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Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) @ CUNY

Computing Integrated Teacher Education is a four-year initiative to support CUNY faculty at all ranks to integrate state standards aligned computing content and pedagogy into required education courses, field work and student teaching. Supported by public funding from the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) Computer Science for All (CS4All) program and private funding from the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund, the initiative will focus on building on and complementing the success of NYCDOE CS4All and pilots to integrate computational thinking at Queens College, Hunter College and Hostos Community College.

The initiative focuses on:
– Supporting institutional change in teacher education programs
– Building faculty computing pedagogical content knowledge through the lens of culturally response-sustaining education
– Supporting faculty research in equitable computing education, inclusive STEM pedagogies, and effects on their students’ instructional practices

Module 3 – BMCC

  • Background

    • The design process is at the center of our work together this summer.

    Task

    • We invite you to visually represent or model your own design process using some digital tool.
    • You can capture how you design or make anything — whether it’s related to your work as a teacher educator or not.
    • You can share your typical design process, or create a vision for a more idealized or aspirational design process.
    • We think doing this will help you learn a new digital tool, and to help you think intentionally about your design process in advance of our work together this summer.

    To complete this task:

    To visualize your design process, select and use a digital tool  – preferably one that’s new to you or that you want more practice with. You can use one of the ones we recommend below, or locate your own.

    NOTE: Some of these require you to create accounts. If you’d like, take a look at the privacy policies of these tools to see if the benefits of signing up would outweigh the risks for you.

    Stuck?

    • Consult any online tutorials the tool may have on their site
    • Try sketching something on paper first, or do some free-writing to generate ideas about how you generally go about design!
    • Make multiple “rapid prototype” iterations until something feels right.
    • If you’re stuck on something, we encourage you to troubleshoot. Google around, use your colleagues as resources, or go to our help sessions on Mondays!

    To Share:

    • Reply to this thread.
    • Add a brief reflection:
      • Share something new you learned about the tool you used.
      • Did you look at the privacy policy? Did anything stand out there?
      • Share any limitations of the tool that you used that you discovered.
    • You can share your work as a link, or an attachment to this discussion thread
    • If you’d like to embed an image in your post, you’ll have to upload it somewhere first (for example at imgur). Then use the image icon in the discussion forum to link to it.
Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 36 total)
  • OMG! This module took a lot out of me. This is the first time I work with any of those digital tools! PHEW! Much more than the 2 hours it says it should take on the pacing tab. I was really impressed with Sara’s presentation in our orientation breakout room. She shared a timeline she created with her students using Knightlab for a topic from a class she taught.

    I teach about the history of POC in American Schooling. My student read “The Story of Latinos and Education in American History” by Abdin Noboa-Rios. The book traces the experiences of Latinx, Chinese, and Asian Pacific Islanders in the history of Schooling in the US; paralleling it to the history of African Americans’ and education.

    Sara’s timeline activity goes perfect with that topic and reading assignment. Although she did her timeline with Knightlab, I tinkered with Padlet. I created (rough draft) instructions for my students that I can post on BB. That would propel me to learn how to use Padlet, which is new for me, for the class activity.

    I did look at the privacy instructions a bit. I really don’t understand most of it but I chose Padlet because I can sign in with my CUNY login info. Safe enough….

    Limitations, I did not find a tutorial for beginners. I had to play around with it for a long time, maybe that why it took me so long to complete this module.

    That’s it. Here is my first Padlet! Super proud of myself!

    https://padlet.com/yolandamedina94/the-story-of-latinos-and-education-in-american-history-6dnd5nboa98pycv8/slideshow 

    Wow. This was an adventure. I feel a bit like Alice…I’ve spent the day falling down rabbit holes and finding strange new worlds.

    I decided to stretch myself by using a new technology. I use PowerPoint and Google Slides all the time, and I am somewhat familiar with Padlet. Miro and Loopy were too modular in their approach to the design process, so I decided to go with Jamboard.  I spent some time playing and discovering what it can (and can’t) do.

    Jamboard is a part of the Google universe, which is both a blessing and (from a privacy standpoint) a curse. It is SO simple to use websites when they just ask you to sign in with your gmail account. I already have seemingly hundreds of different passwords that I keep track of with a password keeper. But now I sign into a lot of sites using my gmail account.

    From a user perspective, I felt a little creatively constrained by Jamboard. I kept wanting to change things that couldn’t be changed. I wanted more choices for colors of sticky notes and circles (where is purple, people???). I wanted to be able to crop my photographs inside the app, so that I could more easily work the text around the images. I wanted more font choices (if they are available, I couldn’t find them…only font sizes). I wanted to be able to change how the text looked inside the sticky notes. I wanted to have shapes (e.g., arrows) to work with, in addition to the drawing tool. Still, I’m pretty happy with the result.

