Image Blog Lesson Plan 1

Title: Image Peer Review
SoL:  7^th Grade History GOVT.4c: Federalism, power is divided between the Federal and the State governments with this style of government. 

Other Skills: Students will get to practice research, and persuasive writing skills, as well as peer reviewing skills.  Students will learn how to open up to classmates and be able to take recommendations and decide if they have merit or not and how to act on them.  They will also learn how to give constructive criticism. 

Lesson Plan: Students will write a 5 page paper, where they decide the merits of a federalist government as America has it.  Should America shift to a Union government? Or should America give more power back to the States?  Students will write a rough draft of this paper, then post it up on Flickr.  From there they will select 2 partners to peer review their papers.  When peer reviewing they will use Flickr’s note function make notes on various sections of the paper with suggestions or comments that they feel will be useful.  These will be made in a way that only the 3 plus the teacher will be able to access and read.  Once the peer review is finished, they will then edit their papers as they see fit and hand it in as a final copy.

Image Blogs

Image blogs are a bit trickier to use in an educational setting, but with a bit more effort and creativity students could benefit from this aspect of the web as well.  While I read about image blogs in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, I think seeing a few of them brought them more to life. 

The first thing that struck me about image blogs is the potential that anyone can join along with them.  This comes in two ways, first there is the obvious point that if allowed anyone can upload photos into a group centered on a theme.  "The Red Rule" is an example of this, as I looked the photos were taken from all over the world, they just all had the color red as its main point (at least to me it felt like the centerpiece).  This could be useful for collaborative projects, but also I think it’s useful as a resource for pictures themselves.  Images can be a great way to spur a student’s interest; if they can actually see something it can become more real to them.  While it may be easy to use a search engine to find photos of historic events, when it comes to current events it can be a bit more difficult.  Flickr on the other hand can be a place to look, should important current events begin to unfold during a school year.  In fact I had noticed that a great deal of the photos in the “Red Rule” were under 2 hours old.  Attach key words in such groups to an RSS feed and a teacher has a great tool for showing their students the world. 

The other feature that I really liked was that people are able to comment on sections of a photo.  While I read about this feature, it stood out for me in the photo group “The Commons”.  This blog was created along with the Library of Congress to share public photographs.  When I read that you could comment on photos in Flickr, I thought about comments in the comment section much like a regular blog, then I also knew you could place comments on the photograph but for some reason I kept thinking that was more for the person who submitted the photo.  However on the Commons, there were plenty of photos were people selected sections of the pictures and left comments in regards to their thoughts, or to explain something.  While too many comments can make a picture hard to follow, I do think students being able to put a box over an area to pose a question or point something out can to the experience.  In this way the student is positive that what they are referencing on the photo is understood. 

Lastly much like my idea in regards for using a wiki to create a portfolio, Flickr can also serve the same purpose.  The teacher can take photos of various projects and have students use the commenting features to explain their projects.  As an example of this I looked at a 3^rd grade teacher who posted a picture of a student’s project on Flickr.  In this way a student can have a new goal in mind, aside from a good grade; they also have a chance to show off to la larger audience which can now include their parents and extended family.  I think posting pictures on the web could be akin to having your work posted on the family refrigerator.  This is a student’s time to shine, and having to perform for a greater audience (or getting to) may add an extra incentive to work hard on their project.

Wiki Portfolio Possiblities

     So for another use of Wiki's in an educational setting, I got to thinking how it could be used in a different form than just student collaboration (not that I'm insulting collaboration by any means).  One thing then occurred to me which was the VGLA.  This is an alternate assessment program for students who may not perform their best on standardized tests.  Instead the teacher is held responsible for creating a portfolio of the student's work over the year to show that they have mastered the year’s content.

    Wiki's would be a great asset for portfolio based assessment.  The reason for this is that a teacher or student can upload student's assignments to the wiki with little trouble, for safe keeping.  This makes storage or sending it to the grading committee a non-issue.  The teacher would be made the wiki’s moderator, so that the student free to contribute, and make alterations but at the end of the day the teacher is the one who decides wiki.  This prevents the student or anyone else from permanently altering any assignments once they have been submitted and finalized.  Also using a wiki allows a teacher to use more than just written assignments to show that a student understands the content.  Students could add podcasts as they talk about content, photos of visual based assessments, or even a teacher could video record skits and other performance based assessments and upload them onto the wiki.  Since the point of a portfolio based assessment is to allow for differentiation when grading a student, a wiki is definitely a way to allow this.

