Promoting Education and Technology Through FIRST Lego League

Professors in Residence (PIR) is a grant-funded program at James Madison University that focuses on promoting education to underprivileged K-12 schools in a two hour radius. JMU professors who volunteer are assigned to a school and meet with students and faculty. The program was formed in 2004 as a diversity outreach program in high schools to reduce minority dropout rates (and increase diversity at JMU), but it was soon concluded that the children needed to be reached prior to high school. PIR is now in middle and high schools in Richmond, D.C., and Waynesboro.

PIR website

I travel to Waynesboro High School every week and think about how much elementary schools would benefit from the program. Unfortunately, PIR is not taking on any more schools because of budget constraints. I am in the process of working toward having the PIR Program implemented in elementary schools, especially the elementary school where my mother teaches fourth grade. It qualifies as an underprivileged school with its 62% free lunch statistic. It is located in an area with approximately an 82% Caucasian population, but the school has a 54% minority population. From my experience volunteering in the school for the past four years, the children can use all of the help that can be provided.

The goal of the PIR Program is to widen the horizons of students and show them that the sky is the limit and that they can go to college. So many students that I have worked with (at the elementary school and at the high school) do not believe that college is within their grasp. At the elementary level, they are not supported at home and as a result; do not see the importance of homework. At the high school level, they are not doing their homework to allow time to work to buy a car or to take care of family matters. Many of their parents are encouraging them to drop out of school to work to pay family bills and care for their siblings.

A growing initiative within the PIR Program is FIRST Lego League (FLL) teams at PIR partner schools. FIRST is a non-profit organization partnered with JMU and is the foundation for Lego robotics teams. Lego robots are programmed to complete missions and teams compete on four levels: a research project, robot performance assessment, robot design, and teamwork. I am new to the FLL domain, but the children really get excited over the technology. They learn to build and program their robot by themselves and their coach is there for support. Finding people to commit time to coaching is a difficult task, but the technology seems to be scaring off a lot of potential coaches.

FLL website

From your experience, teaching in K-12, going through K-12, and/or having children in K-12, do you believe that FLL will promote science and technology for students? How do you propose we help potential coaches ease their technology fears?

Also, from your experience, teaching in K-12, going through K-12, and/or having children in K-12, do you believe that working with elementary (and/or middle and high) school students to show them that “college is possible” will decrease future drop-out rates and increase their interest in education? Why do you believe so and what are your personal experiences?

VoiceThread Spreading Creativity?

Creativity is a common characteristic for educators of all experience levels. When creating lesson plans and deciding on projects, students like a variety of assignment types. A unit project can often be an assignment in which students can portray their own creativity. During a teaching workshop, one teacher used vocabulary words to express student creativity. The project had students portray their definition of a new vocabulary word. They could draw the definition, create a “wordle” of synonyms, etc. Once the students completed the assignment, the teacher used email to share the projects to students in England. The English students did the same and the students were able to compare how different students interpreted the definition differently.

In the search for a blog topic, I came across a new internet tool that could have helped the teacher communicate easier. VoiceThread is an internet tool that enables students to communicate with other students around the world. It works as a web-based global conversation. Students can “post” a presentation which could include documents, videos, and still images. Once the student has posted their presentation other users can look through the presentation and create comments in the form of audio, video, or text. These comments provide students with not only feedback from the teacher but with students from across the world.

I thought this was an interesting and creative way to spread diversity into the classroom. I encourage you to browse through the different projects on VoiceThread and comment if you find something you like! Have you used VoiceThread in your classroom? How do you feel about this form of technology? Do you see it useful in the K-12 classroom? What about in a Higher Ed situation?

Simulation Stimulation!

Learning by doing is one of the most effective ways to truly understand how some things work. Experience in any field is often required of potential employees before certain companies will hire them. While education is also often required in these circumstances, the completion of class projects is not always seen as an adequate substitution for hands-on experience. In fact, in some fields, a lack of experience in the workplace would even be considered a dangerous problem.

So, how could someone get experience without actually doing the very thing that they have no experience in? The answer is simulation. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the United States military have been doing it for years, and for good reason. The impact of flight simulators on pilot effectiveness is evident (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffpiu018.pdf). Pilots can now practice flying multi-million-dollar pieces of equipment without ever having to pay the consequences for "beginner" mistakes. Some medical students are fortunate enough to have access to surgery simulation software, with which they can dissect cadavers without ever having to touch a corpse. Here is an example of some anatomy class support software provided by a current nursing student: http://auth.mhhe.com/APR/aprvideo/APRoverviewnewfeatures/APRoverviewnewfeatures.html.

What do you think? Can technology offer valuable "hands-on" experience, or is this type of practice actually just play and not "real" enough to suggest that users know what they are doing? What are some other areas of education where simulations could be beneficial? What are some areas where simulation might not be appropriate?

The Web as a Worldwide Classroom…Webcast!

