This document summarizes a study that implemented a technology program called ALASKA into three Algebra I classes at an urban high school. It included a professional development component called PREDICATE for the three algebra teachers. The goals were to increase student learning, encourage teacher creativity, and help teachers create their own digital content to share. The program included tablet computers, collaborative workspaces, a digital library of teacher-created content, and professional development workshops for the teachers. Over three days of workshops, the teachers learned to use software to create content, discussed how to best support student learning, and reflected on incorporating the new technologies and content into their classes.

1. Thinking About ALASKA Technology Leads to Thinking about Student
Learning: A Professional Development for Algebra Teachers
Sindy SHELL
Pepperdine University
Los Angeles, CA 90045
Nancy HARDING
Pepperdine University
Encino, CA 91436
And
Eric HAMILTON
Pepperdine University
Los Angeles, CA 90045
ABSTRACT
Teacher creativity is a untapped resource in K-12 education. In
classrooms across the nation, teachers teach a curriculum
designed by publishers of textbooks. With this current method,
teachers lose their identity in a prescribed pedagogical
framework. ALASKA, a classroom technology infrastructure and
teacher-created digital content library allow teachers to create
their own content, collaborate with colleagues, and have students
engage in the digital media. This study details the implementation
of ALASKA and the teacher professional development
component of ALASKA called PREDICATE into an urban high
school’s Algebra I classes. This study provides insight into the
curriculum planning teachers experience while implementing the
ALASKA project. Learning engagement is also reported and
provides insight into the potential ALASKA can bring into the K-
12 schools.
INTRODUCTION
This paper describes the implementation of a technology program
into three Algebra I classes. Included in the technology program
is a professional development component for three novice high
school algebra teachers entitled “Preparing Digital Libraries for
Customized Access to Educational Experience” (PREDICATE).
The professional development is part of the larger project, “Agent
and Library Augmented Shared Knowledge Areas, or ALASKA.
ALASKA is an instructional support platform that integrates four
distinct technologies: collaborative workspaces, pedagogical
agents, learning object libraries, and Tablet computers that permit
handwritten activity. ALASKA operates with the premise that
ALASKA can a) provide students more fluid and realistic access
to a greater array of instructional scaffolds; b) have faster access
to the teacher when desired or when the other scaffolds are not
effective; c) secure the learning benefits from helping peers; and
d) secure the learning benefits of being helped by peers. The
project is currently being implemented in a large urban Southern
California high school.
Problem
Professional development emphasizing teacher creativity with
digital media in mathematics education is new largely for two
reasons. The first is that lay-person tools for production of
sophisticated digital media have only recently emerged. Teacher
authoring of digital content for classroom use has been an elusive
goal for years. The notion of teachers creating content has
encountered numerous obstacles related to the limitations of
teachers’ time and technical requirements (DiGiano, Chung, et
al., 2002; DiGiano, Yarnall, et al., 2002). Second, such tools
specifically entail producing supplementary curriculum content,
in formal learning environments where teachers are not expected
to be content producers but rather are content conveyors,
disseminating knowledge and following pre-defined curriculum
in preparation for accountability tests. Mathematics and science
teachers simply are not expected to be creative.
At least, that message comes through loudly when examining
state and federal funding programs involving research and
innovation in teacher preparation and teacher professional
development.
Creativity in education more broadly, of course, is the subject of a
broad literature and specialized research journals. There is robust
literature on ways to foster creativity in students (e.g., Kaufman
& Sternberg, 2006). There is a strand of literature on school and
school system administration that explores creativity and
flexibility in school leadership (McCallum, 1999; Stoll &
Temperley, 2009). And, of course, there is an extensive body of
literature and research support (especially from NSF) designed to
furnish teachers with creative or innovative instructional
activities, materials, or full curricula.
