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For my final project in course five, the potential for overhaul could possibly focus on two units. Since my units are always changing I like to think that we are perpetually at day 1 everyday when it comes to change.

First option would look at my IB Economics Year 1 unit on national income and the level of overall economic activity in an economy. The focus here is on looking at the circular flow of income model, measures of economic economic activity, fluctuations in the business cycle and connections to Theory of Knowledge (TOK). This unit gives a good platform to integrate technology and encourage students to be innovative in their technology use. The plan here is to try and move through the 4 tiers described in the article A Matrix Model for Designing and Assessing Network-Enhanced Courses. These are substitution, augmentation, modification and most importantly redefinition. Using tools like voicethreads, diigo allows for the creation of tasks inconceivable without the use the computer. For example uploading graphs and discussion points to VoiceThreads on the business diagram and having students debate the possible stages on the diagram the economy is operating at would meet the learning objectives of higher order thinking. Also using diigo students could now bookmark articles as a class giving examples of recessions and booms and share these with the class using the innovative features of diigo that allow students to do things with shared bookmarking that couldn’t be done before.    

Second option might be to look at my IB Economics Year 2 unit on Economic Development. The focus here is on distinguishing between economic growth and economic development, the characteristics of economically less developed countries, the diversity among these countries, international development goals and connections to Theory of Knowledge (TOK). Similar to the approach laid out above I would have students use the many technology tools available to compare various developing countries and present similarities and differences on how countries develop in terms of economic growth and economic development. We would look at the distinction between economic outcomes and human outcomes. For example innovative tools such as gapminder which allow students to create graphs comparing economic indicators for many different countries create power stimuli for visual learners and others . Students could then include these diagrams on their personal blogs or where they could embed other information (google docs and google presentation) to create an online presentation that others could then comment on.

Those are my two ideas at this point and for each of them I don’t foresee any issues that would limit my ability to accomplish what I want to do. I and my students already have some experience with integrating technology into these classes so it be will more about creating activities that can redefine what i have done before. The goal will be to try and create new tasks only available through the integration of technology which will allow for new ways of learning for my students.

Looking forward to the final project!

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I have been working in a wireless laptop school for a number of years now. I find these devices are starting to become less noticeable and just part the everyday learning environment. I would like to focus this blog post on this and some other changes I have noticed over the years. The bandwidth has continually increased. At first it seemed that as bandwidth went up so did demand. That’s not a big surprise for us economists. There can be a lot of pent up demand that needs to get satisfied before you can figure out the optimal allocation level. This year is the first year I don’t hear many complaints about weak wireless signals and a slow internet. It’s usually the sites that are slow now (e.g. blogster). Solution? Stay away from slow sites. Another change I’ve noticed is some sites are making it more difficult for us teachers/students to use the free third party software as more conditions are being applied or features being taken away (e.g. voicethreads, jing, diigo). This of course is to encourage you to sign up for the premium version, which you need to pay for (another concept us economists are very familiar with). Student’s behavior has pretty much remained the same. They will get distracted quite easily if you haven’t developed a lesson that keeps students engaged. There needs to be some measurable outcome that students know that have to reach for each activity. I find student blogs good for this. They are easy to check for student progress and students can embed all kinds of other real time online tools within them (e.g. google docs). Teacher engagement of becomes important here. Even when the class activity is online, teachers need to be moving around helping students and initiating conversations if need be.

Just a quick thought on other devices in the classroom. I used to have students keep their mobile phones away, but now with permission, they can use them to calculate, research and take pictures of the learning taking place in the classroom. It has not been abused and they know when it is appropriate to get them out. They don’t even verbally ask now, they just look at me as they retrieve their mobile to do a task and then they put it away once completed.

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If students can understand concepts better through another lecturing medium, why should teachers spend class time lecturing? This is a great point that is being made in the article Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl’s “Fisch Flip”. I don’t think anyone can disagree that using our time in the classroom to best meet students needs is what it’s all about. Flipping the classroom and practicing best practices in reverse instruction can help us do this. 

