Saving the world one student at a time

When I arrived at UNT, one of the projects already underway in the research center where I work was MSOSW (Middle Schoolers Out to Save the World). The focus of this project is to increase middle school students' interest in science, technology, engineering and math through a problem-based unit focused on energy conservation. The students participating in this project, which included schools from Texas, Louisiana, Maine and Vermont, use Watts Up? devices to measure the amount of vampire energy used by the electronic devices in their homes. This project involves a lot of in-depth learning about energy consumption, carbon emissions, measurement units for energy and power, energy costs, carbon footprint, stand-by power and product design. In addition to these concepts, the students are required to do a lot of math for conversions, and they must use a spreadsheet. Because I see such value in these types of projects, I wanted my pre-service teachers to experience firsthand what it looks like to complete a problem-based unit from beginning to end. I observed this unit being taught last year at Good Shepherd Episcopal School, but I had never actually planned and taught it myself. Let me tell you, the planning was much more time intensive than I had assumed, and I ended up staying up late one night to get all of the materials ready.

The first thing I did was put my students into groups of 2. I normally let them pick their own partners, but they have gotten, how shall we say, comfortable this semester, and I wanted to break them out of their apathetic little comfort zone. The next thing I did was set up a Google Presentation for each group. I wanted them to see how this tool worked, so I created one for each group and set them up so anyone could edit. The next thing I did was lay out the project on Glogster. I was never really happy with how this turned out, but you can see it here. The process of setting up this glog (their term, not mine) required me to go find all of the resources I wanted them to have for the project. This included a carbon footprint calculator, a vampire energy calculator, a graph maker, a couple of videos and a spreadsheet for entering some data. As the pre-service teachers went through this project, I had them report their information in the Google Presentation along the way. I also brought a few Watts Up? devices to the lab and hooked them up to a monitor, a CPU tower, the printer and the document projector. I wanted them to do the math required to calculate how much energy the lab uses in a 24 hour period. Overall, they did a really nice job and completed the whole activity, even though it was not for a grade (I will grade it in the future, I think).

Here are a few lessons learned from this tech-rich problem-based unit:

1. Pre-service teachers actually like this kind of work. I have to say, this was hard and the students really struggled with some of the math and science concepts. But they stuck with it and took the topic seriously. I would even go so far as to say they learned something about energy conservation from doing this. I also hope they learned something about using this teaching strategy with students
2. Glogster is kind of cool, but it has been extremely unstable and unreliable lately. On several occasions I have logged on and gotten some sort of "We will be down for the next 36 hours, but we are adding some really awesome new features!" Well, when I go to retrieve my work from a Web tool and it is not there, I'm done with that tool. That is a total deal breaker for me. So, Glogster, I am sure your new design is really awesome, but you let me down on several occasions and I'm done. I will also not be pointing my students to this tool because it let many of them down too.
3. When you set up a Google Presentation to be edited by anyone with the link, it will not let you import images. The students made a graph that was exported as a JPEG, and I wanted them to import it into a slide. Google Presentation wouldn't let them do it, so we found a very bothersome work-around. If we pasted the image in a PPT slide, we could copy and paste the graph into the Google Presentation (but only if we use CTRL-V, not the mouse). I don't know if this was a bug in the new re-design of Google Presentation, or if they have this feature disabled for when anonymous users are editing a document. Either way, it was annoying and slowed the process down temporarily. In a K-12 classroom, this could mean the difference between a project going well and the whole thing crumbling in your hands. I do have to own this one, though, because I never tried to edit a presentation or insert an image as an anonymous user. I should have done this beforehand, but I just took for granted that it would work.
4. Google Spreadsheet worked like a champ, and I will definitely use it in the future for activities like this. I have used this tool for years, but I had never seen multiple people entering in data at once. The students also thought this was really cool.
5. The Vampire Energy Calculator is very cool, and I think this is what really brought the project home for the students. Even the act of physically dragging electronics into different rooms made this more like a simulation than a calculator. It's a very well-designed tool.

