Journal of Technology-Integrated Lessons and Teaching

Acknowledgements

Craig Erschel Shepherd — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

The Journal of Technology-Integrated Lessons and Teaching (JTILT) is an online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal that is published semi-annually by the University of Wyoming in partnership with the Teacher Education Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). The journal publishes original, technology-rich lessons, activities, professional development, and micro-credentials for PK-16+ professionals and their international equivalents.

The views expressed in JTILT are not necessarily those of the publisher nor the partnering association.

Volume 2, Issue 2 Introduction

Cecil R. Short; Craig E. Shepherd — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Journal of Technology-Integrated Lessons and Teaching (JTILT). This journal publishes international, peer-reviewed, technology-rich lessons, activities, and materials for teachers. These resources are freely available for adaptation, use, and dissemination through a Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0). JTILT provides a venue for PK-12 teachers, media specialists, librarians, instructional coaches, administrators, teacher educators, and other relevant parties to highlight, reflect, and share teaching practices.

Creating Interactive Books with Augmented Reality

Sarinporn Chaivisit, Younglong Kim, Thanh Do, Ayodeji Ibukun — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This workshop helped educators to create interactive Augmented Reality (AR) books at the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) conference. The goal of the workshop was to train participants to gain skills in integrating AR into their professional lives. All participants created an AR book or curriculum vitae during the workshop. This manuscript describes the specific activities, assigned times, and educational tools used during the workshop. This workshop was designed for participants with no previous knowledge or skills in developing AR materials. Educators interested in teaching educational technologies, especially AR, could be instructors for this lesson. Preservice teachers could also take this lesson.

Using Nintendo's Game Builder Garage to Facilitate Hands-On Learning in Graduate Game Design Education

Noah Glaser — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This activity is built around the hands-on use of Nintendo's (n.d.a) Game Builder Garage as a tool for teaching game design principles in an online, graduate-level course. Throughout the course, students use Game Builder Garage to design and create a fully functional game over four weeks, applying the course concepts to their projects, demonstrating their practical application of these principles, and receiving feedback. This activity details a four-week game jam implementation of game design theories and best practices using Game Builder Garage.

Digital Florilegium

Dave Mulder — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This lesson explains an approach to engaging students in close reading of challenging texts. It introduces florilegium, an ancient reading practice utilized by copyists in medieval European monasteries. This lesson’s approach to florilegium took a digital twist: rather than hand-writing snippets of text into a copybook as medieval monks might, we used a Google form to capture the whole class’s snippets from a shared reading. These text snippets became a shared digital repository that students could use to engage the text in a variety of interactive, creative ways. In the instance described in this article, the students were graduate students taking an online Educational Technology course, but the practice is flexible and could be adapted for use in many different content areas and grade levels.

Tinkering and Modeling

William Tai — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

In high school Geometry, three dimensional solids are often overlooked and not part of the regular curriculum. The exclusion of three-dimensional (3D) geometry can affect spatial relationships and cause learner anxiety, correlating to a negative relationship with environmental navigation (Lawton, 1994). To mitigate learner anxiety in the introduction and manipulation of spatial figures, Tinkercad was utilized for creative virtual design and papier mâché was used for a hands-on, artistic approach to mathematics.

Welcoming Newcomers to Makerspaces

Shannon M. Smith, Craig E. Shepherd, Maxine Evans — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This article provides several self-guided, simple, creative activities to help learners gain familiarity and create with maker tools. Activities center around four categories: low technology, paper circuitry, Sphero robotics, and Cricut cutting machines. Learners use maker resources to build animals, construct LED bracelets or lanterns, code sirens, design stickers, and more. Although the intended audience for this article was undergraduate preservice teachers, most activities have also been completed by students in grades 3-8. Because materials differ by activity, they are presented in each activity.

