Digital Divide Week 2

 The truth is, most of my students face many if not all of the dividing factors we talked about in class. The biggest one that affects them on a day to day basis is their socioeconomic status. This can make it difficult for basic needs like shelter, nourishing food,  and proper hygeine. It also affects them needs within a technologically advancing world when you don't have wifi, a laptop, or anything with a modern operating system in your home. A lot of my students that have technology at home are working with technology that is usually over a decade old. Another dividing factor is the urban community they live in. A common misconception about digital divide is "well they can go to the library". I have been to the library nearest to them and one located in an affluent suburb. Both of these libraries are ran by the same entity "Columbus Metropolitan Library" and are within 20 minutes of one another. In the one on the south side or "inner-city"; its not as nice, has less features, and had ten times the homeless people as the one located in suburbia. All of this said, many of my students still face many large scale and systemic dividing factors like ethnicity, race, and education level. All of the students I teach fall into atleast one of these umbrellas of dividing factors, this makes it extremely difficult for this to even have the same level of exposure to modern hardware or operating systems.

Covid played a huge part in eventually widening the digital divide of the students in my community. As crazy as it sounds, the biggest way it did this was by shrinking the gap. The problem was, the gap shrunk really fast and with funds that were not sustainable. This cause two things to happen one of which is that money in really fast. Anyone in education knows that all money comes with a deadline to spend it by. A lot of money with a short deadline means inevitably in will be spent somewhat inequitably. That is money coming to our schools versus other schools and also how my school spent that money. The other problem for this is it takes a glaring problem and makes everyone think it isn't one. This is especially dangerous in schools because of the fact that that money has to be begged for over a long time. All the momentum to getting money for tech had gone away and now has to start back over at square zero.

I would say overall my school district does a bad job in terms of digital equity in comparison to other districts. The biggest way this is the case is not having one to one computers. I have heard some pretty wild numbers on why they couldn't have students carrying laptops back and forth from home and I can respect that thought process. However, that just means we need a computer for every student in every classroom. This points back pretty well to our reading this week from Jean Ayton(1980). While it doesn't necesarily talk about one to one technology, it talks about compliance over creativity, lack of freedom of choice, and extremely teacher directed environment. This is all immediately made better if not fixed with properly funded and properly used technology within the classroom.

Anyon, J. (1980). Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of WorkLinks to an external site.. In Learning Power: Organizing for Education and Justice. (Oakes, J., Rogers, J., & Lipton, M).  Teachers College Press. 

Digital Divide Week 1

     My name is Trent Fry and I teach at South HS in Columbus, Ohio. I teach both push in and pull out 11th and 12th graders as an intervention specialist in both math and english. I have taught in Oregon, in an affluent suburb of Portland. I also have spent a year teaching online in title one, predominately hispanic, district just north of Denver, Colorado. I am originally from Ponca City, Oklahoma and got my undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma in special education. I am only in my 5th year teaching, but have got to see a lot. I have been in situations where the struggle was spending $18,000 dollars just as a special education team and have been in situations where the struggle was getting more than 10 chromebooks in a class that averages 15-20.

    A simple definition about the community I work in is that it would be considered "inner-city". I would love to apply what I learn in this class and apply it to the students that I teach. However, I am one teacher in a district of 45,000-50,000 students. On top of that, my district is in what they have described as a budget crisis. We are currently set to run out of money early in 2027 and have yet to negotiate our contract. I am unsure of the impact I could have in this setting even in my most fervent state. While the intended beneficiary of this call to action would be the students within my school and classroom, the call to action would not put the onus on them. The true call to action I struggle with. I think it could be as narrow as the district I work in, but could go as broad as the federal government and the way it funds us to be not just have our most at risk students not just survive, but thrive. 

    Whenever I was looking to accept my current job, I did a little digging around in terms of the data of the students I would be serving, but it was much more real to do so after being there. Our school serves 873 students in grades 7th-12th. The racial break down of our school is 570 students who are black, 114 students who are hispanic, 107 students who are white, 67 students who identify as two or more races, and 8 and 5 students who are Native American and asian respectively(NCES.org). The school was built in and opened in 1924 and according to people I have spoken to, became a predominately a school with a predominately black population in the late 40's. That  social culture has become very rich and deeply embedded at this point. I think the largest showing of this is in our marching band. It has a vibe and sound of that of an HBCU band as apposed to the famous marching band of Ohio State right up the street. It is my favorite part of our school. Economically the data is very interesting. The south side of Columbus is very intertwined with gentrification. Within a couple blocks you could be in very affluent to then very poor neighborhoods. The zipcode we serve the most has a median household income of around $54,000(incomebyzipcode.com). Our academic scores are troubling at best. USnews.com has us at 7% proficiency in math and 24% in reading. 

