Module One - Introductions, Logistics, and Project Examples

Module 1.1 Introductions and Creation of a ComicLife Page

Create a comic book style page that contains information about each person in your triplet.

  1. Get into groups of 3, determined by alphabetical (first name) order, get a MacBook pro from a cart in room 4002, then find a workspace in the CyberCafe, room 4002, or room 4006.
  2. Next, find and launch an application called ComicLife and familiarize yourselves with the basic operation of the program. It is quite intuitive and mostly drag-n-drop.
  3. Using the built-in camera or another camera that one of you may have brought, import a picture of each person into the computer's iPhoto library or directly onto your comic.
  4. Add text boxes or call-outs in order to convey the following information about each person:
    • Name
    • School and District
    • Project idea
    • A little known but interresting fact about you
  5. Last, add a text box that explains one commonality between all three of you.
  6. Save your poster to a USB stick using the name format first_first_first, where each person's first name is listed (alphabetically by first name as well) with underscores between them (all lower case, no spaces).
  7. Bring that stick to the computer in room 4006 and then copy your document to the folder called "Merit_Participant_Posters_2008". Remember to remove your USB stick.
  8. Help other groups complete steps 1 to 7

Module 1.2 Logistics of the Institute

How Participants are Divided into Multiple Groupings

During the Summer Institute, the 50 Merit participants will be divided into homeroom groups based on grade level (K-5, 6-8, 9-12). The homeroom is designed to maximize communication, learning and support by having one instructor per 8 people. While your homeroom will be the place that you spend the majority of time during the institute, you will also attend whole group discussions and activities and training workshops outside of your assigned homeroom. Specifically, there will be subject-area collaborative sessions, during which teachers of specific subjects (ie. math, science, humanities) will meet together to discuss the continuum of instruction across grade levels. Some subject areas will receive the support of an outside professional in that area who can consult with teachers regarding specific content as well as present some of the real-world issues that are currently relevant to research, industry, and academia. In addition, the Merit program involves flexible groupings during the 'electives' sessions during which participants can choose from a variety of workshops based on their platform, interests, needs, or requirements of their project. Those workshops might include topics such as the iLife suite, Adobe applications, web authoring solutions, or utilization of emerging technologies (probeware, interactive whiteboards, iPods, etc.)

The Pre-Institute Survey

Task 1B: Take the Online Pre-Institute Survey

Please go to our pre-institute online survey and work through the questions at your own pace (in one session, however). The questions have been adapted from an teacher efficacy survey created by Ohio State University and asks about a wide range of educational issues. Please be as thorough as possible as this survey will be used to measure a variety of aspects of the institute (but not you as an individual). The cumulative data also plays a big part in our annual reports to donors, Foothill College, and the community.

How to Save Work

Task: 1C How To Name Your Files and Where to Save Them

Consistency in naming files and folders and storing all documents in the correct place(s) will facilitate easy access to all institute deliverables, therefor we request that you follow a specific structure and process for saving all work completed during the institute. You will receive a USB memory stick (a.k.a. Flash Drive, Thumb Drive, KeyChain Memory, etc.) at the beginning of the institute, and we recommend that you keep all of your files on that device as well as a back-up copy in one of the following places:

  • Another memory stick
  • Online file storage (xdrive.com, ibackup.com, flipdrive.com, box.net, snapdrive.net, etc)
  • Email files to yourself
  • Burn CDs
  • Floppy Disks (Fixed PCs only)
  • Upload to the KCI server (if available)
  • iDisk
  • Yahoo groups

We suggest that you create folders on your memory stick as shown in the chart below. Notice that there are no spaces or capital letters in the folder names -- this makes it more likely that the folders can be easily read by a variety of operating systems and servers in the event that we have to move your files from place to place. When naming documents, please respond to your instructor's specific request for naming protocols. In general, though, all document names should include your name and some sort of indication of the content. For example, Joanne Smith's curriculum map might be named j_smith_curric_map.ins (those last three letters indicate that it is an Inspiration document).

