Student Consumer Guides: Service Learning Lesson Plan

A California Principles of Economics class project created “Student Consumer Guides” to be distributed among students at school. These guides served the school-wide community of students by helping teens with “limited funds” make informed decisions about local goods and services. The class enlisted the help of other community entities like the Consumer Affairs Bureau, Consumer Reports and local news stations in creating their consumer guides.
This Student Consumer Guides incorporates inquiry learning into a unit on supply and demand. Students were asked to select the products and services they would review, the criteria used for reviewing goods, and a rubric to evaluate projects and services.

http://www.servicelearning.org/slice/index.php?ep_action=view&ep_id=326

This lesson plan allows for a large amount of student input and transfers many of the student focused benefits noted in our Inquiry in Social Studies mind map. Content is mostly student generated, so teacher influence is negated and students can take ownership of their work. Because the project is focused on the goods and services most likely to be used by students, it connects the students’ in-class lessons with their out-of-class activities and should provide excellent motivation for students.
Some of the methods and best practices are also seen in this lesson plan. Students are encouraged to explore familiar topics within a defined structure. By doing this, they do their own research, create their own meaning, and reach their own conclusions as social scientists.
One of the challenges that could face teachers trying to enact this type of lesson plan is providing a structure to help guide student activities that does not stifle student creativity. A specific difficulty in an assignment like this is the very wide scope of potential goods and services to be reviewed. Taking some class time to list popular goods and services for students to research may be helpful, but it runs the risk of excluding students who have specific goods and services they want to advocate. Another solution would be asking students to submit proposals for which goods and services they which to research. This method allows students to propose exactly what they want to research, while still giving the teacher the ability to disapprove any inappropriate or unnecessary research.
A project like this may have difficulty in finding the resources needed to make an effective consumer guide. By integrating local news stations, the Consumer Affairs Bureau, and Consumer Reports into the lesson plan, students should have access to the resources needed to make useful Student Consume Guides.

This project provides a very intriguing way for students to investigate supply and demand and consumer behavior within their local community. The content is extremely relevant to students and connects their classroom environment to their community. The methodology employed lets students act like social scientists. The structure and community involvement ensures students will help students from getting overwhelmed by the assignment. All in all, a very well done service learning lesson plan.

Response to Karl Fisch

The goal of education is to prepare students to be contributing members of society. Teachers hope to convey to their students both information and the means to utilize that information. What has not changed over the past 30 years is the type of information to be conveyed. The question becomes about conveying the means to utilize that information.
Certain of those skills are not connected to technology. Higher-order thinking skills do have a technological prerequisite. These skills can be taught to students without the teacher using technology or asking their students to use technology. And if students can learn the information and how to utilize it without technology, what is the role of technology in the classroom?
Technology is the medium of expression for both the information and the skills needed to utilize the information. Just as a man today can build and live in a house without electronic tools, students can be taught without electronic tools. But those students will be ill-prepared for 21st century society, just as a house without electricity would be ill-prepared for a freezing winter.
Teachers cannot ignore the medium of expression that students will be using in society. And it is quickly becoming true that technological literacy is as important today as reading and writing 30 years ago. 21st century society will require its citizens to communicate with technology, and a teacher unwilling to learn technological literacy is being irresponsible to their students.
Technology gathers myriad information that students can easily access. Technology provides an environment for students to easily learn and practice higher-order thinking skills. Technology will be the medium of expression that connects people together. And none of that can be ignored.

Adam Heinemann
University of Florida
ProTeach Graduate Student

Visit rancoremalone on YouTube!

I wanted to announce that I now have a YouTube channel, entitled rancoredmalone, that includes a vlog discussing my practicum experience.
There's 5 videos up (or being put up now), and there will likely be more added soon. Be warned that I do swear a couple of times, and most of the videos are just close-ups of my face when I'm talking. So, if you like looking at me and hearing me ramble on, check out rancoredmalone on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/user/rancoredmalone

Great method or great technology?

