It is finished....The end of Capstone

Just as JC said, it is finished, so to is the Capstone course that I am taking.  Writing this blog post is the final activity I have to do for the course, assuming my portfolio is approved.  I think it will be.  Looking back on my experiences, if I were going to redesign it here is what I would do. 

• Do a better job of getting participants to begin planning for their portfolios in the introduction course.  Everything I did in intro, I couldn't use for Capstone I or II. 
• Increase the time of the Intro class and shift some of the work from Capstone I into the Intro class.  I found Capstone I to be the most work intensive of all three courses. 
• Change the way the portfolios are done so that Capstone I creates about half of the Capstone II portfolio at the proficient level.  Then have the Capstone II class finish the portfolio.  
• Figure out how to have better discussion prompts that actually lead to discussion rather than people posting information.   
• Cut down on the busy work and increase the challenging cognitive thinking work.  This course was way to repetitive in what they asked you to do.  I want a challenge, not busy work.    
• Put all the information for an assignment in ONE PLACE!!!!!!!  I went crazy having to read three different things to try and understand what was expected for all these assignments.  
• If it is important, make sure it is in a rubric.  I had a couple of instances where I lost points because I failed to do something that was not listed in the rubric.  
• Require facilitators to have grades submitted by a certain time or students get an automatic A.  I had a professor do that with a class once.  I think its a fair exchange.  I had some issues with a facilitator and grades in Capstone I.  
• I am still waiting to find out what the difference is between Personalization and Customization.  In the world of education those two are pretty much the same thing.  
• I would make sure that all the links work properly, BEFORE sending students to them.  
• I would also pick either an ITRT type indivual or a teacher and design the course more towards them.  This course squence seems to see-saw back and forth between the two making it more challenging.     
• Finding better articles on technology integration.  Too many articles I read had a great idea in the abstract, but did not provide the kind of practical examples that give me ideas on how to incorporate it into my own teaching. 

Ok a couple of things I did like about the course:

• I learned more about technology integration and the NETS-T/S
• The curb cut idea is a really good one.  See universal design in learning for more information. 
• Forcing us to blog has been good because I can look back on my posts and see learning taking place.  
• The discussion board rules are great.  Forcing people to actually say stuff that enhances the conversation rather than just agreeing.  Requiring a post by a certain time was also good.  It keeps the conversation moving.  Also, the idea that everyone has to have a response before you add a second comment to someones post.  That was another good idea.  
• I also liked how we were required to keep a digital bookmarking file.  I am going to keep using mine once I delete all the Capstone 1 or Capstone 2 tags. 
• The courses helped me bond with my new co-workers as we lamented the course and its work.

Final recommendation to people thinking about taking the Capstone course is to say its not worth it.  I would have been really mad if I had to pay to take these courses.   

Share the Wealth Presentation for Capstone II

This is a quick five minute video explaining what the Capstone Sequence is and what I learned from it.  I created it using PowerPoint and PhotoStory 3.  It highlights the positive aspects of the course. 

Yes it was a class project called Share the Wealth. 

I also want to take a minute to talk about some of the negative aspects of the Capstone sequence that I am almost finished with. 

1.  Repetitive busy work:  I felt like these courses repeated themselves with the work that they asked for between the three courses and with in the courses themselves.  The course felt like it was designed by committee.  I would have liked some more efficiency.    

2.  Poorly organized:  The course did a terrible job of putting everything you needed to know about an assignment in one place.  You had the directions from the course timeline, the rubrics, and then they syllabus.  I even had instances where points were taken away for something I had no idea needed to be included.  They have too much information spread out.  They need to consolidate.  

3.  Too dependent on the faciliator.  For two of my three courses I had an excellent facilitator who really helped to make these shortcomings less of an issue; however, for one of the courses I had a bad facilitator who only exacerbated these issues.  I think this course can be better designed to eliminate some of those issues.  

I don't think I will be recommending this course to other teachers.  Too much work for too little learning gain.  I got a better handle on technology integration in the classroom and the NETS-T from one 12 week course I took in graduate school than I did with this thirty week sequence.     