Clearly, there appears to be little or no explicit guidance on
helping teachers to function as active and creative agents in the
complex enterprise of navigation of mathematical content and
student cognition. The same observation holds true for the US
Department of Education’s professional development research
programs (Institute for Education Sciences, 2009), where mention

2. of nurturing teachers’ creativity or their generative abilities is
conspicuously absent. An extensive survey of state education
agency (SEA) professional development programs in New York,
California, Michigan, and Illinois, produces the same finding.
Innovation by professional development specialists is sought, as
are sound implementation, and efforts to improve the quality of
teaching. But we have not found a state educational agency
(SEA) that expresses explicit interest in helping science or
mathematics teachers function creatively.
Two just-published reports by the National Academy of
Education (Kilpatrick, Quinn, Bass, Cobb, Daro, & Gomez, 2009;
Wilson, Ball, Bryk, Figlio, Grossman, & Irvine., 2009) that
highlight a national agenda in teacher quality and mathematics
and science education similarly do not make the leap into
identifying or suggesting we draw teachers, their imagination, or
their creativity into upgrading mathematics or science education.
Yet they do highlight the need for high-quality opportunities for
professional growth, the early-career teacher dropout rates,
teachers’ dissatisfaction and alienation in their profession, and the
lack of personal agency teachers cite in criticizing teaching in
high-stakes testing environments.
SCOPE AND SEQUENCE OF THE ALASKA PROJECT
This project is supported by the Institute for Education Sciences
(IES), emphasizing the development of a classroom
communication and collaboration system with peer student
tutoring, digital libraries and collaboration with colleagues
(Hamilton & Harding, 2008).
ALASKA
ALASKA is the technology that the teachers and students use. It
includes the technology hardware and software needed to create
virtual collaborative workspaces. The hardware required is tablet
computers, one for each student and teacher. This creates the
infrastructure needed to create collaborative work groups, peer
tutoring, and teacher assistance. The software required is
synching software, which allows all of the students and teacher to
be networked. Finally, ALASKA includes the digital library
created by the teacher.
Technology
This project incorporates technology into public school
classrooms to facilitate student learning and professional
development for teachers. A goal is to increase students’ state
mandated test scores while encouraging teacher’s creativity and
individual pedagogy style. We aim to support teachers’ creation
of their own content that they can share with colleagues. This
study implements technology for students that is teacher
designed. The project has two main threads. The first thread is
teacher created content. Teacher created content includes
designing, developing, and fostering mathematics teachers to
create personalized, cumulative digital toolkits of animations,
diagrams, videos, and knowledge scaffolds for use in their own
classrooms. The second thread looks solely at how that teacher
creativity draws can impact learning and teaching. This thread
explores the role that creativity can play in higher-level K-12
mathematics and science learning. The personal digital toolkit
approach is unique, and provides one possible way to carry out
investigations of teacher creativity. The personal digital toolkit
allows teachers to have ownership of the content that they teach.
The project, however, seeks to challenge mathematics and science
educators to research and develop other ways to leverage their
untapped potential.
Collaborative Workspaces: This project refers to
collaborative spaces as computer screen images that are
dynamically edited and shared on both computers simultaneously.
In that case, the teacher’s screen includes an image of each of the
students’ screens as thumbnails. The teacher can also isolate a
single student’s screen, and edit the student’s screen or annotate it
in real-time.
There are several software systems that can instantiate this shared
screen form of collaborative workspaces. In this project, we use
the SmartSync system by Smart Technologies, with modifications
that we have developed in formulating the ALASKA platform.
Additionally, instant messaging systems may be seen as a form of
collaborative workspaces, and they play an important role in
ALASKA. We originally used a variation of the Microsoft Live
Messenger’s Software Development Kit (SDK) system because it
allows handwritten communication, essential to communicating
mathematical ideas rapidly. While it proved effective in the
crucial goal of transmitting data packets of handwritten notation
necessary for mathematics, the off-the-shelf messaging system
proved inadequate for most of the more complex interactional
pathways, therefore part of this proposal involves development of
a messaging system attuned to ALASKA’s instructional
processes.
