For the past 22 years I have been a teacher. I started my career teaching Drama and Public Speaking. As a young teacher in the 1980's in the Delaware public school system I experienced a number of layoffs. (The Drama teacher seemed to be the first to go when budgets got tight.) I accepted a computer support job for a consulting firm who worked with private schools. After a year of teaching adults, I decided to go back to teaching children, this time in the computer field. For the past fifteen years I have been teaching computer-related classes (grades 8 - 12) at a private, college prep, K-12 school, Caravel Academy, in Bear, Delaware. Specifically, I have taught Keyboarding and Word Processing, Introduction to Computers, Computer Applications, Basic Programming, Pascal Programming, Programming in C++, and AP Computer Science. The changes I have observed in the philosophy and technology of teaching computer concepts has been tremendous.
Since I began teaching in 1976 I have taken courses at the University of Delaware to enrich my performance in the classroom. I enrolled in whatever courses appealed to me with no long term goal in sight. In 1995 I decided that the time had come to organize my approach to professional improvement. In the spring of 1996 I entered the Master of Instruction program. My main goals are:
The Psychology of Teaching course was one of the most influential courses I took in terms of expanding my understanding of how students learn. I had been taught from a solid behavioral point of view. This course introduced me to the cognitive approach. Dr. Morrone led us in discussions about new ways of looking at the learning process. For example, we discussed beliefs about intelligence, whether one looks on intelligence as a dynamic or static state of affairs can make a difference in students' perseverance toward accomplishing complex tasks. I found this especially enlightening for the types of tasks I ask my students to attempt and complete. We also discussed the role that a student's self efficacy can play in their attitude toward difficult tasks. These discussions helped me look at the process of learning (and teaching) from a new perspective and added to my efficacy as a classroom teacher.
The Models of Instruction course expanded upon the cognitive approach. The models we discussed: reciprocal teaching, direct instruction, collaborative/cooperative learning, cognitive apprenticeship, case based teaching, inquiry and conceptual change were mainly based in the cognitive approach to learning. For use in my computer science classroom I found the variety of models very helpful. I wanted to include more diversity in the structure of my classes, combining the models we discussed gave me the basis to do that. I was able to move from the view of myself as always the sole source of knowledge in the classroom to sometimes the source, sometimes the facilitator, sometimes the coach, and sometimes the learner along with my students.
The fourth core course, Techniques for Behavior Change was a swing back toward the behavioral approach to managing children's behavior in the classroom. We focused on the advantages that the single-subject design has for individual teachers and students. I learned through my 22 years of teaching how to manage my students as a group. This course provided me with techniques to help those students who cannot function well within that group. In learning about token-economy systems, changing criterion designs, reward menus, student contracts, and various recording systems I now feel confident that I can implement a well-designed student intervention and document the results.
While the above mentioned courses helped me enrich my knowledge of the techniques of teaching, the elective courses helped me to keep pace in the ever-changing content area of computer science. The elective courses I took were: Applications of Electronic Databases in Education, Using the Internet for Curriculum Development, Multimedia Literacy, Communication Principles in Multimedia Presentations, Independent Study: How Models of Instruction are supported by technology, Teaching for Better Thinking.
Several courses helped toward my goal of learning about the Internet and the World Wide Web. In Applications of Electronic Databases in Education I learned what equipment one needs to connect to the Internet. We also experimented with telnet, e-mail, listserves, newsgroups, gopher menus, and the then fledgling beginnings of the World Wide Web as viewed through Mosaic. I took this course in the summer of 1994. In the computer field things change rapidly. By the summer of 1996 when I took Using the Internet for Curriculum Development gopher and Telnet were old technology and the World Wide Web and its search engines were the be all and end all of research on the Internet. In this course my colleagues and I developed lesson plans that incorporated the use of the Internet in helping students reach curricular goals. In addition we revisited the equipment and software that are necessary in order to 'be online'. In Communication Principles in Multimedia Presentations the major presentation that I designed addressed the topic of evaluating information one gleaned from the Internet. It is a presentation aimed toward helping students analyze and evaluate information that they find on the Internet and its worthiness for research use.
