KarinaLiles

Website | Timesheets | Midterm Report | Final Presentation | Annotated Bibliography LEGO WeDo Robotics Karina Liles

Internship in Educational Technology **Reflections**


 * November 21, 2011 **

I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things. It seems I’m having the most trouble finishing lesson 3! I wasn’t quite pleased with the delivery of the lesson. After completing it, I watched it and was slightly dissatisfied. I wasn’t as engaged as I had hoped to be. With that being said, I’m sure students would not enjoy it either. I really want these lessons to be something that students look forward to being a part of and teachers look forward to using. I will have lesson 3 complete soon and will post immediately. Fortunately, my supervisor is patient with me and understands my concerns. Furthermore, she appreciates the fact that I want to deliver an exceptional product.

As for my English lesson, unfortunately my students never got a chance to watch it. The sound was too low and no one could hear it. This could have easily been resolved with a set of computer speakers but unfortunately they did not have any available. I really wanted to take the opportunity to get my students’ input and feedback on the video. I asked them about the video when I returned to worked and they were open to the idea. That was a good thing to know that they were at least interested. Although my English lesson contains a personal lesson to my students, the lesson can be used in several English classes. My personal message can easily be removed.


 * November 8, 2011 **

My internship has temporarily taken a different turn. I am still working on Lesson 3 because I wanted to make a few revisions to the lesson. My plan was to have lesson 3 posted by last week but I found out I had appendicitis. With the surgery and recovery, I’ve been a little out of commission. I hope to have lesson 3 up soon but directed my focus on another lesson for this week.

I am an adjunct professor at a community college where I teach English every Monday night and Reading every Wednesday night. I’m not to return to work until after November 15 (I hope). Both of my classes were canceled last week but someone will be covering my classes this week and next Monday. Instead of having someone else come in and teach for me, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to use a “virtual lesson”!

I created an English Lesson on Planning and Organizing. I used the textbook as a guide and resource for my content. The lesson was centered around four goals: ¡ Goal 1: Choose a topic ¡ Goal 2: Keep your reader in mind as you write ¡ Goal 3: Generate ideas ¡ Goal 4: Organize your ideas

I tried my best to incorporate videos and animations to make the lesson interesting while delivering my content.

This lesson was fairly easy to construct although I still don’t believe I’ve created the ultimate virtual lesson YET. I am waiting on my break though moment but I think the lessons that I’m doing are perfect practice and that the ultimate lesson will take time as I learn from my mistakes and build from effective pieces in each lesson.

This lesson took much longer for me to create than the robotics lessons as I needed to teach for 2.5 hours as opposed to 50 minutes. I struggled deciding on the tool I would use to create this lesson. Usually I create my lessons in iMovie. For this lesson, I started in PowerPoint and uploaded the presentation to AuthorStream. I still wasn’t quite sure if this was the route that I wanted to take because I wanted the person facilitating my class to be as comfortable as possible when sharing the lesson. I realized that the Author Stream upload was moving along very slowly. (I think it took 2 hours to completely upload.) I was afraid that the upload wouldn’t go through so I immediately started thinking of my backup plan. I really wanted to create this lesson in iMovie. I converted my slides to pictures and inserted them into my project. As for animations, I was going to create separate slides as needed with each item that was animated. This seemed like a genius idea until I realized I could not transfer my recorded audio to iMovie. I had just recorded directly into PowerPoint instead of recording separate audio files as I have done in the past and as I should have done this time. So now I was down to plan C. Plan C was to use Jing and record a screencast of the presentation. This was coming along fine until I realized Jing only recorded up to 5 minutes. That would have made for far too many 5 minute segments for my video. Fortunately, the presentation uploaded successfully to AuthorStream.

My main concern is that my class facilitator was not comfortable using the technology and still taught a different lesson. I think this is a major problem when it comes to integrating technology in the classroom. From my viewpoint, showing the video was as simple as clicking the link and pressing play.

I will be creating another lesson for my reading class on Wednesday. I think I’m going to use iMovie for the video.

My 9/27 timesheet has finally been signed as my supervisor was out of the office for a few days. The signed copy is now posted on my internship wiki. Fortunately this did not hinder my work. I was still able to begin my work on lesson 3 and complete other tasks such as the midterm and annotated bibliography draft.
 * October 25, 2011**

I enjoyed creating my midterm project. I gave an overview of my internship and provided some background information on LEGO WeDo Robotics. Finally, I gave an analysis of each lesson. The lesson 2 analysis was more involved because it actually taught a lesson whereas lesson 1 was an introduction to LEGO robotics. For the lesson analysis, my goal was to have the same approach as the director’s cut on DVDs. I wanted to talk over my past lessons and describe my thoughts for each part of the lesson.

Lesson 3 is coming along well. I am really trying to make sure it’s really educational as well as engaging. I want the lessons I create to be as useful as possible. I’m hoping to improve each lesson as I create it.

Lesson 3 will focus on the Giant robotic model. Students will build and program the giant. The standards for the lesson will be:
 * Science 7-3.2 ** Recall the major organs of the human body and their function within their particular body system.
 * Science 7-3.3 ** Summarize the relationships of the major body systems (including the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, excretory, nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems).
 * Math 7-3.6 ** Represent proportional relationships with graphs, tables, and equations.
 * ELA 7-1.3 ** Interpret devices of figurative language (including extended metaphor and oxymoron).
 * ELA 7-3.3 ** Interpret the meaning of idioms and euphemisms encountered in texts.

I chose the two science standards above because the giant robotic model is a good representation of the human body. For math, students will develop graphs to compare average human body sizes to the model built as well as to a size of a typical giant. For ELA, students will read and complete activities for the story “The Selfish Giant” by Oscar Wilde.

As an extended activity, the students will be able to act out the story using the giant robotic model and additional models as needed.

I had a great time creating my first video lesson and thankfully, my mentor was pleased. For lesson 2, I included recommendations for improvements from lesson 1. I think this video has a better quality than the first. Lesson 2 has a better focus on the content of the lesson.
 * September 27, 2011**

Developing the actual lesson was a task. I tried to include a standard from each academic subject but found it better to only include 3 of the four subjects as science and social studies didn’t blend well. I'm hoping that as I continue to make more lessons, they will get better and better as I blend the subjects.

For my internship, I will deliver a virtual Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math (STEM) Course using LEGO WeDo Robotics. After consulting with my onsite supervisor and Dr. Smyth, I will deliver the lessons on DVDs. This will solve the issue of the poor Internet reliability and blocked sites at the school where I will be working.
 * September 13, 2011**

I am extremely excited about this project and I am pleased because I could tell that my supervisor was excited as well. This internship allows me to include STEM in the school without being hired as a consultant (due to budget cuts).

My first tasks were to organize the LEGO WeDo kits, research South Carolina State Standards, develop a high level plan, and create lesson one. I decided to focus on topics that will be taught the 3rd 9 weeks of school so that the lessons will be ready for use and fit right into teacher lessons. I chose to work with 7th grade and pulled pacing guides for each 7th grade subject. From there, I worked on trying to match standards where applicable. I will be doing this throughout the internship, but I wanted to have an idea of the direction my lessons were going.

Lesson 1 is an introduction to LEGO WeDo robotics so that everyone can easily get started.