    I love the school I work at because of the students I work with. However, I would definitely say it is my most difficult job I have had. The school is putting in a lot of effort into educating our students and giving them opportunities after they leave us. However, this doesn't change the fact that they face many hardships from many of the demographics that they fall into. 

5313 Week 5

 

    The research article by Rao, Torres, and Smith (2021) was perfect for me. As an intervention specialist, the vast majority of of my day is with students with disabilities. I have taught online before, and my english 4 class is very computer based. UDL(Universal Design for Learning) is a very hot word in the world of education. I think it is occasionally good for us to revisit the meaning of these hit words. Rao, Torres, and Smith do a great job of describing it as "tools to reduce barriers and support students to meet learning and affective goals" (105). Students with disabilities are constantly faced with a plethora of barriers. Having built in things that remove or give access to get around these barriers is always my goal in my classroom. Two of these tools really stood out to me throughout my reading of this article.

    The lesson plan I am developing is the final project for a mini-unit on the hero's journey. With this being the case, I think keeping track of the continuum of student learning. These students are not only  seniors, many of them are legal adults at 18. I really want to push that onus onto them as we develop them as learners and as humans. A great idea I saw for UDL guideline 7 was "Encourage students to track their tasks on a checklist that can be shared with teachers" (Rao, Torres, and Smith, 110). Not only is this an assignment that is part of a much larger mini-unit, but also I have a lot of issues with attendance in this class. Starting out with an initial checklist will make it much easier for students to follow along with as they are in and out over the time we are working on this.

The next tool that really stood out to me was in guideline 3. This tool also has a lot of what we work on in here and my other educational technology classes "Create “at a glance” step-by-step directions with screenshots" (Rao, Torres, and Smith, 107). This tool will help me in a lot of ways. Beyond the fact that my students are very in and out in terms of attendance, they also really struggle with doing things independently. I am only one person, and spend a majority of my time working one on one with students during a majority of the class. Screenshots give them a better chance at doing things on their own. I think this ties back to the original definition of UDL given to us by the author. It really lowers that barrier of entry for my students to take that next step in the assignment. This is specifically important for my students with disabilities. Many have 14 years of learned helplessness in the school system as students who are continually not able to academically access many assignments. This is a great skill of trying things on their own that they will need in the work force.

Resources

Rao, K., Smith, S. J., & Lowrey, K. A. (2017). UDL and Intellectual Disability: What do we know and where do we go?. Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities, 55(1), 37. doi:10.1352/1934-9556-55.1.37

5333 Week 5

 I think my digital story is coming along really well. With it being a story about the learning environment I work in, I fell like I am living in my digital story everyday. This is a real pro and con because I am thinking about my story often, but also wanting to change it often. I fell like I have a good spine of a story through last weeks planning and just want to make some revisions to it after getting my feedback from class and Professor Shannon. The biggest change I want to make is changing the POV. I got some feedback about making it the POV of one person and I really like that. The type of student I would like to try to capture as the main character is just an "average" student. The high achievers fight through it, and the lowest achievers are usually the cause of problems or not participating in general. I think this adds to the complexity of the problem, but also maybe narrows down the end goal. I will make my needed changes to my planning core, script, and board before starting on the creation of the product itself. I think getting lost in the tiny details of the product will be really easy so I want to try really hard to have a clear picture of what I want before I start that creation piece next week. I think as far as assistance I just want someone to look over a draft of my product before I present it. 

    Two of the resource's I am using from the reading Kapular, D. (September 7, 2018). Top 30 tools and apps for digital storytelling. Tech & Learning are Pixton and Storyboard that. I really enjoy Pixton. I am implementing in my own classroom as a more accessible way for my students with writing struggles. I don't feel I have a glaring issue in writing, but I do struggle with being artistic. I feel like Pixton removes the barrier for art from creation pieces like this as it allows to type what I want instead of make it. Storyboard I use in a pretty rudimentary way, but I still enjoy it. Sometimes what you really need is good formatting and storyboard that gave me grade formatting for my planning process.

I think the authentic audience for my creation is teachers. Especially teachers in a truly chaotic school. My story is to make people think about the balance of dealing with everyones baggage as well as needs. We can't constantly baby our kids with trauma, nor completely ignore them, and we cant assume our worst don't have a reason to be that way. Teacher's are only human so my hope is that they can remember we can simply be a calming force in the chaos. Hopefully that impact is passed on to students. I have noticed the calmest teachers that still demand high standards get the most out of students, because I think they truly crave that. I have developed a lot of planning skills from this assignment. I think I usually would have made this on the fly and not doing that has made me step back and think of what my vision is. I think a role I can play with this story is sharing it out to a couple close colleagues and getting some feedback and having better conversations about the things that are happening around us.

5313 Week 4

https://app.magicschool.ai/tools/lesson-plan-generator?share=2fc01be5-4b83-494a-bb2c-536005b5e2c5  

I have used magicschool.ai quite a bit in the past. I think it usually does a pretty good job if you give it some guidance at giving you materials to work with. I have primarily used it for lower level math and english. The lesson I asked it to write today was for my Algebra 2 students. The standard is N.CN.3 Find the conjugate of a complex number; use conjugates to find magnitudes and quotients of complex numbers.

