Evaluation Studies of the impact of instructional technology

1. Moved Lisa’s comments to a post so people might notice it.

   I can’t figure out how to start an entry – so I’ll just comment on this one.

   I’ve been looking for Evaluation Studies of the impact of instructional technology and have found a few that are worth looking at. This is a major multi-year research study funded by the US Dept of Ed. that I found very interesting.
   Check it out: http://www.txtip.info/projectevaluation.html

   It’s a multi-year study of the Texas Technology Immersion Project. While the details of their technology implementation are different, it’s an example of what appears to be a very well-constructed evaluation. It might help give us some frame of reference for evaluating our initiatives here.

   Comment by Lisa Kissinger | September 25, 2008 <!– @ 7:53 pm –>| Edit
   

NBC News – Lights, Camera, Action, Using News Resources in the classroom.

Reasons to use NBC News archive (annual subscription required) One of the largest archive in the world.

Radio brodcast from the 1920’s and newsreels are included in the archive.
They are sorted by subject and level.

Currently thy have specialty collections on, African american studies, womens studies , etc. Developing Native American and Hispanic collections also.

Video Clips are correlated to state standards and you can browse lists by state standard. Students are watching reports that are primary documents. Transcripts are available for every clip.

With the presentation station rollout resources like this would be invaluable to our social studies teachers from 8th grade on.

Decision 08 setion – with clips current to the election including the political ads that air (and historic ads).
Lesson on analyzing political ads and compring past ads with present. (Daisy ad that aired only once during Johnson v. Goldwater(1964) :fear mongering example compare this ad to Hillary Clinton’s ad for 3am)

The child in the hillary comercial was shot 10 years previous and she is actually 18 and works for the oboma campaign and was interviewed on today and that is also in the archive.

Content areas and categories are updated daily. Most major stories are put into the archive by the next day.

When textbooks are published they are already a year out of date, this archive does not have that issue.

Class discussion based on relevance using video clips (ex: economics – using the current climate and clips from the news to explainhow economics affect kids life)

 

Alan Novemeber @ NECC

Attending his session at the National Educational Computing Conference thought I’d blog some notes to share with you.

Designing Rigorous and Globally Connected Assignments

- We need to have a paradigm shift in US education. We need to communicate globally using IM, Chat, blogs with students in other countries.

-We should have open ended exams where student can used all of the research resources on the web to complete their test rather than “closed book” test.

Both of these skills correlate to real world business skills that are desirable to international conglomerates.

 What you now say is heard round the world (Popes speech about new sins – caused global protests)
If you search google for turkish reaction to popes speech – all website results are from english websites by default. If you add site:tr you get only websites in turkey and their reaction. Our students use internet all the time but truly don’t know how to effectively search.

Step onemaking students globally relevant/employable
- teach our students how to use these tools more effectively

add view:timeline to Google search and it organizes results by recent results (for more up to date information)

Give students problems they need to find the answers to, not memorize the answers.

Check out free literacy sources from Alan novembers web site

Job #1 for students- Have a student in class be designated questioner(researcher) who look up answer in realtime for class.

Create custom search engines in google that students can access and only the results you choose are in that search engine. Faculty members should make these custom google search engine for their students.

Screencast podcast with screen captures to illustrate points. Screen cast has a cost to it (hosted like youtube) . Use camstudio to make the instructive video so kids can teach other kids with examples from prior years students. So kids could watch those video prior to learning it in class. Introduction of the content would be done by the students and children could review.

Job #2 for students- Curriculum design team – Students would prepare curriculum in a digital medium (podcast, dvd, video, etc) for students to use to learn and review material.

 Jing project is software to make visual conversation.

Students should go to Instructional Technology PD classes with teachers as they can learn the software/material with the teachers and provide aid when using the software.

 Battery just died on laptop (think it’s toast, so I had to take the rest of these notes with paper and a pen, ick!

We need to redesign the job description of children and learners.

All student work need to be stuff that other students will use. Kid created content they own the learning.

Job #4- (I know I missed three due to the power crisis) Official Scribe team

Student should work collaboratively when taking notes to accurately reflect what went on in class. A small group of students can use google docs to collaborate on daily/weekly notes for the class that other students can use to learn and review. This collaborative building of a document is an essential workplace skill.

“Too many kids are using their laptop as a$1,00 pencil”

Discussed sample of a 3rd grade classroom who wrote a wikipedia article on a local historical site that wasn’t already in the encyclopedia they then watched as people around the world added to and enhanced their original work each time discussing the changes that were made their value. (teacher added rss feed for article so she could see whenever changes were made.

 Job 5 or 6 Global collaborators – Used site kiva.org where people can loan money to people in the developing world. Connected the students donations to the culture they choose to donate to (tied to the curriculum) and to the financial aspects of investment and rate of return. This would work great with the 9th grade curriculum.

He then ran out of time before getting to the other roles of students and referred us to the article his presentation was on at november learining students as global contributors to see the example projects used in the presentation go to the live links sections

 

Conference is very hectic getting shut out of a lot of session that I would have like to attended. About to participate in the Promethean users forum for districts deploying promethean IWB’s. Will try to find an outlet and post an article about that.

 

 

What student’s want in the classroom?

Here is a link to an article in edutopia July/August 2007 issue where students were asked “What tech do YOU want to see in class?”

http://www.edutopia.org/student-opinions-classroom-technology

Other districts technology plans and committee resources

I’ve placed a sample district technology plan from the Rush Henrietta school district in the shared G drive > Instructional Services > Office of Instruction > District Technology Committee.  As our committee progresses we will put any other files created/used by the committee into this folder. If you do not have access please email me here:  John Bullington