Author Archives: Drew McAllister

About Drew McAllister

I'm an instructional technologist serving professionals and students in k12 education. My current interests lie in how web technologies can be best leveraged to augment and improve learning for both kids and adults.

Annotate Images with Smart Notebook

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Each year Peter Papulis asks his geometry students to apply abstract knowledge of proportions, similarity, and ratios to their own experience – through manipulating images in Smart Notebook. Students take snapshots of one another next to prominent places around school, pull the images into Notebook and estimate the height or length of their subjects. If you’d like kids to collect, annotate, or measure images, Smart Notebook might be your simplest solution.

The Project:

“The pre-work makes the project work.” – Peter Papulis

This is Peter’s second year with this project, and he’s noticed that preparing students with the necessary mathematical vocabulary and walking them through the process prior to entering the lab has made all the difference. Here’s his pattern:

  1. Students begin the unit looking at proportion word problems, gathering an understanding of the vocabulary of proportions and a sense of what proportion is all about.
  2. Once vocabulary is in place, Peter surveys to see who has a iPhone or iPod Touch in the room, arranging the groups so that there’s at least one in each group. He then asks the groups to download the free Multimeasure app and experiment with estimating. The app uses the same mathematics students are learning in this unit. One of Peter’s goals is to demonstrate to students that mathematics isn’t something that’s just on paper. Math is used in tools and problems that surround us, and people can capitalize on that in order to make a profit – as the makers of this app (which has a for-cost counterpart) have.
  3. After the hook with the app, it’s back to the classroom for a “hands-on” approach to this idea. Using real rulers and example pictures, students work out how they can use proportion to estimate the height of common landmarks around the world.
  4. After the practice, Peter takes a portion of one period (~45 minutes) for students to take pictures around the school using cameras checked out from the library. Each group had at least 3 pictures of a student (the reference height) standing in front of a portion of the building or other landmark on campus. They are given a rubric and tutorial before beginning the work
  5. The next day in the lab, Peter oriented students to Smart Notebook (his instructions are here), and the final day is reserved for student work: uploading images, calculating proportions, and annotating their slides. The final product? A student-created estimate of the height or length of a place they walk by every day:

A heads-up:

  • Students must position their cameras as close to “reality” as possible. A tilted shot will skew the estimation of the larger object.
  • When calculating the reference height of their peers, students must use the metric system rather than the English system of measurement (e.g. six feet, two inches should not be written 6.2, but converted into metric units – 188 cm).
  • Without the separate “Math Tools” plugin from Smart, ratios can be a challenge to draw on a PC, but Peter’s students worked around this in a variety of ways.

Peter’s unit is effective for many reasons. From the perspective of educational technology, he leverages tech to both hook his students (through their experiences with the app) as well as provide for personalization and choice (as students are able to travel around the campus and select their objects of choice). All the technology is fairly easy to use, moving tech into the background and allowing the curriculum to take it’s rightful place: front and center.

If you or your students are looking for a way to gather and annotate images, Notebook is worth a look!

Digital Notebooks with OneNote

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In August, Will Swihart, science teacher at West Middle, was looking for a digital notebook solution. Students in science record their daily work into a composition notebook, maintaining a table of contents and reflecting on their past work as they move through the curriculum. Will was wondering if there might be a way to record his own work and publish it to parents, without absorbing more of his time. Tucked away in Microsoft Office is a tool that will do just that and more: OneNote.

OneNote is Microsoft’s popular digital note-taking software packaged with the Office Suite. Built to resemble the look and feel of a notebook, with tabs along the top and pages listed on the side, OneNote is especially popular in districts where students carry personal laptops or slates from class to class. Users can record lectures and sync those recordings with type-written notes; copy and paste information from pdfs, websites, and other documents with citation information automatically preserved; and draw right onto the page. Will’s science notebook looks like this:

For a district like ours, where kids use multiple machines throughout the day, this technology doesn’t fit a student’s workflow. However, the tool can be leveraged as a teaching resource, especially when combined with Microsoft’s free SkyDrive service. SkyDrive opens up a space online where users can store Microsoft Office files and others can view them – even without Office installed on their machines.

