Lynn Lease - TILO Technology Integration Leaders of Ohio Webinar

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Good afternoon! I’m Lynn Lease. I am the Director of the Center for Educational Excellence at the University of Northwestern Ohio in Lima, Ohio. I serve our on-campus faculty offering support in their teaching and learning endeavors by providing professional development and scholarship opportunities including workshops, faculty learning communities, one on one consultations, teaching and learning information, and research proven best practices.

In addition, I am also a licensed educator in the state of Ohio for grades 1-8, and I hold a reading endorsement. In the past, I taught 7th grade language arts in Dayton, Ohio. I also taught reading during the summer reading program in one of the elementary schools.

I am currently finishing my dissertation for my PhD in Education with a specialization in instructional design for online learning. My dissertation study included an investigation of the use of free, pre-designed interactive learning objects.

Today I am going to share with you some of the information from my dissertation including the types of and importance of interactivity, the potential impact of free, pre-designed interactive learning objects, and methods for locating, selecting, implementing, and evaluating the objects. I addition, I’ll share with you three learning object repositories that you can start using today in order to implement free, pre-designed interactive learning objects into your lesson plans to improve your students’ learning satisfaction, learning effectiveness, and their achievement of the learning outcomes.

I first want to show a 3 minute video to help you start to think about open education --- the OER movement.

Educational literature asserts 4 types of interaction – student to student, student to content, student to teacher, and student to interface or technology.

So, of course student to student interaction includes the opportunities you offer students to work with each other in partners, small groups, or even larger groups.

Student to teacher interaction includes the times that you are working directly with your students either through one-one-one teaching consultations or through whole-class instruction.

Student to content interaction includes practice assignments, homework, and anything else that requires students to use content to complete tasks.

Student to interface interaction might include webquests, online games and simulations, i-pad apps, and anything else that requires students to interact with technology or equipment.

These interaction types are not isolated and exclusive of the others --- but they might all be occurring simultaneously and you probably flow seamlessly from interaction type to interaction type without even realizing it.

Think about these types of interaction and whether or not you offer all four types in your classroom. These interactions can be offered in a variety of ways, through a variety of activities, or through a variety of assignments. But, the quality of the interaction is important. The more activity required of the student the more interactive the experience. Students must be called to action --- rather than have the ability to passively observe. So, what are you offering students that call them to action?

There are benefits to offering students effective interaction --- this interaction is achieved through activities or tasks that requires them to act – to participate – the behave or respond in some manner. Interaction increases interactivity which offers students the opportunity to be more engaged in their learning.

When students are asked to act, participate, or behave and respond, they are likely to become engaged.

The educational research indicates that this engagement yields three important outcomes which are increased learner satisfaction, increased learning effectiveness, and increased achievement of learning outcomes. The increased achievement might seem obvious – but the learner satisfaction and learning effectiveness is also important. Think about your students --- When learners are satisfied with an experience, they are more likely to want to repeat that experience. When they realize the learning wasn’t arduous, they are more likely to want to continue in the learning process.

Interactive learning objects are one way to offer interactivity to our students. These offer student to content interaction and student to interface interaction.

We need to keep in mind that the technology and more specifically the objects are simply the tools to deliver information – but the responses required of students, the interaction required of them is what leads to the engagement and the interaction outcomes you see here. The quality of the objects we select and the manner in which we implement the objects is vital to the success of the students.

Let’s first examine some terminology so we are all on the same page:

There are many words or acronyms used by educators to describe these small chunks of content.

LOs or learning objects
OERs or open educational resources
ILMS or interactive learning materials
Simulations
Games
or
Interactives

The study I conducted for my dissertation used the terms free, pre-designed interactive learning objects – by definition these are interactive web-based tools that support the learning of specific concepts and they were previously designed and containing elements requiring action of the user.

I was studying objects beyond static, almost passive resources such as electronic textbooks and videos requiring passive learning of the learners – simply the intaking of information with no output required. My dissertation study focused on interactive objects that were free and already designed by someone else.