My own understanding of reverse instruction and the flipped classroom is evolving as I read articles like The Flipped Class: Myths vs. Reality. I like the point that they make about the flipped classroom being “a place where all students can get a personalized education”. In my own economic classes I use a class blog for informational and assignment purposes. Students use their own personal blogs for displaying their work. I also use a website with videos of of lecturers explaining concepts and also current event type of videos for doing case studies. 

My own experience is that you really need to mix it up. Students sometimes want me to lecture and put my own spin on a concept even if they have viewed a video. I remembering learning in a course I once took on “how the brain learns” that it can take students up to 5 times to be reintroduced to a concept before they really get it. It can take this many times for learning to transfer from their working memory to their long term memory. Changing contexts and using different examples really helps students stay engaged through this process. I don’t believe there is a specific formula one can use in flipping the classroom. Every class is different. I would suggest every class flips differently (even if its the same subject and same level).

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I’ll try an analogy here that may or may not work . Some would say technology integration in education is really just all about the same game but with a new uniform and equipment set. The fact is the rules have changed and that means the game is no longer the same. The coach needs to draw on new knowledge and teach his players new way to do things. The game may evolve into something no one was expecting. Education is similar, what are we preparing students for? The answer is we don’t really know and there in lies the solution. We know technology is changing the way we learn and the way we do things.

When I read the article Why Integrate Technology into the Curriculum?: The Reasons Are Many it mentioned that technology changes the role of the teacher and I think it does but now as things have progressed, I think it is more about changing the weightings of how much time you play in each role whether it be “advisor, content expert or coach”. The article What is Technology Integration? I like the idea of what technology integration is NOT. Sometimes it helps us to focus on not what is it but what it’s not. It’s like telling students not to focus on the similarities of similar concepts but focus on the differences because its the distinctions between them that may really helps us solidify our understanding of each.

If I look through the framework of the Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) and try to apply it to my own practice of technology integration I can see some areas I could be more effective in. I am doing well in attempting to create an environment that technology is being integrated in an active, constructive, goal directed, authentic, and collaborative ways. When I look at the levels of technology integration I see infusion level is defined as “the teacher provides the learning context and the students choose the technology tools to achieve the outcome”. I have done this both ways with in that I have chosen the tools for the students and have let them choose the tools. Both work well but only if students have experience with the tools. If they don’t have and you assume they do then you are setting things up for less success. The transformative level is the one I’m attempting to do at the moment. Hopefully my students are learning new things to do new things that wouldn’t have been possible without the integration of technology into the lesson. This one requires the most planning but also the most reflection afterwords as students can sometimes surprise you on what they have learned and how they learned it.

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“The transition from an institution-centered, contact-hour teaching infrastructure to a distributed learning infrastructure will not be easy. Technologists alone can not lead the way, as they did in creating the Internet. The focus is shifting away from the electronic medium itself and onto its mind boggling capacity to amplify the human experience — the message. We would do well to remember that quality education and quality entertainment share one characteristic: both should be engaging “(Graves, William H. Towards a Distributed Leaning Infrastucture. The Canadian Multimedia Conference Proceedings, 1994) 

My last post was about an undergraduate course I took in university called “Computer Applications” so when I the required reading touched upon “Technology Integration” so it was no surprise that my thoughts quickly went back to an graduate MBA course I took in the 90’s. My final report for the course centered on the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) Industry which looked at the impact ICTs will have on the industry of education over the next five years. Specifically it looked at what was then another hot word “distributed learning environments”. Distributed learning environments was defined as digital/computer networks that distribute learning content and resources to distributed learners in geographically dispersed locations. With help from Harvard’s Michael Porter’s value chain and five competitive forces model  I analyzed the present status of the industry and how things may change over the next five years. At the time I was working for the Faculty of Education, University of New Brunswick, Dept of NB Education and Industry Canada doing training and setting up community access centers which were located in rural schools all over Canada. These centers provided the local community access to computer labs and the information highway after school hours (evenings and weekends).

