Google Shared Spreadsheets

In class today, my students accessed a Google shared spreadsheet that I set up for our What's for lunch? data collection. Each day this week different students are taking photos of four lunches of their classmates. Today I partnered them up to help each other with the data entry.

After teaching the class how to log in and access the spreadsheets - they began entering data. The student were completely engaged in the activity. They loved the fact that after everytime you entered a piece of data into the cell - the program automatically saved and updated everyone's page.

I observed:

• Students helping each other insert rows in the spreadsheet
  
• Students searching and finding nutrional data about food items
• Comments like: "This is so cool", "this is amazing".
• Students asking each other where they found their information.
  
• Students actively working on the assignment for over 40 minutes.

The novelty of the shared spreadsheet engaged the students in the activity and they completed most of the data entry during the class period. One student commented that she was going to finish up from home (another benefit of Google).

I was pleasantly surprised with their enthusiasm.

Engaged Students!!!

Friday was the first class period where I truly felt all of the student were engaged in the career unit. Some of my observations:

• Each student was working the entire period on one aspect of their project. Some were planning Powerpoints, some were making brochures, several were designing the look of the kiosk, several were looking for photos or video clips from unitedstreaming.com for their projects.
  
• There was a lot of questions and interactions among group members like:
• Does this look OK?
• Let's each find good photos of the careers we researched.
• I think we should videotape some people for our project.
• Can you help me make a hyperlink on this slide?
• You work on the brochure and I will design the poster board, ok?
• What is the address of our wiki with all of our ideas?
  
• We should have cookies or candy at our presenation to encourage people to come to our booth (love this one!)
  
• At the end of the period, one freshmen remarked, "Wow, I got a lot done today. This is fun".
  

To me it has felt like it has taken a long time for the engagement to happen. Here are some of the reasons I think why:

• It was a new semester of mixed age levels and it took a long time for the students to get comfortable talking with each other (perhaps because of the # of freshmen in class?)
• The research component took longer than I expected and some of the students had a hard time figuring out what information was important to collect.
  
• I should have waited and introduced the Excel component AFTER we started creating the kiosks. For many students, Excel was a new program and even though we completed a practice spreadsheet together, several were confused about how to set up their career data. I think their uneasiness about doing it "right" dimished their level of excitement about the project.
• It might have been better to save this unit until later in the semester when the students had a higher degree of technical skills. At first they seemed lost of how to make their kiosk project interactive and "student friendly". After I showed them some samples of Powerpoint games and simple videos, the students seemed eager to try them.
• The idea of presenting their career projects to other students might make some kids uncomfortable - resulting in less engagement.

I am planning a survey this week to gauge their reactions to the project so far.

Reviewing my Desired Goals

I pulled out my UbD project plan to look over my Desired Goals of my career unit:

• Oregon Department of Education career related learning standards:
• Students will develop skills to assess personal characteristics, interests, abilities, and strengths.
• Students will develop skills in identifying, evaluating, and using a variety of resources for exploring personal, educational, and career choices.
• National Educational Technology standards for students:
• NETS*S #3: Students use productivity tools to collaborate in constructing technology-enhanced models, prepare publications, and produce other creative works.
• NETS*S #4: Students use telecommunication to collaborate, publish and interact with peers, experts, and other audiences
• NETS*S #5: Students use technology tools to locate, evaluate, and collect information from a variety of resources.

I decided to do a quick check of how I am doing on meeting some of these goals:

• This past week my students did a great job of using technology tools to locate and collect information and a little bit of evaluation - but I think I will focus a blog topic on that.
• Students will start to prepare some type of documentation and an interactive component of their Career kiosk this week.
• We are using wikispaces for collaborative planning of the career projects. Maybe I could encourage the students to seek out resources by experts through email or listservs.
• The students took a personality career survey and identified which traits matched particular careers. They also used the Librarians pathfinder to locate information on careers. I think they need to look outside of the Internet for more sources: interviews, primary documents, videos on unitedstreaming, etc.
• I'm still a little unsure of how specific technology skills are developing. I need to find a better way to assess this in an authentic manner.
• The groups are still a little uneasy around each other. I was hoping blogging would help the communication issues - I will encourage more communication on the wiki and Moodle.
• I feel a little uneasy about the progress so far. Its going OK - but I don't yet see the "excitement" of making an authentic project yet. I think it will help when they start assembling the kiosk and making the interactive component. We'll see ...
  

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.