3. Week 03

This week we discussed lesson plans, learning goals, learning profiles, and 3D printing. Notes at my blog

Reflection

1. Are you planning to use the fabricated object in your classroom? If so, how?

I have ADHD, so I consider fidgets an important part of a classroom environment. I have in the past used many 3D printed fidgets that I ordered off of Etsy. I intend to build more 3D fidgets that I can hand my students. If I were the Digital Fabrication Instructor, I would probably have my students make their own fidgets. I don’t know how to integrate physical computing or Media Compuation into making a fidget, however, so it will just be me making fidgets for my students.

1. Think on a learning activity involving 3D printing. How could it be aligned with your curriculum / standard? What are the challenges?

I have yet to teach a learning activity that explicitly uses 3D printing, however, I have had my students make creatures that reacted to their environment, lit up, and / or made sound, possibly that also moved, using Circuit Playgrounds, and this term I am having them create a large project of their own design using the Circuit Playgrounds. Several of the students chose to use 3D Printed parts for making their creatures or projects. It is sometimes challenging to use 3D printers with a class because each print takes a while and there are only 3 3D printers in the school (this is very much a first-world problem; I’m used to having 0 3D printers). However, the need to be careful with resources helps encourage students to plan their time wisely, which is the main goal of the current project they’re doing (see week 1) anyway. I am lucky that my curricula is almost entirely about making. Basically any time the students are creating things and expressing themselves, they are doing what they are supposed to be doing in my class, so it is very easy to fit 3D printing in.

I also offered Tinkercad Codeblocks to students who are practicing programming loops. I showed them a thing I 3D printed, and asked them what they noticed. They correctly noticed it was made out of a lot of the same exact shape, and I showed them the code that created it used a loop, like what they were learning about in class. They changed the value for the number of times it looped. However, they also noticed that just looping the shape wasn’t enough, they needed to keep track of a value for the radius, and change it, and recognized that as a variable. They were generally excited to get to be 3D printing, even though many of them claimed not to like Tinkercad. I also prefer the coding version where I do not have to manually line everything up.

1. Have you started an educational portfolio? Why or why not? In your opinoin which are the advantages of having these education portfolios? How do evaluate success a learning activity and how do you keep track of possible modification/improvements ideas?

I keep most of a learning portfolio at my blog. Generally, nobody who isn’t me reads the blog, but I find it very helpful to my process to keep track of everything formally, imagining someone who isn’t me but in a similar situation might find it useful. I have sent the blog to potential employers so they can see the wya I think. I’ve definitely looked back on my reflections on old lessons lots of times, taken what I’ve learned and used it differently with different students in new contexts. You can see on my blog my old lessons with eighth graders on Khan Academy, and how I’ve used that this year with 10th grade students in a full-year course, but also how there was still a lot to learn in each of those lessons. I’ve used variations on projects that I did with seventh graders with my eleventh graders, and before I did so I read my old blog posts. I also remember what I write better than what I don’t in the first place, so it’s nice to have the record to read, and also nice to have written the record so I remember more. I do not store my observation information or my student reviews on that site (other than very generally) because I do not want it to be easily identifiable for my students, and I do think some kinds of personal feedback should be kept personal. Given I mostly use it just for me, and content to me matters much more than presentation, I haven’t done much to make it visually appealing or easy to look through for others. I may tray to do that some day.

After each class, I write the outline of what we did that class, making sure to mention questions I noticed students had, places they struggled, places they didn’t, anything that surprised me, then I look at what the students created and wrote in their design journals to see if there were any gaps in knowledge, questions they asked or problems they had directly, and write about it in the blog. While i do this, I will often note places I wish I had done things differently. Sometimes, I still have classes in front of me, and can try those different things. Once, for a class on nested for loops I changed the class so often I actually noted it in three different parts, with a final guide on how students did. I’ll usually end a post with ideas I currently have on what I would do differently next time that are general, some more specific reflections and/or changes will go in the outline for the lesson itself with what I would change. Sometimes, a much later lesson will provide context I didn’t have immediately afterwards for how much they did or did not learn about. I won’t always go back and edit the post, though sometimes I will. Usually, I’ll just mention what I realized they didn’t learn in the post where I realized it, and what I’d do next time to both lessons.

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