The article entitled “The Impact of Cognitive Organizers and Technology-Based Practices on Student Success in Secondary Social Studies Classrooms” provided tremendous support for utilizing cognitive organizers to help students integrate content material with “various graphics, pictures, and templates.” Students used Inspiration 6 software on desktop computers within a school computer lab to create the cognitive organizers.
An experiment was designed and executed where the control group used traditional textbook teaching methods, which included teacher presentation, cooperative learning, and a guided reading worksheet. The treatment group used a pen-and-paper cognitive organizer, which was later converted onto the computer using the Inspiration 6 software. Both groups met for four 90-minute class periods. Both groups were inclusive classrooms containing general education students and 20 with mild disabilities. Both groups were assessed using a 35 question pre/post test. The results showed that the treatment group performed better at the post-test to a statistically significant level.
In my own classroom, I would like to use cognitive organizers to help students make their own connections with the material presented. The experiment focused on the Cold War, taught over four 90-minute class periods. Both the unit topic and unit length seemed to fit this method well. The unit being taught should be significant enough for students to make their own connections with the knowledge without being so broad as to become muddled. The Cold War is a good example of a unit topic, as would be the Civil War, World War II, the Great Depression.
I was curious how the experiment would’ve proceeded were the students given just the pen-and-paper cognitive organizers. Was the success mainly a result of cognitive organizers or the technology used to best create them? I personally suspect that this technology was the main factor that made the cognitive organizers useful enough for students to organize information.
My thoughtful question is an extension of one asked by the experiment’s authors in the article’s discussion section. The authors ponder “If students were provided access to the software, would they attempt to apply it, voluntarily, in other classes or would they independently generalize and maintain the strategy without the software?” I also wonder how students would utilize the technology if given it independently. I suspect that a heavy amount of guidance is necessary to make the technology accessible and useful to students.

Technology in the Everyday Social Studies Classroom.

After finding out that I was supposed to write about a "blog, podcast, AND wiki" instead of a "blog, podcast, OR wiki." I found this interesting psychology podcast through iTunes entitled "Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files." The words "Everyday Life" most interested me, because I find relating the social studies to students a very rewarding and sometimes difficult task.

This podcast would probably be best used as a supplementary material for a high school psychology classroom, given its length and frequency of release. However, certain podcasts may cross over with their subjects and be useful in a number of classrooms.

The two podcasts I downloaded concerned themselves with the emotional effect of music on listeners and a “powerful mnemonic device.” Both of these topics are interesting to students and integrate psychology into their everyday lives.

The wiki I found was one for a 8th grade social studies class focused on revolutions throughout history. What I found tremendously interesting about the website was not how it could be used as a resource for other social studies teachers, because the material is mainly the exact same as what is presented to the 8th grade social studies class. I was very interested in how it was used as a resource for that 8th grade class. All the resources on it would be extremely useful for students in the classroom that need to study or reference the class material for a paper or presentation. I imagine this is how most of us will use technology as a resource in our classrooms. Not necessarily to link our classroom to resources all over the country and all over the world, but to link it to all the resources available within our classroom itself.

http://msimon.wikispaces.com/8th+Grade+Social+Studies

Freak Out! (About Economics Blogs)

For my choice of social studies blog, podcast, or wiki, I found the blog of my personal favorite work of Economics, the Freakonomics blog, written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and maintained by the New York Times online opinion section at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/ .

Freakonomics was an instant classic for me after I read it because it exemplified the reasons I was interested in economics: it was curious, it was interesting, and it was personally relevant. And when Economist Steven Levitt admitted, “I just don’t know very much about the field of economics. I’m not good at math. I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory,” it rang true.

(Note: When you don’t really know economics, having a bachelor’s in Economics leads people to ask a lot of questions you won’t know the answer to. So I don’t know what’s wrong with the economy, although I think something bad happened because people invested in houses with money they didn’t have because they all assumed house prices would never go down. And once everyone realized they had assumed that, the market collapsed because they were all speculators ((like the ones in 1929)).)