Capstone II Session 5

The theme for this session is Bloom's taxonomy.  For those of you who are not of the educational world, Bloom's taxonomy is six levels of cognitive thought moving from the low knowing and understanding something to creating and evaluating on the higher end.  I was asked to read an article entitled, "The New Bloom" by David Cochran and Jack Conklin with Susannah Modin.  It provided an overview of the updates to Bloom's taxonomy, the original was writen in the 1950s, and briefly touched on how the taxonomy needs to be connected with to technologies use in the classroom.

Next on the agendaI was a blog post from Steve Hargadon entitled, "Long handled spoons and Collaborative Technologies".  I really liked Steve's line of thinking about Web 2.0 tools and thought some of his inisights on early adopters and then company adopters of these technologies were very astute.  I agree whole heartedly that this new world is relying more and more on trust and authenticity.  I loved his line, "First of all, ideas have always been easy--it's the execution that is hard." because it is so true.  I am full of ideas, but executing those ideas, that is actually making them happen, is incredibly hard to do.  He follows that up with another astute observation, "I've also found that my really good ideas don't end up actually being really good without input from others."  He is actually making an arguement I have heard already from Seth Godin.  The idea of gathering together a "tribe" of people to create good works.  Seth's been promoting this idea for some time.  I am curious now if Steve is a reader of Seth's. 

The final article of this session was one called "Communication and Collaboration 2.0" by Anita McAnear.  Nothing shocking in this article.  She does make an interesting point that the two most valuable skills needed for our culture is what she calls collective intelligence or the ability to work with others in a smart fashion and negotiation. 

Comparing the two articles, I felt like Steve had a lot more interesting and creative ideas, whereas Anita was just kind of throwing some stuff out there in a short little one page article. 

Capstone II Session 3

Sometimes I wonder why I can't take a simple idea and turn it into a cash cow like the folks at Big6 did. The process they came up with is what most people go through anyway. They just managed to translate it into words and create a whole bunch of things to help students work through it.

Next up in this session was an article entitled, "Evaluating & Using Web Based Sources," by Glenn Bull, Gina Bull, Kara Dawson, and Cheryl Mason. It is a ten year old article that is already dating itself to some extent; however, it does include some interesting bits of information. One such bit of information was the process for evaluating web sources. It looks like this:

1. Identification of Potential Resources
2. Evaluation of Appropriate Resources
3. Integration into the Research Paper
4. Citation of the Resource
5. Verification by the Instructor

The article does not talk enough about focusing ones search for information on good sources rather than scouring the net for information. In today's internet its more about figuring out where to go to get information rather than trying to evaluate what comes up in a Google search (which the article does not even mention). I do like how this article breaks down the evaluation of a web source into three areas authority, domain, and consistency.

I had not really considered before how important it is for the teacher to back check all web based sources. I see how important it is to make sure students are citing good sources and to correc that if not; however, this adds a huge time burden to teachers already hectic schedules.

The next article, "Connecting Depth and Balance in Class," by Matthew Kuhn explored how educational technology is matching up with some traditional learning taxonomies.  Much to my surprise my own school district and team was mentioned as having partaken in the authors study on this subject.  This of course took place prior to my joining the team.  Basically his take is that technology is going to make it easier to teach across multiple intelligences and to address the variety of levels in Blooms taxonomy.  Nothing earth shattering in this article. 

Continuing through this session's reading list I found "The Personalization of Reading and Learning," by Tyler on the On Our Minds Blog on Scholastic's website.  The premise of the post is that the spread of technology is requiring schools to do more to customize individual learning experiences.  My issue with using this for a class, which my Capstone II course just did, is that it does not say anything else of relevance in the article. 

Hoping to find something more engaging and exciting I turned to "Personalized Learning Puts Students In A Class of Their Own," from the Science Daily website.  I am a HUGE supporter of the idea the article mentions when it says, "In fact, the image of classrooms as 'knowledge factories' has not changed much since the Industrial Revolution, despite the major advances in teaching methods that have occurred.  This model holds that teachers input information, pupils process it, and out comes the learning in neat little packages."  I would add that those neat little packages are grades.  The article even mentions how the shift to standardized curriculum makes it harder to offer personalized learning experiences.  After all that exciting introductory material things get decidedly less exciting as they begin explaining the iClass project.  As far as I can tell the project allows teachers to set goals, sub-goals, and suggested studies and then it sets the student free to meet them.  For an article on this project, it does a great job of not really telling you anything about it. 