     Another great use for a wiki as a medium for a portfolio is that it is accessible for the student, teachers, and guardians to look at whenever they want.  This allows the involved to watch for student growth or trouble.  With the information only a few clicks away the student and guardians at the very least will be able to stay informed of student achievement before it is too late for any changes to occur.  I know that my parents would have loved to have been kept up to date on my progress, and would be sure to alter my behaviors if progress was not being made. The benefit for teachers extends to more than just the teacher for that year.  Teachers who have the student the next year could also benefit from seeing a student's work the year prior.  In this way they can better prepare for the student's strengths, weaknesses and maybe able to notice trends before the student has left their class for the year.

     In the end, I think that a wiki has amazing potential for use in an educational setting.  They could be used as a project based assessment to make sure that a student has mastered a certain SoL.  They also can be used in a setting such as portfolios to monitor progress, and ensure that a student is taking in more than just one unit's worth of SoL's. 

 

A Wiki Related Assessment

Title: Wiki-advancements
SoL: USII.4d

• Inventions that contributed to great change and industrial growth (electricity, telephone)
• Reasons for the rise and prosperity of big business (national markets created by transportation advances, captains of industry, advertising, and low cost production)
• Factors that resulted in the growth of industry (access to raw materials and energy, workforce due to immigration, inventions, and financial resources)
• Examples of big business (railroads, oil, steel)
• Postwar changes in farm and city life (Mechanization reduced labor needs, industrial development in cities created increased need in labor, industrialization provides increased access to consumer goods)

Web Tool: Wiki
Other skills acquired/practiced:  Students will work on collaborative skills, as they work in groups of four in order to create a finished product.  Students will get practices using the internet to find resources for both information and for tools to convey ideas.  Students will get practice with netiquette, as well as internet safety.  Lastly students will also get experience building a wiki, and develop familiarity with wiki programs and tools.
Lesson Plan:  This lesson plan involves students being placed into group of four, and will be asked to create a wiki regarding the industrial revolution in America.  The students will be told that the idea for this wiki is to help spark an interest in history for students their age.  This will be done by explaining how major events in history mirror events within their own lives.  Students will analyze changes that occurred in America during the Industrial Revolution and relate that to changes that have occurred in the beginning of the 21st century as a result of changes in the internet and other forms of informational technology.  Examples could be comparing Mark Zuckerberg with Carnegie, or Amazon.com with Sears.  Students will be given a rubric as a reference to guide their wiki along.

What to do about Wiki's

                After reading up on Wikipedia’s accuracy concerns and looking at other educational related wiki’s I came to a few opinions on the entire subject of wiki’s in the classroom.  First I want to talk about Wikipedia, I’m not going to provide a link, as well…everyone knows about Wikipedia (and if not, I’d be shocked).  I know that various sources such as “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts: and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” have touted the accuracy of Wikipedia’s articles and how it watched over by a number of dedicated publishers.  With this sort of support it could be argued that Wikipedia is a viable source for students to turn to when needing to research topics.  However I’ve had a few concerns with Wikipedia myself and reading various articles about its accuracy such as the study done by The Guardian has not helped my opinion any. 

                The Guardian in 2005 asked several experts to look up articles regarding their fields.  The scores ranged from a 0 at the lowest to 8 out of 10.  While 8 out of 10 in my opinion is a rather good grade most of the scores rested in the 6 or 7 range, which as far as student education is concerned is too low for students to trust.  The problem with students receiving inaccurate information is not only that they will receive a lower grades on whatever they are handing in, but the fact that students have now been misinformed.  This just adds to the challenges that teachers have, since instead of a student getting the information right the first time, the teacher now has to take time to dispel the information and reteach the correct material.  Also, I am not just taking the word of these experts who I do not know either.  Once again I turn to my herps on the internet.    The page dedicated to turtles has a line in it that is false in regard to reptiles.  In it, the article claims that turtles “unlike most reptiles, stick out their tongues to catch food”.  While this is a famous trait of lizards, it is only a trait that a very few lizards actually possess.  When you break it down that turtles cannot use their tongues to catch food, nor crocodilians, tuataras, snakes (unless they’re talking about how snakes smell, but really that’s not the idea I got from the sentence) and most lizards, the statement “most reptiles” is incredibly false.  This has not been a passing error either, while yes I know I could go in and change the sentence I decided to sit back when I first saw it and see if it was altered by someone else…it never was,  this flaw has been on this site for several years now. 

I am not saying that Wikipedia has no place in the class room; it just should not be seen as an authority on the subject.  Instead Wikipedia provides students with a starting point for research.  The pages are essentially a synthesis of information based on a collection of sources.  Students can be taught how to take a secondary source and dissect it for its source material in to either do research themselves or be taught how to figure out possible bias.  Wikipedia it should be said though, is not the end all and be all of wiki’s.  The other wiki’s that I looked at provided great examples of a wiki’s use for education.