So, that is my first attempt at teaching the MSOSW unit, but it will not be my last. I already have some ideas for how to make it better next time, and I hope this is serves as a catalyst for some students to begin envisioning this type of instruction in their own classrooms.

Digital Fabrication, take two

Yesterday I was asked to cover a class for one of my colleagues, so I planned another round of digital fabrication activities for his students. I had done the same thing last week with another colleague's class, using the materials I developed last year. The first attempt last week did not go nearly as well as I remembered the activities going last year, so I was motivated to rethink how I was presenting the content, as well as the activity I was having them do. The "old" activity was challenge that involved designing a container for tootsie rolls that would maximize the surface area:volume ratio. The concept was good, and the students approached it with enthusiasm. However, it turns out that their math abilities were a pretty major roadblock to getting anything substantive out of the activity. After the box was built and they stuffed it with tootsie rolls, the learning was basically over. This issue has roots in several factors that are true of most preservice teachers.

1. Preservice teachers' pedagogical knowledge has more to do with their worldview than their aptitude or attitude. Since most of them were taught from a traditional approach, the chasm between problem-based design activities and the lecture-test-essay model they are used to is a quantum leap. The problem is not that they are resistant to new pedagogical approaches; they simply have very little, if anything, to which to anchor them.
2. Before preservice teachers can understand something as a teacher, they need to take a step back and experience it as a student. Activities, therefore, need to be authentic and replicate, as much as possible, the way it might be done in a classroom.
3. Based on the previous two observations, if the instructor wants preservice teachers to abstract pedagogical principles from an authentic activity, he or she is going to have to lead them there. You can't expect inexperienced teachers coming from a traditional paradigm to naturally make connections between the activity they just did and broader educational ideas. It's like giving someone from a remote tribe in the Amazon rainforest a debit card and expecting him to naturally gravitate to an ATM and get some cash. The notion that there is "money" in a "bank" that can be "accessed" remotely just does not mesh with the way he thinks the world works.
4. Finally, authentic activities must be accessible. That is, they can not be too hard nor too easy. If the activity is too easy, the preservice teachers think it is fluff and busy work; if it's too hard, they can't envision themselves teaching that way. Either extreme will likely reinforce the worldview you are trying to change.

To improve on the previous activity, with these observations in mind, I designed the following challenge:

1. I started by describing the mentality of many students today, which is that every task they are given in school has a right answer, and their goal as students is to get the right answer the first time. Many teachers reinforce this mentality by how they conduct their classes. At present, the world works much differently than classrooms do. In the world, we encounter problems to which we must develop solutions. These problems are typically ...
• Ill-defined: the cause of the problem may not be readily apparent
• Ill-structured: because we don't know the cause, we don't know where to start exploring solutions
• Complex: there are many factors involved, each of which influences the other, and we don't know how changing one factor influences the other factors
2. I then tell them the story of William, a 14-year old boy from Malawi who had to drop out of school because is family was literally starving to death. They could no longer pay for his education, so he used the library to try to educate himself. From reading physics and "green" energy books, he got the idea of improving his family's way of life by building a windmill and generating electricity for his home. Using the images and diagrams from a book on wind energy (he was not able to read English very well at the time), he built his own windmill from old car, tractor and bicycle parts and provided electricity for his home. Soon, people from all over came to his house to charge their cell phones. Not long after this, he built another windmill to pump water to irrigate his family's crops.
3. I transition to the next point by telling the students that William solved his problem by using the resources available to him to create a solution to his problem. This took several attempts, and you can see how he improved his design from the first windmill to the second. In the same way, teachers need to provide opportunities for their students to solve problems using their available resources. Since there is no single right answer, students must be evaluated using different criteria.
4. I then talked about a new set of resources that students have access to. We talk for a minute about how everything they use now was first designed in a virtual 3D environment before it became a physical object we can use. I took a minute to show them ModelMaker, a simple tool for creating 3D shapes from 2D cut-outs.
5. I then explained the challenge, which was create a windmill that was able to lift a bucket of tootsie rolls. They would construct their windmill using card stock, a pencil and masking tape, and they would design their bucket using ModelMaker. The group able to lift the most tootsie rolls would win the  challenge, the prize for which was getting to eat as many tootsie rolls as they wanted. :-)

Here are some pictures of the activity ...

