Group items tagged

(Week 9: Tolulope Oladipo and Michelle Bear) This is a journal article that is available in Diigo. The link to the article is also provided below: The Real Versus the Possible: Closing the Gaps in Engagement and Learning. Retrieved from https://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/books/educating-net-generation/real-versus-possible-closing-gaps-engagement-and-learning. This article explores the generations of learners, how we can utilize technology in learning, the discovery of education community and learning science. The authors discussed further educational Goals about learning, improving student's success, engagement and learning through people to people interaction, people and tools, using information technology device as a vehicle by which concepts are presented (such as using simulations, and animations), using collaboration and rich media communication to promote interaction an engagement. The author discusses how access to technology determines generation of learners, such as the Net generation. According to the authors, many students in the K-12 and post-secondary education do not have adequate access to advanced instructional technologies or the web. Despite the engagement created by technology-enabled interactive instruction, many students, teachers, do not have the requisite experiences. The authors went further that internet resources are not yet fully integrated into the day-t0-day classroom routine. The authors cited a finding that proposed that motivation is a key factor to learning, and that engagement and learning can be achieved through competency and control, curriculum, instruction, the organization, management of the schools and the environmental conditions. Furthermore, according to the authors, the Board on Children, Youth and Families 2004 National report recommended that we can keep young people in school and making learning worthwhile by forming a good connection between learners and the context in which learning occurs. We sh

Week 8: In our Data Action meeting we discussed intructional strategies involving simulation and games. This article explain some advantages and fears for educators implementing games into their lesson plans. Matthew Farber Social Studies Teacher, Ed Tech Leadership EdD Candidate, Author In the fall of 2014, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop (a nonprofit founded by Sesame Street creator Joan Ganz Cooney) assessed the impact of the gaming in school settings.

Initially, I was very hesitant to buy into learning through online games. I know that children today spend so much time in front of screens, and I didn't want to contribute to this obsession (for some children it does border on that). I did see that BrainPop, a site which I use frequently, introduced GameUp and Spotify. I figured if BrainPop was okay with gaming for learning, then I had to give it a try. Well, my students will now beg for BrainPop and will do evey activity, quiz and graphic organizer associated with a lesson in order to get to sortify. What a great tool. I am now a firm believer.

I too see the benefits of using these online games within instruction. The games provide students with a means of engagement that we often struggle to provide students. With the growth of technology, students are becoming more in-tune with new technology and are using it more often at home. By connecting technology to instruction, we are able to meet them in the middle. There are so many tools available online that it's a shame not to use them!

From the abstract: "This article presents a reflective case study analysis of an attempt to enhance student learning through the introduction of student-centred teaching methods in a masters-level social research methods subject. The introduction of a range of specific techniques, including case study teaching, problem based learning, groupwork, role-play and simulation, is reflected upon. The article concludes that the re-orientation of the curriculum toward student-centredness in this case had a positive effect on student performance, learning experience and subject evaluation. In particular, the use of student-centred techniques facilitated a strong social context for learning, and provided students with a common experiential framework from which to explore the technical aspects of the curriculum. However, the analysis also found that students continued to place value on more formal teaching methods, and that the value of student-centred techniques in this case rested in the way in which they were integrated with more didactic teaching practice"

Student Engagement The video is appropriate for grade 9-12 and it covers social studies literacy. Moreover, the video provides strategies that educators can employ to challenge, engage and empower students. This is done by introducing students to topics that affect them every day. This is a good instructional tactics that can be employed by my team. During our review, we realized the important of student's engagement and team work to learning and understating the topics in the assessment data that we reviewed. Having students work in groups and on projects goes a long way to improve collaboration, team building and learning among students. In addition, students were given complex topics to explore and they were introduced to research paper. Educators can use the protocol to determine the level of engagements, design innovative curriculum and instructions, and increase students strategic reasoning skills. For instance, educator may use some assessment tool like quizlet live to build collaborative learning and engagement among students. Student can become innovative through learning from the real-world related concepts or hands-on activities. The protocol can serve as blue print in this regard.

