Teaching skills with a purpose

This week I spent some time in direct instruction with my students on specific PowerPoint skills (Word outlines, slide master, action buttons, and animations). Teaching these skills without a real purpose for using them would have been a waste of time.

One of the things that I have come to realize during this research project is that there must be a real purposeful reason to learn the skills and then opportunities to use them. There are other skills in PowerPoint that I don't cover - such as how to convert a slideshow to a webpage. We aren't going to be posting them online and that's not really how most people use PowerPoint - so why teach it?

I am looking back at my former scope and sequence of skills and re-evaluating some of the skills I used to teach. Yes it is nice to learn how to do a pivot table in Excel, or hanging indents in Word or automatic slide advance in PowerPoint - but if there is no real reason to learn it and use it - how can I think that the students will ever really "learn" this skill and retain the information?

Wouldn't it be better to teach them how to learn than trying to cram "everything" they should know about using a piece of software - one that will eventually change anyway?

Cycle Three Plans

During the next cycle I will continue to provide lessons where the students create authentic projects for authentic audiences – but students will have more choice during this cycle.

After reviewing the National Technology standards for students and my scope and sequence of skills, I determine that students still exposure to more desktop publishing skills (columns, section breaks, drop cap, customized borders) but also review some general paragraph formatting skills (indents, before/after spacing, styles, and outlines). My plan is to list these technology skills for the students and give them some options on how we can use them in a project and let them decide as a class how to demonstrate their understanding. Some of the options will be: a class newspaper, a basic website, Word tutorials, etc. By allowing students to choose the format of their project I am hoping to increase ownership and engagement in learning.

We have not covered any PowerPoint skills this semester so the final capstone project of the term will be an integrated PowerPoint and Excel project. Students will be given the opportunity to choose any educational topic that is of interest to them and one that they could teach their classmates about. First they will determine prior knowledge by designing an Excel survey about their topic. Once they have collected that information, students will design an interactive PowerPoint presentation on their chosen topic. Direct instruction of the following PowerPoint skills will be covered: opening a Word outline in PowerPoint, creating a slide master, custom animation, action buttons, and adding sound or video to PowerPoint. Each PowerPoint project from the class will be linked together on a main project so all students can view each other’s projects.

The final days of class instruction will incorporate a “Choose your own Techventure” time – where students can pick any type of technology that we have at school and work individually or in groups to explore the software tools.

Mail Merge

Today students finished their mail merge letters. Students had the choice to write a letter in support or against Oregon House Bill 2650 - the removal of junk food in public schools -or- a letter about reducing lunch waste and incorporating a lunch recycling program at schools.

After conducting our own analysis of our school lunches and researching these two topics, students wrote their 1st drafts. Working in partners, the drafts were edited using "track changes" and finalized. Students looked up addresses for Oregon Senate leaders and editors of local newspapers. These addresses were inputed on a Google shared spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was exported for anyone to use.

I demonstrated the format of a full-block business letter. Students began the steps of the mail merge and added the appropriate "fields" in the letter. Using the mail merge helper allowed students to preview their letters before merging. The final letters were printed, signed, envelopes were addressed and mailed.

My goal in doing the letter campaign was to give students an authentic reason for learning how to write a formal business letter and to learn the steps of a mail merge letter. One student summed up his feelings, "I don't know if my letter will make any difference but at least they know how us teenagers feel".

Cycle Two begins - What's For Lunch?

Today I began the second unit for my Action Research Project. The title is: What's the lunch? The idea is for the students to collect authentic data about what students at VCS eat for lunch and to use that data for further investigation with student projects.

The assignment for this week is:

• Choose four different lunches to evaluate on your assigned day.
  
• Take a photo of the lunch.
• Write down specifics about the lunch: day of the week, description of item, service size and costs (if hot lunch).
• Research the nutritional value of the lunch: calories, fats, and carbohydrates (g).
  
• We will determine costs of lunches brought from home in class.
  
• Log into Moodle or access the shared spreadsheet at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p_VM5beL2JAqn6doweazPfw to enter your data.
  

Before the students are asked to analyze the data in Excel, I will review basic formula writing with functions (sum, average, min, max, count) and then introduce 3 new functions (If, Countif, Sumif) with a skill lessons. This week I will observe students using Excel and use a rubric to determine whether the students can complete the first assignment by themselves, with assistance from a friend, or help needed from the teacher.

