Dissecting Frog App for High School.

The following is a blog entry from the Science Department at Sullivan Heights.  Najinder Gill critiques an app she used in her Biology 11 course.

When I found out Najinder  dissected frogs in her classroom, I asked her if she was interested in doing a virtual dissection, and being one who loves to try something new, she agreed.  We talked for a while, she signed out an ipad to look  at Frog Dissection app for the iPad and off she went.  The interesting thing about Najinder's concept was she wanted to use the app for students that missed the live dissection since students couldn't do the dissection without supervision.  But she couldn't be in two places at once (continuing on with her class and catching the student up with what was missed).  She believed this was the perfect solution to that problem.  Below is Najinder's assessment of the app and the worksheet she used with the program is linked here as well as below.  Thank you Najinder Gill for sharing out there.

FROG DISSECTION APP

The frog dissection app is a very good app to use in place of doing actual dissection.  It is an app that I will be using with my classes. Reasons why the teacher may choose to do the virtual dissection: less expensive, if student is absent on day of dissection it is an easy makeup lab, for students who can’t handle doing a dissection, more ethical, students less likely to mess up the dissection, easier clean up, ….

The app has many things available on it – dissection, background information on frogs, life cycle, videos,….  Positives of the app: includes relevant background information of frog, includes how frogs develop, the dissection is quick and there is little room for mistakes,  all the internal parts of the frog are clearly seen (which may not be the case when you do an actual dissection).  The videos are simple and good visuals to show how the digestive and respiratory systems work.  The quiz is a great way of ending the lab which not only focusses on the frog but also the lab techniques used. Sometimes it is difficult to explain to students how to cut open the frog and what tools to use so the app helps with this.

Critique: I think  students need to be guided on how to use the app and that they don’t just jump to the dissection without going through the background information first. To help with this  I have included a handout to use with the app which guides students through the app. The app doesn’t show the difference between a male or female frog.

The Change of Education needs to consider the Teacher

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosz/2040577615/ 

I've been reading all these different manners of changing your educational practises, from Backward Planning, to Activating Students' Creative Thinking, and the list goes on.  With the changes in our school of "No Marks", "technology implementation", "Using Web 2.0 Tools", "Eportfolios", and many more that we are exploring, we all need to remember one thing.  Even though one of these methods looks great and alive (The exploration in our Physical Education Department is absolutely fabulous - tweet Ryan Neufeld - @teacherneuf and Jeff Vaughan - @CptKudos  for more information), this doesn't mean it will work for everyone.  Not all teachers are the same, we may have similar training, and have gone to the same classes, but the personality of the teacher does come through somewhat, in some way, or manner.  This means that not all methods of teaching will work the same for every teacher due to this personality.

The great news is that if every teacher is different from the next, students won't get use to one style of learning, and this is a reality of life - no two things are the same (look at the picture - really look - and tell me if you see the exact Flamingo twice - look at their coloring). 

So as teaches this is what we normally do  (Sorry for speaking for a group of teachers but after 25 years of teaching in a number of schools and acting as a computer facilitator of learning technology - I've seen a lot of styles) - we take what we like the most out of every learning experience and we use that.  Sound familiar?  So do students.  We do not criticize the different manners in which a student learns, we try to instigate a number of ways of learning in our lesson plans, try to touch all (or as many as well can) of the different ways students learn.  Why can't we accept the same of teachers?  We learn different, we use what we've learned, to the best of our ability.  Some of us learn quickly, some of us take more time to contemplate things, but in the end, almost all teachers have the same goal, to be the best that we can.

Think about it.  How much do you use what you've learned compared to a colleague?

New Procedures and Ideas for Professional Development.

Sullivan Heights continues to think and learn with new ideas procedures for professional development. We'll continue to make Individual Learning Goals our goals.  Most of the school's goals last year were in regards to learning new technology or new methods of assessment using apps, Web 2.0 tools online and growing with learning networks online using Twitter.  Below is a slide show from Jane Hart (excellent blog to follow) on the impact of social media on the workplace (and relevant to the educational field of learning).

The impact of social media on workplace learning

(View more PowerPoints from Jane Hart)

It's true, our school has been crazy with learning last year.  Everyone wanted to try something new, learn something new, do something new.  We've explored numerous areas of learning with technology, but we've also examined new ways of teaching and/or assessing with our students in regards to this technology.  With all the learning last year, this coming school year our school needs to look more closer at the impact of this learning on both our teaching styles, our new manners of assessment, the learning done by the students and ask ourselves if these changes that have developed are actually helping our students.  