(Week 7: Michelle and Tolu) http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.umuc.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=537ab470-df86-45e4-b0e1-6a514e8ff2f5%40pdc-v-sessmgr05 This journal article is accessible through the link given above by accessing the UMUC library. This article reviews the literature relevant to games and simulation pedagogy in higher education. Two researchers collaborate to apply a qualitative method, coding and synthesizing the results using multiple criteria. The main objective is to study the impact of games and simulations with regard to achieving specific learning objectives. The article indicates that simulations have a positive impact on learning goals. The researchers identify three learning outcomes when integrating games into the learning process: cognitive, behavioral, and affective. This article can further instructional practices by providing g rationale for integrating simulations in academic curricula. Among the many reasons for including simulations in the classroom: they facilitate the transfer of knowledge, stimulate greater student engagement, and strengthen social development of students (Vlachopoulos & Makri, 2017). The article helps to ensure that the simulation is thoughtfully and deliberately introduced to minimize confusion and demonstrate how the simulation will reinforce course goals or objectives. References Vlachopoulos, D., & Makri, A. (2017). The effect of games and simulations on higher education: a systematic literature review [Entire issue]. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-017-0062-1

(week 9: Jason Caputo and Ericka Posey) This article is accessible via jstor from the link above and can also be searched from the title via UMUC library. This article discusses research on online communities and the interaction between L2 (language learners) with L1 (native) speakers. It examines the benefits of participation in these communities as part of the learning experience. The research in the article supports the use of authentic experiences, even online, as a driver of language acquisition and student motivation to improve. Authentic experiences like those found online fill a gap in typical learning environments by giving cultural and linguistic context to communication. Though you may not teach a language or be able to include online communities directly into your course material, this article highlights the need to expand your instruction outside the four walls of your classroom. Provide opportunities for learning and assessment that reflect student interests and real world situations. The more student interests are taken into account, the greater their passion for learning. The more reflective of real world experiences, the deeper the learning experience. Thorne, S. L., Black, R. W., & Sykes, J. M. (2009). Second Language Use, Socialization, and Learning in Internet Interest Communities and Online Gaming. The Modern Language Journal, 93, 802-821. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2009.00974.x

Videos: EL Education provides a variety of educational resources for teachers across the world. This bookmarked section includes videos of teachers and students engaged in a variety of strategies for learning. One or more of these videos could be helpful as a strategy to include in your data action plan.

A great educational site with video and resources for teacher to help enhance teaching and learning across difference disciplines.

EDTC615 Fall2018 Group 6 Dimension: Student Engagement. The video EL Education- Policing in America: Using Powerful Topics and Tasks to Challenge, Engage, and Empower Students. Student Engagement. My SMART Learning goal is that "The percentage of students who will score 90% will increase by 80%. This means that 80% of the students will score 90%.". The dimension is Student Engagement. The video is appropriate for grade 9-12 and it covers social studies literacy. Moreover, the video provides strategies that educators can employ to challenge, engage and empower students. This is done by introducing students to topics that affect them every day. This is a good instructional tactics that can be employed by my team. During our review, we realized the important of student's engagement and team work to learning and understating the topics in the assessment data that we reviewed. Having students work in groups and on projects goes a long way to improve collaboration, team building and learning among students. In addition, students were given complex topics to explore and they were introduced to research paper. Educators can use the protocol to determine the level of engagements, design innovative curriculum and instructions, and increase students strategic reasoning skills. For instance, we may use some assessment tool like quizlet live to build collaborative learning and engagement among students. Student can become innovative through learning from the real-world related concepts or hands-on activities. The protocol can serve as blue print in this regard. EDTC615 Fall2018

This article provides multiple different strategies for helping students in social studies learn new vocabulary. The article divides these strategies into categories and discusses the importance of activating students prior knowledge before focusing on new social studies vocabulary words.

This article focuses on how a multi-strategy approach can assist students in learning new social studies content vocabulary. The article provides a case study that includes three groups of students which focused on different methods of vocabulary acquisition. The article notes that a multi-strategy approach is the best for assisting students in learning new vocabulary.

One of the things I found interesting was "students first learned to ask important questions about the text to guide their thinking and then used questions to help them develop a main-idea statement for a short section of text. They then learned to combine several main idea statements into a longer summary with the aid of a graphic organizer." These strategies were taught and practiced for six weeks at a time, before a new one was introduced.

This article gives proactive teaching strategies to use for all ELL learners regardless of their proficiency level. It even provides a checklist that ELL students can use independently.

