EEND 679 Module 4 Discussion

EEND 679 Module 4 Discussion

Jim Nielsen

The idea of personalized learning has been around for a long time.  I mean, it sounds like an amazing idea!  Cater all learning to the individual that is doing the learning- makes sense!  The problem is how do we do that in a class of 30 students?  Or an entire course load of 150 students over the course of the day.  Where do we focus our personalized learning goals?  Is it to struggling students, social economic disadvantaged students, students from different races, students that are advanced and need to be pushed?  I have heard all of these groups singled out at different times in my career for personalized learning.  As an educator, how can we streamline this process, and how does technology aid us in this borderline impossible task?

I teach co-taught biology and have taught this class for 10 years now.  I feel comfortable saying that I have one of the most diverse classes in the school as far as learning styles and levels are concerned.  In the same class, I have students that struggle with 2^nd grade math and reading and students that will move on to Honors Chemistry the next year.  This makes personalized learning almost a necessity in some fashion, but also extremely difficult as well.

When I first embarked on my journey for personalized learning and assessment I found the task daunting, and to difficult to manage with the variety of students in my classroom.  Trying to change the curriculum for individual students just isn’t possible in my book!  At the same time I realized how important it was to make learning important to each individual in my classroom, make it personal for them.  Luckily, I teach biology-the study of life… I tell my students all the time, it is almost unfair teaching biology because it is the study of them and their living world, a topic so easy to make interesting.  That is when I dropped trying to conform to personalized learning goals of the individual, and move towards Authentic learning for everyone in my room.

Authenticity has become the driving force of every lesson I teach in my classroom.  If I can make the individual students care about what they are learning because it is about their lives and their experiences then students will truly care about what they are learning.  Not every student, in fact very few, of the students I teach will go on to be scientists.  But we all have human bodies, we all are living in a world that needs future generation’s help to make a sustainable future, and we all use a genetic code to be human.  If I can make my lessons authentic and about real world issues that these students or someone they know will face, I really have created personalized learning for a larger audience. 

I really liked the High Tech High School.  What an awesome delivery of instruction.  No textbooks, just authentic instruction using the technology available to them at the time.  I think in a perfect world, all high schools should function this way.  I see my classroom leaning in this direction.  I am continually decreasing my text book use and lectures, and increasing my labs and activities.  I also constantly ask myself if my students really need to know the info, or if it is just trivia that they may never utilize in the real world. 

My favorite formative assessment tool in this module was the digital badges.  I have a little experience with this as my son’s cub scout troop uses a type of digital badge to assess the lessons formatively as they go through scouts.  I like the idea in my classroom as well.  If I could come up with digital assessments that in turn they would get a digital print out showing mastery or completion, it might be a unique formative assessment of how they are progressing with the material.  I also love how the one teacher uses google to make a badge table!  I really want to use that in the future!  I am going to plan a unit “flipping” the classroom where students will have the opportunity to earn badges for tasks on their own time that accompany work we are doing in class.

Thank you,

Jim Nielsen