Here are some guidelines for naming your folders:

General work... (lastname_work)
smith_work
Project Web Page/Web site... (firstinitiallastname_webpage)
jsmith_webpage
Project... (lastname_project)
smith_project
Digital Movie... (lastname_movie)
smith_movie
Poster... (lastname_poster)
smith_poster

How to Submit Work

Work completed during the institute will be submitted in a number of ways:

  1. Posted on a shared online document (ie. GoogleDocs)
  2. Collected onto memory sticks
  3. On blog websites
  4. Saved invisibly online (i.e. the survey)
  5. In e-mails to institute staff
  6. Hard copies in class (rarely)
  7. On our server, via files and folders

How to Bookmark Sites - Places to Keep and Share Bookmarks Online

Most computer users are familiar with using and (hopefully) organizing bookmarks, or favorites which are your computer's links to websites that you visit while using your internet. Over the past few years, however, many services have emerged that allow users to store bookmark lists online so that they can be accessed from any online computer. Just recently, with the advent of web 2.0 technologies, the capabilities of online bookmarks has expanded to include social bookmarking -- a scenario in which many users can contribute to the same 'account'. During the institute, you will utilize one online resource for creating and storing annotated bookmarks for easy accessibility by you, your colleagues, and your students.

Task 1D: Bookmarking Jigsaw

  1. Divide homeroom group into 6 subgroups of 3(ish) each.
  2. Each subgroup will investigate one of the following online bookmark organizing/sharing sites for about 15 minutes.
  3. Report back to the whole group providing a quick guided tour as well as advantages/disadvantages of the service.

Here is a useful Bookmark Comparison Chart

How to Use The Old EWYL Resource List

The EWYL Resources page has been set up to help you find a variety of resources to help you with your projects. Although not actively maintained, this resource page is available for you to use anytime. It contains a rich assortment of web resources. The topics include educational theory and technology integration as it relates to best practices in instruction. The second navigation bar includes topics on project design and development.

Module 1.3 Merit Requirements and Deliverables

Attendance: Summer Institute and Year-long Requirements

The stipend you receive is higher than an average of many school district's teachers' adjunct duty rate, so your complete attendance is expected. You must attend the 15 days of the Summer Institute from 8:30 to 3:30 and we request that you please sign in and out daily. If you have to leave for a portion of that time, please let your homeroom instructors know. If you miss more than 6 accumulated hours you will need to make them up by completing any tasks, trainings, online discussions, or activities that you missed as well as an additional follow-up day during the school year (4 instead of 3).

Year-long Follow-Up Requirements:

  1. Attend 3 (18 hours) of the following follow-up class dates (please mark your calendar):
    • Oct. 13, 2007
    • Nov. 3, 2007
    • Dec. 8, 2007
    • Jan. 26, 2008
    • Feb. 9, 2008
  2. Choose, register for, and attend 2 units (= 24 hours) of LINC classes (paid for by participant). It is suggested that you take all of the units during the same Foothill quarter so as to avoid paying the approximately $29 in non-tuition fees for two separate quarters.
  3. Participate in 6 hours of any ONE of the following activities:
    • Innovative Learning Conference (Octobe in San Jose)
    • Regional or Statewide CUE conference
    • Reading and Scoring 2007-08 EWYL Institute applications (early March)
    • Scoring CA Media and Multimedia Festival Projects (mid April)
    • Attending the Technology Help Lab on Saturday mornings at the KCI (total of 6 hours minimum)

Deliverables: The Following Items Should Be Completed By the End of the Summer Institute:

  • A detailed project plan online.
  • A web presence for your project.
  • A digital video about your view of the role of technology in teaching and learning.
  • A poster for your project.

See the Project and Products page for more details.

Year-Long Expectations

  1. Respond promptly to all information gathering surveys and emails
  2. Mentor and coach two teachers at your school or in your district to integrate technology into their curriculum
  3. Promotion of LINC classes in your school or district
  4. Passing out LINC brochures and flyers
  5. Presenting at a staff meeting about the KCI and LINC

Project and Multimedia Submission Deadlines

  1. Complete student projects by APRIL 1, 2009
  2. Submit at least one student project to the CA Media and Multimedia Festival in mid-April, 2009

Module 1.4 Using Online Collaborative Tools: GoogleDocs

What Are GoogleDocs?

