Talking with Butcher

On February 8th and 15th, we had a chance as a group to talk with Kirsten Butcher, our Human-Computer Interaction teacher, about our meetings with the Museum and our on going unfolding of the classification module. Her feedback has been very helpful. We have been stressing to come up with a design that keeps our clints happy, while at the same time being true to good design principles.

It seems that Museum wants to take the classroom experience of helping students learn to classify and put it on the computer. The problem with this is that they are two different ways to teaching, with different strengths and limitations. Face to face interaction allows the instructor to give verbal and non-verbal feedback to students based on their observation of the students. A computer doesn't pick up on non-verbal cues from people. It cannot see that a student is becoming frustrated due to a lack of understanding and then adjust the instruction to solve that problem. One of the strengths of a computer is being able to give honest, instantaneous feeback to an individual student.

So, after with talking with Dr. Butcher, we realize we need to be better at designing a learning module that draws on the strengths of computer technology- honest, instantaneous feedback. Students need to interact with a module that provides scaffolding, direction toward the scientific focus of classifying, and feedback that helps them see that they have been successful or that they made a mistake.

Now fast forward to today, Febuary 11th. We presented a ROUGH prototype of our project to our capstone class, taught by Dr. Zheng. We received great feedback from classmates (i.e.- when a student picks a characteristic to classify by and clicks a radio button, the pictures of each bird could zoom in on that feature to help students focus on one thing and to give them a close-up view of the feature they picked). Dr. Zheng talked about the interactivity of the concept attainment part of our project. He was wondering if we were going to ask students what good classication was, or were we just going to tell them. We need to ensure that students are given 0pportunity to discover or the activity won't fit the description of a concept attainment activity. He also wanted to us to address students background knowledge of birds. We need to make sure learners understand enough about birds to know what characteristics they will be using to classify them. Dr. Zheng also was happy about the phrase that learners would being asked to "create their own exhibits at the museum".

Curator Video Script 1st version

Just done the draft for three curator video scripts.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=1IS4L9gBXLgyhFyMkq0JN0xEkGB020s5npm0c-kTtP0kwJYnSF7_mbiUZt9sv&hl=en

Referenced Heather's suggestion as below for the C2 video. So the two examples go from simple observation to deeper specimen classification.

Several things need to discuss with Cathy and our group

1. The way we scaffold and model the students in our videos.

2. Proper video length. I tried to time my script, they are all a bit longer than we first discussed (30 seconds or so), each video may take around 60 to 90 seconds. So I think we need to add it to our interview questions asking them how long is suitable and won't blow the 4th grader's away.

3. For the filming time, it looks like the museum is ready. But I'm wondering if we need to get it done asap or wait for more possible revisions.

One suggestion, we would like to steer away from saying classification schemes are more or less scientific- we want them to understand when they classify or sort what they are doing is scientific, but we would like them to realize there are different levels of sophistication. So you could talk about really easily observed features/characteristics that you can group by, or how you can take some time to really observe specimens and find out a lot more about them and sort them according to those observations, and how that helps you learn and share more with other scientists. I think it is important that it is discussed about how your classification schemes have to be based on observations, and words like “cool”, “scary” or “ugly” can’t work because they may mean things to different people, and don’t really tell us about the specimens.

Video Design Draft Plan

Actors:

Mainly, we will have two high school students to be our actors.. Madlyn and Heather prefer them to be girls. So Cathy will look for candidates who take drama courses from her neighborhood, and check with Madlyn at the same time.

Part I: Scientist Introduction (30-40 seconds)

In this video, the teen scientist will do a brief introduction which covers the below talking points

1. introduce herself
2. address the definition of classification, but not in a abstruse way that the 4th graders cannot understand;
3. clarify why we classify
4. make reference on observation module and demonstrate normal life classification examples (activate the learner's schema)
5. introduce curator (transit to Part II videos)

Part II Video: Curator Explanation and Question (50s + 40s + 30s, need 2 pages)

Part II video will be composed by 3 individual video clips presented on two pages.

Curator 1 (C1) will include:

1. greeting students
2. introduce herself as a curator and her daily work
3. address the general principles on how to classify;
4. present 5 museum items belong to the same category
5. ask the students to think how they would classify the 5 items based on their prior knowledge and what the curator just addressed;
6. instruct the student to proceed to next page to watch two classification example videos and justify their results;
7. instruct the students to be prepared for the main activity after watching the example videos.

 C2 will include:

1. demonstrate how the curator classify the 5 items;
2. clearly clarify the thinking process of how and why the curator classify them in two different ways;
3. remind the students that there are more different ways to classify these 5 items and that they should not be limited by what the curator just presented.

 C3 will include:

1. demonstrate a "less-scientific" way to classify the items;
2. explain why it's a "less-scientific" way compared to "scientific" ways, and how to avoid it;
3. cheer the students if they do not classify in the "less-scientific" way and encourage them to test their knowledge in the main activity. 

Part II videos can be associated to scaffolding and modeling learning theories.

EDPS 6440 02.03.2011

UMNH Observation Module
http://www.integrateducation.org/umnh/blog/


as little reading as possible, using video, draw attention

We were talking about the learning theories should be associated with our capstone project, Schema:  Modeling and Scaffolding are the three main theories we currently can see from our project, and I will further clarify them later.

After today's meeting and discussion, we all feel that we get a better idea and clearer mind on our project. Firstly, while trying to balance our client's requirements, we really should stick to our project and designs based on the learning and instructional theories; Secondly, instead of all of the six people (Yes, we have the biggest group ever!) working together on every stage and detail, we divided our main responsibilities. Just contribute more on whichever part you are interested and capable of. With this, we divided as below:

Website: Josh will start building the layout of our Classification module, Kathy will meet Aron next Monday for suggestions and possible technical help. The website need MySQL and PHP skills, Kathy is MySQL teacher, so she will do more job on the coding things (which I don't know). Claire is willing to do some graphic works, but this is my main job for now.

Classification Activity Materials: Matt is doing research and picking 15-20 birds out of the 50 birds Heather provided to us. The qualified ones should share one or more similar characteristics with 3 or 4 other birds. This is not an easy job, more like doing a pretty complicated puzzle and memory game among the 50 pictures.

Video: Cathy and Claire will take on this part. Instead of doing a simple introduction video for our learning module, we decided to go further and deeper. So in this way, before doing the classification activity, the students should be prepared and get a clearer idea on how to complete the task. Since we are mainly working on the videos, I will further expand this part in the next journal.

Assessment and Testing: Denice will be in main charge of the testing and assessment since her husband is 4th grade teacher and he also has a lab of 15 laptops for students working together. We are so blessed to have such a great resource!

Other: All other design parts like building the characteristic table, revising, completing the portfolio, etc will be ongoing works that everybody will share a portion.

We now feel much much more comfort and much much much much more confident about our project.

Capstone Project

On Thursday, January 27, 2011 our IDET group met with Madlyn Runburg and Heather Paulsen at the Museum of Natural History to discuss our capstone project, a web page on Classification. We presented ideas concerning activities we thought would help 4th grade students learn to classify, but Madlyn and Heather felt our vision, while wonderful, was too large. The team decided to concentrate on the bird classification activity.