So now I am left with the last article for the session.  Will it redeem the session or continue the trend of poor articles?  The article comes from the website Tech&Learning, which gives me hope.  The article is called "Creating a Technology Climate Where the Self-directed Learner is Nurtured," and it is written by Rickey Moroney.  As I began to read things were looking good.  The article was talking about how a teacher uses rubrics to help students self-evaluate their work as they progressed through a major project in a middle school social studies class.  I really liked the idea of assessing students understanding of the project itself.  It makes sense that for large complex projects students might not understand all that we ask of them.  I also like the way the author focuses on securing multiple sets of data to find answers to the questions he asks about how well is project is working.  While more detailed then necessary, I think this was a good practical example of how major projects can be effective teaching tools in the classroom.  With all such ideas, my only major concern is the time required to do something like this is significant and can possibly interfere with the need to cover a set amount of content prior to a high stakes test. 

As to the prompt that asks, "Is the iClass model from the ScienceDaily article a realistic model for the lesson you are creating?"  I say that the article did not provide enough information for me to model anything after it. 

The finaly question prompt says "What are realistic expectations for self-assessment by the students who will participate in the lesson you are designing?"  With the lesson I am designing I think the opportunities for reflection plus the voting at the end of the lesson will serve as good measures of self-assessment by the students. 
 

Capstone II Session 2 Reflection

In "Developing Metacognition" by Elaine Blakey and Sheila Spence talk about three basic metacognitive strategies. The first involves making connections between old knowledge and new knowledge. The second is the ability to select the right strategy when approaching a problem or situation. The third is being able to plan, monitor, and evaluate the thinking process. Then they present six strategies for utilizing metacognition. The first is to make a list of what you know and what you would like to find out at the onset of a particular research question. The second is having a discussion about the process of thinking. The third is to write about your thinking. The fourth is to give students the training necessary to help them plan and self regulate their learning exploration. The authors break out steps five and six into distinctive categories. Step five is debriefing and step six is self evaluation. Personally I think those two steps fall into the same category of evaluating how the process went. Nothing earth shattering in this article.

The next article was "High Tech Reflection strategies Make Learning Stick" by Suzie Boss. The article begins with a nice story of how blogging can be used as a tool for reflection and the positive impact it had on two students. Great idea I thought, but what were the details in its implementation. I don't know how that teacher used it in the classroom, so I don't really know how effective it might be in my classroom. Another idea mentioned in the article was to create a video confessional corner, like they have in reality tv, for students to use to record their thoughts on the how the learning process was going. I liked this idea, but had concerns about how some students might treat it. The article also mentioned some of the pitfalls of reflection, urging readers to stay away from rote responses and predictability. The article encouraged teachers to use thought provoking questions and to model reflection to the students. Overall, I liked how this article encouraged reflection and the added value that technology can bring to the process.

The third article was titled, "Students Thrive on Cooperation and Problem Solving" and it was written by Bob Pearlman. Bob starts this article off on the right foot by going right after NCLB and the idea that unlimited funding can help education in of themselves. He then moves on to say that problem based learning or PBL can help develop the skills necessary for students to succeed in the 21st century. For those of you unfamiliar with PBL it requires that students work together to answer complex questions about real world items. It also requires that students create something to show off what they learned in engaging the problem. I really like how this article mentions eight key standards to include in every project. These eight standards have students

1. work in teams to learn how to collaborate
2. take on critical problems to learn critical thinking
3. present what they find to learn oral communication
4. write to learn written communication
5. use technology to learn how to use technology
6. address global and real world issues to learn citizenship skills
7. do internships to learn about careers
8. research through the process of all of the above to learn content

Then the article channels some of my former professors ideas of multi-disciplinary projects. Then they talk about the need to do a better job of grading. Moving beyond the simple letter grade to reports that actually show how students are doing with various skills. I am encouraged to read that this form of learning is challenging to implement from a teaching stand point, but that it is necessary because the rest of the world is working hard to catch up to us.