These objects might require students to drag and drop things on the screen, organize digital images, read-watch-or-listen and respond to question or directional prompts, select digital items based on a task, or solve problems by building or manipulating digital objects. These are chunked pieces of content often focused on 1 or 2 specific learning objectives. Some of the objects can be downloaded or shared via a Google classroom or other learning management system, some can be embedded into a teacher wep page, and some offer a special link for students for easy navigation to the object.

Many of these objects are housed in repositories or digital and multimedia libraries. It’s important to note that many of the repositories are simply libraries that link out to resources that can be found on the internet. Some of these objects could possibly be found through a Google search. The benefits of the repositories are that they are often searchable, categorized, offer explanations and reviews of the materials. Starting in a repository is often better than a Google search because the repository contains metadata or information that explains the objects, how they can be used, what previous users or reviewers of the objects think of the objects, and other features which we’ll take a look at in a moment.

Here is one sample interactive learning object that I located in the MERLOT repository which linked out to wiley.com. This object is chunked around the topic of photosynthesis. Students are required to read and click and navigate through the various topics within the object. They will see things moving on the screen to display the concepts and will then be asked questions to test their knowledge and comprehension of the topics. This assessment comes in the form of pop-up questions as the students navigate through the object.

The interaction requirements call on students to navigate, read, watch, and respond. The assessment is offered through on-screen quizzing. This is an excellent way for students to informally and formatively assess their knowledge.

I located this object in the OER Commons repository and it deals with the concept or topic of fractions. The students are able to click to change the denominator and then add the pieces to the numerator to view different fractions in different forms from circles and other shapes to 3-d cylinders and cakes, as well as number lines. Students can also click the tabs at the top to view various games that offer various levels of skills. Students are given fractions and asked to fill in shapes with the appropriate pieces, show equality of fractions using different shapes, and match fractions in various forms.

The interaction is offered by students clicking, dragging, observing and creating various fractions in various forms. This is a great activity for students to test their own knowledge of fractions.

This object was located in the PBS Learning Media repository. Students are offered the opportunity to build a variety of different triangles using virtual linkage strips. It is highly interactive but also comes with other materials which I will demonstrate for you near the end of this presentation.

If you are using something that is free, you are obviously saving money --- which is important, especially in schools that have limited educator budgets.

If you are using something that is pre-designed – by someone else, you are obviously saving time. But, I say that cautiously, because you can spend hours and hours digging through learning object repositories if you don’t have a system. It is critical that you are searching in the right repository, that you have a specific search to conduct, that you understand how the searching features work for the repository you are using. You could waste a lot of time feeling lost, chasing rabbit trails, without yielding any good search results if you don’t have a plan and system for locating, selecting, implementing, and evaluating these free, pre-designed interactive learning objects.

So, I want to stop and let you know about an excellent guide, the only guide that I could locate, that helps educators on the quest of finding, choosing, and using interactive open educational resources. In 2014, John Shank published a guide that outlined the need for interactive technology learning materials. His book is rich with specific information about a number of repositories. The title of the book indicates that it is for college educators, but it is also very applicable to PK-12 educators as well. He offered lists and repositories by discipline and specific searching tips for those various repositories. His book also points or links to video tutorials that he created to showcase searching strategies for many of the repositories.

I recommend this book for any educator wanting to know more and do more with interactive learning objects.

My dissertation study asked community college instructional designers how they were locating, selecting, implementing, and evaluating free, pre-designed interactive learning objects ---- or the reasons they were not using the objects at all.

I interviewed 11 community college instructional designers – three of them were users of the objects and 8 of them were not users of the objects. My study, although small in nature, found that, for my particular group of participants, that more instructional designers were not using them and that there were specific reasons they were not being used. This is troubling to me as an educator because of the sheer number of free, pre-designed objects that are available online. There are thousands of objects available --- but, as my study indicated, these objects are not being fully utilized.

