I’ve moved the majority of the content found at busynessgirl to Edge of Learning: https://edgeoflearning.com

If you would like to continue receiving posts, please go to the new site and subscribe – you will be able to pick the categories you would like to subscribe to at the new site. So if you want only math content or only learning design content, you can choose that.

Along with the new site, I am publishing all of my curriculum at a new storefront on Teachers Pay Teachers: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Edge-Of-Learning

If you have used something I’ve provided in the past, please consider doing me a favor and buying something at the TPT website just to provide a review of the activity there. You can’t review an activity without buying it, but it won’t cost you more than a cup of coffee.

If you want to be sure to see new curriculum activities as they get published, make sure to subscribe to those curriculum categories (Business, Math, Tech & Society, Utah History).

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In under 2 minutes, you can get a summary of the sections of the video (with timestamps) and create pause points with questions to engage students’ curiosity and problem solving skills.

Step 1: Start the prompt in ChatGPT

Here is the prompt I used in the tutorial:

You are a teacher who will be playing the following video in class (I am giving you the transcript). Please create timestamped summaries of the different sections of the video. Before each summary, add a pause point with questions that you could ask the students to engage their curiosity and problem solving (on topics related to what will come next in the video).

Video Title:
Transcript:

Step 2: Grab the Transcript Summary from YouTube

Put in the Video Title and Transcript Summary from YouTube using Copy / Paste. Make sure to remove any unwanted text that might be grabbed from the copy. While you don’t have to put in a title, I find it helps if you later want to refer to the exact video in your next prompts.

Step 3: Process the Prompt

You should receive summarized sections of video, followed by a “Pause Point” with questions to ask the students to reflect on what they have just heard.

Getting the section summaries also allows you to easily skip a section of the video that is irrelevant to your students.

Want more help? Here’s a tutorial in under 2 minutes.

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Your new assistant is a 3rd or 4th year book-smart college education student who is a great self-starter and a little overconfident. They get tasks done super quick, but you have to coach them on how to do better and they do make mistakes here and there. They understand educational theory and have read all the textbooks, but don’t have a lot of practical classroom experience (luckily you do).

If you work with them, tell them what you liked, and send them back to redo things they didn’t get right, they improve and learn.

If you see that they made a mistake and fire them, you just lost your opportunity to have a really valuable assistant.

At this point, if you’ve heard about ChatGPT but have STILL not tried it, you might need to see it for yourself. So here’s a video to help you get started.

Direct YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_z4GQjGO7k&t=1s

Here are just a few of the things I’ve gotten ChatGPT to do that would be helpful activities for a teacher or instructor:

• Get the transcript from a YouTube video and reformat to be proper text.
• Create graphic organizers
• Write skits for class on a particular topic
• Change the reading level of a text
• Generate math word problems for a particular interest (like Minecraft)
• Create vocabulary lists from a source
• Create reading passages on a topic
• Create dialogues for students to practice on a topic or event
• Create matching activities for a source
• Create Kahoot questions for a source
• Sort information into tables
• Write poems or songs about a learning topic
• Grade and give feedback on short essay questions
• Create guided discussion questions
• Create guided notes for a source
• Write a story to teach a lesson

Prompt: Find the 15 most difficult vocabulary words in the previous text and make a matching activity (worksheet) for 6th grade students where they match up the vocabulary words and the definitions. Please write the definitions at a 6th grade reading level.

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Last fall I performed a little experiment. I took the exact same problem set of three fairly simple math problems and had a screenreader (in this case, Microsoft Narrator) try to read the problems in Word, in a PDF format, and in Blackboard.

The video “Equations and Screenreaders with Word, PDF, and Blackboard” will show you what it is like to navigate (or try to navigate) these three formats using the Microsoft Narrator screenreader.

When teaching online, in-person, hybrid, or whatever, I will provide PDF files for sighted students because the formatting tends to stay more consistent and the files will open on their screens and be printable even if they don’t have Microsoft Word. But I always create the problem sets and quizzes in Word first so that I have a file format that is compatible with screenreaders in the event that I have a student that is blind or visually impaired. If I have such a student in class, I just provide all the files in both PDF and Word formats.

