ADDIE Project - Chemical Reactions - Analyze

I.            Who is the audience?

                A.       High school academic chemistry students in grades 10-12

                        II.            What do they need to learn?

A.       Write the instructional goals

1.       To design a series of online activities that students can independently complete at home to build the fundamental knowledge and skills necessary to conduct, identify, predict products of, and write proper equations for chemical reactions of varying types so that class time can be dedicated to hands on laboratory exercises.

B.       For each instructional goal, write the instructional objectives 

1.       Make online activities easy to navigate

2.       Reduce the number of links to external sources of information to reduce distraction for students

3.       Incorporate video, text, and interactive simulations into the activities to meet diverse learning styles

4.       Make the platform for the online activities visually appealing and interesting to promote student engagement and motivation

                              III.            Create a concept map based on preliminary research

A.       Products of a series of brainstorming sessions, and are the starting points for the flow charts providing clear directions for the production of the product

                              IV.            What are the delivery options?

A.       iTunes U, Edmodo, Google Sites, etc.

1.       Google sites can be utilized for individual activity webpages, and a link to the unit homepage will be on our class webpage.

                               V.            What constraints exist?

A.       Some students may have limited internet access or computer resources at home.

B.       It may be a challenge motivating students to complete activities at home

C.       Time constraints due to busy student schedules may present a problem

                              VI.            What will the students do to determine competency?

A.       Accuracy in completing assignments, worksheets, quizzes, etc.

1.       Students will be required to complete short assignments at home and submit them online via the class webpage.

2.       Weekly quizzes will be given in class assessing their knowledge of fundamental concepts learned in online activities.

3.       A summative assessment will be given at the end of the unit in the form of a traditional test.

4.       Lab reports for in class exercises will be required to assess students’ abilities to apply fundamental knowledge of chemical reactions in a lab setting.

                            VII.            What is the timeline for project completion?

A.       Including management, assigning tasks, flowcharting, storyboarding, design, etc. 

1.       Research and resource location (1 week)

2.       Design and Development of activities and encompassing webpages (3 weeks)

3.       Classroom implementation (4 weeks)

4.       Summative assessment and student feedback (1week)

                           VIII.            What are the classroom/Web learning differences?

A.       Ensuring all students do their own work, teaching of the Web concepts, computer literacy, etc.

1.       It will be difficult to ensure that all students are completing their own work considering I will not be there to monitor their at home progress.  Parent involvement will be necessary.

2.       Students may need some web navigation guidance before beginning the unit to ensure that tasks can be completed independently from home

                              IX.            What are the pedagogical considerations?

A.       Verbal, visual, tactile, auditory, etc. 

1.       Students’ prior knowledge must include naming chemical compounds, writing chemical formulas, ionic bonding, and general lab equipment and safety.

2.       Information will need to be represented by multiple means to meet diverse learning styles. 

3.       Formative assessment will be necessary via online quizzes and/or classroom quizzes and discussions to ensure that students are not falling behind.

Augmented Reality in the K-12 Horizon Report

http://www.nmc.org/publications/2012-horizon-report-k12

As I began reading through the executive summary of the K-12 Horizon Report, I felt relieved to see that the significant challenges that occur at the local level in education in executing ambitious plans in technology implementation were acknowledged with the sentence,  “ While there are many local factors affecting the practice of education, there are also issues that transcend regional boundaries and questions we all face in K-12 education; it was with these questions in mind that this report was created.”  This article was not written to address what can be done now but what could be done sometime soon.   After reading that, I felt more motivated to continue reading the article, because I felt that it would be an informative guide to things on the way, but I felt no sense of urgency or pressure that such technologies would or should be put into districts right away.

It was reassuring to be familiar with all six technologies, although I have no real expertise in them.  Nothing was completely foreign to me.  After reading about each of the technologies, I thought that the technology that would have the most significant impact on my instruction as a high school chemistry teacher was augmented reality.  However, I found it interesting, and worth noting, that AR on a large, practical scale would not be possible without the other mentioned technologies, particularly mobile devices, apps, and/or tablet computing.  It is exciting to think that with the exponential growth of technology, in five years, as predicted by the report, AR could be commonplace in many classrooms.

From the information presented in the report, the suitability of AR in education was obvious to me although it is still most commonly used for marketing or entertainment purposes.  It makes me proud to see Philadelphia as a front runner in AR implementation.    The project of the City of Philadelphia Department of Public Records, which makes historic photographs visible via a mobile device at the location where the photo was taken, would be great for a field trip, and although it was not created specifically for education, it is surely of value to anybody interested in learning about the history of the city.

From what I read, it seems that the technology necessary to create AR experiences is becoming more accessible and easier to create.   Since I am still in the early stages of my teaching career, I hope that I will one day be able to use it in my own chemistry classroom.  I think that most teachers would agree that active learning and an environment in which students can be actively engaged is far more effective than an environment in which students are passive.  While the video linked below shows what AR for chemistry might look like, it would be far more exciting to have 30 chemistry students viewing and manipulating the enzymes and complex molecules, analyzing the data that can be calculated, and making it accessible to their teachers and classmates via the internet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZxK6j4JTHQ&feature=youtu.be 

AR would make my classroom environment more active, because it will provide a more dynamic representation of the atoms and atomic interactions which my students study than I can currently provide for them.  “Dynamic processes, extensive datasets, and objects too large or too small to be manipulated can be brought into a student’s personal space at a scale and in a form easy to understand and work with.”  Helping students to visualize such processes or datasets, has been one of my biggest struggles as a chemistry teacher.  Physically bringing them into the student’s personal space would be remarkable.

My Thoughts on the National Education Technology Plan and Karen Cator's ACU Presentation

I do not question why the National Education Technology Plan was developed.  Nor do I question the intentions of those who designed it.  I do not question Karen Cator’s enthusiasm for sharing the ideals of this plan.  Technology is not only the way of the future, but the way of the present.  Its proper implementation needs to be a top priority in the world of education, and education needs to be a top priority for us all.
However, I did find myself questioning, how this plan is going be a success.   As this plan continues to be implemented over the next two years…

1. How will access to technological resources be made equitable among ALL learners when educational funding among different school districts is not currently equitable?
2. How will this plan ensure that, if ALL learners have access to a device and educational content 24/7, they will be proficient in using them?
3. How will a homeless high school student be motivated to use this new technology to learn, when he is worried about where he will be sleeping that night?
4. How is this plan going to be fully implemented by 2014 as planned, when unfortunately some educators, including administrators, still don’t know that it exists?

Personally, I found Karen Cator to be inspiring due to her professionalism, knowledge, and passion.  I too am passionate about technology and using it in my classroom, but I think that the use of technology needs to have a very specific instructional purpose.  The use of technology for its own sake, or throwing technology at schools and students in hopes that it will solve an unknown or underlying problem will most likely be ineffective.  I don’t think that the American education system is broken, but that it is a work in progress.

The principles upon which this plan is based are principles that I as an educator hold with utmost importance.  We should teach the individual.  Students should have personal choice in what and how they learn.  Research on cognitive development and learning science should be the basis for curricular and instructional changes.  However, with my current (relatively limited) understanding of the details of the National Education Technology Plan, I remain skeptical of its success by the year 2014.