Design Mode : BrainStorm

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Brainstorm [?]

	Brainstorm Brainstorming is the first step in the Design stage (stage 2 in our design model). This is one of the most creative parts of the design process. At this stage, you will brainstorm in your group about the activities you intend to incorporate in your learning environment. While brainstorming, try to identify solutions to challenges and problems which arise. Looking through "lenses" of the meta-principles in the Design Principles Database (DPD), may help you to bring up ideas. Please read each of the following meta-principles. Questions to scaffold your brainstorming process are included.
Initial design ideas:	[?] [Edit] [Close] Initial design ideas This is a place to throw in your initial ideas about activities in your learning environment. Create a bulleted list. In the next step, you will be able to use the meta-principles from the DPD to enrich your ideas.

Make Contents Accessible:	[?] [Edit] [Close] Definition: Making science accessible contributes to knowledge integration by building on what students know. To make science accessible, instructors design materials that connect to students� ideas and encourage students to reconsider their existing ideas. Making science accessible involves adding ideas to the mix that students bring to science class, scaffolding the inquiry process so that students generate new connections and providing supports that move students in a normative direction. It also involves ensuring that students connect ideas in a web such that they are prepared to revisit science in everyday life rather than isolate school science. Finally, making science accessible means ensuring that students get feedback on their reasoning. Such feedback can motivate them to continue to learn science rather than giving up on understanding science. [Principle connected to this meta-principle] [Guiding Questions] Build on student ideas Communicate the rich diversity of inquiry Connect to personally relevant contexts Create a clear and engaging flow of activities Create a cognitive conflict Engage learners in complex projects Provide students with templates to help reasoning Provide teachers with supports for adaptation Reduce visual complexity to help learners recognize salient information Reuse student artifacts as resource for learning Make Content Accessible How can you make the content: Relevant to the learner? Interesting? Personal? How can you connect the content to the learners' previous knowledge? How can you ensure that complex subjects are clearly and appropriately presented for the target audience.
Make Thinking Visible:	[?] [Edit] [Close] Definition: Making thinking visible, involves modeling and evaluating how ideas are connected and sorted out to form new knowledge webs (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Collins et al., 1991; Linn, 1995). Teachers, scientists, students, and technology can all model knowledge integration (Linn & Hsi, 2000). Making thinking visible both adds new perspectives to the mix considered in the knowledge integration process and makes explicit the interpretive process of combining perspectives to form more coherent knowledge webs. When role models succeed they often help learners understand the nature of scientific research as well as the cultural characteristics of scientific communities. By making their ideas visible, students can inspect their own knowledge integration processes and engage in linking, distinguishing, or reconciling ideas, as appropriate to deliberately guide their learning. This Meta-principle is divided to two types of ideas: a. Making thinking visible so students can learn about the ideas of others and communicate their ideas to teachers and peers. b. Designing models or visualizations to communicate complex concepts, using visualization tools to make complex scientific phenomena visible. [Principle connected to this meta-principle] [Guiding Questions] Create a clear and engaging flow of activities Enable manipulation of factors in models and simulation Enable students to relate between micro and macro levels of phenomena Enable virtual navigation for exploring complex physical systems Model scientific thinking Provide dynamic visual aids for the perception of 3D phenomena Provide knowledge representation and organization tools Provide students with templates to help reasoning Reduce visual complexity to help learners recognize salient information Scaffold the process of generating explanations Support student initiated modeling of complex science Use multiple representations Visual representation of data collected by students Make Thinking Visible How can you encourage learners to externalize their thought processes? By so doing, can you bring them to reflection and better communication with peers and instructors?
Promote Autonomous Life Long Learning:	[?] [Edit] [Close] Definition: Promoting autonomy so students can become lifelong learners involves establishing a rich, comprehensive inquiry process that students can apply to varied problems both in science class and throughout their lives. Students need to guide their own learning, recognize new ideas, and develop a view of effective inquiry to become autonomous science learners. To become autonomous lifelong learners students need opportunities to generate and recognize new ideas and to connect them to existing ideas, they need to learn to monitor their progress so that they gain more cohesive understanding. They need to engage in sustained project work so they can connect personally relevant problems to class topics, and reflect on experience using a robust inquiry process in diverse contexts. Instruction should help students become autonomous by providing varied supports and communicating a robust inquiry process. [Principle connected to this meta-principle] [Guiding Questions] Design prompts for planning and monitoring Encourage reflection Engage learners as critics Engage learners in complex projects Establish a generalized inquiry process Involve students in evaluation processes Provide teachers with supports for real-time adaptation Promote Autonomous Lifelong Learning What activities can help learners develop into independent lifelong learners? What skills can be developed through your subject which might be useful for the learners in their future?
Help Students Learn from Each Other:	[?] [Edit] [Close] Definition: Help students learn from each other calls for orchestrating social supports so learners can benefit from the ideas of others. Encouraging students to listen and learn from others, takes advantage of the collective knowledge in the classroom community. First, encouraging students to analyze and build on ideas from peers can introduce new perspectives and motivate students to interpret their own ideas. Second, when students interact, they connect to the cultural aspect of learning by bringing to light the alternative views held by learners and the criteria used to interpret ideas. Third, by enabling students to question peers and authorities, social supports can encourage the deliberate nature of learning. [Principle connected to this meta-principle] [Guiding Questions] Employ multiple social activity structures Enable multiple ways to participate in online discussions Encourage learners to learn from others Engage learners in instruction of their peers Integrate online with offline activities Involve students in evaluation processes Promote productive interactions Reuse student artifacts as resource for learning Scaffold the development of classroom norms Scaffold the process of generating explanations Help Students Learn From each Other What activities could support your learners in learning from and teaching each other? What tools can be used to share knowledge among peers? What is collaborative learning? Would answering peers forum posts be considered to be peer teaching?
Peer Feedback	[?] Peer feedback Give feedback to and receive feedback from other peer groups (according to course instructor's directives). The intent here is to allow people outside a design team to examine products, ask questions, and help to understand points which might not be noticed by an insider. You will review your peers' products and provide feedback. You will also be expected to present your design team's products to be reviewed at various points in the process. This review occurs midway in the development process, therefore it is not necessary to present finished products for review. However, it is important to present your ideas and materials as clearly as possible in order to enable others to give meaningful feedback. The time planned for group feedback is 30 minutes. During the first 10 minutes, each group will examine a second group' s artifacts and give feedback using the "Add Notes" tool. Dialog between two groups will be held, based on the feedback received (10 minutes for each group). Additional notes may be added at this time to document point which we were raised in the discussion. The notes can be used later for editing and improving your project.