Will’s goals were 3-fold:

  • Easily post his daily bell ringer and class purpose
  • Add pertinent pictures from his doc camera, worksheets and textbook materials
  • Display the notes online, but avoid the upload/download tasks typically involved in updating a website

OneNote performs these tasks quickly and easily. Will pulls in his bell ringer, a slide created in PowerPoint, simply by dragging and dropping it onto that day’s OneNote page. He can insert an image from his document camera by displaying the item through his AverVision software and doing a screen capture through OneNote. Other files can be added through a “File Print” option in the insert menu of OneNote, making the notebook page a quick representation of that day’s work.

And getting this online? Will posted one link to his website in September. SkyDrive and OneNote have been automatically updating his online science notebook ever since, without Will pushing one additional button. The online version makes the notebook available to students inside and outside school, even if they don’t own Microsoft Office.

If you haven’t tried OneNote yet, check it out. You’ll find it in the Microsoft Office folder in your “All Programs” menu.

 

 

Publish Student Work – Online

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The first tip I sent out to schools was one that was quick to put in practice, but big on return: impose a NO TEXT rule for student presentations. This week’s tip is like it:

Publish student work online.

If your students are creating something – anything – for your class, a growing body of research is demonstrating that students learn more deeply when they are working for someone other than their teacher or the peers in the classroom. If someone were to ask your students, “Who are you doing this project for?” and their answer would be, “Our teacher”, a few simple changes to your assignment could dramatically affect your students’ motivation and engagement.

Some Background:

Students create all the time, in school and outside it. They create for their peers, for their family, and for themselves. In the last ten years, they’ve been creating more and more and more content, filling up terrabytes of space on the internet with everything from profound reflections on identity to absolute drivel. Why the increase? Because it’s easy. Technology, especially mobile technology, has lowered the threshold of effort required to share with the world.

But the threshold hasn’t just lowered for personal publishing – it’s lowered for educational uses, too. There are compelling reasons to leverage these publishing media in our approach to teaching, and the number of those reasons is growing. Recently, Derek Bruff, the director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, wrote,

“Social pedagogies [approaches to teaching that leverage social reasons to learn] can provide sufficiently strong motivations since representing knowledge for authentic audiences can satisfy students’ desires for connection and sharing.” 1

Publishing work online connects students to real people who aren’t in your classroom, imbuing student work with a sense that the product ought to be worth viewing.

Publishing in this way raises student anxiety about work, a condition that can actually promote learning, and brings a new context to the role of a teacher. Bruff illustrates this with the picture below.

Publishing for an authentic audience produces the stress of performance, a somewhat negative emotion, but couples it with the positive experiences of making connections and sharing. When students are placed within this dynamic, the “teacher” is cast in a different light. Instead of the sole evaluator of a student’s product, she is now the keeper of skills that will help that student perform well in the eyes of an authentic audience.

Will this work for all students? Of course not. Each of us views the task of performing for others a bit differently, but teachers at West High and West Middle have found that adding “audience” to their teaching toolkit has changed the way students are approaching their work.

A few ‘homegrown’ examples

The slides below outline 3 different levels of authentic audience.

  • Low-stress: A teacher groups students in one of her classes with the students in another of her classes. No teaching partner is needed.
  • Collegial: Two or more teachers in the same school building or school district combine efforts and direct students to view and/or collaborate on required work.
  • Distance: Two or more teachers, located across the States or world, connect their students, opening up opportunities for discussion not only about content, but about culture and perspective as well.