Today I’ll share with you strategies offered by the users of the objects and highlight some of the roadblocks to using the objects so that you can avoid those as you start to research the objects for your own students.

So that you are fully informed, I need to share with you the issues that were discussed by the participants in my study. Both users and non-users of the objects discussed issues that need to be considered when discussing the use of free, pre-designed interactive learning objects.

In my opinion as an educator and trainer of educators, all of these issues can be avoided or at least curbed in some way.

Time – if you spend the time to research the various repositories and locate the best repositories for your discipline and student level and then utilize the help tutorials to best search those repositories, you will actually end up, in my opinion, saving time in the end. Again, Shank’s book that I mentioned earlier is a great place to start. And, I’ll demonstrate a couple repositories today that will help get you started.

Faculty Buy-In/Acceptance – the research supports of the use of interactive elements for the current student generation --- for various reasons and with positive outcomes. If we understand this research, test it ourselves, and then can share those successes with other faculty, the buy-in or acceptance of the objects might increase.

Quality – one of the participants stated that just like anything else that we use or consume, there are quality products and less-than-quality products. The trick is learning how to best search in order to find the quality items. Many of the repositories have implemented a peer rating or professional/external review of the objects they offer. This will hopefully only increase our ability to find the quality objects.

Budget and Knowledge of “what’s out there” – the objects are free, so why the concern over budget? The issue was finding the people hours to do the searching --- or being so overworked themselves that they couldn’t budget the time to search for objects. Again - if you spend the time to research the various repositories and locate the best repositories for your discipline and student level and then utilize the help tutorials to best search those repositories, you will actually end up, in my opinion, saving time and money in the end. This also holds true for knowing what is out there. It might take time up front, but exposing yourself to webinars like this one through TILO, you are learning what is available to you as an educator.

Accessibility – this concerns both cross-platform use –IOS to Android operating systems from phones or tablets to PCs, etc. It is important that you test the objects on different platforms depending on how your students will access the objects. Some repositories are offering platform filters in searches so that if your students are using an IOS operating system, the search will yield only results that are IOS compatible. In addition to cross-platform use, accessibility also concerns ADA compliance for students with learning difficulties or disabilities. It is important that you consider any unique needs that your students might have as you select objects.

pbslearningmedia
lynnleasephd@gmail.com
tilo2016

http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/about/ - play this video (2 minutes)

http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/

Browse Standards

Standards - Common Core
Document - College and Career Readiness and K-12 Math
Grade 7
BROWSE

Grade 7 CCSS.Math.Content.7.G.A Draw, construct, and describe geometrical figures and describe the relationships between them.

Filters available

Icons for videos and interactives

Constructing Triangles
Summary and Information

Icon for Video - Icon for Interactive
Icon for Support Materials
Heart to like/save
Icon to share – Google classroom or other social media/communication tools
Quick Assign offers a code for students to use without logging in
Information – Grades, permitted use, favorites and views, Credits

Launch
Start - Instructions if needed
Show a sample

Support Materials - Activity (lesson plan with learning outcomes, supplies, process, evaluation), For Teachers (worksheet key), Student Handout (worksheet)

Educational Standards - National and Common Core

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See this activity on . . . Link to more information on that same topic

Dashboard with Files – Favorites – and other options depending on how in-depth you want to get.

Student View with code.

www.oercommons.org
lynnleasephd@gmail.com
tilo2016

Standard – Common Core English – SEARCH
Grade: 7
Learning Domain: Writing
Education Level: Middle School
Material Type: Interactive (5 results)

Primary Source Analysis Tool

Education Standards Outline
Tags
Information
View Resource:

? Bubbles guide the student
Download

MERLOT Place – videos for various searches.

Show MERLOTPlace on YouTube

Search MERLOT
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“Periodic Table”
Category: Science and Technology
Subcategory: Chemistry
Show other options --- but SEARCH to see how many are found (119)
Select Drill and Practice (4)

Online Periodic Table and Elements Flash Cards
Information – About – Also Viewed
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