ISTE Blog Post Week 3

#EDU643 #Week3

Prior to COVID-19 and emergency remote learning, my Physics I classroom was very student-centered and heavily relied upon students sharing previous knowledge or past experiences, citing evidence to support a claim, making observations in order to draw conclusions, and communicating with their peers. As a co-taught teacher, my lessons needed to be engaging and relevant in order to keep the students’ attention. While there was not a singular lesson that I would consider my favorite, there were many worthwhile labs and hands-on activities that I enjoyed incorporating into the class. These resources required students to draw on several different scientific skills and/or practices, while simultaneously gathering data to be analyzed at a later point in time with the class as a whole.

One of the lessons that I particularly like is our ‘Discovering Forces’ lab, which takes place very early on in the school year. The activity is inquiry-based in nature and requires students to make observations as to what forces are acting on certain objects and/or in certain scenarios. There are 7 different objects or scenarios, each one corresponding to a table in my classroom. Students work in groups of 3 or 4 individuals and have 5 minutes at each station to converse with their peers, describe what they see, and articulate what forces they believe are acting on the object or in that particular scenario. We then come together as a class to look for patterns amongst the observations, which essentially leads us to identifying the main forces we will be covering in the course. As the initial activity is very inquiry-based, the subsequent whole-class discussion requires a significant amount of scaffolding in order for meaning-making to occur. Overall, there are very few, if any, ISTE standards that are addressed in the aforementioned lesson as it does not incorporate technology in any way, shape, or form.

This is significantly different when compared to lessons that I implemented into my Physics I classroom once we had made the transition to emergency remote learning. Once online, each of our lessons had a baseline level of technology incorporated into them. Students were regularly asked to research specific topics, formulate arguments with supporting evidence, and convey such sentiments to their peers while utilizing our district-wide LMS, or Schoology. My favorite lesson during our time online was a ‘modern-day’ take on a traditional in-class project, the egg drop. Typically, students are required to design a device that will protect an egg when dropped from approximately 15 feet, or the height of our atrium. Designing a protective device was still the main goal of the activity; however, technology was incorporated into the design of the project much more once we were required to go online. Students still utilized the internet to look up various designs and research ways to increase impact time, while subsequently decreasing the amount of force acting on the device upon impact. However, they did so in a much more collaborative way.

Modifications were also made to the assignment that allowed students to test their devices from a lower height, or approximately 8 feet. Upon designing, testing, and revising their devices, students would submit a video clip of their final egg drop attempt and show whether or not the egg was able to withstand impact with the ground. All in all, the project relied much more heavily upon the use of technology than it would have if we were in a traditional classroom setting. Upon looking at the ISTE standards, I believe the project addressed the following in one way or another:

After such experiences, my personal teaching philosophy has somewhat changed. I now realize that technology, and online classes in general, allow you to do activities similar to those that you would do in a traditional classroom and expand on them or enhance them, yet these activities will not be exactly the same. Before the emergency remote learning experience, I had the wrong mindset when it came to online education. I was thinking of ways I could take my current practices and activities and fit them into an online mold. This way of thinking was limited in nature and I felt restricted by technology. However, I now know that, instead of looking for technology to fit your previous pedagogical methods, you need to develop and refine your pedagogical methods to fit the technology that you have available to you. This enables you to design a high-quality online course for your students and provide them with a robust educational experience despite being in a remote or non-traditional setting.