The lunch information will be entered into the shared spreadsheet and students will work with partners to analyze the nutritional content (calories, fat and carbohydrates), the cost of the lunch and evaluate the waste that is thrown away. Students will determine how to calculate the information in Excel and then individually make graphs that represent the data in a visual manner.

Next week, each student will design a one page poster related to the topic of nutrition, cost or waste. There will be specific formatting requirement for this project, but students can select the message and design.

Finally, students will choose one of two projects to share with the community. They have the choice to do these projects by themselves or with one partner. The first one is to write a letter to the editors of three newspapers explaining their opinion on one of the topics: nutrition, cost or waste. Students who choose this project will use “track changes” for peer evaluation and learn how to set up a mail merge for their letters.

The second option is to create a simple podcast voicing their opinion on one of the three topics: nutrition, cost or waste. The podcasts will be posted to the school Intranet website. Students who choose this project will use “track changes” for peer evaluation of their script and learn how to edit an audio recording with Audacity.

Students will continue to blog about their progress and write private journal entries to the teacher.

That's the plan!

Observation - Take this project seriously ...

The Problem:
Whenever I need to tell a student to "take their project seriously - this isn't entertainment" I know that the student IS NOT engaged in an authentic project. Too often I see my students "having fun" with their assignments. To me this means that they are bored with the assignment and as a way to entertain themselves they add silly or humerous aspects to their projects as a way to engage their friends to look at their projects.

The Assignment:

The students could choose between two concepts for their final project in Computer Applications class:

• One was to create an original business and make a business plan and use PowerPoint to describe the various aspects of the business. The technical skills included: Using the slide master to create an original template, integrating Word outlines and PowerPoint, using a variety of layouts to include charts, diagrams, and text, and basic animations. The content focus was to write in a persuasive way to accuarate describe the business and engage the reader to explore the various aspects of the business.
• The other project choice was to create a PowerPoint to review course material from another class to help students prepare for their final exams. The technical skills included: Using the slide master to create an original template, integrating Word outlines and PowerPoint, using a variety of layouts to include charts, diagrams, and text, and basic animations. The content focus was on explaining (and/or testing) content material in a clear and accurate manner.

Students were encouraged to make the PowerPoint presentations engaging and interactive by using "action buttons" in the presentation so that the view was actively engaged in moving through the project instead of passively sitting back and watching the presentations.

The Results:
Students who chose the course review project seemed to take the assignment more seriously than the students who "made up" the business plan. Their projects were focused on the content material and their goal was to make a presentation that would actually help a classmate review for the upcoming final exam. Many also included short quizzes that asked the student to choose the correct answer.

Two of the students who made the business plan had to change their original idea because the business they chose wasn't appropriate for the project.

While most of the students liked their business topics and were engaged in their PowerPoint topic, I felt that several students thought the assingment was silly and did not seem engaged in their project. It wasn't until the end of the assignment and students went around to each other's computers to view the projects that some students commented that some projects were better than others because they had a purpose or were well made.

One student in particular engaged many students in his project because of the high-interest topic (a travel business that focused on James Bond movies) and the visual "eye candy" of his presenations (music, video and photos from the movies).

Conclusion:
This outcome of these projects has shown me that students NEED an authentic audience in projects otherwise the students don't see the purpose or value in what they are doing. Even though the assignment was a simulation - it still felt "fake" - and the some of the students were not engaged in the project or they were engaged but the quality of the project was poor.

The challenge is to create open-ended projects that are authentic, but still at the same time meet the technology goals of the class.

Observation - Class Survey Planning

Thursday: Data Collection & Charts - authentic audience

Objective: Students will design a survey to gather information about their classmates. This information will then be graphed and placed on the school Intranet website.

Day 1 Procedures:

1. Students were broken into groups according to grade level. They discussed which information they are interested in gathering.
2. Once they chose a topic, they opened Excel and decided a format for gathering their data.
3. Students printed off data gathering spreadsheets.
4. Students have until Monday to collect data from theirclassmates (minimum: 30 responses)
   

Day 1: Observations

1. # of Groups: 2 freshmen, 1 sophomore, 1 junior, 3 senior (2 absent)
   
2. The students immediately were engaged in the activity.
   
3. It did not take long for the groups to decided on a topic.
   
4. Several commented they liked the idea of publishing their results on the Valiant Pride Intranet site.
5. In two of the groups, it seemed like several of the students were engaged and one student wasn't as involved in the planning of the survey.
6. Three groups needed direction in setting up of their data spreadsheets.
   
7. All students left with data sheets for the surveys by the end of the period.