Digital Library: ALASKA involves digital libraries or
collections of small videos, diagrams, animations, or widget that
are self-contained and can be invoked by a student or teacher
(Lee, Prakash, Jaeger, & Wu 1996; Minenko 1998). These
programs, or applets, explain, illustrate or simulate mathematical
ideas much like concrete manipulatives do. For example, an
applet may include a short animation of how to use the
substitution methods to solve a system of linear equations. It may
ask the user for linear coefficients and then sketch the system, or
provide its own coefficients. For the purposes of this project, the
library also includes answers to questions that students might ask
about mathematical topics. These answers are formulated by a
teacher or group of teachers in a school, and they can be any of
modes that can be represented by a computing device. For
example, they could simply be text answers that are stored either
in extended and symbol ASCII form, or they could be symbols
and sketches stored in graphics form. A teacher might choose to
provide a short explanation to a question by creating a
handwritten solution stored digitally that can be played back with
audio narrative and timestamps, or a short video of less than a
minute in length. The digital library features of ALASKA are
client (teacher)-generated, to supplement curriculum materials the
school uses and to correspond to the specific standards for which
the teacher and school are accountable.
Tablet computers: ALASKA requires a fully functional
notebook computer to handle screen sharing, high bandwidth
internet access, and the computational demands of a digital
library. In order to handle mathematical communication and
notation, a pen-based input device is also required. The Microsoft
Tablet PC Operating System features normal input methods
(keyboard and mouse) but also accepts and processes handwritten
input on tablet computers that have become quite reliable in
classrooms.

3. In discussing these three features of the platform’s logic model,
provides teachers and students with benefits and can eliminate the
guesswork for the teacher; to simplify work for the teacher but
allow the teacher to function in more challenging ways; and to
create usability through flexibility. Each of these is part of a
design to nurture adaptive expertise by the teacher, while
deepening learning and self-regulatory competence of students.
PREDICATE
The PREDICATE professional development was designed to
incorporate current best practices in professional development
with the practical experience of the research team. Ball (1996)
and Carlson and Gadio (2002), suggest that professional
development is effective when teachers’ thinking is grounded in
their own curriculum and improving the learning for their
particular students. At the first PREDICATE meeting, the
teachers chose a chapter from their Algebra textbook to use as a
starting place for implementing the technology. Garet, Porter,
Desimone, Birman, and Yoon (2001), report that professional
development projects that use curricula as a starting point are
effective in stimulating teachers thinking about learning
mathematics. We found this to be true for the teachers in this
project. They are under the pressures of high stakes testing and
very committed to completing required curriculum material.
Part of the educational significance of ALASKA and the
PREDICATE professional development, is to expand teacher’s
usable understanding the connections between content and
student learning by helping to organize and create digital content
to scaffold the student’s learning in their classes. A second related
dimension is in developing a system that promotes development
of adaptive expertise by both teachers and students. By doing
both of these, greater reflection is used by both subjects to make
learning and teaching more personal. Creativity of the content
allows teachers to not become stagnant in teaching the same
content from a textbook year after year. Instead, they are
provided the means to delve into a topic more deeply or teach
something that they are passionate about.
The first step in the PREDICATE professional development was
a week-long in-service for three novice teachers. The teachers
were recommended for the project by the school’s curriculum
coordinator. The grant implementation takes place at a 4,000
student urban high school in Southern California. The
PREDICATE professional development began in August 2008.
The purpose of the weeklong in-service was to introduce Algebra
I teachers to the grant, the technology and the types of digital
media that they could create for their students. The three
participating teachers teach Algebra I at least twice a day.
The broad goals of this August Workshop were to increase
participants understanding of the grant, and introduce them to
content building techniques via Camtasia Studio, Video
production, and web-based content. Camtasia Studio is a screen
capture software; for example, teachers can record themselves
solving a math equation on the computer screen. The anticipated
tasks included, choosing one Algebra Unit as a focus for starting
this work and where they could incorporate the use of the tablets
the content that they created.