 [kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="http://www.curbyalexander.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/fieldtrip2.swf" width="400" height="300" targetclass="flashmovie"]

[/kml_flashembed]

In summary, this activity was a vast improvement over the previous activity. The preservice teachers were able to see for themselves how their design choices affected the way their windmill functioned. Some groups created a "cute" windmill that would not spin, while others created an aesthetically bland windmill that performed wonderfully. Some groups put more focus on the size of their container than they did on the design of their windmill, and one group created a wonderful windmill but their bucket too small. Had the bucket been bigger, they were convinced it could have carried the most tootsie rolls. For some of them, the fact that they created a machine that actually worked was very rewarding in itself. I will do some follow up with my own students to document their reactions, but my impression was that this was effective and worthwhile. And in the spirit of engineering and the design process, there was room for improvement.

The 15-minute Experiment

One tool I have used with students for several years is a wiki. I have personally used wikis for group work, class websites and digital portfolios. However, I have had a hard time coming up with a good activities for my students that really demonstrate the affordances of a wiki (group editing, version history, comments and discussion, etc.) beyond the ability to just create a web page. In fact, my experiences were always similar to Melissa Cole, who had a lot of great ideas for using a wiki in her class but struggled to get buy-in from her class. I have had the same problem in the past, where I would set up a semester-long collaborative project for students to build a collective knowledge base. These projects always started out strong before interest fizzled after a few weeks. One interesting piece from Cole's article was the brief taxonomy of wiki usage, taken from Tonkin (2005):

1. Single-user. This allows individual students to write and edit their own thoughts and is useful for revision and monitoring changes in understanding over time.
2. Lab book. This enables students to peer review notes kept online by adding, for example, commentary or annotations to existing lecture notes or seminar discussions.
3. Collaborative writing. This can be used by a team for joint research such as a group project, essay or presentation.
4. Creating a topical knowledge repository for a module cohort. Through collaborative entries students create course content that supplements and extends delivered material.

I don't think this list is exhaustive, but it got me to thinking. How could I show my students the power of collective knowledge without giving them a project that would drag on forever, while harnessing knowledge each student currently possessed?

Well, I came up with the following idea:

Imagine you were each asked to speak to a group of students new to UNT about tips for being successful in their first semester. In other words, what do you wish you had known as an incoming student? Chances are you could come up with several good tips. But what would happen if three or four of you collaborated on the same talk? You would probably be able to come up with an even better list of suggestions for incoming students. What you will do in the next 15 minutes is collectively tap into your knowledge and experience and provide incoming students with a knowledge base that might be helpful to their transition to UNT (assuming they take your advice).

The result was this wiki, which I created using WikiSpaces. The end result is not totally impressive, and you can see that some of the students took this opportunity to be kind of silly (which I can relate to ... I was always that kid in the class). But what was interesting was the reaction from many of the students when we debriefed about this activity. For most of them, they got it. They were able to see in a  short amount of time that many people can collectively put their heads together and create something useful (e.g., Wikipedia, though that experiment has taken many years to create).