Google Docs is a service that allows users to collaborate on single-version online documents (think Word), spreadsheets (think Excel), presentations (think Powerpoint) and pdf files (think Acrobat). To use GoogleDocs you must first create a Google Account (this is different from gmail), and then add the Docs and Spreadsheets feature to your account. You can create new or upload existing documents or spreadsheets, and then add viewers or collaborators.

Task 1G: Explore and Utilize GoogleDocs and Spreadsheets

Part One: Your instructor will invite you to a pre-prepared spreadsheet that has each person's name in the first column and some additional information for you to fill in, for example "alma mater", "years teaching", and "favorite line from a movie". After you have filled in your row, you can add a title for the next column.

Part Two: In this next activity you will create an online document, invite a collaborator, and work on it online simultaeously.

  1. Get into groups of 3 to 5 people, one of which has used google docs and spreadsheets before.
  2. Each person should go to google.com and sign in (or create a new account if you don't have one) on a separate computer.
  3. Get to the "my account" page and then click on Docs and Spreadsheets if it is listed and skip to the next numbered step.
  4. If Docs and Spreadsheets is not listed under My Services, click on "more" under "Try Something New" towards the bottom of the page, then find "Docs and Spreadsheets" in the second column and click on it. Return to your accounts page then to the Docs and Spreadsheets page.
  5. One person in your group should create a new document and nter some information. For example, a story starter.
  6. Click on the "Share" tab and enter the email addresses (gmail addresses work best) of the rest of the people in your group (a comma and one space between names)
  7. Those people should now have your document in their Docs and Spreadsheets page. If not, they may need to check their email for an invitation
  8. As each person joins the doucment, they can each add more content to your document. For example, one could add descriptive details and another could add dialog.
  9. Be aware that Docs and Spreadsheets can be uploaded from existing Word of Excel documents, or even exported from Google to your local machine.

 

Module 1.5 Sample Multimedia Projects

EWYL Project Pages

Task 1H: View and Evaluate Multimedia Projects

View and briefly discuss project samples shown by instructors.
Independently, you may view more examples.
search our KCI database of project descriptions
Search our old Campusgrid project page:
http://linc.ca.campusgrid.net/home/Curriculum_Projects
My eCoach's eLibrary
Use the CA Media Festival rubric and discuss the quality of the projects.

Project Search

Task 1I: Project Search - Get Ideas for your Project Plan

Continue your exploration of EWYL Projects: Curriculum_Projects

Also explore ThinkQuest, WebQuests and SCORE.

Look for projects that are similar to the one you are contemplating. If you are working with a partner on your project, you may want to do this with your project partner.

Be sure to bookmark any sites you find that you think will be useful later in your My eCoach My Locker.

ThinkQuest

ThinkQuest www.thinkquest.com is all about students thinking and learning together.
Students work in teams to create the best educational websites and compete for exciting prizes, including a trip to ThinkQuest Live, an educational extravaganza celebrating their achievements.
Sponsored by the Oracle Education Foundation, the competition offers a unique project-based learning experience to students and teachers around the world.

WebQuests

In education, a WebQuest is a research activity in which students collect information, where most of the information comes from the World Wide Web. It was first invented by Bernie Dodge in 1995. Visit www.webquest.org.

According to the original paper by Dodge, a WebQuest is "an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing."

Usually, the quest is divided in the following sections:

  • Introduction
  • Task
  • Process
  • Evaluation
  • Conclusion
  • Teacher Page

Students typically complete WebQuests in groups. Each student in each group typically has a "role," or specific area to research. WebQuests often take the form of role-playing scenarios, where students take on the personas of professional researchers or historical figures.