Participants
There a three participants in the project. Teacher One, is just 22
years old. He has been teaching two years. He is very eager about
the project and has an instinctive understanding of the
technology. He has no problem visualizing how it will work.
Teacher Two, has been teaching about 5 years. He is very
confident about his skills. He is happy to be participating, but has
a healthy skepticism about how all of this will work. Teacher 3, is
a change of career teacher. This is his second year of teaching. He
is eager to participate and to date, he seems most comfortable
creating content, but is reluctant to give up class time unless he is
certain students can learn using the program.
YEAR ONE IMPLEMENTATION: AUGUST WORKSHOP
Day one
First the teachers read the grant and we did a short question and
answer session. Then we discussed creating the digital library.
Teachers were asked to think about the type of mathematical
scaffolds that their students need. Melville and Wallace (2007)
suggest that professional development should be based on
enhancing the in-depth content knowledge and instructional
knowledge of teachers. Teachers used a chapter of their
mathematics text to think about the instructional challenges that
they face with their students. They also analyzed examples of
student work from higher and lower achieving students to
determine the types of scaffolds that they would want to develop
(Putnam, and Borko, 2000).
It was clear from teacher conversation that many of their Algebra
I students come to them with little prior knowledge about algebra.
Some students lack basic skills in multiplication and fractions.
Since the technology provides the opportunity for teachers to
develop digital scaffolds, it appeared that this could serve the
teachers’ objective to meet the needs of a wider range of students.
One of the teacher’s first decisions was to create a glossary of
mathematical terms because students need to understand the
language of Algebra. This digital glossary could start with terms
that they found in the textbook and grow according to students’
needs. Another topic that surfaced when talking about the lower
achieving students was motivation. Teachers wondered whether
the digital scaffolds that they created would help to motivate
students who were only taking the class because it is a state
requirement for graduation. They discussed finding web-based
content that might catch and sustain students’ attention.
Day Two
Teachers were excited to begin to play with Camtasia and explore
web-based content. They spent time in the morning creating a
rubric for evaluating web-based content so that there would be a
consistent standard in what was included in the digital library.
Learning to use Camtasia proved to be harder than anticipated,
and created digital media was a slow process. However, a
significant piece of educational pedagogy arose out of this
struggle. What is the connection between the speed that digital
content runs and student understanding? When creating the
Camtasia video teachers played with the timing of their voice
over and the images that the students saw on the screen. Teachers
talked about how much time some students need to understand
what they hear. They explored ways to repeat crucial pieces of
information and create playback opportunities for students. As
Scrimshaw (2004), suggests, using technology can identify
promote teachers’ implementing a ‘student-centered’ approach to
learning. While the three teachers were talking about time, it was
clear that they had different philosophies and they seemed eager
to talk with each other about this. One important goal for the in-
service is teachers’ cognitive development around mathematics

4. teaching. In this instance, the work produced the conversation
that led to opportunities to think deeply about their students’
reactions.
Day Three
The teachers came into Day Three with many questions. One
advantage of meeting on consecutive days is that when the
participants have “down time” they are able to process and reflect
on professional development. Kabasakalian (2007) suggests that
when teachers are guided to think about their own thinking, to
assess student thinking, and to engage in discourse that emerges
from work in the classroom they develop meaningful
communities. The teachers wanted to talk about the amount of
steps that one would include in one video for students, what are
good ways to chunk content? Does chunking content affect
students’ understanding? Another strong thread of conversation
focused on creating directions within the content that would be
clear and simple- with vocabulary links, and some ESL support.
This was a rich conversation and the teachers were excited. When
the teachers started to create content, some of this enthusiasm was
lost with the technical frustration due to the limits of Camtasia as
a content builder. As the leader of this in-service this was a
significant frustration for me. If we invite teachers to explore
technology and how it affects their students’ then we have to
make sure that the technology is up to the task.