    I ended up with 10 slides. I used my own photographs as backgrounds or images in most of the slides, to give visual support to what I was trying to convey.

    My Jamboard presentation is twofold:

    I model the design process I used to create new learning experiences for my curriculum class when CUNY moved into online teaching during the first months of the pandemic. The class centers the creative arts, and it is a very experiential, hands-on course. Needless to say, it was quite a learning curve.

    I’ve also been thinking a lot about the artifact that my colleague and I want to add to this course, so I included specific information about that, as well.

    The opening slide shows the flow of the design process. The photo that I used on this slide illustrates the arduous nature of the process. For me, it is a bit like hiking in the mountains of the southwest. It’s strenuous, and the ground can be slippery, but the journey and the views are worth it.

    The slides that follow unpack each part of the design process. Here goes, and I hope the link works:

    https://jamboard.google.com/d/1xeSL7EcYQlFffnOSjvwfp2J16YAEqn4HatJotn-ceQY/edit?usp=sharing

     

    This was very challenging for me! I have never worked with these tools before. It took me many hours over 2 days! I chose Padlet because I have seen it used a little, and it is mentioned often. I was frustrated by not finding any Help section, or instructions internal to the App. I am reminded of years ago when computer geeks would scornfully say to clueless newbies “RTFM”! I say where is the FM?! I googled around and found some guidance, but doing it that way was too disorganized to be the kind of beginner’s help I needed. I do like to experiment, but after I have a basic sense of how the thing works.

    Nevertheless, I did manage to create a very rudimentary Padlet, and I got a little thrill of accomplishment! The content, such as it is, does represent my usual method of creation. I may return to it to add more visuals, I know it needs a lot more. Now, let’s see if I can link it…

    https://padlet.com/cbarclay9/how-do-i-make-stuff-jdsixvh70niqgrij

    Kudos, Carol, for sticking with it!

    Carol: I love this! The design is simple and beautiful. And the process is so you.

     

    I love this, Ruth! It’s so fun.

    This is so cool, Jolie! I agree that I was super inspired by Sara’s timeline project demo. I love the idea of using padlet and/or slightly more low tech tools than Knightlab for your first test of the project.

    Beautiful, Mindi! I’ve only used jamboard in very simplified ways so you are inspiring me. I always love your photos. 🙂

    Agreed! Simple and beautiful. Yay!

    ooh! I want to learn how to make digital booklets like this. What tool did you use, Ruth?

    Rabbit hole is right! But I’m working hard to thaw my fear of Excel. 😉 Those pivot tables tho…

    I decided to use Loopy, because I’ve never seen it and I like the idea of using an open source too. Here’s my visualization of my design process.

    BTW, it seems to open best in chrome. When I tried copying the link to another browser it was not aligned correctly in the window and part of my work was cut off. Please let me know if you are able to see the whole image.

    Here is my visualization of my design process: https://ncase.me/loopy/v1.1/

    I never used Loopy, it looked fun. I played around with it. I explored Mido too, but this looked like more fun. There was no privacy policy for Loopy — the FAQ’s were cheesy. How do I send fan mail?  I would want to know who owns the content, can remove it, etc.  I started to review the privacy policy of Mido and it overload after the intensity of struggling with the pivot tables.

    I use Excel and am familiar with many functions of Excel. I followed the directions & created a pivot table that list the college, “count of artifact name” and “Count of student observation”. It looks great but I am unclear as to what the data means.  I watched several videos on creating pivot tables, and have to watch more.

    I think that if I created my own data set on Excel used that to create a Pivot table, my experience would have been much more meaningful — and perhaps easier!  Suppose I wanted to create a spreadsheet of my yarn, by brand, color, weight, number of skeins, date purchased, where purchased, etc.  Then I can manipulate the data in ways that are meaningful to me. The same if someone wanted to organize their earrings or clothes closet — or results from a study.

     

    That’s a great point, Jen. Often we can better make meaning of data when we understand the story behind it. Here is a great piece by data artist Jer Thorp on that point.

    That said, all of us are asked to make sense of datasets that are given to us, especially in professional or research settings. The data dictionary gives you a little bit about where the artifact data came from and what its supposed to represent. I wonder what your exploration around yours questions re this reflection were: “created a pivot table that list the college, “count of artifact name” and “Count of student observation”. It looks great but I am unclear as to what the data means.”

    Did you reference the data dictionary? Did you ask other questions of the data and use the pivot table to sensemake?

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 36 total)

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