ITsopedia is a wiki that was created by George Mason graduate students to contain various strategies and tools for including technology in the classroom. I liked the wiki well enough, but what I really liked was the idea that teachers can come together on the web to share their ideas on how to improve curriculum.  One thing I have been told often by educators and people in my grad program is that no teacher is an island, and wiki’s such as this prove that point even more.  A wealth of experience can be gathered for new teachers, teacher’s facing new problems, or just teachers looking for something fresh. 

Another great idea for the use of wikis in the classroom is for collaboration (the original goal of wiki’s anyway).  I created a wiki as an assignment for another class.  The point of the assignment was to create a webquest on a wiki for secondary history students to complete.  My wiki revolved around connecting students from two different States in order to create an online textbook chapter on the Civil War.  I thought that it would be a great experience for students to practice working on an original project with people who live great distances away.  At the time in the class we were reading the book The Nine Shift, which spoke in great detail about how society was changing thanks to communication technology.  The book spoke about how jobs will increasingly be done not in an office but at a location of the employee’s choosing, and coworkers would be from all over the globe.  Employees would then come together on the internet (or other devices) in order to create projects.  This inspired me to create this wiki for the webquest.  Students were intended to be chosen from New York (where I’m originally from) and Virginia, and they would use wikispaces to communicate, decide the content and presentation of the product, and then create it.  I felt the idea had great merit, as due to the discussion board and being able to track the activity of each group member, teachers would be able to ensure participation along with differentiation in the assessment.

With the changes going on in technology, I feel each educator will have to decide what place it has in their class room.  For me wiki’s have a very valuable place, they just need to be used correctly just like any other tool.

Allways remember wiki-audiences

     Planet Math (http://planetmath.org/ ) is a wiki that claims on its home page “to help make mathematical knowledge more accessible”.  I surfed through this site, and found that it had a very different set up from Wikipedia, which I suppose is to be expected.  It’s not a list of words and concepts but from what I can tell various math projects.  The wiki, like most is able to be added to and edited by its members. 

However I have only one problem with this wiki.  First I have to say that perhaps my greatest weakness in school has always been math.  I’ve always been fond of the sciences, but math has always felt too abstract for me.  When I read that for my class I was going to have to review a math wiki, I was a bit worried that my…weakness was going to make reviewing this page more difficult than it really needed to be. Then I clicked on the page link, and read the mission statement I described above on their home page.  Immediately my mind jumped to Wikipedia and how its founder bragged about his goal being to make all knowledge accessible to all.  I began to feel more comfortable, until I began to explore the wiki.  At the very least the site organization makes it hard to navigate and truly grasp at a great deal of this math, without having a math background.  Sure it may perhaps be that the math is indeed accessible to me, in a sense that I can see and read it.  However without having a sufficient math background I was left feeling like I couldn’t make sense of it all.  For me, I felt like it would be like having Wikipedia written all in Latin.  Sure, I may recognize a “Pax” here and a “Diem” there.  In the end sadly an overwhelming amount of the information would be lost to me.  I felt that way with this wiki, as I would click onto an article and it felt more like I jumped into the middle of a book written in a foreign language.  If I cannot easily get the background information to work forward, then math has only superficially become more accessible to me. 

                The lesson that can be taken away from looking through this wiki is to always remember the purpose of your wiki.  If the purpose of a wiki is to make information accessible to anyone reading, it needs to be laid out in such a way that anyone can at the very least build up an understanding of a topic.  In the case of math, perhaps links to earlier concepts that are vital background knowledge could have done this.  If the purpose of the wiki is to only be understood by those contributing to it, then little worry to outsiders need to be given. 

Second Technology Lesson Plan

Title: Explorer’s Blog

Web tool: Blogs

SoL:  WHII 4: The student will demonstrate knowledge of the impact of the European Age of Discovery and expansion into the Americas, Africa, and Asia by:

a)  Explaining the roles and economic motivations of explorers and conquistadors

b)  Describing the influence of religion

c)  Explaining migration, settlement patterns, cultural diffusion, and social classes in the colonized areas

d)  Describing the Colombian Exchange, including its impact on native populations

e)   Mapping and explaining the triangular trade

f)   Describing the impact of precious metal exports from the Americas.

Extra Objective: Students will practice writing and communication skills, as well as blogging skills.  Students will be expected to research their explorer’s points of view and site their sources via linking to other websites.  This form of citation will also force students to be able to scrutinize internet sources for reliability and bias. 

Lesson Description:  Students will take the role of being explorers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Students will then be assigned which countries they will be sailing for, and will be asked to create a blog where they discuss why they decided to explore the world, what they find, and the benefits for their mother nation.  Students will be asked to write 4 blogs for their explorer discussing the motives, the Colombian exchange, and triangle trade.  Then the students will be expected to post as their explorer on 3 other student’s blogs who were assigned different countries.  This is the bare minimum however, should a rich discussion occur, then the better for history!