The focus of these three videos is the paradigm shift in education. We already know that our students are tech savvy, but they use their devices for social media and communication, not education. Therefore part of our job is to help facilitate this shift to help the students see their devices as tools to help enhance their learning and their daily lives, as well as being a means of effective communication. Giving students the opportunity to truly understand and use the technology creates a 21st century tech wise student, not just a social media guru. The first video is a teacher created video in which he describes how cellphones can be used in the classroom as effective tools, and challenges the initial response by the media that portrayed cell phones as mere distractions, taking students out of the educational process. This effective video helps quell the initial fears of parents and teachers early on the in the BYOD process by challenging the initial harsh reaction and then showing how students can, will, and have used their cellphones as effective educational tools. The second video is more grade specific. Created by the Pasco County School District, this video shows the positive effects of mobile devices in the classroom. This video also outlines how they initiated their program, got students involved, and gave an overview of the policy with regards to BYOD. The teacher in the video also explains how she uses her device in the classroom and interacts with her students through different applications and programs. The focus is on elementary education and the pedagogy shift in a third grade classroom. The final video is a teacher made sample of how she has used and is using mobile devices and new technology in her English classroom. The video shows the students using the technology as well as her interaction with them during the lesson. At the end of the video she also reflects on the lesson, commenting on what went well and why the use is important. In the video she also notes how the collaborative nature of technology helps to enhance learning and create a community of English Language learners no matter their content knowledge level.
As mentioned at the beginning of this final class for my Master’s program, my English department took a serious look at our lessons and assessments and discussed how we could incorporate 21st century skills into our classrooms and make our assessments authentic and meaningful. This lesson, at its core, has been around for a few years, but we wanted to adapt it to reflect our paradigm shift in pedagogy. One of the main goals of the lesson is to help students connect with the characters and material. By having them read articles and letters by teenagers adversely affected by the Great Depression, the hope is to create a deeper connection to the period and ultimately future characters and class text. To give this lesson a 21st century feel, we have the students first post to a classroom discussion forum, and then present their ideas to the class. Our second substitution with regards to technology was to find articles online similar to the readings we had the students doing for years. The articles we found online not only gave us the purpose we were looking for, but provided pictures to help set the tone and mood, something that would ultimately transfer over to the students own use of photos to enhance meaning on their blogs. They were then able to read and annotate the articles on their iPads, and save the annotations to a .pdf file. We met the collaborative requirements in three different ways. First, we had the students split into groups of three, with each member of the group reading an article and sharing their analysis with their group mates. Then the class comes back together as a whole and looked at the commonalities between their analyses to give them a better understanding of the time period and the teenagers involved. The third way the students collaborated was through the comment section on their blogs. This was first devised as an extension activity to keep the students in character and focus on tone, mood, and dialect in writing. This also gave a “social” connectivity type feel to the activity. We updated the summative assessment attached to this lesson by having the students create a bog instead of journal entries. Blog posts are just modern journal entries anyway, plus the creative creation side also let them add in pictures, links to outside sources, and links to the initial readings assigned. This gave the blog a more 21st century feel, and allowed for more personal freedom with regards to creation. Through this lesson I believe we met our goals of giving students a better understanding of the time period, introducing them to the setting of their class novels, honing their analytical skills, and giving them practice in creating a specific style and voice while using 21st century skills in a 1:1 environment.