Sarah Ahmad

EDT 8900
Weekly Reflection

For this weekly reflection, Im going to discuss what I did the past two weeks instead of
one. Even though Wright State was on Spring Break, my school where I do my internship was
not. For the first week, which is the week of February 27th through March 3rd, I helped the eighth
grade ELA teacher with finding AIR paper practice tests. This teacher had come to me on
Wednesday morning asking me if I had knew of any way for her students to practice the AIR test
on paper because she did not have access to the computers. At that time the only way I was able
to help her was by showing her the Ohio Practice Portal which was on the computer. However,
later that day I did a search and I was able to find and recall a website that had already put the
Practice Portal on paper. I was also able to show her other things on this website that would help
prepare her students for the AIR test. This meeting minutes totaled for 30 minutes. During that
week I also checked in with the 5th grade teacher as well as the technology teacher who both did
not really need any help at this point in time but would let me know. This totaled for about 15
minutes.
As for this week, I was able to help the technology teacher reset up a projector for a
kindergarten teacher, which was about 30 minutes. This teacher had an issue with the focus of
the projector, after the light bulb was changed out as well as a buzzing sound when the projector
was turned on but no sound was playing. Together, the technology teacher and I were able to put
the projector back in focus and figure out the buzzing sound was due to an electrical grounding
wire being exposed and the maintenance man had to be called to deal with that. The other thing
that I was able to work on this week was helping the Math teacher with her AIR practice test.
One of the principles had sent a Utah practice portal website to this teacher for students to
practice on the test. The test had 25 questions. However, only 17 questions would appear; after
the 17th question a loading page would occur and no other questions would be able to be
answered. I tried a couple of things to fix the problem, such as reloading the page, closing out of
the browser completely and going back to the site and then trying another level of the test. None
of these ideas seemed to work. I think that the issue was on the developers end. The reason why
I say this is because all the other questions up to 17 would work and there was no issue with the
internet connection. I informed the teacher of my thoughts and apologize to her that it was not
working correctly. I think that I will look more into the issue later on and see if I can figure out a
better solution. This meeting lasted about 30 minutes as well. Even though, I did not get a lot of
hours for these two weeks, I know that in the next three weeks, I will have more hours because
we are coming up on the AIR testing and I know that teachers will be struggling with this and the
technology aspects of setting up for the test. However, to make up for the lack of hours I did read
the article for this week and I found it to be very interesting.
The article that I read this week is entitled Use of three-dimensional (3-D) immersive
virtual worlds in K-12 and higher education settings: A review of the research by K.F. Hew and
W.S. Chenug. When I first saw this title I thought that it would be an article discussing how
virtual reality in switch students would use a VR headset and see a 3D world was being used in
schools because these are virtual worlds. However, when I started to read this article, I realized
that the authors were discussing the concepts of using avatars and the ideas of Second Life
scenarios instead. This article surprised me because even though I have heard about people trying
this out in schools, I dont think that it is very popular technology in most schools. For example,
the article discussed how in 2007 a group of 5th graders learned about the river ecosystems and
used the software to learn in a virtual space about the rivers ecosystem (Hew, K. F., & Cheung,
W. S., 2010). This was done back in 2007 and since then I have not really heard of schools in the
traditional world using virtual spaces with avatars to teach students. However, I have seen the
use of virtual spaces and avatars used separately to teach students. I would be interested in seeing
more information about this topic; especially since I was able to get a Google Expedition Kit to
come to my classroom and used it to teach students about river ecosystems. It was a way to use
virtual spaces to teach. I also know that some teachers have used avatars to make lessons more
interactive. However, I have not really seen any teacher using the Second Life scenarios to
teach anything. I would love to experiment with this concept. I do think that the authors were
correct when the stated that this technology was relatively new in 2007 and 2008 and researchers
where trying to figure out how to use it in classrooms (Hew, K. F., & Cheung, W. S., 2010). I
think that it is still being looked at as a relatively new technology because if it is being used, it is
being used in either blended or online only schools.
Overall, I am interested in learning more about the idea of Second Life in the
educational world. I also think that through the internship I might check in with the technology
teacher and see if she has heard anything about using the Second Life or 3D immersion virtual
worlds in traditional schools.

Resources:
Hew, K. F., & Cheung, W. S. (2010). Use of three-dimensional (3-D) immersive virtual
worlds in K-12 and higher education settings: A review of the research. British Journal of
Educational Technology, 41(1), 33-55.