I think it does a good job with this standard depending on what you are looking for. If you are good at teaching the content, a content expert, and skilled at questioning you can definitely use this lesson plan. It does a really good job with giving good examples of practice or example problems. These problems I find follow a very clear path of increasing rigor which is appreciated. The biggest problem I see is that it is just either vastly underestimating how long something takes or somehow under the impression that everyone has totally mastered every standard preceding it. The other big issue is that it doesn't have much in the way of questioning or any real teaching, just a map to follow. Again, I think it does create a rigorous product, but it seems more like a framework with problems as apposed to a lesson plan. I think this perfectly follows what we have been reading about AI in class. AI can be an awesome tool. AI is only a tool, it is a long ways away from being able to weild itself to "build" anything. I think this ties back to that authentic education. Without teachers bringing it to life, it feels pretty soulless.

The tool is used was Raina the chat bot. I think the chat bot is really the best feature in the website. The assessment it came up with was way better broken down into something that I will probably use on my next test. For example, it gave different different assessment questions for different levels and understandings of the standard. I would let it help me find questions to assess my students, but I wouldn't let it do it. I definitely would not let it deliver instruction in any way whatsoever. Again, it is simply a way for an already skilled teacher to save some time in thinking of practice problems, passages, or writing prompts.

I do use magic school. I use it for what it can do, but I use some form of AI as a teacher atleast once a week. I think when it has been the most helpful is with younger students in reading. If you ask it to punch you out 250 words where vowel teams are often used on the 2nd grade level it will be amazing. You can ask it to give you the 5 hardest words from that passage and review them first. I think it's best use is probably for someone like me, an intervention specialist. When I am working on or assessing progress on a very specific skill it does a great job. The insights I would offer on it is that it really isn't too different from the old school teacher guide books I grew up on. It is an effective tool for an effective teacher, not a replacement for one.

5333 Week 3

     The story I would like to explore is that of the learning environment for my students. I work at an inner-city school right in the heart of Columbus Ohio. I love the school I work at. It is a fun place to work that is always full of life and laughter. With that being said, it is also one of the most overstimulating places I have ever been in my life. Teaching there can be hard, it can be hard anywhere. But more importantly, it seems like a hard, sometimes impossible, place to learn. I want to tell my story from the point of view of the students, even the students who sometimes cause the distractions. The name of the story will be "How am I supposed to learn today?" this will be a commonly used phrase when I am telling the story. The hoped impact would be educators having some more perspective and empathy for students. The challenge will be learning in this environment, the transformation will be for the reader, and the resolution will be a changed mindset about understanding their challenges.

    This story would be used in an educational environment more in a PD setting. I think these are things we all know about, but are easy to forget in the heat of the moment. It is really difficult to have empathy when someone is essentially destroying something you are passionate about. This will never take away that feeling, but could possibly cause that one second pause we all need sometime. It will somewhat be a Nancy Duarte story map switching between the "good students" and the "bad students". Since this story is for educators, the standards should be for them too. The most important standard will be 2.2.a, advancing a shared mission. That is the goal is to advance the shared mission of having empathy for our students, while still holding them to a high standard. I think some teachers hold the standard without empathy, and others have the empathy but dont hold the standard. I think this story can help with both.

    I think the pixton app was a great way to tell a story, but I also really enjoyed creating a podcast for my intro class, so I am pretty torn between the two. The way I would assess this is the same way I would assess anything, to see if it had it's desired impact. I think if it has that on the other educators in the calss then it can be assessed as successful. I think Ohler's was the most impactful reading for me. I knew what I wanted to write about, but I didnt really have a direction to it. The different arcs made me realize that it needs to have some sort of end goal. Ohler's different maps made me realize how all sad stories have a way of teaching us a lesson and something to leave with. I think this is what inspired me to possibly make the end of the story(since it's told from the students POV) as a plea to have some empathy from the educators that serve them.

5313 Week 3

 When looking at How People Learn II written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2018 and comparing it to Gura's thoughts on a creative learning environment, one thing really stands out. Gura has an interesting thought that creativity can be both taught and grown. I think this is really interesting because we often view it as a fixed thing. However, better understanding of our selves and how we learn(what the learned from the infographic), makes me think that you could be taught better or grow even more. The ISTE student standard that stands out is 1.1.b. Creating a customized learning environment allows us to be more likely to be creative and gives us more space for our metacognition, executive functioning, and self regualtion.

References

Gura, M. (2020). Fostering Student Creativity. EdTech Digest the State of the Arts, Creativity, and Technology 2020: A Guide for Educators and Parents. p. 7.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). How people learn II: Learners, contexts, and cultures.Links to an external site. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press.