"Reading Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners," by Colorin Colorado. Type of post: Strategies (in a sort of blog)…. This is a very good read for ESOL/ELL instructors. For one thing, it discusses some of the reading comprehension skills that can be taught and applied on a daily basis. Among them: * Summarizing * Sequencing * Inferencing * Comparing and contrasting * Drawing conclusions * Self-questioning * Problem-solving * Relating background knowledge * Distinguishing between fact and opinion * Finding the main idea, important facts, and supporting details Further, the article talks about why reading comprehension skills are particularly important for ELLs: "English language learners (ELLs) often have problems mastering science, math, or social studies concepts because they cannot comprehend the (language in) textbooks for these subjects. ELLs at all levels of English proficiency, and literacy, will benefit from explicit instruction of comprehension skills along with other skills." As an ESOL teacher (and support co-teacher), I can definitely relate to this notion. The article also discusses "Classroom strategies: Steps for explicitly teaching comprehension skills." Most ESOL teachers know that a lot of work on comprehension strategies; identifying important vocabulary; effective "partnering"; and other crucial steps mean the difference between having their ESOL students comprehend an important or main idea, versus having them suffer through difficult texts. (Even many so-called "native speakers" are often not good readers, and stand to gain a lot from instructional strategies outlined in this article. [If you took so-called "reading/literacy courses" to receive your teaching certification in any particular state, this will be clear to you.])

"Reading Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners," by Colorin Colorado. Type of post: Strategies (in a sort of blog)…. This is a very good read for ESOL/ELL instructors. For one thing, it discusses some of the reading comprehension skills that can be taught and applied on a daily basis. Among them: * Summarizing * Sequencing * Inferencing * Comparing and contrasting * Drawing conclusions * Self-questioning * Problem-solving * Relating background knowledge * Distinguishing between fact and opinion * Finding the main idea, important facts, and supporting details Further, the article talks about why reading comprehension skills are particularly important for ELLs: "English language learners (ELLs) often have problems mastering science, math, or social studies concepts because they cannot comprehend the (language in) textbooks for these subjects. ELLs at all levels of English proficiency, and literacy, will benefit from explicit instruction of comprehension skills along with other skills." As an ESOL teacher (and support co-teacher), I can definitely relate to this notion. The article also discusses "Classroom strategies: Steps for explicitly teaching comprehension skills." Most ESOL teachers know that a lot of work on comprehension strategies; identifying important vocabulary; effective "partnering"; and other crucial steps mean the difference between having their ESOL students comprehend an important or main idea, versus having them suffer through difficult texts. (Even many so-called "native speakers" are often not good readers, and stand to gain a lot from instructional strategies outlined in this article. [If you took so-called "reading/literacy courses" to receive your teaching certification in any particular state, this will be clear to you.]) Colorado, C. Reading Comprehension Strategies for English ... - LD OnLine. Retrieved March 31, 2018, from http://www.ldonline.org/article/14342/ L

My Data Learning Team is looking at an area in which a class struggles. While the students are older than in this study, it's sometimes good to go back and look at other possible stresses on the student.

PebbleGo is an early childhood research base for young children learning to read. Information is child friendly and includes many pictures and videos to enrich student learning. PebbleGo has a read aloud feature that allows text to be read to the audience, if necessary. It also has online games relating to topics on PebbleGo and printable resources. This resource requires login information and can be purchased as a subscription by an entire school.

Pebble Go is an excellent online resource for student reserach. This site is divided up by category of science, social studies, and biographies. Students use this interactive website to learn about different academic content areas. For each topic, readings, videos, games, and audio recordings are provided. This allows students of all ability levels to be able to access the information and understand the content. My students love this site as it is a great starting point for any reserach project!

Dimension: Depth of Knowledge Rating: 3 This article is a good example of how to collaborate and learn from peer to peer. I like this exercise because it would allow students to apply words to topics for understanding what is necessary to build an essay. This could be used for group#4 action plan and a good tool to support my team's SMART Goal achievement for improving their writing proficiency for the 5th grade students because it focus on decreasing their English language barriers so they are able to reach their WIDA exiting level of 4.4. With practice students will be able to remember what they are learning so that they are able to break the text and understand what they mean in order to write. Scaffolding would be a good way to get to the bottom of improving in the English language.

Great video! It directly addresses many issues ESL/ELL teachers have in reaching their students, and in helping them make sense of complex texts (like the one mentioned here from 'The Washington Post') and other readings. (Again, as I often mention, if you have taken 'reading literacy' courses for your state teaching certification, you know that newspapers like 'The Post' are designed for students with grade 12+ reading ability.) For ESL/ELL learners, this is especially difficult. In the school featured here, 27% are ESL learners in a "blended" classroom in a Portland, Maine middle school. It appears that the social studies teacher and the ESL support teacher work effectively in tandem, helping students to be "close readers," and focusing on students themselves as those responsible for their own learning. The teachers use excellent ESL/FL strategies such as "pacing and pausing," "reading aloud," "sharing with partners," and so forth. ESL/ELL learners work together with their mainstream counterparts, and the process seems to work quite well. I like their approach ('Reading, Thinking, Talking, Writing') here. With proper teacher guidance, this puts the burden on the students to come up with their own interpretations of the text/s they are reading. From the 'Planning and Protocol Rubric': hitting '4s' on most dimensions, except for perhaps 'Technology Integration' (not entirely evident). Otherwise, students are expected to perform at a very high level. My SMART Learning Goal: After three weeks of targeted instruction--and in concert with the content-area teacher--75% or more of our students will score at least one point higher on their ESOL RELA and ESOL math assessments. Targeted instruction, based on the requirements of the 'Action Plan Tracking Sheet,' closely hews to what is going on in this video.

