Conceptual Diagnostic Tests

I recently read a few of Physics Teacher Frank Noschese’s “Action/Reaction” blog. A question was posed to him about How can you show a teacher who thinks he/she is meeting the standards that he/she is actually not? For me, this is ridiculous that a science teacher will stand his ground on this issue without firm evidence. Sometimes, I believe, that this evidence can come from student's grades but this is bias. Student's grades are based on the assessments that you believe fit the standards. The problem is that you do not know for sure if your assessments are valid or reliable. Good thing there are trained professionals doing just that.

Maybe the evidence is coming from standardized test designed by professionals to measure those select standards. These tests will have been proven to be valid and reliable when testing for the standards. With this evidence, I can more firmly believe that the teacher is doing his job. But there's one more problem with this evidence. What if the teacher is teaching to the test or the students can reason through a story problem with math skills and linguistic skills instead of actually understanding the concepts?

Frank Noschese mentioned that there exists Conceptual Diagnostic Tests for this reason. He states that, statistically, students far underperform on these tests as compared to what would be expected with other means of assessment. In other words, students can do well on classical tests and exams without knowing the concepts. Noschese suggests that taking this CDT as a pre and post test will show how much physics a student will actually understand and how well you taught it. When a teacher examines the data of poor performance, he/she will realize that something needs to change. This would be the best way to convince teachers who are long veterans that something needs to change.

Will I enact this? Hecks yeah I will. I will add it to my Evernote list of must do teaching practices.

Puzzles and Dragons

Educ 504 has once again provided me with a great teaching activity. This will be my modified version of the activity

Objective: Students will verbally communicate concrete observations and inferences to put together a 16 piece puzzle in a team of 2 units comprised of 2 students each. 

Themes: Observation. Communication. Teamwork. Critical Thinking. 

Materials: 

1. 2 tables or workstations to fit two people each. 
2. A picture
3. 4 students/players

Set up:

     Cut up the pictures as you would like (it can change depending on the objective). Place the pieces upside down or covered in an envelope on two tables. Set the chairs so that the units of 2 students will be facing away from each other. Take 4 volunteers and split them into the two units to sit at the tables. All other students will be observing and taking notes.

Rules:

1. The two units are to only look at the pieces in front of them. 
2. The two units are to only communicate verbally. 
3. Observers must be silent
4. Observers in no way can contribute to the activity of piecing together the puzzle. 
5. Time limit will be set at 10 minutes.

Discussion (for all students): 

What was the point of the activity?

(Players) What worked the best?

What kind of language was most helpful?

(Observers) What kind of language was written down as notes?

This will provide a segue into talking about observations versus inferences.

(There was no dragons in this post. Dragons are cool though. There might be a dragon on the picture. Who knows?)

The Video Game Curriculum

Video games are able to motivate people to play for hours on end. Sometimes, video games can be so captivating, they would cause death. I'm sure you've heard a few stories about that during the World of Warcraft era. These same people who may spend 30-40 hours a week on a game, would not give a rats ass about school. So here's a proposal, set up the classroom like a game. There is a decent amount of research that goes into how video games motivate their players. I will allude to only a few in this blog.

Where to start...

I think the first thing is to allow students to create an identity in you classroom. In a science class, when you walk through the door you should be a scientist. You could have them put on lab aprons and prepare goggles (because wearing them every day for an hour would be annoying.) Explicitly explain to them that they are scientists and should act like one. Overall, this may be tough in many schools and the students may not play along. It's worth a try.

Structuring the course will be difficult. The first thing people are most worried about is their grade. I think a grading system that would best work is something that resembles a progress bar. There was a Ted talk I watched about how app developers love putting in an progress bar for any reason big or small. For a classroom, it give the students a visible goal, and they're able to visually see their completion and mastery of the course. The use of a progress bar would be a positive change in the current classroom norms. Most teachers believe that telling the students that they all start with A's is, in my eyes, bad practice. This tells them that your grade will only get worse. There is no room for improvement. There is only punishments for not providing perfect work. Instead, a progress bar mean that the students start at the bottom. The only way to go is to go up. You cannot get a worse grade that you have at the beginning of the school year. This process would use positive reinforcement based on the amount of effort and work put in. More work put in would result in a greater addition of points. Little work would mean some points.

A con of this practice may be that a student must always calculate the points needed on future assignments. A pro of this would be that the student must plan ahead to reach a certain goal. This brings another con which may result in students reaching a minimum goal and stop working overall. They were able to reach their minimum C so why should they come to class anymore if they passed the class. Hopefully the classroom culture developed by this gamification of the curriculum will engage and motive the students to the point where the previous con would not arise.

The curriculum should be heavily scaffolded. Great games keep you in a pleasantly frustrating experience. This would mean the units were just the right difficulty. So like the Zelda series, once link receives a new item, the game forces the player to use the new item in order to immediately proceed. Throughout the reminder of the quest (usually a dungeon) the puzzles are focused around the new item. Only until the end will the environment call for the player to integrate multiple skills and items. For the classroom, this means the basics must be met first before you can pull them together for a more challenging skill. For the class, the units will be structured as in any class but there is a strong need for feedback to know what's working and what isn't as well as the help when needed.

One of the difficult ideas is that students may need to work at their own pace. This divides the classroom environment from a community into individuals. I do not know how to challenge this dynamic other than allow collaboration for boss battles (tests). There are many schools who have moved to an online curriculum where the entire curriculum is structured and posted online for students to complete at their own pace. When I came across this, I found this to be a perfect tool for a video game structured classroom.

