TPACK Ch8 Art in Education

Nancy DePlatchett makes a case for arts education by how each of the nine listed learning skills for the 21st century can be enhanced by arts education and how arts education is very consistent with the learning theory in How People Learn (2000) by Brown, Cocking, and Bransford. I was inspired by how creating original artwork, students are self-directed and engaged in a self-discovery process that develops their flexibility and adaptability. I would like to emulate this same art-making process in the science classroom by having students involved in more inquiry-based projects and activities that they initiate out of their own curiosity.
I would like to post the nine listed skills:

• information and media literacy
• communication skills
• critical thinking and systems thinking
  
• problem identification, formulation, and solution
• creativity and intellectual curiosity
• interpersonal and collaborative skills
• self-direction
• accountability and adaptability
• social responsibility

on my classroom wall and wiki. They are very relevant to the real world and would be helpful if they were more visible to the students and teacher each day.

She then highlights an extensive list of internet resources for integrating technology in the visual, music, dance, drama, and media production areas of arts education.

Some of the Visual art's resources like Crayola' site and Sanford's marker and pen website have some interactive primary art resources. I tried the drawing web app on Crayola's site. It provided many options of color and pen sizes for each of Crayola's products. The Sanford site has a memorable character named Carmen that hosts some interactive lessons on art content.

But, I think if kids are going to be subjected to subtle marketing they may enjoy Blue Man group's make your own art site more because of the creative mediums (Twinkies, Jello, confetti, Cap't Crunch..), animation and ability to share their work with friends. It is definitely worth a look!

She concludes with how arts education can be enhanced with technology and advocates for educational models that integrate arts and technology into the core curriculum. I could envision an art-based or bricolage model (note 8 in TPACK Chapter 1) in my science classroom. I think that "playing" or "tinkering" with readily available tools, materials and instruments is an powerful, engaging and effective way to learn that is under-valued in science classrooms. I would seriously consider some form of this model to be used in conjunction with the engineering design and scientific processes.

TPACK Ch9 Science Content Team

Here are 3 rich science links by level to check out:

Elementary
The BBC's Bite Sized Science Clips are excellent. My 5 year old son enjoys using these engaging activities. They are organized by content and level. Some of the text for the lower grade level is automatically read. At higher levels, there is an option to have the text instruction read.

Middle School
Marc Prensky considers programming to be the new literacy, Programming: The New Literacy,Edutopia, Feb 2008. Scratch is a new programming language from MIT. It is designed to be an easy way for people to create their own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art on the web and easily share their work. It can help students apply mathematical and computational skills while learning to think creatively, reason logically, and work collaboratively. I highly recommend incorporating Scratch into class projects or as a summative assessment.

Highschool
The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science is an incredible resource from the University at Buffalo for science teachers who aspire to incorporate a case-based method of instruction in their class. The site's introduction is brief and compelling: "Although the case method has been used for years to teach law, business, and medicine, it is not common in science. Yet the use of case studies holds great promise as a pedagogical technique for teaching science, particularly to undergraduates, because it humanizes science and well illustrates scientific methodology and values. It develops students’ skills in group learning, speaking, and critical thinking, and since many of the best cases are based on contemporary—and often contentious—science problems that students encounter in the news (such as human cloning), the use of cases in the classroom makes science relevant."

TPACK Ch9 Science, Technology and Teaching

Raven McCrory first discusses the relationship between technology and science. Then he describes where to use technology in the curriculum, what technology to use and how to use it. He finishes the chapter with discussion about how a teacher's knowledge of subject matter, students, pedagogy and technology help answer the previous where, what and how questions.

Where to use technology in the curriculum:

1) Areas of the curriculum that are hard to teach
2) Areas that technology is an essential element of the science being taught.

