Hold On Tight Here I Go!
Marisabel's Blog
What A Great Journey!I am so excited that the end of the program has come. I am so proud of myself and my cohort 13 for powering through the process and of how much we have grown as educators. I feel empowered with tools to get my students ready for the 21st century. I plan to continue research into tech tools and their impact on learning because our reality is that tools are in constant flux and evolution and we must stay on top of the latest innovation in order to best support our digital learners.
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Executive Summary, Capstone Video, Defense PosterIt was essential to have my executive summary done to make the poster . The video could stand on its own it was just hard to get all your best point said in 90 seconds or less. I enjoyed putting the poster together once I had my summary. I wish I could have added some of my creative side into it, but I guess Academic posters can't have any of that. After I took out my personality everything seemed to fit better so that was a plus. I have grown quite fond of Adobe Spark for making videos and I'm looking forward to using it in my classroom. It is very helpful to have your script written down before you start recording but it's very forgiving if you do make mistakes. You can record one slide at a time allowing you to pace yourself and not end up a runaway train, which was my experience using screencast-o-matic. I used my Research paper to build my executive summary and that made it easier. I say easier because it was still very hard to limit the information. Once I narrowed my focus quite a bit my summary began to come together. I wasn't able to fit all my executive summary on my poster but nonetheless I am happy with how it turned out. I believe we are all naturally born curious and life-long learners. Some of us may learn faster than others but eventually we all learn. Touro has brought out a spark in me that had been asleep for some time. I am glad to have the opportunity once again to serve society in an upgraded way. I plan to use my new found knowledge to support my school and colleagues. I plan to start with my classroom and as I work with others to find more best practices, share with all that will listen. About Marisabel Olguin
Thank you for visiting my website. You'll see here that my mission is to incorporate technology in the classroom in a meaningful way. My driving question is: How will students engage with an online platform for independent reading? I recently have been working on getting my master's in innovative learning but my journey has been a long time coming. Sixteen years ago I discovered my love for teaching, nurturing and helping others. As a happily married mother with a few college credits to my name, in 2001 I was given the opportunity to work for the Napa Valley Unified School District in a dual immersion school. I jumped at the opportunity and climbed my way to the top. After eight years as a Instructional Assistant I was given the opportunity to teach Pre Kindergarten. While teaching Pre Kinder I began my quest towards earning my teaching credential. Now a mother of three I decided to take it one step at a time. I am currently in my second year of teaching fourth grade and loving every minute of it. I am still at the same dual immersion school and I look forward to using all I have learned in this Master's of Innovative Learning Program to incorporating technology in the classroom in a meaningful way to enhance both my and my students 21st century educational experience. Reflections on My Journey Although my journey is in innovative learning with technology, sometimes our students just need a new creative method to help them cross the bridge. Dervin and Baggio both provide insight on the importance of a sense-making moment and helping our students cross the bridge with a strategy that works for them. Baggio emphasizing the use of visuals to impact learning. Baggio quotes Conner(2008), "Visuals improve the learning process and quicken your ability to make connections". My student was having difficulty visualizing how to separate the egg carton in different sections to make equivalent fractions and though I had used the carton during my instruction he needed to physically lay out the yarn himself on the carton in order to visualize the different sections and how he could compare different fractions. Both my student and I felt excited by the experience. He was surprised that I offered him the tool to use while he took his quiz. I don't think that I would have offered him the tool had I not recently read both Dervin and Baggio. Thanks to the journey I have been on I am beginning to notice those moments when my students need something extra to get them one step closer to making sense of their experiences in the classroom. Lasting Learning from the Innovative Learning program TPACK is an overlap of Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge. According to Gikipedia that was recently updated in 2018, Similarly Transliteracy is an overlapping of sorts, it combines a range of capabilities required to move across a range of contexts, media, technologies and genres. Conceptually, transliteracy is situated across five capabilities: information literacy(effectively use information to solve a problem), information and communication technologies (ICT covers any product that will store, retrieve, manipulate, transmit or receive information electronically in a digital form), communication and collaboration, creativity and critical thinking, underpinned by literacy and numeracy. Furthermore, transliteracy was first developed in 2005 by the Transliteracies Research Project, directed by professor Alan Lie as a part of research into online reading that coincidentally is what my capstone is directly related to. I have added a link to a video were he explains about RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment, 2012) https://youtu.be/oUUxxRCXqwQ . In the video Lie explains his project as a way to use social media as a tool for research. He describes the Users as wondering through information alone and how his project RoSE can help the Users navigate through information with a more social interactive experience. In our capstone we are hoping to do the same thing for other educators. We want to use our research and work to help other educators use technology in the classroom successfully. I already am seeing more student engagement with the incorporation of technology in my classroom, by having transliteracy in mind when putting together lesson plans we are increasing the modalities by which our students can achieve success. I feel that this last semester I was able to incorporate some transliteracy in my classroom by using Google classroom. My students used an online database that had a multitude of resources available for them to write a report about one of the California Missions. In addition they had to demonstrate knowledge by producing a final product that allowed for a variety of communication modalities. I look forward finding new ways to incorporate transliteracy into my lesson plans. TPACK Reflection Mishra & Koehler explain TPACK as an overlap of Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge. they further explain, technology changes: how we teach (Pedagogy), what we teach (Content), and the contexts within which teaching/ learning happens. This advances my knowledge on what we as teachers need to know when preparing our students for the 21st century. The learning pit reminds me of Dervin's sense-making metaphor except in the pit students are reassured that being in the pit makes for deeper learning and working through the problem with others makes for a successful learning experience. Therefore, if you avoid the pit you are not challenging yourself and are not making intellectual growth. Dervin's sense-making triangle emphasis has been placed on understanding how the individual saw self as stopped, what questions or confusions they defined, what strategies they preferred for arriving at answers, what success they had in arriving at answers, how they were helped by answers, and what barriers they saw standing in the way to arriving at answers. Technology in both of these scenarios if used in the way TPACK presents it will help the learner climb out of the pit or could help the learner bridge the gap. Students have the world at their fingertips when they have technology available to them throughout their day and are supported by teachers who facilitate learning through pedagogy. Well, if I though putting a video together was difficult I hadn't been asked to put together a presentation poster. I am having a difficult time adding my graphs. One graph I was able to make again which I wish I didn't have to. I am going to ask and do some more research before I go and make my others that are not as simple. I'm not sure why I can't just drag and drop my bar graph? And I just can't do everything they are asking me to do! My introduction has to provide adequate context but must be brief and oh ya, it needs to include background and need but make sure it doesn't have to much text because that's a DON'T. Oh man, this just seems like I can't cut my research down enough without losing the heart of my work.