Screenreaders will read LaTeX, but … they read the actual LaTeX code, they do not “interpret” the LaTeX as the readable or spoken math. If you are teaching blind students who will go on to advanced mathematics, physics, engineering, etc, it is probably the right choice to just teach them to write and interpret LaTeX code so that they can be literate in the writing techniques of advanced mathematics. However, if you are teaching courses where 90% of the students are not going on to these careers, I think it places an unfair burden on the blind student to adapt to LaTeX when you could just as easily make a document that is screenreader compatible.

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WASHINGTON D.C., USA – MAY 31, 2020: Protest Black Lives Matter protesters march after death George Floyd, group standing against White House Donald Trump president US

As educators, I think we owe it to our students to go learn more about the issues of the day. I find podcasts have been an excellent way to learn more about all topics I am not familiar with. You can listen while you hike, walk the dogs, watch your children play, garden, craft, cook dinner, etc.

If you’ve never listened to podcasts before, just download one of the podcast apps (personally, I like Overcast). Then search for the name of the podcast, and download the season or all episodes. You can also choose to subscribe to receive new episodes.

The following podcasts are all ones I have listened to in their entirety over the last few years, and I found them educational and eye-opening about the issues of systemic poverty, racism, and socioeconomic inequity. If you feel like you should be doing something, but for you it’s not protesting, then please become a more educated citizen.

The 2nd season of “In the Dark” is about the Curtis Flowers case. To understand just how systemic racism in some counties is, you have to listen to the whole podcast. Don’t jump to the end.

You should listen to every episode of “The 1619 Project” because there is a lot you weren’t taught in school about slavery. For example, did you know mortgages were developed by banks so that plantation owners could borrow against the value of their slaves? (sorry – that was a spoiler).

The 3rd season of “Serial” walks you through an American court system and all the people who interact with it. You can’t walk away from this season of Serial thinking that the court system works fairly for all people. In fact, it’s surprising that once arrested, anyone without money escapes with their freedom and bank account.

You should listen to every episode of “More Perfect” which provides the intelligent yet entertaining explanations of major U.S. Supreme Court cases, interviews with the litigants, and behind-the-scenes insights about the judges and the actual court proceedings. I’ve listened to many episodes of this one more than once when I need a refresher, and if you’ve never understood the “Citizens United case, this is probably your only hope. My Business Ethics students loved these podcast episodes.

The 1st season of “The Uncertain Hour” covers the modern-day U.S. welfare system and it’s safe to say that you have no idea where the money in the federal welfare program is actually going. Especially with COVID-19 causing such high unemployment rates, you owe it to yourself to become more educated before griping about “all the people on welfare.” This podcast is still going strong, and it looks like the 4th season is also addressing many equity issues.

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Changing Technology, Changing Curriculum

At a recent campus workshop, I asked the participants how their curriculum had changed to account for this incredible technological change that took place in the last decade. A couple brave souls in the audience replied:

• Smartphones can be used as polling devices.
• We can use Smartphones to conduct research in the classroom.
• We use Smartphones to check in students for clinical hours.

And then I asked the question again with a slightly different emphasis: How has your curriculum changed to account for the existence of Smartphones in the world? This was followed by silence.

Most of our course objectives and learning objectives were designed more than a decade ago, when we could still say things like “you need to know this because it will take time to go look it up.” The reality is that today, if I want to be 100% sure that I know the steps of a complex procedure, that a formula is written down correctly, or that I’ve cited a fact correctly, I do take the approximately 5 seconds required to look it up. That information is at my fingertips and the Internet is a more reliable source of facts than my memory.

We are preparing students to be professionals in their fields and citizens of the world and that world is now one where information is no longer scarce in the way it was 20 or 30 years ago. If I went back in time to visit an academic scholar in 1990 and I gave them access to 2020 technology and taught them how to use it, do you think they would adopt the technology to improve their professional life or reject it in favor of making phone calls, sending letters, and acquiring books (with a card catalog) to find information? The Smartphone is an incredible technological advancement and it’s time we start making appropriate modifications.