In support of my goal to learn more about multimedia tools and their use I enrolled in Multimedia Literacy and Communication Principles in Multimedia Presentations. In Multimedia Literacy I learned the use of the multimedia language, Podium. Learning to incorporate sound, images, text, and video in a dynamic presentation was exciting. I have taught my advanced students to use Podium and they were enthusiastic and engaged. Working in collaborative groups they designed and put together informative presentations.(Click here to see samples of student work.) In order to have access to appropriate images to include in presentations we learned to use a scanner. Based on this experience, I included a scanner and a digital camera in my departmental budget at Caravel that year. We have used both extensively and with great results. In order to make the scanner and camera really work one needs access to a program that can manipulate the images. In Multimedia Literacy we learned to use a shareware program called Paint Shop Pro. This program has proved an invaluable tool again and again both in my work with students and the presentations that I design for students. In the Communication Principles in Mulitmedia Presentations class I learned to base presentations on sound communication principles. We worked in the Podium language. (Of course, between the Spring of '95 when I first learned Podium and the Summer of '97 Podium had progressed through several versions and had many new features to offer the user.) Each student in the class designed a major presentation on a topic of their choosing showing that they could use well the communication principles that we had discussed. As I mentioned above, my presentation concerned the evaluation of information gathered on the Internet. I found that many of the elective courses that I completed helped me to accomplish more than one of my stated goals.
Learning to use the Internet as a research tool was an important goal to me. In Application of Electronic Databases in Education the class learned to use the Internet for research purposes. As a part of the class we put on an Internet fair. The class was divided into pairs and each pair researched a different topic on the Internet. My partner and I demonstrated how to gather images from the Internet. We focused on artwork and artifact images. Other groups gathered weather information, earthquake information, and Internet lesson plans for teachers to use. In 1994 using only telnet and gopher tools this was quite an accomplishment. It has made me appreciate the relative ease of searching the Internet with today's search engines and plug-ins. Using the Internet for Curriculum Development also strengthened my ability to research on the Internet. We were required to develop an annotated list of useful Internet resources that included web pages, gopher sites, listserves, and newsgroups. We also developed a sample Acceptable Use Policy. This is a document that students and parents sign that states what a school considers acceptable use of the Internet connections that the school provides. We researched several policies and then wrote one for our school. I took this class in the summer of 1996, in January of 1998 Caravel installed the Internet in most classrooms and was ready to institute an Acceptable Use Policy. I was instrumental in writing and implementing our Acceptable Use Policy. Click here to see it. As a culminating experience to the Using the Internet for Curriculum Development class, each person in the class researched a topic and developed an activity that would accomplish one or more curriculum objectives by using Internet resources. In the fall of 1996, every student in the Upper School at Caravel attended a performance of the Delaware Theatre Company's production of Twelfth Night. I decided to help students prepare to see this play by developing on line activities. I researched Shakespeare, his times, the Globe theatre, Elizabethan dress, music, and life. I put it all together in a Web site along with activities for students to accomplish using these resources. The Delaware Theatre Company published the web address in the teacher study guide, thus making it available to many of the four thousand students who would see this production.
My last goal involved using technology across various curricula so that I might serve better in my capacity as a technology resource for my fellow teachers. In all the courses I attended, my colleagues provided me with engaging and creative ideas about using technology in different situations. In the presentations written for Multimedia Literacy and Communication Principles in Multimedia Presentations, my classmates shared interesting and imaginative ideas. Some examples of the variety of ideas were: discovering state parks, how to use a browser, college exploration, an interactive French lesson, visiting U.S. landmarks, and solving math word problems. In Using the Internet for Curriculum Development and Application of Electronic Databases in Education projects ranged from publishing student book reviews on the World Wide Web to planning a trip to an amusement park to finding political candidates' views on specific topics to nutritional planning of daily meals. In the fall and winter of 1997 I was able to put these ideas to good use. I taught a series of after school classes for Caravel teachers. During those classes I was able to share specific ideas on how to use technology in support of our curriculum.
As an elective course I did an independent study course with Dr. Fred Hofstetter that served to bring all my goals into sharper focus. Because of the advances in educational technology I wanted to revisit some of the current models of instruction I had studied and look at the new ways that technology could support those models. I attended his Multimedia and Internet Literacy class to keep current on new advances in technology. I designed and presented to that class two multimedia presentations that discussed cognitive vs. behavioral educational psychology and how current technology could support either approach. I also wrote a paper that provided more detail on technology's use in today's classroom and how it can be used to support various instructional techniques. I published this paper on my World Wide Web home page. In making these presentations and writing this paper I could see the advances that I had made as a teacher of computer science. It brought my goals of improving my own classroom teaching skills together with my goals of learning new technologies and sharing those ideas with other classroom teachers.