TIPC Ratings

Developing – This lesson is designed for 9th grade students as an introduction in determining accuracy of internet sources. Once students learned the skills of Research and Information Fluency they were able to use digital tools search for internet sources to complete their projects and evaluate their own sources for validity.

Approaching – Students are provided with an authentic relevant task that engaged them in problem solving as they created guidelines for both themselves and peers in a 21st century world.

Developing – Students completed teacher lead collaboration within the classroom using an appropriate modeled digital tool, “Wordle.net”. This document is shared outside of the classroom.

Approaching – Students are provided with an opportunity to develop deeper understanding, communicate and collaborate as a class, and apply the critical thinking skill to develop a new product that can be shared with the larger community.

TIPC Ratings

Approaching – The teacher models search techniques and provides quality resources & determining the authority of sources. This occurs through the students locating and analyzing the published 6 word memoirs through the use of the graphic organizer. The teacher is the facilitator and encourager for students to achieve their personal goals.

Approaching – Students are provided with the communication tools through the School Space Discussion Board. Students are encouraged to communicate purposefully through responses, editing, and reflection without direct supervision within and beyond the classroom. Communication occurs as necessary while working towards developing their unique, personal statement. Reflection occurs as students communicate with each other through the discussion board and have the ability to view their peers with a new outlook.

Approaching – Students critically think about an authentic task and research question: Who am I? Such a question is one that all ages of students can identify with as many of them ask themselves these questions daily. Students were challenged to consider “How do you limit your life or one major event to a 6 word statement?” and “Why they chose their motivating event?”. By providing the students with a purposeful assignment and the ability to take risks, students are able to think critically and solve this ongoing “not a problem but possibility.” By first looking at examples of 6 word memoirs students are able to first analyze how others answered the question before looking at themselves. They examined the anonymously posted memoirs and imagined what the story behind the memoir may be. Through this process they were able to more easily examine their own lives in determining what their motivating event should be.

Ideal/Target – Students have the opportunity to be inspired, communicate, reflect and critically think about the authentic task of finding their “essence” in 6 words. The limitations lead to creativity and innovative responses to a unique and purposeful problem. Students are able to create meaningful work through exploration of their personal identities. Their new ideas are self-created images, words, and thoughts that they developed through research, introspection, and reflection. No one will ever have a 6 word memoir exactly like that student’s nor will that student be in the same place at a different time. They are truly authentic moments,memoirs.

TIPC Ratings

Approaching: This lesson incorporates only a small amount of research and information fluency, but at the approaching level, students assemble and organize information for an authentic task. The task is the formulation of a hypothesis concerning emission spectra trends; the information assembled and organized is collected from the interactive periodic table.

Approaching: This lesson incorporates communication and collaboration at the target level, as students experience the methods professional scientists use to collect and analyze data, and then collaborate with other scientists to propose hypotheses and interpret data. In the process of class discussion, students establish groups and roles to accomplish the task and share their data digitally.

Target: This lesson incorporates critical thinking and problem solving at the target level, as students use individual methods to evaluate each emission spectrum and select the data to record. After their individual data is recorded, students address the challenges of compiling a class set of data that all students believe is accurate and reflects their own data. This directly reflects the experiences of professional scientists as they collaborate and address challenges encountered in data anomalies and differences of interpretation.

Approaching:The lesson incorporates creativity and innovation at the approaching level, as students synthesize their prior knowledge of the characteristics and behavior of electrons and emission spectra in order to propose hypotheses and identify trends they have observed in those areas. It should be noted that I could find no information about identified trends in atomic spectra, so students were not collecting data to support or refute already existing ideas, but were creating original hypotheses and identifying new trends. The final presentation represents a truly authentic task, so authentic that it can only be evaluated based on the student’s own hypothesis and data.

TIPC Ratings

Approaching – This lesson is designed for 9th grade students as an introduction in determining accuracy of internet sources. Once students learned the skills of Research and Information Fluency they were able to use digital tools search for internet sources to complete their projects and evaluate their own sources for validity.

Developing: This lesson falls in the Developing column in the Communication and Collaboration category in the TIPC chart. While the teacher does serve as the main facilitator, the students have time to share ideas with each other and collaborate in determining validity of the internet sites.

Approaching: Students must use alternate search engines on the internet to validate information from the suspected websites. Additionally, the teacher uses quality questioning to facilitate the discussion and spur critical thinking among students in determining what is an authentic site and what is not a valid website.

This lesson could be extended past an introduction so that students search the web and come up with their own list of false advertisements and websites containing false information. The students could then create a presentation to provide to the class or even a false website of their own to fool the experts.

TIPC Ratings

The students are analyzing information, the book reviews, to assemble their own responses to that information. In some parts of the lesson the students are also selecting their own digital tools in order to meet the needs of the assignment.

The students helped to guide a discussion on how the partner groups should be formed. The teacher asked them for ideas on how they could partner up with someone that may have a different point of view. Some examples of the ideas that the students came up with include; boy/girl, different favorite genres, and personality types.

The students are choosing the most appropriate digital tool for their chart of positives and negative and their templates. They are also questioning and using critical thinking skills in order to assess how well a book review is written. They are doing this in order to create their own book review template, which they will use to create their own website for the school. They will reflected on how well they did with the positives and negatives when looking at their peer results in the google doc and when voting on the winning template. A future goal for all students will be to continue to write book reviews containing the positive characteristics discussed.