Consider this an opportunity to teach faculty that it’s not necessary to test everything at a high-stakes level anymore. Some content and skills are absolutely necessary to commit to memory (high-stakes assessment with scarce resources). Other information can be accessed so easily and is not used as often – in this case, it might only be necessary for a student to demonstrate that they can use the information or demonstrate skills in a supported way (using the Internet as a resource, accessing video tutorials, etc.). Finally, there is probably some content we should just leave behind – some things we teach simply out of habit because we have been teaching them for a century or more. Ask yourself if these topics are actually used or needed in the modern world. What better things could you include in curriculum if there was a little bit of room to breathe.

A New Way to Examine Curriculum: the ESIL Lens

To make this process of sorting out what needs to stay and how deeply it needs to be learned, you can examine your curriculum through what I call the ESIL Lens.

• Maybe it is only necessary for the learner to know something Exists – just a mention in class and no assessment.
• The next level up would be Supported – the student should be able to perform the skill supported with resources that are easy to access. For supported topics you can use assessment strategies like take-home problem sets, projects, or recorded demonstrations.
• If the student needs to be able to use the knowledge or demonstrate the skills readily in the next course (it’s part of a scaffolded learning process), you’ll want to bring them to an Independent level, assessing multiple times with both formative and summative strategies with at least one high-stakes assessment.
• Finally, there is the Lifelong level. If a student needs to carry this skill or knowledge into their role as a citizen or into their career, we should make sure that these skills or knowledge are covered in multiple courses and assessed cumulatively and in multiple ways.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that there is more to do than just alter the course objectives and learning objectives from the past. We also need to consider what processes in daily life and careers have changed because of Smartphones. It’s likely that there are new ways of doing, analyzing, and researching that need to be added to our curriculum. Without doing the ESIL Lens work to make space, you’re not going to be able to include the modern ways of engaging.

Take a Deeper Dive

There’s a lot to unpack about using the ESIL Lens, and I invite you to take a deeper dive by listening to the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on A New Lens to Support Learning Outcomes. In this episode, I discussed how to use the ESIL Lens to support learner outcomes.  And maybe it’s time to schedule that heart-to-heart department meeting where you begin to answer the question: How does our curriculum need to change to account for the existence of Smartphones in the world? 

This blog post was originally published on the WCET blog Jan 28, 2020.

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Improvements We’ve Seen

There have been several successful initiatives to improve curriculum as a pathway to college completion. For example, in mathematics, the developmental math series is slowly fading out of existence on many campuses, replaced by initiatives like Quantways and Statways that help students complete college-credit math courses earlier in their educational journey. However, in many states (e.g. Florida, California) this curricular innovation was spurred by a legislative mandate. When financial aid for students is withheld if curriculum doesn’t change, this tends to force the curriculum change, like it or not.

Motivating Innovation

How can we achieve innovation in curriculum without the heavy hammer of new laws? How do we create more relevant, streamlined, engaging curriculum on our campuses? In other words, how do we achieve innovation in curriculum through positive change?

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the Marie Kondo movement to “tidy up your house” and I believe the lessons from this movement apply directly to curriculum.

People who “Kondo” their homes go through this process of piling up all the clothes, all the books, all the kitchen stuff (one type of item at a time) and then take a good look at what they have amassed. When you live in your home, it is hard to recognize through the slow accumulation over years and decades, just how much you’ve amassed. Many Kondo participants are so overwhelmed by their “stuff” that they just can’t seem to move forward in their lives. Releasing this burden of stuff makes the space in their lives to begin thinking about their actual lives again.

Curriculum experiences this same slow accumulation of “stuff” that Marie Kondo sees in homes. This happens through curriculum drift and curriculum bloat.

Piling Up

When a degree or certificate program is first designed, it has a careful alignment and scaffolding of concepts that students need to learn. Over the years we teach the curriculum, the world changes, adding new skills and technologies required by the workplace. Theoretically, we should be removing curriculum as we add new topics, but this is often done in a rushed fashion and results in curriculum drift. We add completely new topics to courses while holding on to everything (or almost everything) that was originally there. This is what I refer to as curriculum drift.