This post is going to dig a little deeper into the world of webcasting, a tool many companies are using to educate their employees and consumers about their products. According to Wikipedia, “A webcast is a media file distributed over the Internet using streaming media technology. A webcast may either be distributed live or on demand. Essentially, webcasting is ‘broadcasting’ over the Internet”(Nov 8, 2009).

Here one study discusses Reinventing the Lecture: Webcasting Made Interactive (2003).

Experience a worldwide webcast first hand, join Oprah and CNN this Monday, November 9 (9pm EST) to be a part of a worldwide webcast, find out more here.

If you had the opportunity to be a part of this worldwide webcast event, what did you think?

Please post your thoughts and feedback about using webcasting as an educational tool. Is this something that will begin to evolve in the K-12 environment? Do you view webcasting as a positive or negative addition to the K-12 classroom? How do you feel about webcast for undergraduate and graduate work? In this course (AHRD 590/ECTC 612) we have had the opportunity to experience a type of webcast by watching the recorded Elluminate Live! sessions. Please post your thoughts about your experiences with webcasting.

Blended Learning: The Best Approach?

The purpose of a study completed by the Center for Excellence and Teaching was to determine if e-learning has caused problems in higher education settings. To do so, a case study at E-College of Wales was conducted. The researchers wanted to examine two types of e-learning approaches. The first is an e-learning only approach to college. The second is a more blended combination of classes on campus as well as online. The hope was to understand what effect e-learning has on students, faculty, as well as management.

The researchers found that the first year of a student’s college career should be focused more on a blended learning approach in comparison to e-learning only. It was concluded that e-learning can be very disruptive to a student’s learning habits. Therefore, when universities are considering e-learning, they need to remember that a more blended approach should give students a better learning environment.

Another study was conducted by Bersin and Associates over a two year period that found the same results as the Center for Excellence and Teaching. They studied blended learning programs and interviewed over 30 different companies in order to find out if e-learning or blended approaches seemed to work the best. They found that the blended learning approach was the most cost effective and had the highest impact for learners.

You can find more information about the blended learning approach at the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology.

Technology as Babysitter?

Kids and Video Games

According to a national survey conducted by the National Institude on Family and the Media, 92% of children aged 2-17 play video games. A third of those have a video game in their room.These same children spend between 22-33 minutes per day playing video games. 89% of video games contain violence.

With these statistics in mind one might ask is this a good use of technology for children? Recently at a restaurant meeting with co-workers and their families I noticed a young family. They had twins aged about 3 years old. The female child was outgoing the boy was reclusive. Soon the boy became bored and did not want to interact with others at the table. The mother took out an Iphone and fired up a game application and handed to the boy. He immediately became immersed in the game. The child never interacted with another human that evening other than his mother when prodded to eat some French fries. His sister continued to charm the other adults at the table gaining strokes for being cute and curious.

Should handheld devices become a substitute for human interaction? Should they become a surrogate babysitter?

Web Accessibility Initiative

When I first started reading this blog I was a bit confused/concerned by the negativity towards online learning; the possibility of it replacing face to face classes, it is for lazy people, and the lack of “completeness” a student has with no face to face interaction. Kellie’s post this weekend (finally) mentioned some good points regarding an online curriculum and I would like to add to that. Kellie addressed the fact that sometimes a person has no choice but to get an advanced degree online due to life circumstances, for example a full time working adult, or one with family obligations to either children or an aging parent. What has not been mentioned are the college students with challenges – whether it is visual, audio, environmental or cognitive. Are these students not entitled to the same education as someone with the freedom to choose between in person or online classes? Not many campuses offer learning environments with assistive technology, putting a vision or hearing impaired student at a disadvantage. What about those that cannot physically attend a brick and mortar campus?
In 1989 – 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, and in 1994 he established the World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/). The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web; included in the standards is a commitment to promote a high degree of usability for people with disabilities.
In 1997 W3C was nominated to host a program focused on web accessibility and from that nomination the Web Accessibility Initiative (http://www.w3.org/WAI/) was born. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops its work through W3C's consensus-based process, involving different stakeholders in Web accessibility. These include industry, disability organizations, government, accessibility research organizations, and more.
WAI, in partnership with organizations around the world, pursues accessibility of the Web through five primary activities:
ensuring that core technologies of the Web support accessibility
developing guidelines for Web content, user agents, and authoring tools
facilitating development of evaluation and repair tools for accessibility
conducting education and outreach coordinating with research and development that can affect future accessibility of the Web.
As we learned in the beginning of this class, accessibility is very important to instructional design - remember our first assignment? We created an instructional support handout explaining the location/use of an accessibility or universal design feature. That assignment is the basis of the WAI. If or when you do online instructional design, I encourage you to take a few moments and look at the work the WAI has done. It is a great resource of information and a good way of keeping up with new assistive technology developments.

A few of you know this is my passion and I wanted to take a moment to share this with the rest of the class. Thanks -