Finding the Cure to Supplement the Science Classroom

I played an interesting game today. It was called Caduceus. The basis of the game was that there was an epidemic of a disease. Most of the people in your prestigious school has left for safety, but you stay to fight the disease with KNOWLEDGE! So you do these puzzles in order to move on and learn about the origin of the disease to cure it.

I went through about half the game and stopped. My quick review of the game:

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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I thought the game had a great back story to it. The plot seemed fully developed and included decent animations. There was an ok sound track and non-stereotypical voice overs. The layout of the game is simple and friendly to use. There are a few discrepancies between clicking on the area for the comic vs going through the journal. I was going to the same place to do the same thing, I should have the same options. The puzzles were hard to figure out. Some of the games were not simple enough to figure out just by looking at it. There was no introduction to the game. It just popped up for you to play. There's a help button but a few of the games make you go through a dialogue between two characters to figure out the game. Although that makes the game more realistic and more developed, that's not what a player wants when he's trying to figure out the game quickly. There should be a text to accompany the audio so that the player can review pieces of the "how-to" without going through 2 minutes of talking. Many of the puzzles were quite fun and challenging, even for a 23 year-old.

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So this game had some interesting implications. For the classroom, I think the simulation of being a professional or an expert can be engaging for many of the students. Here the student would be engaging in scientific study and an investigation to uncover the origin of the epidemic. There were two puzzles that dealt with organizing "interviews" to find out the identity of 5 people and the various characteristics that went with them. This was a very useful skill to problem solve and compile bits of data into one collective summary. It would also provide a common background experience for me to refer back to for examples.

What do you know? Video games can be very useful to the classroom.

20 Questions with a twist

Have you ever played 20 questions? That's the game where you think of a person place or thing and your friends must ask 20 yes or no questions to figure out what's on your mind. I've also played it where you have a riddle and they ask 20 yes or no questions to figure out the riddle. Either way it's a staple of boring long road trips. But now, lets add a twist. You can lie twice!

Woah. Mind Blown. That just changed the entire game! It makes it so much more challenging. It's like putting Mafia together with 20 Questions. Adding in a lie makes the cognitive task of this game extremely difficult. You start to strategize and think about how you can ensure which questions are correct. You can't just assume that what ever said is true. 

In some sense, this makes it more like real life. You want to assume that people tell you the truth. When you can't trust someone, it makes life decisions more difficult. It would even be easier if you know that the person always lied. But when it's impossible to tell what is true and what isn't, nothing is certain. I guess that's why it's so important in relationships. 

But beyond that, this may be one of the first activities that I do in my classroom. It is extremely involved as it requires students to be strategic in choosing their questions, specifying their words, and critically thinking of ways to problem solve. Whether they accomplish the task or not, it shows the cognitive ability of these students. It may prove to themselves that they are able to accomplish the tough tasks of the chemistry or physics classroom. 

Never say never... to Evernote.

I've been looking for a way to organize my new professional life. I was introduced to Evernote early on this semester. It looked promising! Someone had shared their page with the group outlining all the assignments and readings in one page. It even had check boxes next to each element! Woahhh, was all I could say. Nonetheless, I went home that night and downloaded Evernote.

I had played around with it a little but after a while, it didn't appeal to me anymore. I stopped using it and it sat on my computer for a few weeks. Then in this awesome technology class I was taking, we were each assigned a program to present to our group. I had been assigned Evernote! At first I thought, "Blahh." I had already taken a look at it and it was no good. 

 

That was until I actually did the assignment. There's so many cool things to do with Evernote! First of all, it's real utility comes in the fact that there is a mobile app for it. It syncs with your online account and allows you to have all the notes and reminders you created on your computer with you at all times! Another thing is that you can capture pictures with your laptop or camera and Evernote automatically makes it searchable. That's so cool! Normally to do that I would have to find a scanner, figure out how to work the scanner, find the right program, scan the page which takes a whopping 15 seconds. With Evernote, it's snap and done! 

Evernote also has all these side applications that can cater the program to your uses and interests. There's Evernote food which is useless to me but to those who like taking pictures of their food, it's perfect. There's a free draw program for those who have tablets and can annotate their notes and pictures very easily. 

All in all, I'm glad I figured out the full uses of Evernote. I'll be using it in my teaching career for organization as well as collaboration or teaching outlines. Something like that. 

AWESOME! or not...

Take a look at this link: http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/pictures-that-prove-society-is-doomed

Even though I bring it to attention, I too am guilty of such actions at times. But to my credit, I'm a self diagnosed ADD person. My hands are always itching and looking for something to do. But then who am I to say that this isn't becoming the norm for most people?

Technology in the form of a smart phone puts a entire world of knowledge (and lack there of) at people's finger tips 24/7. I myself have finally found the wonders of a smartphone. I have simple games to play with at odd times of the day. I have a planner of all upcoming events and tasks to do. I have the internet and everything that goes with it. All of this in one somewhat bulky, fragile, and expensive thin box of technology and I really have yet to tap into the fullest potential of this thing.

Kids who grow up with these things, native speakers of the language of technology, should understand and become tech wizzes right?  I was recently told a story about a high school teacher stumbling on his students' twitters full of inappropriate tweets about partying and drinking. Many of the students did not know that all their tweets were public. I can't imagine getting a glimpse of their Facebook page.

What I wonder is if these kids ever stopped to think about their privacy on social media. Did they even take a look at their privacy settings on Facebook? I don't have twitter so I don't know if there is a way to make tweets private or not. Did they take their privacy for granted?

It also brought up very interesting questions of what do I do if I was in that teacher's shoes? Does those online tweets count as confessions or do they not have enough evidence to take action? Even though technology will be amazing to work with in the classroom, it may be troublesome to deal with as an authority in the community. Not that I didn't already have enough trouble trying to figure out technology as it is. *mutter* stupid macs *