On the technical side, there was quite a lot of work I had to do beforehand to make this experiment truly 15 minutes. Here is the rundown:

1. Set up the wiki
2. I took advantage of the free teacher upgrade, which allowed me to add users in bulk. This takes about a day to do, since wikispaces wants to verify your .edu or k12 e-mail address.
3. Created a CSV file with a username and password for each of my students.
4. Uploaded the file and created the student accounts.
5. Distributed the usernames and passwords to my class (via Moodle)

I demonstrated this process to the class as well, in case they wanted to try it themselves. I think this is an activity I will include in the future, and I may even have my students edit or add to the existing entries in addition to creating their own. I may have to find a new topic before long if this one becomes saturated, but I think there are still several topics that haven't been addressed.

So, how do you use wikis in your teaching?

Inspiration is for amateurs

This time of year, when there so much to do, I find it hard to get motivated to do some of the things (e.g., grading) that I don't want to do. This morning as I was driving to work, I was reminded of an interview I once saw with Chuck Close, a professional artist. He has these words for anyone who is emerging with their profession:

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

This is a popular quotation, and for good reason. If I treat motivation (inspiration) like it is something that I must have before I can do anything meaningful or productive, I will end up wasting a lot of time. I have experienced this first hand recently with my writing, where I have been much more systematic about chipping away at manuscripts than I have in the past. There have actually been studies about this, and they show that writers who set aside smaller chunks of time each day for writing actually get more done that writers who set aside larger chunks on a couple of days or who set aside a whole day. This seems counter-intuitive, but having squandered many  a "writing day," I guess it wouldn't hurt to try it. After I get this figured out, the question will shift to, how do I get my students to adopt this philosophy?

Digital Portfolio tools

These days I am thinking a lot about digital portfolios. I have been looking at a lot of them, talking a lot about them and coincidentally, evaluating a lot of them. So that I don't forget all of this by next Fall, I want to put my thoughts down and try to galvanize some of the lessons I have learned this semester. I presented this project at the very beginning of the semester. I think this was overwhelming to some of the students, but my objective was to make sure they knew about their portfolio all semester. I knew some (or many) of them would put this off until the last minute, but I also knew some of the students would appreciate getting an early start. So, I discussed with them the purpose of a portfolio, and we also talked about digital footprints and job searches and other big ideas. Then I showed them some examples of different portfolios from former students using a variety of different tools. The last thing I had them do was open an account with the tool they wanted to use, then send me the URL of their portfolio.

