and mythical creatures. As you can imagine, a young boy who loves his pet is a protagonist that many young students can relate to. Many teenagers love their pets and will be hooked into this story line. In addition, the player chooses his pet (a cat, dog, turtle etc.) and can customize his own appearance and name to an extent. This gives players a little bit of autonomy and ownership over the game. The game is interactive in that the player can explore areas (within restrictions) of the game, and can interact with other characters in the game. The last thing that I really liked is that there are very low consequences of failures. The player can keep trying to replay the same level until he/she is done practicing and is satisfied with the result. The low consequence of failure encourages risk taking, and making many attempts to succeed at learning the math.
Unfortunately, Lure of the Labyrinth left something to be desired. The longer I played, the more bored and frustrated I found myself. I asked myself, what would have made it more interesting to me? I realized that although the story line grabbed my attention at first, it soon became too much. I thought to myself, "am I reading a comic or playing a game? Let's get to the game already!" To make matters worse, although there was a long back story, the goal of the game becomes lost. Here's how it goes: the young boy loses his pet, goes to find him, goes undercover and gets a job at the factory. Then he starts doing "assignments" while he's on the job.. But how do these assignments help him find his pet? I'm not sure. And at some point a fairy asks him to plant beans in every room along the way.. Wait, what? Eventually, I found the game to just be a collection of assignments with no real goal behind them. Additionally, while each assignment was a game that obviously included some mathematical concepts, it was hard to know what concepts they were using. There were absolutely no instructions for the games, so I was left guessing as to what I need to accomplish to even pass that level. I was able to figure it out the goal and rules of one game, but the other one is still a mystery. Since I couldn't figure out the goal of that level, I was basically stuck and no new level was available to me.
Overall, I think Lure of the Labyrinth is a great concept with potential, but needs some serious tweaking. Instructions for the games would go along way in keeping the player engaged, and not get frustrated. A more cohesive story line to keep the motivation going would be great. For example, if each level was unlocking a specific tool that helps retrieve the pet, then the reason behind these assignments would be obvious. I think educational games have great potential, but not any game that incorporates some educational concepts will be successful. It needs to be an interesting game, with the educational concepts integrated in an authentic way.
Gee discusses many qualities of a good game. Some of the positive characteristics that Lure of the Labyrinth has is a strong identity the player embodies, it can be customized in some ways, is interactive, and encourages risk taking.. The protagonist is a young boy whose pet is taken by a monster. The young boy follows his pet's sounds and ends up in a secret factory full of monsters and mythical creatures. As you can imagine, a young boy who loves his pet is a protagonist that many young students can relate to. Many teenagers love their pets and will be hooked into this story line. In addition, the player chooses his pet (a cat, dog, turtle etc.) and can customize his own appearance and name to an extent. This gives players a little bit of autonomy and ownership over the game. The game is interactive in that the player can explore areas (within restrictions) of the game, and can interact with other characters in the game. The last thing that I really liked is that there are very low consequences of failures. The player can keep trying to replay the same level until he/she is done practicing and is satisfied with the result. The low consequence of failure encourages risk taking, and making many attempts to succeed at learning the math.
Unfortunately, Lure of the Labyrinth left something to be desired. The longer I played, the more bored and frustrated I found myself. I asked myself, what would have made it more interesting to me? I realized that although the story line grabbed my attention at first, it soon became too much. I thought to myself, "am I reading a comic or playing a game? Let's get to the game already!" To make matters worse, although there was a long back story, the goal of the game becomes lost. Here's how it goes: the young boy loses his pet, goes to find him, goes undercover and gets a job at the factory. Then he starts doing "assignments" while he's on the job.. But how do these assignments help him find his pet? I'm not sure. And at some point a fairy asks him to plant beans in every room along the way.. Wait, what? Eventually, I found the game to just be a collection of assignments with no real goal behind them. Additionally, while each assignment was a game that obviously included some mathematical concepts, it was hard to know what concepts they were using. There were absolutely no instructions for the games, so I was left guessing as to what I need to accomplish to even pass that level. I was able to figure it out the goal and rules of one game, but the other one is still a mystery. Since I couldn't figure out the goal of that level, I was basically stuck and no new level was available to me.
Overall, I think Lure of the Labyrinth is a great concept with potential, but needs some serious tweaking. Instructions for the games would go along way in keeping the player engaged, and not get frustrated. A more cohesive story line to keep the motivation going would be great. For example, if each level was unlocking a specific tool that helps retrieve the pet, then the reason behind these assignments would be obvious. I think educational games have great potential, but not any game that incorporates some educational concepts will be successful. It needs to be an interesting game, with the educational concepts integrated in an authentic way.
Online Assessment: Smarter Balance
Online assessments are becoming the norm. There are online
assessments for most tests including the Graduate Record Examinations
(GRE) and the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification (MTTC).