The other problem we see in curriculum is curriculum bloat. I use this phrase to specifically refer to the bloat of existing topics through the learning resources used to teach (textbooks and even OER materials). Publishers and authors go through revision cycles every couple years where they ask instructors all over the country to “review” the materials. Through this process, the authors and publishers discover missing knowledge, missing problem types, and ideas for modifying the texts (most often increasing them in size). We have been packing more and more chapters into the texts and also into the existing chapters and sections within those texts. Most instructors (especially the adjunct population) are handed the teaching materials and instructed to teach specific chapters (or the whole book). There is rarely a detailed set of instructions for which subsets of material to teach within a section of the text. The result is curriculum bloat.

Tidying up our Curriculum

As we run out of nudge and alert type solutions for improving student outcomes, the next wave of improved success rates must come from a critical examination and realignment of the curriculum we teach.

I believe a lot of curricular innovation fails because we don’t first look for space in the curriculum. We have usually taken the approach to innovate by first thinking about what else we want to add to an already overflowing set of courses. And most faculty look at the overstuffed closet of learning objectives and topics and just think “no way” can I shove one more thing in there.

What if we first “tidied up” our curriculum, making space where we can for innovation? I think this is the solution to successful innovation. Before we decide what to add, we need to decide what no longer belongs in what we teach today, and we need to do that up and down the courses required for the degree or certificate program.

We need to truly take stock of today’s curriculum by “piling it all up” and seeing what we actually have. Marie Kondo suggests that we thank items for the joy they brought us as we bag them up to leave our house. It’s time to do the same in our curriculum.

This post was originally published on the WCET Blog.

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And yet, in most math courses, students only see the graphs they find in their textbooks. These graphs are, for the most part, graphs constructed to teach math. How many real world situations do you know of that are modeled by the graph y=3x-5 ? Twenty years ago, there were valid excuses for us using contrived graphs. It was actually difficult to find real world data and get it into a visual format. That is not the case today.

Several years ago, I began spending 5 minutes of class sharing relevant graphs for the week’s news. One day, a student asked how they were going to learn about the news or see graphs if they were no longer in my class. I had no good answer, and frankly I was struck dumb by the question (is this really how they were getting their weekly news?). But I came back to class with an idea. What if I started a social media account they could follow that would share the graphs from current classes?

Thus, I began collecting and sharing time-series graphs as a hobby. You can find the collection, dubbed “GraphsInTheWorld” at any of the following links. 

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/graphsintheworld/
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/graphsintheworld/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Graphs_World (note this account is relatively new, so there are not as many graphs here)

The Instagram account is best for just browsing the images of graphs (you will need an Instagram account to browse the whole collection). The Facebook account is best for searching for a specific graph by name (click on “Posts” and then a search box appears on the right of the screen).

After teaching a precalculus-level course with this collection of graphs at my back, I realized that it was more than a cute collection. Any time I need a homework problem, a test problem, or an activity for class, I can jump over to the collection and find relevant data and graph examples from the real world. 

Now students are learning about the properties of graphs from these real-world examples, not the “nice” contrived textbook examples with integer coefficients and perfect data. We use Desmos as our graphing calculator for class, and the process of inputting data and finding regressions of all types in Desmos is quite easy.

We talk more about piecewise functions now since disruptive innovations and wildcard events tend to completely change the behavior of a graph. For example, take a look at Netflix vs. Blockbuster. Did you know that Blockbuster once looked at buying Netflix and then rejected the idea? We now talk about the “whys” of graphs as well as the data. 

One of the most popular discussion graphs in the last year has been the graph of U.S. Pedestrian Deaths. There are so many theories that readers and students proposed for the sudden change in the graph. And the point is not that there is a right or wrong answer, the point is that there are many many factors that influence these numbers.

Many students and mathematics outsiders follow the collection now, and I want to prompt them to become curious enough to think about the “whys” of each graph and do a little outside reading and research. Thus, when I share a graph on GraphsInTheWorld, I typically include a question to get this thinking process started. 

GraphsInTheWorld has taught me many random things about the world. I am like a trend encyclopedia now. In arguments, I am now infamous for saying “Actually, I don’t think that’s correct … let me show you a graph.”

And the thing that makes me happiest about this project? I still see students from past courses commenting on the current graphs. They are still learning and still engaging with math in the real world, long after the class has ended.

Cross-posted on the Almy Education Blog

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