Tool	Pros	Cons
Google Sites	This is an easy tool to use. The interface is simple, and it is easy to find the features you are looking for. There aren't any hidden features or misplaced menus, just a simple set of tools, layouts and themes to choose from. I have used this tool for several years as a way to organize my lectures, and it works great for this. File uploading is especially easy because it is done directly on the page rather than in a dashboard. You can choose to hide the attachments on each page, then create a link to them. Sites builds the menu as you create pages, so the navigation is almost a no-brainer. You can also easily embed videos, slideshows, images and docs from Google's other services. If you a Google apologist, like me, you will find this very easy and convenient to use.	There aren't really that many options when it comes to the look and feel of your Google Site. There are some nice themes, but there is nothing that really stands out or looks flashy (if that is what you are going for). As one of my students put it, "I want my portfolio to look cute." Not exactly my objective when making a portfolio, but that's important to some people. You are able to customize the appearance of the Google Sites, but it takes some time and a little HTML know-how. This is not something a lot of preservice teachers want to dive into.
WikiSpaces	Like Google Sites, this tool is incredibly easy to use. The interface is very similar to Google Sites, and there are a lot of widgets that allow you to add different media to each page. The file manager is quite different than Google Sites, but it is very easy to use. Each page also has a discussion section, so you can center conversations around each page, as well as see the history for the page. This is quite different than Google Sites, where most of this information is hidden. The History tool is nice if I need to see when a page was last edited (as in, after the deadline). I don't make a big deal about this unless it is a major edit. Aside from being a pretty good portfolio tool, WikiSpaces is a great environment for teaching wikis and collaborative knowledge building. To demonstrate the power of collaborative knowledge building, I had my class collectively make this wiki in about 15 minutes.	Like Google Sites, this options for layout and themes are pretty spartan. Some people like this, including me, so it really isn't a con. But the cuteness factor is pretty low. You can customize the website to some degree, but you will have to live with some of the layout features. You will also need to change some of the settings as soon as you create your wiki. The default setting is for anyone to be able to edit the site. If you are using this tool to create a portfolio, you will want to turn that feature off and make yourself the only editor.
Webs	This tool is where you start to trade ease of use for look and feel. The first two tools look very much like something you would expect from a wiki. Webs looks more like a professional website. You have a lot of options in terms of themes and layouts, and they all look very nice.	If you choose to use this tool, be prepared to spend some time messing around with it. I have done a lot of blogging, web design, web mastering, etc., so I was able to make sense of Webs pretty easily. My students, however, struggled with this tool. Once they spent some time with it, the interface started to make sense. I would not recommend this tool to novice web creators. Unless you upgrade to the paid service, you also have to put up with ads on your website. Personally, I wouldn't want ads for reducing belly fat (pictures included!) on my educational portfolio.
Wix	Of all the tools, this one looks the best. Wix is built on Flash, so it looks very professional and, well, flashy. You are able to upload about any kind of file, and Wix has built in widgets to play and display media. The majority of my students were drawn to this tool because they look so good.	Intimidated by new tools? Not familiar with web design? Don't choose this tool. It is NOT for beginners. I had many students choose Wix, and I was able to walk most of them through it. Some of them bailed out and went for Google Sites or WikiSpaces. You will spend a lot of time formatting and figuring out the layout. The end result is a fantastic-looking portfolio, but you will put a lot of sweat equity into it.  The most frustrating feature in this tool, which is true of Webs as well, is embedding a YouTube video. By far, the clunkiest I have EVER seen. This is disappointing considering how well some of the other features work. I guess the developers ran out of steam.
Weebly	This tool is surprisingly easy to use. I am least familiar with it because I didn't have any students choose it. This is how I usually master a web tool, by answering all of their questions. The interface is drag and drop, and even though some of the features (e.g., file uploading) aren't very intuitive, the overall ease of use is a plus.	The free service does not include most of the cool features Weebly has to offer. They tease you with a host of widgets and options, but when you try to add them to your page you get a pop-up telling you they are only available for Premium customers. This might not be a bad idea for someone who wants to keep this portfolio around after the class (or graduation) is over, but I am realistic enough to admit that most of my students drop this project like a hot rock once they have a grade.

So, there is a simple breakdown of tools you can use for a digital portfolio. This is not exhaustive, nor is it very detailed. But there is enough information to get someone started. I will still recommend Google Sites and WikiSpaces to my students, and I am pretty sure they will still choose Webs and Wix. They're like moths to a porch light. The good thing is, the more of them that choose Wix and Webs, the better I will learn them and the better my support will be.

What tools do you use for digital portfolios? Am I missing anything obvious? Let me know!

And the portfolios started rolling in ...

At the beginning of this semester, I wrote about my revised portfolio project that I give my preservice teachers. I was in a portfolio funk, and I needed to try something new before I started resenting this project altogether. Isn't it funny that after you have taught for awhile, you can start talking about your projects as if they are people? Maybe it's just me. I have this metaphor in my mind where each of the assignments are these unfamiliar visitors that enter my classroom at about the same time each semester. I introduce them to my class and talk about them a lot for a week or two, then I give my students a chance to get to know this stranger a little more on their own until he isn't a stranger anymore. Then he leaves and doesn't come around much until the final portfolio is due.

OK. Focus. So, I rolled this assignment out at the beginning of the semester and showed them several examples. Of course, these examples were all based on the old way of doing the portfolio. So, I created a couple of examples on my own using the new way of doing things. Then I proceeded to remind my students very often to get started early on their portfolios and not wait to the last minute. They did anyway. Then I offered a work day where I didn't take attendance but they could come and work on their portfolio and ask questions. Many of them came, some did not. They probably should have. Some students didn't come to the work session but later e-mailed me long lists of questions. Not cool. Then today they turned them in.