Personally, I've found most of the computer based assessments I've
encountered to be be reasonable. Unfortunately, the Smarter Balanced
online assessment that Michigan has adopted to administer K-12
standardized assessments is far from that.
I had the opportunity to browse through the some of the tests offered by Smarter Balanced, which covered both the Math and English topics and spanned across K-12 grades. Although I am an avid technology user, I personally found the online test to be cumbersome and difficult to use. It made me imagine how much more difficult using this assessment might be for students who may not be as tech savvy.
The overall structure of the online test is not bad, but several things are formatted in ways that makes the user interface unfriendly. For example, the question information, and the question itself were placed in 2 panels side to side. The left panel would include the necessary background information to answer the question, and the right panel would contain the actual questions. The problem arises when the background information is a long piece of text or includes some tables and graphs, and the student has to scroll up and down, and even worse, scroll sideways just to see the information. The student can expand the width of the panel to see the information better, however it then covers up the question. This type of structure makes is difficult to navigate because a student has to keep switching back and forth between panels and has to keep scrolling to see various parts of the information.
I also found it frustrating that the test wouldn't let me move around between questions. Even though I could flag a question I wasn't sure about, I couldn't skip it and come back to it later. I had to provide some sort of answer to be able to move on. This is unlike the GRE; I clearly remember being able to move back and forth between questions in each section, making it easier for me to answer the questions I felt ready for. Also, every time I would do something not allowed by the system (such as skip a question), I got a scary looking error message, with extraneous information! I don't think that the student needs to know that this error is "[Message Code 12784]". Why is that even there? I found it to be really distracting, and a bit distressing to see this message every time.
On the math tests, the calculator is pretty bulky, and a bit hard to use. I kept trying to press "Ans" to get the answer but it wouldn't work, until I realized there is a small button with the = sign that I'm supposed to be pressing. Some questions asked the students show their work, but the answer space looked like it was to provide a paragraph of text. It would be really difficult showing work that would ideally need a diagram, involves division and other operations by just typing it in like regular text. It would make it very difficult to read, and I'm sure would lead to higher rate of mistakes. Also, specifically in the G7 Math Performance Task, it says that the test has questions 1-5 at the top, but then there are only 4 questions. I had to spend some times trying to figure out if I had missed any of the questions.
On the English Language Art tests, some of the words were underlined lightly, and wasn't clear why that was until I realized that if I clicked on those words, a small box appeared with its definition. This is actually useful, but I wish was presented in a different way as I found this hard distracting. Also, some of questions were in multiple choice format, and asked the student to pick one correct answer. Although the students should only pick one answer, sometimes the system would only allow students to pick one answer, whereas other times it allows them to pick more than one. I think this just increases confusion and difficulty because of the inconsistency presented in multiple choice answers.
Overall, I think online assessment tools can be a useful thing. It saves paper, and could allow for immediate results. However, with an online assessment tool such as the Smarter Balance, the test starts to test how well the student can overcome some of the user interface challenges, rather than the material itself. This is especially true if we consider that students can easily get nervous about tests and the technological difficulties might hinder their performance. Another scenario is that the students realize this test doesn't affect their life directly, and so when they see that the test is difficult to use and navigate, they give up easily. So what exactly is this tool measuring? Is it really measuring student performance, or is the student performance becoming overshadowed by the tool itself? How fair is it to base teacher evaluation on "student performance" when it is gathered by online assessment tools such as this one?
I had the opportunity to browse through the some of the tests offered by Smarter Balanced, which covered both the Math and English topics and spanned across K-12 grades. Although I am an avid technology user, I personally found the online test to be cumbersome and difficult to use. It made me imagine how much more difficult using this assessment might be for students who may not be as tech savvy.
The overall structure of the online test is not bad, but several things are formatted in ways that makes the user interface unfriendly. For example, the question information, and the question itself were placed in 2 panels side to side. The left panel would include the necessary background information to answer the question, and the right panel would contain the actual questions. The problem arises when the background information is a long piece of text or includes some tables and graphs, and the student has to scroll up and down, and even worse, scroll sideways just to see the information. The student can expand the width of the panel to see the information better, however it then covers up the question. This type of structure makes is difficult to navigate because a student has to keep switching back and forth between panels and has to keep scrolling to see various parts of the information.
I also found it frustrating that the test wouldn't let me move around between questions. Even though I could flag a question I wasn't sure about, I couldn't skip it and come back to it later. I had to provide some sort of answer to be able to move on. This is unlike the GRE; I clearly remember being able to move back and forth between questions in each section, making it easier for me to answer the questions I felt ready for. Also, every time I would do something not allowed by the system (such as skip a question), I got a scary looking error message, with extraneous information! I don't think that the student needs to know that this error is "[Message Code 12784]". Why is that even there? I found it to be really distracting, and a bit distressing to see this message every time.
