PROPOSAL
ISTE Standard for Students with relevant indicators:
Creative Communicator
Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals.
6c) Students communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively by creating or using a variety of digital objects such as visualizations, models or simulations.
ISTE Standard for Educators with relevant indicators:
Citizen
Educators inspire students to positively contribute to and responsibly participate in the digital world. Educators:
3b) Establish a learning culture that promotes curiosity and critical examination of online resources and fosters digital literacy and media fluency.
3c) Mentor students in safe, legal and ethical practices with digital tools and the protection of intellectual rights and property.
Skill Level:
Advanced
Grade Level:
9-12
Subject:
Social Studies - World Geography
Core Curriculum Standard(s)/Objective(s)/Indicator(s):
WG Strand 1: HUMANS AND THEIR PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT
WG Standard 1.3: Students will cite evidence of how the distribution of natural resources affects physical and human systems.
ISTE Alignment:
Students will use MyMaps to communicate complex ideas in a simplified manner through its mapping visualization and ability to link iconic imagery, links, and key information.
Educators will encourage a learning culture of curiosity as students examine world regions to determine cause and effect while implementing those conclusion on MyMaps and presenting media responsibly to support the data.
UDL Alignment:
Engagement: Sustaining Effort & Persistence
Checkpoint 8.3: Foster Collaboration and Community
In the 21st century, all learners must be able to communicate and collaborate effectively within a community of learners. This is easier for some than others, but remains a goal for all learners. The distribution of mentoring through peers can greatly increase the opportunities for one-on-one support. When carefully structured, such peer cooperation can significantly increase the available support for sustained engagement. Flexible rather than fixed grouping allows better differentiation and multiple roles, as well as providing opportunities to learn how to work most effectively with others. Options should be provided in how learners build and utilize these important skills.
•Create cooperative learning groups with clear goals, roles, and responsibilities
•Create school-wide programs of positive behavior support with differentiated objectives and supports
•Provide prompts that guide learners in when and how to ask peers and/or teachers for help
•Encourage and support opportunities for peer interactions and supports (e.g., peer-tutors)
•Construct communities of learners engaged in common interests or activities
•Create expectations for group work (e.g., rubrics, norms, etc.)
Because the maps are shareable, the students can engage with one another’s projects, work together within cooperative learning groups to enrich their maps, and being online allows for global shareability. Students will participate in peer reviews during the development phase referring to a suggested questions sheet for prompts. Students will complete an assessment sheet during the presentation phase.
Engagement: Recruiting Interest
Checkpoint 7.2: Optimize relevance, value, and authenticity
Individuals are engaged by information and activities that are relevant and valuable to their interests and goals. This does not necessarily mean that the situation has to be equivalent to real life, as fiction can be just as engaging to learners as non-fiction, but it does have to be relevant and authentic to learners’ individual goals and the instructional goals. Individuals are rarely interested in information and activities that have no relevance or value. In an educational setting, one of the most important ways that teachers recruit interest is to highlight the utility and relevance, of learning and to demonstrate that relevance through authentic, meaningful activities. It is a mistake, of course, to assume that all learners will find the same activities or information equally relevant or valuable to their goals. To recruit all learners equally, it is critical to provide options that optimize what is relevant, valuable, and meaningful to the learner.
•Vary activities and sources of information so that they can be:
•Personalized and contextualized to learners’ lives
•Culturally relevant and responsive
•Socially relevant
•Age and ability appropriate
•Appropriate for different racial, cultural, ethnic, and gender groups
•Design activities so that learning outcomes are authentic, communicate to real audiences, and reflect a purpose that is clear to the participants
•Provide tasks that allow for active participation, exploration and experimentation
•Invite personal response, evaluation and self-reflection to content and activities
•Include activities that foster the use of imagination to solve novel and relevant problems, or make sense of complex ideas in creative ways
The students have the flexibility to choose the medium of the presentation of their project, as well as selecting the specific culture they will be reporting on. This lets the student personalize their project to their interests. They will explore the culture to determine relevant or significant details and direct them toward the appropriate groups. They will consider peer evaluations and reflect on its relevance and incorporate where beneficial.
Representation: Comprehension
Checkpoint 3.4: Maximize transfer and generalization
All learners need to be able to generalize and transfer their learning to new contexts. Students vary in the amount of scaffolding they need for memory and transfer in order to improve their ability to access their prior learning. Of course, all learners can benefit from assistance in how to transfer the information they have to other situations, as learning is not about individual facts in isolation, and students need multiple representations for this to occur. Without this support and the use of multiple representations, information might be learned, but is inaccessible in new situations.Supports for memory, generalization, and transfer include techniques that are designed to heighten the memorability of the information, as well as those that prompt and guide learners to employ explicit strategies.
•Provide checklists, organizers, sticky notes, electronic reminders
•Prompt the use of mnemonic strategies and devices (e.g., visual imagery, paraphrasing strategies, method of loci, etc.)
