Creating Stellar Lessons with Digital Tools

From Integration to Innovation in Technology-Enhanced Teaching

Kenneth J. Luterbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032000121
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000571738
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Creating Stellar Lessons with Digital Tools prepares teachers in training and in-service teachers to use technologies for design and development activities with middle and high school students. While software, open resources, handheld devices, and other tools hold great potential to enhance learning experiences, teachers themselves must model technology use in ways that inspire students to become producers and leaders rather than consumers and followers. Featuring concrete applications in social studies, English, mathematics, and science scenarios, this book provides pre-service and in-service teachers with seven paths to creatively integrate and innovate with computational thinking, datasets, maker spaces, visual design, media editing, and other approaches.

Part ITeaching in Contemporary Times

1 Teaching in Middle Schools and High Schools

DOI: 10.4324/9781003172284-2

As we begin to consider the development of stellar lessons with digital tools, let’s proceed with shared conceptions of teachers and their capacity to create stellar lessons in contemporary times. First, as a teacher, your contribution to society is tremendous. Creating a classroom or online environment in which students learn a lot is immensely beneficial. When students learn (joyfully), thanks to you, they gain knowledge and skills crucial to success in life, as well as gain confidence and self-esteem. Though students may not always regard learning as joyful, as teachers, we do well when making learning effective and pleasant. Now, we can turn to activities in this book to pique interest and to nurture discovery. Second, all teachers can create stellar lessons with digital tools. With mobile computers in our purses and pockets, when not in our hands, every teacher possesses technical skills. Creating stellar lessons with digital tools will draw on your technical skills, which you can enhance as you wish by proceeding through hands-on activities in this book. You need not develop a nerdy obsession with technology, though doing so is optional.

Teachers have been incorporating digital technologies into their lessons since Apple and IBM introduced microcomputers to the masses in the early 1980s. Those technology integration efforts continue to help students use computers for practical purposes. Indeed, all students graduating from high school can use word processing software. Further, virtually all high school graduates can use Flipgrid, and create a rectangle or a circle in a graphics program and include such shapes in their desktop-published documents. Students benefit when teachers help them master those software tools which enable them to complete routine tasks, but there is nothing exceptional or stellar about that. Teachers who go no further than demonstrating routine or consumer uses of software are stuck in what we might regard as the black hole of technology integration. Unfortunately, their students are more likely to be followers than leaders.

How can a teacher emerge from the black hole of technology integration and thereby provide students with greater capacity to lead? Consider the case of a teacher requiring students to combine digital images, text, sound, and video in order to make a presentation, whether in Keynote, PowerPoint, Prezi, or Flipgrid, for instance. In this case students need to produce an original work. Since this task requires a synthesis of content and development work, it requires skills at the top of Bloom’s original cognitive taxonomy (Bloom, 1956) and revised cognitive taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). That type of assignment has potential for making stellar use of technology for learning. However, many times the potential in this situation is not realized. Even though production work ensues when using multimedia development tools, lack of planning, disregard for fundamental visual design principles, and minimal time on task often yield terrible results. On the other hand, sometimes students perform admirably in this case. They take appropriate care to assemble media thoughtfully to advance cogent arguments in a consistent visual display, which results in the development of a presentation with persuasive arguments in support of a particular position. This case raises numerous key points, which provide the insights necessary to escape from the black hole of technology integration.

First, the mere specification of an assignment or instructional activity with a development task is insufficient for teaching students to make stellar use of technology. Many teenaged students make extensive use of consumer electronics, especially gaming devices, but comfort using digital technologies is insufficient preparation for successful completion of a development task. Students benefit from demonstrations and guidance. Watching others make exceptionally good use of technologies is important. When teachers model stellar use of technology through design and development activities, students are much more likely to become innovators themselves. Second, a synthesis or production activity creates potential for outstanding use of technology whereas use of a technology as a consumer is not likely to do so. For example, requiring students to engage in routine web searches in order to gain information needed to complete an assignment is respectable, but not stellar.

Teachers emerge from the black hole of technology integration when they help students transition from consumers to producers. In this book, producers are innovators, both designers and developers. Viewing an animation to learn about planetary orbits is a first step toward recalling facts, but creating the animation advances learning because it requires application of knowledge. Likewise, reading about cryptograms in Book Scavenger (Chambliss Bertman, 2016), for instance, is beneficial for learning, but creating a program to create and decode cryptograms fosters greater learning and creativity. Viewing graphs on a digital dashboard in order to learn about a particular cause–effect relationship may be helpful for learning, but creating a digital dashboard, for instance, alters the learning experience in favor of higher learning, which occurs at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Bloom, 1956). Using an instructional app to learn is sufficient for many, but designing an app, which requires a synthesis of knowledge and innovation, engages higher-order thinking skills. Designing is one of seven paths to stellar use of technologies. Proceeding along any one or more of the seven STELLAR paths in Figure 1.1 will lead teachers and their students toward innovative and stellar uses of technology. If you fancy the cosmic metaphor, proceeding along a STELLAR path will enable teachers to emerge from the black hole of technology integration toward supernova innovation.