On the math tests, the calculator is pretty bulky, and a bit hard to use. I kept trying to press "Ans" to get the answer but it wouldn't work, until I realized there is a small button with the = sign that I'm supposed to be pressing. Some questions asked the students show their work, but the answer space looked like it was to provide a paragraph of text. It would be really difficult showing work that would ideally need a diagram, involves division and other operations by just typing it in like regular text. It would make it very difficult to read, and I'm sure would lead to higher rate of mistakes. Also, specifically in the G7 Math Performance Task, it says that the test has questions 1-5 at the top, but then there are only 4 questions. I had to spend some times trying to figure out if I had missed any of the questions.
On the English Language Art tests, some of the words were underlined lightly, and wasn't clear why that was until I realized that if I clicked on those words, a small box appeared with its definition. This is actually useful, but I wish was presented in a different way as I found this hard distracting. Also, some of questions were in multiple choice format, and asked the student to pick one correct answer. Although the students should only pick one answer, sometimes the system would only allow students to pick one answer, whereas other times it allows them to pick more than one. I think this just increases confusion and difficulty because of the inconsistency presented in multiple choice answers.
Overall, I think online assessment tools can be a useful thing. It saves paper, and could allow for immediate results. However, with an online assessment tool such as the Smarter Balance, the test starts to test how well the student can overcome some of the user interface challenges, rather than the material itself. This is especially true if we consider that students can easily get nervous about tests and the technological difficulties might hinder their performance. Another scenario is that the students realize this test doesn't affect their life directly, and so when they see that the test is difficult to use and navigate, they give up easily. So what exactly is this tool measuring? Is it really measuring student performance, or is the student performance becoming overshadowed by the tool itself? How fair is it to base teacher evaluation on "student performance" when it is gathered by online assessment tools such as this one?
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Students bringing their own technology to class: In or Out?
I've been hearing about the Bring Your Own Device movement. Students bring their own devices to use at school rather than using technology provided at school. This movement sounds good in theory, but as a teacher, it makes me anxious just thinking about using this in my own classroom. I definitely see some potential benefits. For example, students can bring in devices that they're comfortable with, and extend their learning beyond the classroom when they realize that their devices can be more than just a phone or a tablet. Additionally, schools wouldn't have to spend money to buy technology (or as much technology), which is a relief to a lot of schools experiencing budget cuts.
However, I truly believe that the risks outweigh the benefits. Here's why.
Depending on students' own equipment on learning creates too much of a variation between students with respect to their classroom experience. A student's technology might not carry the necessary features highlighted in the classroom lesson. And if a teacher decides that each student can just work with whatever features are available on their device, how is a teacher going to plan a lesson effectively? Also, what if a student brings in a device that the teacher is not familiar with? How is that teacher expected to help guide the student if they can't guide their project or help them troubleshoot? I also think that students using their own devices (especially phones), could be distracting. Imagine a student constantly being aware of every email or notification they receive while they are in class. I'm sure most will give in to the temptation and check their messages during class.
More importantly, equity between students becomes an issue. What is a student doesn't have any technology at home? Or they are too embarrassed to bring their technology because they feel like it's too old, or it's not cool? Teenagers are constantly comparing themselves to others and feel pressured to have the latest trend. Bring Your Own Device is just exacerbating that pressure. It also puts pressure on the parents who may not be able to afford that technology, but feel like they need to buy it for their child to get the most of their school experience. Can students share? Sure. But a student might be overprotective of their phone for example, and may not allow someone else to use it freely.
I think that Bring Your Own Device is an easy way for a school to remove the responsibility off of them, and leave the teachers and families to deal with it. I understand that not all schools can afford top-notch technology, but it's really not about having the newest computers. It's about what you do with the resources you do have.
However, I truly believe that the risks outweigh the benefits. Here's why.
Depending on students' own equipment on learning creates too much of a variation between students with respect to their classroom experience. A student's technology might not carry the necessary features highlighted in the classroom lesson. And if a teacher decides that each student can just work with whatever features are available on their device, how is a teacher going to plan a lesson effectively? Also, what if a student brings in a device that the teacher is not familiar with? How is that teacher expected to help guide the student if they can't guide their project or help them troubleshoot? I also think that students using their own devices (especially phones), could be distracting. Imagine a student constantly being aware of every email or notification they receive while they are in class. I'm sure most will give in to the temptation and check their messages during class.
More importantly, equity between students becomes an issue. What is a student doesn't have any technology at home? Or they are too embarrassed to bring their technology because they feel like it's too old, or it's not cool? Teenagers are constantly comparing themselves to others and feel pressured to have the latest trend. Bring Your Own Device is just exacerbating that pressure. It also puts pressure on the parents who may not be able to afford that technology, but feel like they need to buy it for their child to get the most of their school experience. Can students share? Sure. But a student might be overprotective of their phone for example, and may not allow someone else to use it freely.
I think that Bring Your Own Device is an easy way for a school to remove the responsibility off of them, and leave the teachers and families to deal with it. I understand that not all schools can afford top-notch technology, but it's really not about having the newest computers. It's about what you do with the resources you do have.
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