My solution was for content experts to collaborate and be facilitated by instructional integration specialists. The study went on to look at the skills these people would need and where this industry might go over the next 5 years. Now it is many years later and although we still have these people in our schools and universities, the instructors and teachers are now taking on more of the roles these people used to and still do play. In my next post ( as this one is getting a bit long for a blog post) I will further expand on these roles and how I see TIM and SAMR frameworks being applied to my own practice of technology integration.

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I read the article “What difference might one “S” make” and I thought back to the time I took a course called “Computer Applications” in university. I was quite into the internet at the time. Back then it was listserv, gopher, WhOIS, telnet, ftp and Lynx text based browser. It was quite the buzz being able to communicate with a mass a of people on listserv and discuss interesting and unique topics. To telnet into and take over another computer. To send files from one part of the world to the other also seemed pretty useful. I remember really enjoy doing that but in my “Computer Applications” we were learning about the the various office tools and I remember not being very motivated to do the activities using the various software.I spent most of my time on the new mediums. It’s like I understood (made sense of) how office software worked but when I needed to apply these skills to an activity that didn’t have much meaning for me, I just went through the motions. I think my grade reflected this. So when I read this article I couldn’t help but agree with the author’s sentiments on removing the “S” and start using the course to apply these skills within a much more integrated approach with other subjects. He called this a “much more authentic way of learning”. When I’m using technology related activity in class I used to ask students if they took the technology education course in the school but now I don’t. Why? It’s because it didn’t matter. In most cases the application of the technology that I was teaching them didn’t match up with what they had learned or that any overlap was so basic it really didn’t provide for much an advantage over the other students and therefore it was irrelevant for me to ask the question. The ed-tech course (computer applications) didn’t really teach them much they could apply in the real world. I believe using the NETS framework makes so much more sense and will help avoid the experiences shared above.

I regularly use cuts of videos from documentaries and movies to teach concepts in economics. I know my students are using basic diagrams already created and transforming them by adding more economic complexity to them. How much they do this I’m not really sure as it is hard to tell. They look pretty original when they are submitted. There are many economic videos on youtube that I have used in class that combine economic lyrics with rap music (which is also famous for remixing). One of the more popular economic music videos is a Hayek vs Keynes rap anthem.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My students also like to use images and diagrams in their blog assignments. I always tell them to use images that they have permission to use but the impression I am getting from some of the readings is that it is ok to use things without permission as long as you are creating something transformative and you give attribution. I guess I’m still a little old school. Perhaps this new school of thought will prevail among the new generation of artists and the argument will become moot.

My Google presentation is about the economic concept of Elasticity. It looks at how consumers and producers respond to price and income changes. It basically looks at how sensitive people are to changes in one variable by measuring the response of the other variable. I would normally teach this through detailed equations, diagrams and bullet points. With this presentation I am trying to use the things I have learned about presentation zen design principles to engage the learner, grab their attention and hopefully create more meaning for them before getting into the more technical aspects of the concept. This presentation touches upon getting students to look into their behaviors when they go into Starbucks and when they buy a variety of products. It also gets them to think about the relationship with various products (substitutes or complementary) and how producers revenue and income (e.g. farmers) are affected. 

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Presentation Zen design principles certainly makes one think about the many different aspects of not just how to do a presentation but also what it means to be creative. Following these principles can make anyone more creative. I like how the discussion is about the process and not the technology. How to create a better PowerPoint presentation has more to do with what you do before you turn the computer on. Thinking about things such as design, story symphony and empathy and realizing that they are key features in getting it right with your audience and they need to be worked out before you start creating the slides. There are many other tips in the readings about presentation zen but the ones that stand out for me and resonate long after my initial introduction to this process, are to keep it simple, use original visual themes not templates, show some passion, ask yourself if it can pass the “elevator test”, know your audience and most of all figure out how to create meaning for your audience. I am just starting this process. I am in the design stage of my presentation and I am excited to try and apply all of these things I have highlighted. I’m sure I will miss hitting on some of these but fortunately it’s about the process and I am learning a ton.