The WebQuest is valued as a highly constructivist teaching method, meaning that students are "turned loose" to find, synthesize, and analyze information in a hands-on fashion, actively constructing their own understanding of the material. WebQuests' focus on group work also makes them popular examples of cooperative learning.

Score

http://www.score.k12.ca.us

Schools of California Online Resources for Education - This site provides links to quality Internet resources and teacher-developed lessons. Supporting California's content standards, over 3,000 web resources are searchable by grade level or topic. Lesson acivities include projects, electronic field trips, discussion groups, and more.

Module 1.6 - Project Plan and Project Search

  • What is Meant by the Real World
  • Basic Principles to Keep in Mind for Creating Real World Projects
  • Searching For Real World Project Ideas
  • Project Planning Template

What is Meant by Real World

Have you ever taken a class during which you have asked yourself, “When will I ever need to know this again in my life?” Have you ever had a student ask you, “Why do I have to learn this?” Engaged learners do not ask these questions.
One of the best ways to engage students in learning is to create projects that have an obvious real world connection. “Real World” will vary by grade level and the interests of the students.
These projects can be:

  • Community service projects
  • Real scientific research that is shared with experts and others
  • Creation of a usable product
  • Pursuit of a strong personal interest
  • Connecting abstract principles to real world activities
  • Personal growth and improvement
  • Family genealogy and history
  • Caring for others
  • Collaborating with and sharing information with others
  • Preparing to teach a concept to others
  • Creating a product that has value to others.
  • Connecting learning to the student’s lives or personal interests

Simulations are great real world projects because they force students to create potentially real scenarios.
The following web sites are examples of real world simulations:

  • City Building Education - City Building as a Model, Doreen Nelson
  • Science Videos - Science Fair Projects
  • iEarn - Some projects are designed to help students really make a difference in the world. iEarn has real world projects that teachers can join (for a fee) that allow students to help people in need.

Digital Storytelling is another great real world connection for projects. The following sites are good resources for digital storytelling:

Projects that connect students with experts in the field are powerful real world projects. Some of these projects include:

  • Project Exploration connects students with paleontologists in the field.
  • The Jason Project was started by Dr. Robert Ballard who discovered the Titanic. Each year Dr. Ballard takes a team of research scientists to a different location to study environmental issues. The Jason Project connects classrooms with these scientists through a multidisciplinary curriculum. (Local chapter is JASON@Ames - NASA Ames.)

Another way to think about real world is structure your classroom or project as a company.
Story Centered Learning
School to Career

Basic Principles to Keep in Mind for Creating Real World Projects

  1. Students of all ages can conduct real, first hand research and create meaningful real products utilizing available technology in the same way adults use technology in their jobs.
    See these projects for examples of real world projects done by elementary students:

    See these projects for secondary real world project examples:

  2. Technology is best learned when there is a real need to learn. Students and teachers learn best when they need to create a product.
  3. We must be careful not to create a technological underclass:

In 1998 the US Dept of Commerce's report on the digital divide pointed out that Hispanic, Black and Native American families are far less likely to have a telephone, much less an Internet connection than other ethnic groups in America, and that schools in poverty areas were less likely to access to computers, the Internet or high quality educational technology programs. This is particularly true in rural and urban areas.

  • In the San Francisco Bay Area 41% of households with an income of less that $40,000 have Internet access at home while 81 % of households with an income of $80,000 or more have online access at home.
  • These disenfranchised groups are being left behind in the digital economy while right here in Silicon Valley Joint Venture's workforce study shows that there is a 31-77% gap between jobs and potential employees in the high tech industries.
  • Once thought to be the great equalizer, information technologies, according to James Katz in the Markle Foundations funded study, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
  • When students work in interest groups, age and ability differences are not a barrier, but an asset to.
  • When projects have a direct connection to the real world (real audience, real product, solve real problems) students are more likely to be intrinsically engaged in learning.
  • Helping students to make the connection between the real world and learning is at the heart of the constructivist theories of Jean Piaget, Seymour Papert, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and John Dewey.

http://curriculum.calstatela.edu/faculty/psparks/theorists/501const.htm

McTighe and Wiggins in their book Understanding by Design* discuss curricular priorities in terms of enduring understandings, important to know and do, and worth being familiar with. The real world connections are directly related to enduring understandings. They go “beyond discrete facts or skills to focus on larger concepts, principles, or processes.” (McTighe and Wiggins Chapter 1*)

According to a book review by Bobby Matherne ©1999 in “A Reader’s Journal” of The Process of Education by Jerome Bruner, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1963:

“The goal he (Bruner) offers is to tie the knowledge into a structure that both makes it both worth knowing and usable in areas beyond the learning situation.