This guide provides key steps to encouraging buy-in and safety in your school while setting up social media to advance student learning in the classroom. If you are interested in Edutopia's other classroom guides, see http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-guides-downloads

Week 8: Group 2- James Sweigert, Sabrina Carey, Jennifer Freburger

This is a journal article accessible via the UMUC Library. The focus of this article is on a three-year study in which a focus group consisting of middle-schoolers were targeted. More specifically, this target group consisted of 123 students, all with disabilities from 12 different schools in the mid-west. The focus of this study was to compare these students willingness to show empathy, caring, and a willingness to intervene to help a victim of bullying with their academic test scores and report cards grades. This target group was compared to schools without the intervention plan. In the 12 target schools, the selected students participated in intervention lessons through the program "Second Step-Student Success Through Prevention". Our group, Group Two felt strongly connected to this article as two of us teach students with disabilities while all three of us are employed in the public school system where character traits such as empathy, caring, and a willingness to intervene to help a victim of bullying are taught through advisory lessons to ALL students. However, within our schools and counties there are no programs tracking data on the effectiveness of such lessons. This article is highly useful to our team because our Smart Target Goals all relate to increasing specific scores or improving behavior types. We will be using information discussed in this article within our current implementation period. For example, by applying an emphasis on This is a journal article accessible via the UMUC Library. The focus of this article is on a three-year study in which a focus group consisting of middle-schoolers were targeted. More specifically, this target group consisted of 123 students, all with disabilities from 12 different schools in the midwest. The focus of this study was to compare these students willingness to show empathy, caring, and a willingness to intervene to help a victim of bullying with their academic test scores and re

I like the ease of use of this software tool for a classroom setting. Since time is limited for a particular subject, this tool allows interaction, quizzing, gives helpful hints, provides short questions and answers that will hold students' attention, and at the same time provides geography statistics of the United States. Students can challenge themselves over and over for the quickness of the answers, and knowledge of the content. Technology can be overwhelming, so with limited time, I think software integration in a classroom should have ease of use.

Hi Sharon, This website provides multiple aspects in 1 site, which is very good for students to use. I could see myself using this tool when discussing more about where students live and finding more information about Maryland. The only con was that personally it was hard for me t navigate and find certain features. For students, they would definitely need more user-friendly tools. This is definitely a website that will save a lot of time and energy, and provide reinforcement of topics learned in social studies!

Hi Sharon, I took a look at the website and I agree that it is perfect for a classroom setting. Students can work together to complete the activities or the teacher can use the software to assist class lectures. The program is effective because it comes with a map and key visuals that would help students learn their geography. I took a quiz on the rivers/lakes/oceans and I didn't do very well, however I believe it was great practice, after a few attempts, I will be able to learn their names and locations. Great tool selection! Best, Denee Devenish

By using handheld technology tools, autistic students are given a learning boost and a social one.This supports students with learning needs because they can use it to communicate.

(Week 7: Amber, Angela, and Kenneth) This article is accessible through the link given above. The article discuss a research method that is based on student centered teaching rather than teacher centered teaching. The article displays the changes for a teacher design where the teacher leads every activity and shift the focus to the teacher become the facilitator. Instead of having large number in classes, small groups scenarios are shown to be more effective with students learning from their experiences rather than the teacher teaching all the knowledge and content. This shift looks as though it was a two year time span and shows some effective result where student centered teaching where student are active learners. Teachers can use this article to design and implement a different approach to teaching by empowering themselves to switch up the way they teach in the classroom. Instead of lecturing information, they should try to work with their student and create exercises where the student learn from each others and their experiences where the teachers are the facilitator. Barraket (2005) states that student centered approach promotes small group activities that will improve the response of pedagogical challenges of teaching social research methods (Barraket (2005). Reference Barraket, J. (2005). Teaching Research Method Using a Student-Centred Approach? Critical Reflections on Practice. Journal Of University Teaching And Learning Practice, 2(2), Retreived from http://www.eric.ed.gov.ezproxy.umuc.edu/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=EJ1059434