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    • Cohort 22
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                  Madigan Home        Learn More        Standards        Inspiration        About the Author


Reflections on My Design Process 


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In the infancy of planning my capstone website page, and displaying all the learning from my year in the program, I had the opportunity to try out a "new to me" Web 2.0 mind-mapping tool called Popplet.  There's a link on the left that take you to my original thought process of how I wanted to lay out my website before I even knew it was going to be a website.  It features many of the big ideas and helpful tools that I got to explore throughout the year.  As I started this process, I didn't have any audience in mind, my goal was to grow my own personal toolkit.  As I've grown though this process, I've shared what I've learned with my PLC and my math department, and now my hope is that the audience of my capstone website would be any middle school or high school math teacher that's interested in using technology in their classrooms. 

The goal in designing my logo was to infuse the idea of using technology (personal devices specifically) to keep high school students engaged in the classroom.  My original sketch on the left was to have the word "engage" written in cursive using the cord of a iPhone or iPad.  I wanted one end to look like a plug, and the other end to possibly lead to an actual device.  I received mixed feedback from my cohort, and following some of their advice, and because my art skills are not my forte, I decided on the logo on the left, which shows to important aspects to me.  It clearly has what looks like either a phone or tablet, and still includes the word "engage" which hopefully is implied that the device is being used to engage.  It's almost imperceptible, but the background of the logo looks like graph paper, and that's appropriate because I'm a math teacher. 
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Designing lessons with the purpose of engaging students became the primary focus as I explored using devices more in the classroom, and as I developed my use of stations for my block days.  We explored many different theories and research on lesson design, and one particular one that I researched was the ARCS model.  ARCS stands for Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction.  The picture to the right is a link that leads to a brief slide show that myself and two of my cohort members produced to showcase our learning.
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Designing my own website was quite the undertaking.  Some of these pages were very intuitive and some took a lot of thought process and time to complete.  The About Me, Inspiration, TPACK, and Home pages were pretty cut and dry and my design ideas for them came pretty easily.  The pages that were most difficult for me were the Learn More, Lessons, Assessment, and Design Process.  Upon reflection, I realized that building a website takes an enormous amount of time and creativity.  I invented a new term along the way..."ignorance procrastination."  To me, this is putting something off because you don't know how to do it, or how you WANT to do it.  There was never a time when I didn't want to get things completed, but there were definitely times where I put things off because either I didn't know how to use some of the technologies, or because I was completely out of creative ideas.  As uncomfortable as it is, the only cure of ignorance procrastination is to sit at your computer and just start plugging away at something, your product will start small (and probably not what you want) but eventually it will develop.  At Napa High, we have a philosophy of RISK, REFLECT, REVISE, and REPEAT.  This mantra definitely supported me along the process of getting my Master's Degree.
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Below is a candid picture of my organized chaos as I was working my way through this process:
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