Change is good but it can also be stressful, the handling of the impact and  logistics of change.  Change can sometimes be uncomfortable because it forces us out of comfort zone; even when the change is good. Not everyone embraced the learning, but some recognized that they needed to change with their fellow colleagues.  The difficulty has to do with the rippling effects of change in the school. It forces teachers to create new routines, new ways of thinking or believing and new perceptions of the world around them. With any sort of change one needs to sit back and reflect on these changes:  Has it made a difference to me, to my students, and/or even to parents?  Has it improved my/student's situation in the school or even outside of school? Has it been beneficial?  

The changes in our school with Twitter was like a tiny pebble thrown lightly in a pond, the ripple effects went farther then anyone really thought it would, in our school and outside to PLNs most of my colleagues at school have made.The only way to recognize this effect was to stop for a moment, take account of events and the situation around you, reflect and document what you have learned, to actually take the time to assess the change in the students and in your environment, and note what has come about with the change.  


This is where we need to go for this next year.  We need to reflect on the effects and affects of our learning.  We need to assess our learning and the learning of our students:  is it worth the change?  We also need to realize that this change may be affecting our students as well, in ways we should look at.


With all this change happening in our school, we need to ask the questions:

• Why are we doing this?
• Why are we making this effort to change?

Because the world is changing, the students are thinking differently (their experiences in today's world have taught them to think differently), and working in today's world is a lot different as well.  Thus we need to understand what changes we as a school need to make as well, and you as a teacher need to consider.

There is a  deeper issue at work here that Sir Kenneth Robinson so eloquently underscores in his book "Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative?" At the heart of most schools Sir Robinson believes is our obsessive preoccupation with academic ability and the confusion of academic ability with intelligence. To Robinson there is "much more to intelligence than academic ability and much more to education than developing it." John Bareell agrees with him in "Developing More Curious Minds".  Both point out the truth, that it is not so much the academic ability to memorize and recite what is learned as much as the importance of teaching students to be creative and to be curious about learning, to develop further the love of learning, and instilling in students a curiosity to continuously learn or want to learn.  That's what this change is about, to change and help students become more creative in exploring new information on the information highway, to collaborate and learn form each other, and to question what they learn, be it questioning the sources, question the books, the Internet, even the teacher.  This means different ways of teaching (backward planning, project based, differentiating, collaborate group work, etc), assessing differently (no marks, skill sets, rubrics, etc) and grabbing students curiosity (through the internet, web tools, blogging, critical thinkings, etc).

That's a lot to ask for.

As my mother once said to me and I have repeated numerous times to my students "There is no such thing as a stupid question, it's just stupid not to question". 

so that's what I hope our school continues to do, not just change but to question our change and see if it not only develops a curious and creative mind in our students but to show the students that the teacher as well is curious and creative.

Let the questions continue.... with the learning ;) and the assessing of our learning.

Learning Summary of an innovative teacher

Davis is new teacher at our school that fully embraces technology.  He has used the iPads, the COWS (computers on wheels), the library, working hard on engaging students in his Language classes with the use of technology.  He uses the technology for assessment (oral composition online), making an oral assignment fun instead of just memorization.  You can see much of his work online on his wiki at http://mrdavisfrenchclass.wikispaces.com/ and you can see his summary and assessment of what he's learned this year at Sullivan Heights.  Even better, follow him on Twitter.

 What Worked:

Ipads: fotobabble App.

• Easy to create an account and use
• Take a picture and record voice over picture
•  Can sign in on the fotobabble website to copy and paste the link of the conversation and upload it to a wiki
•  Some issues with uploading the conversation on the app. Have to test it at the start of class and if it doesn’t work, sign out and sign back in and it should work

What didn’t Work:

Ipads: garage band

• Couldn’t save the files anywhere besides on the app
• Couldn’t transfer the conversation file to an email, wiki or itunes

Ipads: email

• Couldn’t sync any student emails to any projects
•  Only capable of storing one email address
• Overall I think the ipads and the fotobabble app is better than using a PC for recording conversations. Students are able to receive such quick feedback while playing back their conversations. They can also get the app for their iphones, ipods or itouches which gives them access to the tech on their own.

Overall Mr. Davis' innovative methods of differentiation with students, engagement of activities, and just plain putting the fun back into learning a language has the students clamouring to learn more.  Excellent work Mr. Davis.

From a Science Teacher Department Head.

Guest blogger:  Mr. Edwards - Science Department Head.

Positives:

• The kids seemed to really excited about working with the gizmos.  This helped increase the enjoyment of discovery learning, and/or the re-enforcement of what was already taught.  (ie the students were truly engaged).
• The level of difficulty of the different gizmos was in some cases challenging, but students were still able to work through the activities with some guidence.  Thus this tool is as effective as long as the teacher is prepared and has done the work in advance as well.
• The instant feedback of the five follow up questions both for the teacher and the students was nice to have, provided the students did it themselves and not copy what their partner had as their responses.
• The student worksheets provided had insightful questions, and followed a logical order in investigating the activity.
• The gizmos are versatile for either review, or discovery learning.