What technologies are classified into 3 categories:

1) Unrelated directly to science but used to support science-
EX: spreadsheets, word processing, graphic software

2) Designed for teaching and learning science-
EX: Model-it, Virtual Frog, Cooties, BIOKids, and WISE
I especially value the interactive science simulations at PHET.
There are many research-based sims with a searchable data-base of teacher created lesson plans. I find this technology most useful at helping students grasp abstract concepts like the nature of fields and electromagnetic waves, to differentiate between the velocity and acceleration of an object and especially electricity and magnetism concepts.

3) Technology designed to do science-
EX: Microscopes, Telescopes, Measuring Probes, Scientific calculators

Tips on How technologies are used:
- Teach students how to first use the system or tools
- Give them time to "play" with the system or tools
- Identify possible failure points and make alternate plans in case of breakdowns
- Plan a specific activity
- Consider environmental conditions like the amount of student talk allowed during the activity
- Plan for assessment of what students learned and the efficacy of the activity.

I believe having time to "play" with a technology system or tool is an important step in an effective implementation. During "play time" formative assessment can take place and troubleshooting can occur. Students are able to orient themselves and the teacher has time for some 1 on 1 troubleshooting to bring students up to speed.

TYPE II Technology

In Type II Uses of Technology in Education, Cleborne D. Maddux and Dee LaMont Johnson describe Type II applications as making new and better ways of teaching available - ways of teaching that would not be available without information technology. This concept is not new. It originated it the late 70's and early 80's. Although an oversimplification, Type I and Type II technologies can be further clarified as not "good" and "bad" but instead "simple" and "complex".

TPACK CH2 reflection

Reading Chapter 2 has made me aware of the more subtle digital divides. I see the additional divides in public school and am encouraged by reading this chapter not to reinforce them. Access to hardware, software and internet access has always been the only digital divide I have been aware of in the past. Access to quality technology mediated instruction is an important issue. We struggle with this at Mt. Blue HS. I think it to have quality TMI there needs to be regular professional technology training for teachers and students. The technology committee at our school has worked hard at providign teacher training several times a year during early release days but I do not think it is enough. We are finding the gap between teachers use of technology widening. There is a need for basic computer training and advanced training.

Too often I have observed computers used to satiate students in study halls instead of being used as tools to communicate, inquire construct and organize knowledge. I do not use them as much as I would like to in class because of our non- 1:1 environment and network stability issues. If each student had a laptop and broadband access at home I would feel more comfortable spending more time building organized online learning environments and resources fpr my classes. I would like to use a wiki in all of my Physics classes. And I think that giving all my students a more challenging lab environment will increase their engagement and understanding.

TPACK Ch1 reflection

Teaching is an ill structured and complex domain. Being able to shift from the stable and transparent traditional pedagogical technologies to protean, unstable and opaque technologies will help prepare students for applying their designed knowledge to the real world. By being able to deal with ambiguity, frustration and change in the classroom, teachers will help model for their students how to navigate in the real world. I am interested in exploring how to help students be successful in ambiguous more real-world environments. They are too comfortable in static black and white environments. I have been trying to assign more design your own labs for my students in college prep Physics classes. Assigning such labs really challenge my student to organize their investigations and understand the essential concepts.

As a teacher that is continuously working at improving a new Engineering Design course last semester, I love the perspective of "knowledge as design" and "wicked problems". How do I help students accept and work with these paradigms? How do teachers help students be comfortable creating satisificing solutions to wicked problems? And are satisificing solutions acceptable when building a bridge? Is there levels or graduations of satisficing solutions to be used in different contexts?

Creative repurposing is critical to teaching in a low income district and for overcoming the "Functional Fixedness" discussed in Chapter 1. A colleague's students used wikispaces to create quizzes in an English class. The students were wonderfully creative in this exercise.Their quizzes were full of personality. The personality in the quizzes made the formative assessment engaging to peers. There is a whole community of creative repurposing emerging and supported by web 2.0 technologies for personal projects at www.instructables.com. I would like to have student's post their design projects to this kind of forum to receive feedback and document their work.