The realistic, interesting examples written about in the book and blog title Freakonomics made me interested in how economics could explain the decisions people make. The Blog features posts about car prices vs. house prices in Detroit, the selling value of burial plots, and the right amount of ice for 7-11 drinks. Any single one of these can make an interesting discussion topic in class when tied into an appropriate lesson. Not only that, but these posts are about issues that could be relevant to students. Not only that, I can already imagine ways to incorporate chapters from the book Freakonomics into lesson plans for high school economics classes.

When a particular approach to economic thinking can be more personally relevant to students (and their teacher) I think meaningful learning, learning attached to previous knowledge and interest of the students can best occur.

The Amazingness of Zotero

Here are some drag-and-drop citations from Zotero, both of which refer back to utilizing Zotero.

1. “quick_start_guide [Zotero Documentation],” http://www.zotero.org/support/quick_start_guide.

1. “Zotero Makes Writing Papers a Bit Less Painful | Wired Science | Wired.com,” http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/zotero-makes-wr/.

Technological Spinal Damage

Why should technology be integrated into social studies classrooms? How has the learning from our first session influenced your answer? Please support your views with content from the readings.

The internet is an amazing resource for teachers because of the sheer volume and access to resources it provides. No matter your discipline within the umbrella of social studies, there will be additional resources for you to choose from. And your students will likely also benefit from the learning opportunities presented by access to a vast number of resources.

And it appears students are more interested in utilizing these new technologies to express themselves than they ever were for taking notes or reading textbooks. Their enthusiasm for this new technology suggests that both teachers and students will benefit extremely from integrating technology into the social studies classroom.

But as substantial as these new resources are, I wonder if there were similar feelings whenever a new piece of technology is introduced into the classroom. Teachers having access to videos to show what they could only merely describe before. Students using offline computers to learn in a new way and to express themselves through typed words. Both of these technologies likely had similar (although maybe less substantial) effects on how teachers and students existed in the classroom. And while we can clearly understand the benefits teachers and students gain from the access to additional interesting, relevant course materials, it seems a little harder to understand why students are so interested in expressing themselves in this new manner.

I personally believe that adolescents are much more prone to utilizing these technologies than other age groups. The adolescent psychology concept of “imaginary audience,” where students feel that “they are always on stage and that everyone around them is as aware of, and concerned about their appearance and behavior as they are themselves.” (quote coming from the Instructional Strategies book used in ESE 6345, page 5) The ability of technology to seamlessly connect people together must be appealing to adolescents on this level. Uploading a podcast or blog post that is, theoretically, available to anybody in the world must be quite the thrill. And November’s book provides many examples of students or groups of students whose work has been noticed on a larger scale than the individual classroom. I would say I received a similar thrill to being exposed to these technologies because I loved the idea that everything could be connected to everything else. I love the fact that people could be connected to my work (and I to theirs) and that disparate threads could be easily integrated together. After week one of class, I felt positively giddy about becoming more technologically literate and I dove in headfirst.

Many students encountering these technologies probably have the desire to dive in head first. Unfortunately, that desire could lead to technological spinal damage. Attempting to use the Internet as a resource without proper web literacy is bound to hamper learning. November expresses this fear when he paraphrases Marshall McLuhan, “The real danger is that is that a majority of students will lack the critical-thinking skills necessary to separate the message from the medium.” (Page 80) Students need to be taught web literacy to make the Internet into a safe source for learning and expression.

Web literacy does not come easily. I have always considered myself well-versed in technology, but I did not know exactly how search engines generated their results or how to completely read domain names. At the same time technology is compelling and interesting, it is daunting, an obstacle to overcome. This is the real value of November’s book to me. It really is providing “Web Literacy for Educators.” And once we can become fluent in web literacy, we can transfer these skills to our students and truly unlock the amazing potential of the internet.