My question this week is how can I bring an authentic, real-world feel to my classroom through technology? It shouldn’t be a hard question unless I am asking about math, or the second most math-filled science, chemistry.
My initial research took me toward creating a blended or a flipped class (Fulton, 2012) which I have witnessed as a chemistry class. Watching the video lectures as homework allowed students to get help and extra instruction in-class and work collaboratively. It is closer to a workplace model, as when I was an engineer, I tended to read or watch videos about things I need to learn at home and then go to work to do my work and collaborate with my co-workers. I am not sure if students would think a flipped class as feeling authentic. They certainly might enjoy it as feeling different than what they are used to.
In the Google Hangout discussion, David Wicks recommended I look into “serious gaming”. I found an article that described serious gaming for social decision-making. They described taking a room full of people and breaking them down into small groups to role-play the different sides of an issue. The groups get a much clearer sense of the problem and can recommend resolutions to stakeholders (Susskind & Kim, 2016). For some discussions in science, this may work well. David had offered an idea that there may be a chemistry serious game. There is. Zachtronics produces the game SpaceChem where the player runs the chemical synthesizer for frontier colonies. The player has to figure out how to construct the process to construct the molecules. It has been very popular, very addictive, I have heard of its use at the collegiate level but its learning curve for initial play is steep and it costs per license. It is much more like real-world chemical engineering than anything else I have seen.
One of the guidance articles I read this week intrigued me with its emphasis on online learning and encouragement of teachers to be prepared to teach an online course for K-12 students (Kennedy, n.d.). This article encouraged me to look for applications that could handle messaging, documents, reports, videos, pictures, homework and everything as an online class needs a robust classroom online infrastructure to rest on. In my search, I found the article How to Do More With Less (Pape, Sheehan, & Worrell, 2012). It recommended tools for all different areas of studies and ones that could message with students and parents.
I intended to look at my question through a lens of how to make my classroom feel more like a workplace. Workplaces have all kinds of different feelings and structures even within different rooms of the same building. What I did and the technological tools I used in the repair engineering department were different than the tools and the environment I had across the hall in the software engineering department. Maybe having different feeling classes, like a blended class or online class, can imitate the real-world. It is hard to say what will feel authentic to my math or chemistry students in my future room and district. My peers have affirmed my blended and flipped class readings. I am eager to try flipping and/ or blending my class, using online tools, trying some “serious gaming”, using some POGIL activities in what seems to be a never-ending quest to find what will feel authentic for my classes.
References
Fulton, K. (2012). Upside down and inside out: Flip Your Classroom to Improve Student Learning. Learning & Leading With Technology, 39(8), 12-17.
Pape, L., Sheehan, T., & Worrell, C. (2012). How to Do More with Less: Lessons from Online Learning. Learning & Leading With Technology, 39(6), 18-22.