Drawbacks:

• Some students could not complete the online assessment at home if they did not finish in the time provided.
• Some students simply saw what the other students answered in correctly, and thus had an advantage, making the formal and informal assessment questionable to whether they understand it.
• We could not get the gizmos to work on our iPads, due to unavailable software, thus we were limited to the laptops, which were not always available.
• There are no gizmos written specifically for the Earth Science 11 curriculum here in BC. 
• Some gizmos are more useful than others, and are too simple.  They would ber better as a demo, than as an activity.

Suggestions to the district coordinator:

• Different versions of the questions to help minimize copying.
• Try and get the software for iPads, or make them compatible with the existing software.
• Try and get gizmos for both Science and Tech 11 and Earth Science 11, as these courses could really use an engaging means of learning. 

There will be contunued use of the gizmos for next year, provided we get accounts by the district. 

Mobile IPads

We've been doing something a little different at Sullivan Heights with our IPads, we've been using them as COWS (computers on wheels - yes I know, this acronym makes you smile).  That means that students get different IPads every time different teacher signs out the cart full of IPads - we're sharing.  This action would not usually make a difference except most of the Apps on the IPad use email to save your work or send your work to someone and most of these apps want you to put in your email address on the IPad setting.  Why is this a problem?  When the student sets up their email, they will then have to  removes the email before they put the IPads away at the end of the classroom period.  This procedure will take up valuable teaching time.  So what do you do?  The only thing is to ask the creators of the Apps to make some changes or to get a generic account that everyone uses to email their own work to themselves.  The second problem with this situation is that all IPads are on the "guest access" system in SD36 and this WiFi system does not let you email out.  Well, back to the drawing board....

As you can see, the booking calendar for the IPad COW is very busy, with teachers using them for projects for 3 - 5 days, but in between the project other students are using the IPads and the different Apps for different reasons.  We've had a number of incidents already where one student forgets to log out of their Twitter Account and the next classroom using the IPad uses this twitter account.  

One brilliant teacher (K. Phillips) is using blogs for students to record their learning, and to help in assessment of learning.  But when she was using the IPads and using Blog Press, once you log into this app you cannot log out.  So we've looked at others (BE Write HD - excellent look and great for sharing on Google Docs your work - I liked this one and Blogsy - we're still investing this rich one) and decided to use Blogger, a simple app specific for blogspot, and for the needs of the student.  They can add pictures from the photo roll with the IPad (to help record any scientific information they need).  I've seen their work and I (as well as Phillips) am amazed at the learning, the analytical evidence shown, the exploration of learning in different areas that the student chose.  

So where to next?  We're still experimenting with Blogsy, and BE Write worked for one student but not another.  We're looking at apps that have a "sign out" feature.  So beware, those that get a COW of IPads, make sure any app you purchase has a sign out feature and also has it so there are a number of ways to get your info to the teacher.

On a side note, I love Comic Book but if you don't finish your comic in that time period and post it to Twitter (the great feature I loved), then you're hooped.  Because you can't save it to your system without it disappearing when sharing the IPads.  Sorry Comic Book, you need to fix that  ;)

Differentiation - a lot of work but worth it....

I've been working with differentiating my Information Technology 11/12 class this year.  The class consist of 31 students in grade 11 and 12, at different levels of skills.  Some are in Grade 12 and have taken the course previously (there were 7 of them), for some  it's their first time but they have previous knowledge (6 of them), and some have started with no knowledge at all but have heard from friends that they liked the course.  

The course started with a basic lesson on plagiarism and copyright .  Every student needed to learn these rules since the course consist of taking pictures, editing them, and putting them online.  Then all students did a small unit in Adobe Photoshop.  But after that point students were allowed to choose the area they wished to follow as well as given the option that at any time they could change their mind and start something else (see below for choices).  With the ability to choose what they learn students took ownership of their learning with the premise that this would motivate them to work harder.  The premise was wrong in many ways.

This was an elective and as such some students chose to take it for an easy mark, a supposition that was wrong, my expectation was high, every day you needed to learn something new.

The intro (copyright and Photoshop) took one month to get through, the selection of choosing what they  wanted to learn was in October.  It took approximately until the end of October to the 1st week of November for students to understand expectations of the level of commitment that I wanted.  I expected students to work hard everyday.  My expectations of myself is very high and I expect the same work ethics from my students.  What I forgot is that sometimes the student doesn't want to work, they want down time, something that I very much understand, being one more week before the Winter Vacation.

I did however see that the students are enjoying what they chose to learn, that this took time for students to understand if they try, I was happy and they should be happy.  Instead of trying so hard to not work, when they did start working, they enjoyed what they did.   