Figure 1.1 STELLAR paths

For example, when modeling how to design an app, a teacher might use a program such as Sketch or Adobe XD to depict the visual design and functionality of the app. To demonstrate how to design and style a 3D character or a new product, a teacher might use Blender. Serious design work requires a synthesis of skills and creativity, both of which favor stellar use of digital technologies. After that design work, a teacher might tinker with a 3D printer or laser cutter in a maker space to produce the character or product. In the app development case, after designing the visual interface, a teacher might model engagement in computational thinking by writing and debugging the code for the app. Such modeling may help students gain insights into problem solving. In contemporary times, it is often helpful to leverage datasets, whether for app development or to seek a pattern in a dataset, perhaps using a spreadsheet. When leveraging a dataset, many of which are free of financial cost and easy to acquire, a teacher might demonstrate that visual representations of data sometimes reveal patterns in data. For such demonstrations, a teacher might create graphs in an electronic spreadsheet or use a software tool such as matplotlib. Alternatively, a teacher might implement a machine learning algorithm in a spreadsheet or call a Python function that invokes a machine learning algorithm to find patterns in data. Another path to supernova innovation involves use of application software for development work. For example, a teacher might use animation software, such as Adobe Animate, in order to depict motion, whether to animate a character or to simulate planetary motion, for instance. Alternatively, a teacher may use Cascading Style Sheet specifications to create the animation. When teachers demonstrate how to engage in design or production work that invites originality, creativity, and thoughtfulness of purpose, rather than show how to use a template or some other quick and dirty cookie-cutter approach, they act as innovators and model for students how to make stellar use of digital technologies.

Importantly, the seven STELLAR paths to stellar lessons offer multiple options. You may wish to pursue a single STELLAR path, such as the design path or the path to produce creative work using application software. Alternatively, you may choose to pursue a combination of two to seven STELLAR paths. Consider, for example, Social Studies teachers who want their students to recognize the distortion effects of map projections. Some of those Social Studies teachers will also want their students to realize that they can create maps themselves and specify the map projection. Those teachers will have varying amounts of time to learn the requisite map creation and map editing skills. Given this book, Social Studies teachers with five minutes can learn to acquire mapping data (which may also be called geographic data or geodata) and learn how to drop the data files on a web browser window at a particular website in order to produce accurate and detailed maps of the world or regions of the world. With another five minutes, they can learn to change the map projection, which will enable them to help their students attain the goal of recognizing the distortion effects of map projections. Teachers willing to spend a little more time can learn additional map editing skills, as revealed in this book, and then help their students gain those map editing skills, as well as skills to design an app with geodata and skills to create the app. The STELLAR paths and this book provide you the flexibility to spend as much time as you wish advancing your technological knowledge and your capability to model stellar use of digital technologies.

Technical skills are one requisite to stellar lessons with digital tools. As a teacher, you know about the planning involved in lesson development. We may consider lesson development as both a systematic and a systemic process. With respect to systematic lesson development, you may begin with front-end analysis, particularly learner analysis in order to discover the prior knowledge of your students and gain insights into their motivation to learn, as well as determine what instructional activities they prefer or even enjoy. Second, drawing on your pedagogic and subject matter expertise, you select particular instructional activities to help your students attain the instructional objectives. Third, you select or create instructional materials needed to implement the instruction. Fourth, you deliver the instruction, including opportunities for student engagement and practice. Then you evaluate learning gains and the effectiveness of the instruction. As time permits, you reflect on the lesson and improve it. In that systematic or step-by-step manner, you enhance your teaching practice. You may also consider lesson development as a systemic process. Indeed, teachers work in light of expectations of parents and generally respond to the rules and norms established by school administrators. Further, public school teachers and school administrators respond to school district administrators who are responsible for ensuring that schools operate in accordance with laws. Enactment of a new law or a change in the interpretation of an extant law can alter a teacher’s instructional practice.

In this book, we consider both theory and practice of lesson development. As teachers, primarily through the development and delivery of lessons, we seek to help students learn. That is, we endeavor to help our students acquire a particular capability, which may involve the acquisition of facts, concepts, intellectual procedures (e.g., adding fraction...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Teaching in Contemporary Times
• Part II Resources, Technologies, and Techniques for Innovation
• Part III Instructional Scenarios