•Incorporate explicit opportunities for review and practice
•Provide templates, graphic organizers, concept maps to support note-taking
•Provide scaffolds that connect new information to prior knowledge (e.g., word webs, half-full concept maps)
•Embed new ideas in familiar ideas and contexts (e.g., use of analogy, metaphor, drama, music, film, etc.)
•Provide explicit, supported opportunities to generalize learning to new situations (e.g., different types of problems that can be solved with linear equations, using physics principles to build a playground)
•Offer opportunities over time to revisit key ideas and linkages between ideas
There are review stages with the teacher and peers followed by the implementation stages. Students will build concept maps or fill out a template guiding them through stages of data collection and organization. Students will use the prior knowledge of maps but with the new idea of interactivity with maps that can be personally labelled and categorized. Students will “own” these maps on their google account for future reference and we will look back at them over time to revisit the key ideas surrounding culture in regards to other factors and influences.
SAMR Level:
Redefinition
By creating their own, shareable map, students will be able to include hotspots with further information on a location as well as collaborating with others. Within the popup they can include links, images, informational text, etc. They can examine other student’s maps regardless of that student’s geolocation and can gain an understanding of others’ views of the effects of the physical environment. These collaborations can be done real-time and can be augmented with live chat.
TPACK Alignment:
CK: A knowledge of how the distribution of natural resources affects physical and human systems.
PK: Instruction will include traditional lecture, online exploration, peer and teacher reviews, student self-analysis.
TK: Internet, Computers, Tablets, Google MyMaps where they will create a type of diagram where they will find imagery from the internet.
Project Title:
MyMaps: Humans & Our Physical Environment
Project Summary:
Students will create a MyMap on Google Maps. Each student will place markers for at least 5 different locations noting key physical features of an area and explaining how it affects the culture of that area including imagery and hyperlinks.
Statement of Need
Analysis Phase
* Who is the audience and their characteristics? Peers, anyone the student shares their project with
* Identify the new behavioral outcome? Awareness and consideration of physical geography’s affect on culture
* What types of learning constraints exist? Internet and capable device
* What are the delivery options? Internet, maps can be printed once complete
* What are the online pedagogical considerations? Using online tools that allow for collaboration, global access, and sharing
* What is the timeline for project completion? Two weeks. One day for lecture and selection. One day for outlining. One day for development. One day for peer and teacher reviews. One for implementation and revision. One day for presentation and evaluation.
Design and Development:
• Familiarity/Understanding of Google Maps and MyMaps
• Create a new map, titled with the culture/region and a name with examples
• Gain an understanding through research and prepare a lecture on culture and its relationship with physical geography
• Prepare outline for students to follow for their project that includes a project description, instructions, and outline for them to fill in.
• Prepare evaluation form for presentations
PROJECT
Link to example:
Screenshot of example:
REFLECTION
I discovered the Google Maps MyMaps tool during an assignment to review online learning tools. I chose to create a project using this tool because of the 15+ tools that I reviewed, this is the one that most captured my imagination and time. I spent time exploring it and sharing it with friends and family. My best friend and I even created a map collaboratively plotting the National Parks we had visited together and posting pictures and stories of our trips.
I had a goal for this class to work collaboratively on my learning efforts by engaging in online communities. The shareability of this tools allows for many forms of collaboration, one of which I explained in the previous paragraph. This project aligns to my leadership goal by adding the tool to the tool spreadsheet made available to my colleagues and explaining the function of the tool and my enthusiasm for it. While the students are expected to use this tool as the only means to accomplish the assignment, there is a lot of flexibility within the tool about how to accomplish the task.
I struggled with timeliness in creating this project. I found myself getting distracted easily, falling into the rabbit hole of learning about multiple cultures. I resolved it by determining that I only needed to outline 5 main points of the culture, include at least one image, and for the benefit of example, at least one credible website link. This helped me to understand some struggles the students might face and to create a rubric and outline that would help them avoid the same struggles I faced.
I would implement this project by introducing the concept of culture, and discussing the idea of how culture can be shaped or influenced by physical geography and vice versa. I would then demonstrate to the students my example project, and introduce them to the MyMaps tool. We would spend some time exploring the tool with no pressure of mistakes. The next classtime students would fill in the outline of what cultures they will feature by exploring possibilities on the internet and determining what key features they will include, they will gather imagery, and include sources. Next class they will build their maps. Then they will have peer reviews, comparing and sharing their work, evaluating and implementing feedback. The the class will have the opportunity to collaborate on a single class map that will be made available to be shared with the other classes for comparison and exploration.
I need to create a more thorough example that employs the responsibility of the Digital Citizen. As well, I would like to collaborate with schools from other regions around the US and hopefully around the world to demonstrate how perception influences the students views on culture. However, in regards to the Creative Communicator standard that is the focus of this project, perhaps the students could determine if there are any other tools they think would be beneficial in gaining an understanding of the same concept and allowing them to explore those options.