At the end of every class I asked individual students "Did you learn something today? What?"  Sometimes I got the straight answer of "nothing" and sometimes it opened up a conversation of self-assessment that was wonderful, exactly what I wanted, a student that honestly said "This is what I learned, this is what I need to work on", and the best question "Can you teach me this ....?".  They wanted to learn.  What better reward for a teacher, a student who wants to learn.

Like any major change in the dynamic of introducing a new teaching method, it takes time to iron out the problems, to set the right expectations, but like life, both these factors change with the change of personalities that you have in the classroom.  It is only through repetition, of explaining in detail your expectation of the student and to follow though with these expectations, will the students understand what they need to do and what they are expected to do in your classroom.  

Diversifying the lessons, teaching 7 different subjects at the same time in a classroom within the hour is challenging, students still need to learn to ask each other before asking the teacher, to rely on peers and researching their own answers before relying on a teacher.  I continually remind them, I will not be there to give you answers forever.  You need to rely on yourself more then me.  

That's the best lesson I can teach them, "Rely on yourself".  As Frank Tyger, nationally published editorial cartoonist, columnist and humorist for the Trenton Times said "Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you."

This is an example of one of my student's flash christmas assignment.  From my class at Sullivan Heights Secondary High School in Surrey, British Columbia, to you at your school district, have a Merry Christmas.

11 Desktop Design	11 Web Photoshop	12 Advance	Programming Languages
Copy Write and Plagiarism	Copy Write and Plagiarism	Copy Write and Plagiarism	Copy Write and Plagiarism
Emailing	Emailing	Emailing	Emailing
Photoshop	Photoshop	Advance Photoshop	Fireworks
Principles of Design -	Principles of Design for Web Pages	Fireworks	Intro Flash
Color Unit	Color Unit	Color Unit	Color Unit
Illustrator	HTML	Illustrator Advance	JavaScript
Indesign	DreamWeaver	Advance Dreamweaver - CSS	Java
	Flash	Flash
Final Project – Newspaper	Final Project Web Page for Teacher	Final Project – Starting a New Business	Final Project – Exam.

Just had to add this from someone else's blog.... Thank you soooo much!!!

From E-Learning Provocateur- 

The A to Z of learning

It all started with a tweet by Anne Bartlett-Bragg (@AnneBB) observing an instance of the term s-learning representing social learning.
Amused by our industry’s obsession with single letter prefixes, I replied facetiously that I preferred the term slearning – simply because it sounds so awful.
Then Anne suggested we play an alphabet learning game, and she proposed the first term: a-learning is awful learning? action learning? adaptive learning?
Well that was a red rag to this nerdy bull, so I replied with b-learning is book learning. In the blink of an eye we had roped in Penny Wheeler (@pennyjw) and Claire Brooks (@clairebrooks) as we embarked on a
26-letter journey of frivolity.

All fun aside though, assigning 26 letters to learning is a lot harder than you might think.
Sure, you can make up anything (eg zebra learning). But if you adhere to the spirit of the game and confine your answers to terms that are pedagogically meaningful, the level of difficulty rises significantly.
More than just a game, I found the exercise prompted me to critically reflect on the broad range of instructional approaches that are adopted in the digital age.

So what did we come up with?
• a-learning is awful learning, action learning, adaptive learning
• b-learning is book learning
• c-learning is Confucian learning
• d-learning is distributed learning
• e-learning is enhanced learning
• f-learning is free learning
• g-learning is great learning, generative learning, granular learning
• h-learning is hidden learning, holistic learning
• i-learning is incidental learning, integrative learning
• j-learning is just-in-time learning
• k-learning is kinaesthetic learning
• l-learning is learning to learn
• m-learning is meta learning
• n-learning is new learning
• o-learning is objective learning, organisational learning
• p-learning is learning from other people
• q-learning is quantum learning, quick learning, quality learning
• r-learning is research oriented learning
• s-learning is social learning, socially networked learning
• t-learning is transformative learning
• u-learning is universal learning
• v-learning is video game learning, voracious learning
• w-learning is we learning
• x-learning is xenogamous learning
• y-learning is Gen Y targeted learning
• z-learning is Zen learning
No doubt you noticed that we tended to avoid the obvious (eg electronic learning, mobile learning).
In fact, I think it’s quite a thought-provoking list.
Wanna play?
Anyone can play the A to Z Learning Game.
Simply follow the #azlearninggame trend on Twitter and chip in the next answer.
Just remember to use the hashtag, and try to pick something unique.
If it’s abstract or obscure, justify it within the 140 character limit.
Go on, have a go. I dare you!

They say teaching goes in cycles, from cooperative learning learning years ago to diversification now, bits of the old, with the new....  This list makes me think of that and the changes that teachers are always going through.  Thank you so much for making me smile on this post.  ;)