The students are using the information gained from the book review critiques to create their own book review template. This task is both meaningful and authentic to them because they will be using the winning template to write their own book reviews.

TIPC Ratings

Ideal – students add to and re-visit previous information regarding an area of weakness. After researching their specific games, students then take that information and transform it into the types of questions and answers that would be asked in their chosen games.

Students use google docs to compile and fact check their questions. Once they have completed the game, students post the games on the internet for others to share. This category could be increased if students could play against another school using skype.

Ideal – students take information from an area that they are scoring weakly in and create questions and answers in a variety of formats using digital media. Once they have completed the games, the games are played and students assess ways they could improve on their questioning techniques.

Approaching – students use information to create a project that is original and that provides students an alternative to flash card, study guides, and cramming to remember facts.

TIPC Ratings

Approaching: Students had to make their own connection between the parts of their city and the parts of the cell. They were given the freedom to select the most appropriate digital tools and information sources. The student groups initially used Google Earth to explore the design, land features, and structures found in their city. They collected their research and organized it into a google doc. Following teacher comments inserted into the shared document, students refined their research as needed.

Students selected their own partners and digital tools to communicate and collaborate. They organized their roles within the group to gather research and share with on another whether at school or at home through the use of Google Docs. Most groups also selected a media tool that all members could collaborate .

Approaching: Students had to determine how to compare the parts of a cell to the city they selected based off their research. Digital tools were applied to think critically and solve a task that involved higher order thinking skills.

Approaching: Students created meaningful, original work within the guidelines set forth by the teacher. Students were very creative in comparing the parts/functions of their city to the parts/functions of the cell

TIPC Ratings

Developing: Students are provided with a data set, but must develop their own questions to guide their selection process. Additionally, they are required to complete the data set by making the necessary calculations. Students also track the performance of their chosen players requiring them to find the information online.

Developing: Students communicate with audiences within the classroom as they are required to work in groups of two to compare statistical measures, make their selections, and complete their written proposal to the “Olympic Committee.”

Target: Students use higher-order thinking skills and engage in an open-ended learning experience as they use technology in the form of an Excel spreadsheet to find statistical measures and solve a “real-world” problem.

Approaching: Students are required to manipulate, evaluate, and analyze a set of data to make predictions about which players would form the best possible team.

TIPC Ratings

Entry: Students are following the prompt of the teacher to analyze several short stories to complete a class assignment. This was not the focus of the lesson and therefore did reach a high rating on TIPC.

Approaching: Students used a Google form to provide feedback during the student presentations and some students did use a blog to communicate outside of the class with the ITRT, to resolve any technical difficulties. Having other classes comment or provide feedback would incorporate another way to include outside communication and collaboration. Students did create an authentic task of developing a news report from the plot elements of the short stories. Allowing student groups to work outside of class on their assignment prompted the integration of student organized communication and collaboration techniques.

Developing: Students elaborated on ideas and topics that were introduced in class by producing their news report. Specific digital tools for problem solving were not addressed, because this was not the focus of the lesson. Students engaged in critical thinking as they analyzed short stories to identify the elements of the plot which would fit within the structure of a news cast.

Ideal/Target: Students used critical thinking, research, and collaboration to create an original product incorporating plot elements of short stories read in class within a news story structure. Students modeled strategic risk and creativity by incorporating sounds and music to enhance the message of the news story and to grab the audience immediately (characteristic of a news story). Students analyzed the characteristics of news stories to guide the production of their original and unique product. This is a great example of allowing students to be creative while still expecting a product which shows the student’s understanding of the content required in your class.

TIPC Ratings

Research and Information Fluency:

APPROACHING – Students had to assemble and synthesize information from their research and analysis of the novel in order to evaluate current reality TV and answer the essential questions. This is an authentic task because it examines reality TV of today and the effect it has on real people and society. Students also used a Google collaborative document to display and share the ratings of all TV shows on a scale that compares it to the novel.

Communication and Collaboration:

TARGET – Students were engaged meaningful communication in all parts of the lesson. The first two discussion board tasks were combined with full-class oral discussions in what because a fishbowl type/Socratic Seminar discussion where students could comment online and/or take part in oral discussion in a fluid fashion. The teacher lead this by projecting the discussion board on a screen, highlighting student comments, and following them up with questions to students that asked them to dig deeper in their thinking and allowed other students to ask questions and provide feedback. This type of discussion would not have been possible without the use of digital tools, and therefore, went beyond the confines of the traditional classroom. The final paragraph blog post was evaluated in a more formal way by the teacher for elements of writing (prepositional phrases) and how it addressed the essential questions. Students also reflected on the ratings of the shows by their peers using the collaborative Google document by viewing and discussion what action could be taken by individuals and society based on the compiled information.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving:

TARGET – This lesson provided students with the opportunity for a lot of critical thinking from a close analysis of the text to internet research, to answering essential questions that required synthesis of ideas. Also, students were supported each step of the way by each other and by the teacher through discussion boards, a blog, and oral discussion. Students also reflected on the ratings of the shows by their peers using the collaborative Google document by viewing and discussion what action could be taken by individuals and society based on the compiled information.

Creativity and Innovation:

APPROACHING – The authentic task of having students evaluate the societal and interpersonal impact of a reality TV show provided students with the opportunity to synthesize information from a variety of sources and created a meaningful work in the collaborative rating document that has real meaning for today’s student and for our society in general.