Coincidentally, I went to visit my 94-year old grandmother this weekend. She has no Internet and I didn't bother driving to Panera or Starbucks to find a connection. So, during the final crucial moments in the semester for my students when they finally have one last chance to put it all together and make a case for that A they think they deserve, I was silent. I had no idea what kinds of messages I would have when I finally checked my e-mail. I was already constructing responses in my head as the blue bar moved across the screen toward the newly refreshed Gmail inbox. And there it was, a very full inbox ...

But none of the messages were from my students. At least none from the section who had to turn in their projects today. Could this be? I had to know for sure. I went to Moodle, and sure enough a large portion of the class had already turned in the assignment. They did it! I looked at a most of them, and I was beyond pleased at their work. Yes, there were some errors and missing items, but for the most part they looked great.

But the thing that really struck me was the learning that took place in order to get these projects completed. This was no easy task, no matter which tool the students chose. They had to learn how to host files online, and how to make sure a file was readable by anyone who happened to see it. They learned about file sizes and formats, and how to make navigation simple and effective. It was really amazing to see how so many of them stuck with their questions until they figured it out. All things considered, I didn't have one person who expected me to bail him or her out. This is a huge win in my opinion.

So, for now my faith is restored in the power of portfolios. I am left being a little less cynical and little more confident in each student's ability to meet a challenge head on. Yes, I had a couple of them confess that they were up all night finishing, but I can hardly take the blame for that. I will probably never know the full impact of this project, or class, on the bigger picture of their teaching career. For now I am just basking in the satisfaction that they did such a great job and took ownership of their work.

I will follow up in a few days about some of the tools they used to create their portfolios and discuss (at least from the perspective of my class) the pros and cons of each tool as a portfolio management system.

And now that I think of it, I need to have Mr. Portfolio come by more often. Maybe dinner or tea, and he can tell me how his kids are doing ...

A (mis)Conceptual Framework

I am in the process of wrapping up yet another semester of teaching preservice teachers how to use technology in their classrooms. It is at this point in the semester, when all of the projects except the final portfolio have been graded, that I start thinking about what went well and what didn't go so well. As someone who is very self-critical, I look at each project and think about ways to improve it for the next semester. This semester, I have been thinking more about how the whole class is structured rather than how to improve each of the projects. I actually think that most of the projects and class activities went well this semester, but the course in general was just a collection of disjointed assignments.

I have also been struck by some of the things the students have written in their assignments this semester. I'm not surprised or shocked because I was an undergraduate once and it takes time to get your head around the complex world of learning, students, schools and education. I don't think anyone ever totally gets their head around it. (Sorry, Arne.) But, for some reason I was able to see past the grading of these assignments and start to see some themes emerge. These "themes" emerged as misconceptions about how students learn, classrooms interact and schools operate. There were a lot of assumptions without a lot of support for their claims.

So, for once I am going to keep the projects and class activities, but I am going to rework the framework within which I present them. Rather than framing the course around technology tools, I want to frame the course around educational concepts that directly address preservice teachers' misconceptions about learning, teaching and technology. A similar approach has been tried before quite successfully by one of my colleagues, and I am ready to get out of the box a little bit. I have started a draft of my (mis)conceptual framework for teaching preservice teachers about how to use technology as part of their teaching. The general idea is that I will talk about a major educational concept (e.g., scaffolding), introduce a major misconception associated with that concept and address that misconception through a technology-based project.

This may end up being the worst idea ever, but it may also work like a champ. I have redesigned this course about half a dozen times or so, and I am not afraid to try something totally new. I'm sure I will be writing something around next December reflecting on how this new approach is working. Do you have thoughts or experience with this approach? I would love to hear your ideas.