Review the projects in the Real World Connections Activity # 8 for rich examples of projects that have a powerful real world connection. Things to do when you set up collaborative groups:

SEARCHING FOR REAL WORLD PROJECT IDEAS

To Do:

The Web is full of many projects and educational resources that can help you, inspire you, or give you ideas you can adapt to fit the needs of your students and your multimedia project idea. Take time to explore the following links, or to do a web search on your topic. Look for projects that have real world connections for real audiences. Use this chart to help you keep track of and evaluate these resources:

Project Planning Template

This Project Planning Template is modified from the ASTL Planning Model.

Additional resources for planning a project (based on Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project are available on a Project Based learning CD from WestEd.

This is a suggested framework for your plan.

  1. Name of Project.
  2. Partners, if you are working with a partner or partners
  3. Rationale. (Why is the project important or worthwhile?)
  4. Enduring Understanding(s)
  5. Major Goal(s) and Associated Standards.
  6. Specific Objectives (approximately 3-5. These should be based on goals. Objectives are measurable and require action verbs such as will do, will perform, will demonstrate, etc. Objectives tell who will do what, to what degree, by when, and how you will know the objective is accomplished).
  7. Assessment Strategies (How will you know when your objectives have been met? How will you continually adjust and improve this project what it is in progress?)
  8. What is the Real World Connection?
  9. How will technology be integrated into this project?
  10. Collaboration
    • How will you create collaborative groups?
    • How many students will be in each collaborative group?
    • How will you determine student rolls for the collaborative project teams?
    • How will students work with their partners or the project team?
  11. Project's Activities and Timeline. (See information on Inquiry Based Learning and Gagne’s Events of Instruction—Module 2)
    (What will the students do and by when)?
    • How will you assess prior knowledge?
    • What decisions will you and any teachers with who you are partnering make?
    • What decisions will your students make?
    • First milestone or short-term goal?
    • Tasks to accomplish this milestone (Who will do what by when)
    • Second milestone or short term goal
    • Tasks to accomplish this milestone (Who will do what by when)
    • Additional milestones (Continue to plan each milestone using the who will do what by when model.
    • Final product
    • What will it be?
    • When will it be due?
    • How will you "publish" student work?
    • How will students share what they did with others?
    • How will you celebrate your success?
  12. What are the main innovative features of your project?
  13. Target Population and Number of Participants.
  14. Estimated Timeline. (Again, see information on Gagne’s Events of Instruction and Inquiry Based Learning—Pages 56-60)
    (When should each stage of the project take place?)
  15. Estimated Budget.
    • Cost of additional tools necessary to successfully complete the project
    • Proposed method of getting funding for this project (if needed)
    • How you might do this project if no funds are available.
  16. iographical information (Yourself and your partner(s))
  17. Concerns you have about this project.
  18. What kind of ongoing support do you envision needing to be successful?
  19. Student Directions (http://webquest.sdsu.edu/)
    • The Introduction orients students and captures their interest.
    • The Task describes the activity's end product.
    • The Process explains strategies students should use to complete the task.
    • The Resources are the Web sites students will use to complete the task.
    • The Evaluation measures the results of the activity.
    • The Conclusion sums up the activity and encourages students to reflect on its process and results.

Module 1.7 Relevant Issues

These are articles discussing important issues we face as educators in our technological world. They are challenges that we strive to overcome as we learn to use technology and its benefits to improve the learning environment.

More Articles: these need annotation (perhaps in GoogleNotebook)

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