1st Rough Cut Attempt
I am grateful for all the examples, how to videos, blogs and readings because they may be the most difficult video I have tried to put together in all my years as a learner. Kissmetrics' Blog, "9 Insider Tips for Creating a Killer Explainer Video" helped me brainstorm with a more focused frame of mind. Answering the questions to the creative brief helped me put together a more advanced version of my script. Although it is not done yet, I am getting much closer to the final product. With the help of my cohort I am confident I can make improvements and adjustments to meet the time requirements. I decided to use Adobe Spark because I am most familiar with it and I can record directly to the slide. I am having trouble with the timing and my audio is getting cut off before I am finished talking. I am hopeful that maybe adding a few words on the slides will help me keep the spoken words more brief and at the same time shorten the video length. I changed my mind on the script a few times and ad-libbed a lot so I need to clean that up as well. Below is my very rough cut capstone video.
My capstone audience can be any educator that is looking for something fun and engaging for his/her learners to do while they work with small groups. I think they are my perfect audience because I have found that using an online platform for reading and other engaging academic tasks will keep learners engaged, freeing up the teacher from managing behavior issues while trying to successfully lead a very important differentiated small group lesson or a one on one check in.
It will be important that I have a how to video explaining the ins and outs of some of the more effective online platforms. It will also be important to let them hear what learners have to say about their experience with epic! for example. Having an infographic that clearly shows improvement overall in my students engagement and post online platform assessment, will also be crucial to proving the benefits and entice them to want to try new technology in the classroom for independent reading. Storyboarding 101It has been fun trying to play movie director but I have to say I'm glad I'm not getting paid for this because my blockbuster is proving to be a brain-buster. I'm struggling with the flow of the frames and information timing. Lei Han in Soft Skills, expresses the importance of motivating your audience with a practical solution not necessarily a perfect one. Using the sample template has proven to be very helpful. I was able to plug in my thoughts and then add a drawing (more like a very rough sketch). The storyboard checklist was very daunting if I waited to have all those ducks in order, I probably would never gotten started. I plan to make sure I incorporate those items, it just felt better to jump in and start filling in the template and then see where I was getting stuck and focus on that. I'm excited to see my finished product even though I see some long nights in my very near future. Editing video is not my forte but I'm ready to roll up my sleeves. Below is my first draft of my storyboard and script.
How can my fellow cohort members support me with completing my capstone and how I can support them?While working to complete our capstone being able to bounce ideas off of each other is very important. Because we are all working towards a similar goal we can understand the reasoning and purpose behind our ideas. I recently got very helpful constructive criticism for my capstone logo and was able to give advice to others as well. During this year we have been able to share our experiences using new tech tools. Having others experiences can save lots of time. When you have learned short cuts and ins and out of new tech tools the best thing you can do is share what you have learned, it saves everyone time and you look smart too! How will you work to support positive cohesion among your cohort?I think it is important that we network and continue to collaborate together to strengthen our groups efficiency. If we continue to depend on each other for information on new tech tools we can be a stronger influence on our peers. What is important to you in terms of group norms?I am a very easy going laid back person but I do like to start and end on time. I don't mind a few minutes here and there if it's acknowledged. The most important norm to me is, maintaining a respectful environment that allows all of us to grow and be better educators for our learners.
This week was fun and sometimes frustrating. I enjoyed thinking about and drawing sketches of what I though I wanted my logo to look like. I wanted it to say what my driving question asks and answers but without all the words. I took a peek at a few of the logo making software and quickly realized that you can create for free but you cannot own it unless you pay for it. I created my first draft using Logomaker.com and I'm not ready to pay for my logo just yet. Although I like the logo I created, I still have other ideas I would like to check out. It took a few tries to get the wording down right. At first I filled in all the boxes they wanted me to fill out but all the info you put in they use in the logo. I thought it was to wordy so I started to eliminate words. After I saw a few of the logo examples I decided I could eliminate reading if the book image already implied it. I'm still not sure if I want to use the word "online" I think the wifi fan may be enough to imply that it is online but I am just not sure at this point. This is the first draft of my logo and I really do like it, I just wish it could imply more imagination. I envisioned a computer with creative and fancy free animals and images just flying from the screen with a student fully engaged staring at it, but probably in order to get that specific I will have to pay a pretty penny to have the software designers work on that for me. Maybe I can draw my own logo on an iPad Pro with the iPad pen i'm not sure but I will look into it.
I want my capstone logo to say that students of the 21st century are ready to use more of their instinctive curiosity, creativity and imagination to learn with technology as their unlimited access to the world. |
Marisabel OlguinNVLA 4th Grade Dual Immersion Teacher at Napa Valley Language Academy Archives
June 2018
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