Scaffolding student searches ... how much is too much?

I recently gave my preservice teachers an assignment where they designed an activity that had students using Internet resources. This project was based on two premises:

1. If teachers are going to have students using the Internet to find information, they should already know themselves what kind of information is available on the the topic, and
2. Teachers need to consider how they deliver these websites to students.

I know some people will disagree with me on this, but I approached this concept from the perspective that a tech-savvy teacher should try to maximize the amount of time students are engaged with the information that is relevant to their topic and minimize the amount of time they sit at the computer looking for stuff. I presented this project under the general theme of "scaffolding." It's a term that gets thrown around by a lot of teacher ed. professors, yet most of the preservice teachers I have talked with don't know how to actually operationalize this term. I mean, they can tell me what scaffolding is, but they don't recognize it when they see it in action and they don't know how to do it themselves. So, the scaffolding in this case was both constraining the set of resources given to the students and developing a strategy for delivering that set of resources to students.

Rather than letting the preservice teachers develop their own delivery method for the resources they selected, I gave them 3 options (yes, more scaffolding). Their choices were TrackStar, LiveBinders and Google Custom Search. Giving them a limited set of options to choose from gave us a good opportunity to talk about which tools would be most appropriate for different ages of learners and different types of media (text, video, simulations, etc.)

Overall, my students did a pretty nice job on this assignment, but it has me wondering if there are other ways to talk about helping students develop their information literacy. I approach this problem from the teacher perspective without going into too much detail about the students. How do you address information literacy and/or scaffolding with your preservice teachers?

Implementing Digital Fabrication

As I mentioned in my last post, there are a lot of aspects of digital fabrication that I really like. Students being able to design, create, evaluate, re-design and re-create objects that they conceptualized on the computer. Students being able to physically hold something they designed in a virtual environment. There are many elements of this kind of teaching that represent many of the hopes people have had for infusing technology into teaching and learning: direct application, real-world importance, creativity, etc. Until recently, most of my experience designing and fabricating objects had been done in my office on my one machine that is connected to my computer. There was no waiting for other people, no transferring files from one computer to another, no having to think about how and where to save files so I could resume my work at a later time. In the back of my mind I knew that the experience I had fabricating objects would be much different than the whole-class experience my students would have, and there were several technical aspects of this process I had not anticipated until I released it into the wild with my students.

I had some ground rules for myself when deciding how to introduce this activity:

1. I wanted to give the class 1-2 authentic tasks to do. I did not just want to just have the students using the software for the sake of using the software. That has never turned out favorably for me.
2. I wanted them to be able to finish in one week. That means one class meeting for one section and two for another.
3. I wanted them to have fun and like what they are doing. This all gets back to my belief (and that of many other people) that one way to change attitudes toward technology is to provide people with engaging, meaningful and yes, fun activities that include technology. People, teachers in particular, tend to abandon technology because they have had bad experiences with it.

So, I set out to design an activity that met these criteria. I had the students complete these activities and submit their work when they were done. The first activity was used to introduce the software (no printing or cutting involved), and the second activity was for application. Overall, my students were very gracious and rolled with the punches. They seemed to like the second activity more than the first (Really!?!), and though I have no data to support my claims, I truly believe they understand digital fabrication more than they did after reading an article and watching a video. Here are my reflections (both technical, pedagogical and philosophical) from the experience.