Frog Olympics

Abby Harris — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Groups of three students make a small, medium, and large frog, using Cricut Design Space to size correctly and personalize their frogs. Once the frogs are folded, they are entered into five Olympic events: Long jump, same-side flipper, backwards flipper, high jump, and fastest faller. Students keep track of their measurements. During each event, the student can make three attempts and keep the best measurement. After each team member has completed all the events, students will calculate the mean, median, and mode for the three frogs for each event. As a class, they will put all the data on the board and decide if the mean, median, or mode best represent the data fairly to decide which team will get first place.

Exploring Geometry and Art through Tessellations

Alyssa Erickson — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

In this lesson, elementary school students explore geometric shapes and tessellations using a Cricut Maker 3. During Part 1 of the activity, students review geometric concepts of regular versus irregular polygons and lines of symmetry. This includes using shapes cut by the Cricut machine to determine which regular polygons form a tessellation when put together. Then students answer reflection questions. During Part 2, there is a discussion about how the artist MC Escher used different types of symmetry (e.g., translations, rotations, and reflections) to modify irregular shapes to create tessellations. In Part 3, students are given materials to prototype their own tessellation using regular and irregular shapes and at least one type of symmetry transformation.

Exploring the Volume of a Cylinder

April Day — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

During this lesson, students create cylinders of different radii and heights using the Cricut Maker 3. They then test the volume of their own cylinder and compare it to the volume they calculate from the formula. They observe the differences in volume for cylinders with various radii or heights.

This lesson is intended for 8^th grade math, but it could be modified for different grades by changing the shape students work with. For example, 5th graders could use rectangular prisms. Other shapes could include square and triangular pyramids, triangular or hexagonal prisms, and dodecahedrons.

Fortune-Telling Finches: Linear Functions as Predictors

Brian Johnson, Rebecca Bramwell — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This lesson gives students experience with block coding Finch robots to move across plexiglass surfaces. It builds student computational thinking skills, mathematical self-efficacy, and interest in technology careers (McLurkin, et al., 2013; Martin, 2019; Kazi, 2023). Finch robots are small, physical robots that can be coded to move in a space. In this 8th grade math unit, conducted in the library, students identify relationships between variables while using block coding to make predictions and test hypotheses. This lesson extends students' knowledge of linear functions through observing patterns and using the guess and check strategy to complete a variety of challenges.

Designing Collaborative Tech-Rich Learning: Building a Multi-Player Game Controller with Makey Makeys

Nate Turcotte — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This lesson challenges learners to consider the educational benefits of using games to support teaching and learning practices through a Makey Makey design challenge. A Makey Makey is a digital toolkit that creates a closed-loop circuit by connecting alligator clips to conductive materials. I introduce the Makey Makey during a unit exploring the use of gaming technologies in PK-12 classrooms. During this lesson, groups of learners use a Makey Makey to build a multi-player game controller. This article describes a lesson that has been successfully integrated with undergraduate students in an Introduction to Technology in Education course and with middle and high school students.

Virtual Roller Coaster Design

Frank Jamison — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This lesson offers a technology-enriched educational experience for 10th grade students that focuses on applying geometry, trigonometry, and physics. Students design a virtual roller coaster by applying geometric shapes (e.g., circles, triangles, and polygons), trigonometric ratios (e.g., sine, cosine, tangent), and physics principles (e.g., forces, energy conservation, motion dynamics).

Students are challenged to make simulations that reach a height of 100 feet, a track length of 1000 feet, and incorporate one or more loops. They explore concepts like the Pythagorean Theorem, circular motion, and centripetal forces. Assessments focus on precision and creativity, presentation effectiveness, and depth of reflective discussions.

Synthesizing Magnesium Oxide through a 3D Experience

Katheryn Ure, Irene Bal — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This lesson is from the Types of Reactions unit in a High School Chemistry class and focuses on the synthesis of magnesium oxide. The purpose of this lesson is for students to conduct a lab experiment, and understand, at an atomic level, how the reaction occurs. In collaboration between a Chemistry teacher and Educational Technology faculty member, one three-dimensional (3D) experience was created to support the visualization of the reaction and minimize the students’ misconceptions.