Day Four
This last day was devoted to creating video content of the three
teachers teaching. We spent the morning working on this,
perfecting timing and learning to write on the whiteboard with
“camera awareness.” After viewing the videos, all three teachers
solidly rejected this method of creating content. They felt that it
was a poor replication of their live teaching styles. They were
more interested in finding web-based content that they could
upload into their library. At the end of day four the teachers felt
that the technology could provide support for meeting the needs
of individual students and principally lower achieving students.
They were enthusiastic about creating content.
The teachers’ reaction to the in-service was collected through
interviews and pre and post surveys. The professional
development continued and the teachers met regularly to discuss
each part of the implementation.
Monthly Meetings
The in-service was continued over the 2008-2009 school year,
with monthly and bi-monthly meetings. In the first meetings
during September and October, teachers were involved in
creating content. After meeting, teachers began discussions about
creating content to scaffold the higher performing students, as
well as the lower performing students. The teachers discussed and
explored creating content that would contain challenging
problems and brainteasers. There was also conversation about
unmotivated students. How does the teacher know if the students
are using the content or just staring at the screen? As the roll out
of the technology in their classroom approached (January 2009)
there was a significant shift in the teachers’ interests from
creating to content to how the system would operate. They raised
the following questions:
1. Can we see a demonstration to them with tablets so they
can see how the communication between the teacher
and the students?
2. What will the teachers see on their screens? What will
the students see?
3. How are the computers networked together?
4. Since they don’t have a wireless system at the school,
how do we wire in 28 tablets?
5. What is the refresh rate for what students see on their
screens, when they get feedback from the teacher?
6. What does the student toolbar look like?
This shift away from how students learn to how the technology
work does seemed logical and reasonable as they prepared to
incorporate the technology into their classes.
The teacher meetings throughout the rest of the year were
consumed with operational and technical issues. Several technical
obstacles were encountered during the implementation phase.
Each teacher had different reactions to these challenges. One
teacher was quite flexible about the technical issues and used the
tablets in any way that he could with whatever parts of the system
that were working. Another teacher tried to use the technology
but only when he was confident that there would be technical
support in his classroom for the entire class. The third teacher was
reluctant to use the system even with support. From January to
June, all three teachers used the technology to some extent.
Teacher One began using it in all of his Algebra I classes on a
daily basis.
RESULTS
For Year 1, data was collected from two of the three classes.
Thirty-six students were surveyed and asked to choose how the
technology helped their experience in Algebra from organization,
fluidity of solving math problems, novelty, or did not help. 8 of
the students reported that the ALASKA project helped with
organization, 7 students reported that ALASKA helped with
fluidity, 9 students found the project fun, and 3 said that it did not
enhance their Algebra I experience at all.
Current Status
The program is currently in its second year. The same three
teachers are still implementing the program into their classrooms.
The teachers have changed classrooms over the summer to
facilitate sharing the laptop cabinets for ease of mobility. The
initial rollout for year two was this past week. Although the first
day of year-two had several technical difficulties, two of the
teachers are optimistic that those issues will be solved, while one
teacher is waiting for the second semester to implement this
program in his classroom.
CONCLUSION
Whenever a program is implemented into a public school, there
are several aspects that contribute to the change process. Overall,
the program has promise in personalizing education for students
and tapping into an underused resource of teacher knowledge and
collaboration. Overtime, teachers could become stagnant and
bored as the years go on, and by developing their own
instructional content, they can constantly grow in their
professional practice. This idea does change how education is
viewed in the United States. Teachers are perceived as the
disseminator of knowledge, not the creator of it. As a result of
that notion, teachers were reluctant to create their own
instructional materials and content. This alongside the seen and
unforeseen technical issues, the implementation process has been
a long a difficult one. In forecasting the potential for this
program, the question is posed under what conditions would this
program provide optimal results?

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