1. You have to print from the same computer you will use to cut the shape.  If you print from a computer that does not have a Silhouette connected to it, the software will put the wrong orienting marks on the paper and it will be useless for cutting ... unless you want to cut it by hand.
2. The trial version of the software does not let you save your work. You must have a licensed version to save a project on one computer and open it on another.
3. The printing and cutting step of this process is a bottleneck. I have 24 students in each class. They worked in groups of 3, and I brought 2 fabricators to the lab.  Under ideal conditions, everything went pretty smoothly. As soon as there was a hitch, and there were a couple, the line got a little backed up.
4. The more fabricators you have, the better. However, the trade-off is that the more fabricators you have, the noisier your classroom will be.
5. I received a couple different versions of this comment, "I have a hard time envisioning myself doing this activity with my class." It's hard to situate an activity within an instructional context AND create obvious connections to other instructional contexts. When you give preservice teachers a task, they tend to focus on the task. A seasoned teacher may do a better job of seeing those connections because she will have more applied experience than a novice teacher. In other words, I could have done a better job of facilitating what Salomon and Perkins call high-road transfer. I think requires some application and reflection, which we didn't really do.
6. Related to the previous observation, there needs to be more emphasis on creativity in teacher education programs. Rather than being a thing a person either has or doesn't have, I think of creativity more like a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to grow and stay healthy. The older I have gotten, the more purposeful I have become in my creative pursuits. As for my role in the creative development of my students, I think the best way to do this is for them to create a digital fabrication activity in their preferred content area. It's one thing to be able to do my activity. It's an entirely different level of creativity to be able to create a learning activity for a group of children. I may do this at some point.

Overall, I would say this was a good activity for my first attempt at a new concept and new technology. I have a completely different vision for how this will look the next time I do it, which is evidence of learning on my part.

Teaching virtual design in a physical world

I first became familiar with the term "digital fabrication" when I was finishing up my dissertation at the University of Virginia. My advisor, Glen Bull, came into my office one day and asked me to watch a demo with a machine he had recently found. I watched with fascination as he created a 3-D model on the computer, printed it as a 2-D net, cut it out in seconds on the CraftROBO machine and folded it into an exact replica of the model on the screen. This was amazing on several fronts:

• It took a matter of minutes to do what would have taken me a whole math lesson (or more) to do with my 4th grade students
• The fold lines were clean and perforated. The physical object actually looked like the model on the screen. For students who have been spoon fed high-quality media since birth, that makes a difference.
• The design was separate from the actual object, which means I could go back to the computer model and make alterations/corrections, then print another one.

That final point is, in my opinion, significant. Let me explain this by making a comparison to the writing process. For children, the act of writing something by hand is laborious. It's labor-intensive to me, and I've been doing it for 35 years. So, when children write something on paper, they want that to be the first and final copy of that particular piece of writing. It's not that they don't like proofreading, editing and revising, but every change they make means another word, sentence, paragraph or page they will have to rewrite. Writing, in addition to being cognitively demanding, is physically demanding on a child's fine-motor skills. Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell is right, that the best people in a certain field aren't always the most naturally gifted, but those in the right place at the right time with the opportunity to perfect their skills. Maybe the best writers in school are those that don't get burned out from the physical act of writing.

The same is true when students are creating things in the classroom. I used to have my students cut out nets from graph paper and fold those shapes into 3-dimensional objects. After spending more than one math lesson to do this,  we could finally get to the learning. This is not considered efficient in the business or medical world, yet in education we just kind of shrug it off and learn to deal with it. And what happened if a student's shape was not exactly symmetrical or was missing a side? Well, they got to be the kid with the lopsided shape. What if I wanted to demonstrate how changing the dimensions of the shape could conserve volume but change surface area? I guess I could have the students cut out a new shape, but there goes another 15-20 minutes. The fact that the media students used to design the object also became the object used to teach the concept was problematic.

This is not as much of a problem when the students design their model on the computer because they can manipulate it without having to physically create another shape. And for all those Piaget and Montessori fans out there, the end result is still a physical object that students can touch and compare. Students learn the basic foundations of rapid prototyping and iterative design, two principals and practices that pretty much define research and development. This is a far cry from the current model of "one and done" projects in schools today.

Below is  a video created by the folks in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia who are starting to explore how digital fabrication can be applied in schools to enhance student learning.

I will follow up in a couple of days and explain how I took this concept and turned it into a learning activity for my preservice teachers.