Artifact #13 for Keith Alcock

Materials

The procedure involves eleven lessons in all. The first (Computer Integration) provides an overview including background, motivation, requirements, examples, and outlines. It then serves to initiate the search for connections, which can be repeated as often as necessary. Students in effect create their own mind maps in this lesson. The search process includes brainstorming in class to get the ball rolling. To ensure that enough material was available, and to be able to produce my own sample application, I put together my own list of ideas in advance. As some brainstorming sessions were observed by a paraprofessional in the classroom, she also added ideas. Tables of the non-student generated ideas are attached to this artifact (Mind Map). They are grouped first by department and then ordered into branches of a subject area which might correspond to a class. In three cases I took digital photographs of the whiteboard after brainstorming sessions and placed them on the class website for reference. They include both student and teacher generated ideas. Since they are larger than the TaskStream size limit, they are placed in a Word document (Whiteboard) and attached.

The next ten lessons (all except Computer Integration) detail how students might want to document or demonstrate their findings. They involve considerable instruction in programming with screen shots and code snippets that accompany the project template where much of the preprogrammed code resides. Each of the lessons in turn includes an attached printout of the web page describing the activity for presentation to students as well as lists of addressed standards and a rubric for evaluating student work. Students had recently programmed what we called a Homework Calculator to solve a problem from one of their other classes. Since they were allowed to reuse their program on one of the computer integration tabs, I am including a table of their equations as an attachment (Homework Calculators). It is sorted into departments as was done with the mind map. The majority of calculator ideas were generated by students with me providing ideas to a few stragglers. In creating their computer integration application, students implemented some ideas which do not appear in any of the attached files. (I didn't collect lists that students wrote on paper.) For example, one student programmed a tab to automatically display Google definitions for any word typed in, and another displayed images of musical instruments in a PictureBox.

The last of the attachments is a pair of reflective diary entries I wrote about the unit (Reflection 1, Reflection 2) which describe how portions of it fared and what could be done to improve them. In general, I concluded that the subject material was promising, but that the timing left much to be desired. I believe that the students learned a substantial amount in this unit and I know that the student teacher did.