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Final Course Reflection

The Blended Learning Environments course was both a review and a wave of new ideas. Below is my final course presentation followed by my written reflection on a semester of learning.

Three years prior, immediately following my internship year at Byron High School, I took Jen Hegna's Online Learning course. The course was taught over the summer and 90% online. It was a predecessor to what would eventually morph into this Blended Learning Environments course. At the time, it served as deeper training in digital tools like Moodle and introduced me to a variety of ways to ask deeper questions and encourage collaboration in the digital environment. It also provoked deeper research and reflection on best practice teaching and curriculum design in general, not just online.

In this course, the same general themes continued, but I had changed in three years of teaching. Before, I was just launching a project-based Stats courses, and now I am on the 6 iterations past. Before, our only credit recovery option was having students retake a class, and now students work in a multi-course environment. Before, the ideas of mastery-based learning sounded appealing, and now every course I teach uses reassessment and a growth mindset around learning at the core. While taking this course, the readings were not crazy new ideas, but instead re-training and a chance to pause and reflect. In some areas, I have many improvements remaining to meet the ideals captured in the course writings. In other areas, I found myself challenging the best practice literature based on my experience with Byron students.

One of the areas I currently struggle with is curriculum. There are many things curriculum designers think about to build a high quality product, and yet I have not found external curriculum to be effective in my classroom. Instead, I build it all from the ground up where I can understand its purpose, see how students interact with it, and revise in real time. The last part, constant revision, is a huge time-sink. Given only 24 hours in a day, my need to revise means cutting out other things. I cut out multiple pathways and modalities from many lessons in order to achieve a best lesson with feedback over time. In that process, I can make some old resources available as optional tools for students if I think they might help someone, thus introducing extra pathways over time, but I never start that way.

On the other end of the spectrum, I like to design to the 'edges', to come up with learning experiences that offer choice within in order to provide different students with different experiences. Projects that are open in topic but specific in process allow me to still instruct and assess on clear course goals while letting students have fun with the content or experiences they choose.

This class also helped me reflect on my thinking process in course design. The assignments were structured so that each week, after reading relevant support material, I would work on a small piece of the design of a course. This linear process was appropriate when paired with a course. However, I typically design in a more cyclical manner, setting objectives, moving to assessments, creating content, and then going back to the objectives and assessments and revising so it all makes a coherent story. To some, this process may seem flawed, since curriculum should serve objectives, not the other way around. At the highest level, this is true, but lower level objectives need to move around and adjust to make sure the student learning experience is taking precedence over arbitrary substandards, especially if those were initially written by the teacher. I reassess how important various objectives really are to the student and course and adjust as necessary. My greatest goal in a course is not mastery of each learning target, but appreciation for the topic as a whole that leads a student towards lifelong learning and growth.

By the end of this course, I found myself once again thinking about the big questions that drove me into teaching and how to address the problems that I am now starting to understand. There are significantly better models for doing school than our district uses as a whole or I use as an individual teacher with my students. Though exhausting, this course put this quest back at the front of my mind moving forward.

Flickr Photo by Lori Greig, 'this is far from over'.

Downloaded from http://goo.gl/va8JLp on July 20, 2014.

Concept:

This project uses a webcam and hand gestures to control a character in a Unity WebGL environment.

Laboratory Manual in Physical Geology, 12th ed; added by Karen Yip; An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (REVISIONING HISTORY) added by Ann Bragdon; Environmental Science: A Study of Interrelationships, 15th Edition. This essay is an approach to learning the Trivium, emphasizing learning and study skills. Also includes commentary on emotional and physical health, as well as an expanded reading list.

Behind the Concept

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Throughout my time here at ITP, I have spent a lot of time in one particular software platform: Unity. I jokingly tell my friends that I look at the Unity skybox more often than I look at the actual sky (which unfortunately is not too far away from the truth). When we had the presentation by the Google team about their teachable machine. The ease of training a model appealed to me and learning of how to integrate this into Unity came up as a possible application. I had no experience publishing a unity game to web and had only tried the teachable machine once before attempting to make this project. I definitely ran into some hurdles along the way but I am certainly satisfied with the final result and can’t wait to apply this in other ways!

Process:

Building the Unity WebGL Game

For the game and assets I downloaded asset pack from the unity asset store (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/packs/low-poly-game-kit-110455) which provided a base for me to build off of. This part was not too tricky; the difficulty came in trying to understand the player controller script and modifying it in order to receive custom inputs. Once that was accomplished, it was a matter of creating functions for these inputs that can be accessed by my javascript sketch and publishing it to web.

Training Google Image Classifier

Training the model is very easy, but making sure your data is as clean (clear background, adjust hand gestures within class to account for margin of error). Following is an example and not the training set used in final game.

Integrating Unity and Javascript

This part was definitely the hardest part technically. There is a method you can call from javascript on the Unity game instance called “SendMessage()” which receives the gameObject, the function you want to call, and the value to pass into that function. However, this can only be called once the game has fully loaded. Identifying this point was difficult so, with some advice from Yining, I added a start button that would tell the Javascript sketch to run only after that button had been pressed.

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Demo: https://dylandawk.github.io/ml4w-homework/FinalTest03/

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Github: https://github.com/dylandawk/ml4w-homework/tree/master/FinalTest03