Authentic audience isn’t just something good for students.  As adults, we understand how creating for others drives us to work harder, think deeper, and make connections so that our creations are something we can take pride in.  Oddly enough, we often call this “teaching.”
What audiences might you open up to your students this year?
  1. Social Pedagogies as Framework for Online Learning ↩

Wallwisher – feedback without hassle

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Every other unit or so, Norma Myers, Spanish teacher at West Middle, opens up a tack-board of sorts on the web. In response to a prompt, students respond with 160 characters or a link to a picture or video. There’s no set up time, and no student registration is required. Just a quick formative assessment using a fun, novel website: Wallwisher.com

You might be hard-pressed to find a website simpler than Wallwisher. Creators set up a “wall” where others can add “sticky notes” that include text and a link or picture. You can create as many walls as you like, and your participants can add as many sticky notes as you ask them to. Wonder how easy it is to set up? Check out the one-minute video below.

For learning?

So, how might someone use this to help kids learn? Well, there are lots of ways. Norma has created a list, and she’s adding to it every now and again. She’s up to fourteen so far. Here’s the list:

  • sentence starters, with students finishing the sentence.
  • birthday wishes in Spanish
  • congrats for school play, math contests etc.
  • links to other sites (games, practice activities, etc)
  • students talk about plans for the weekend, summer etc.
  • grammar explanations, then students give an example
  • I post student errors, students have to correct
  • post pictures when studying adjectives, students write comments
  • when learning how to give advice, I post a problem, they write advice
  • opinion poll (could be anonymous)
  • feedback on activity, quiz etc.
  • during the food chapter, students can give a review of a restaurant
  • storytelling – each students adds new info to the story.
  • matching activity – students match vocab word to a picture or definition

The tasks above mix connecting activities with assessment activities. Norma is able to use Wallwisher to get a bead on her students’ interests, their lives outside of school, and their proficiency in the language, all using a simple interface. She also builds a sense of community among the students in her classes, since multiple periods participate on the same wall.

What about cheating?

With most online tools, the possibility of cheating always exists. This can be worked against in a couple ways.

  1. Ask questions that can’t be answered in the same way by different people. Not only will these types of questions discourage cheating, they also tend to attack higher levels of thinking, whatever knowledge taxonomy you prefer. If your goal is immediate publishing (i.e. you want students to “see” their posts as well as the posts of their peers right away), you’ll have to employ a type of questioning that will elicit different answers from each person.
  2. Enable “moderation” of notes.Norma’s students are learning the basics of the language, so answers to her prompts will be very similar. To prevent copying, Norma enables “moderation” on her walls. Anyone can add a note, but no one can see the notes of others until Norma approves them. Because Norma’s goal is always correct creation of language, she only approves those notes which meet her standards, and she only approves notes after the deadline for the assignment has passed. Her public walls, with their approved posts, become examples to her students of correct language usage.The picture below displays what a Wallwisher wall looks like to Norma before notes are approved.

    This next picture shows what the same wall looks like to the outside world once a handful of notes are approved.

What about safety?

Participating on a wall is a great time to chat with students about the theme of online identity. For younger students, aliases (agreed upon and recognizable by the teacher) might be one solution. For older students, perhaps first name and last initial would suffice. For some, full names may be fine. This is a decision you should make together with your students and their parents.

Walls have unique URLs that most people won’t “happen upon” through a Google search, but enabling moderation for your wall is always the safest way to ensure that only content approved by you is displayed publicly on your wall. In addition, you always have the ability to edit any of the notes on your walls.

What about time?

Wallwisher is great about time – walls are easy to set up and adding to one is a snap. Participation in any online task, however, should consider elements of access to Internet-connected devices. Norma has struck a nice balance in this area. She gives her students multiple days, often over a weekend, to complete a Wallwisher activity.

So, what about you? Have you tried out Wallwisher? If so, tell us how you used it in the comments below! If not, give it a go!

The Sharing Project

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On January 4, the modern and classical language teachers of the Parkway School District in St. Louis, Missouri, met together for a typical, and atypical, professional development day.  The work was typical – adding to and tweaking the online curriculum guide for the district, listening to one another’s ideas, hearing a presentation from a colleague – but one element was changed: the idea that the day’s work would be shared.  Not with the curriculum coordinator, a principal, or even a superintendent.  That day’s work would be shared with other fellow teachers outside the borders of our district.  The world would have a view of what Parkway teachers accomplish.

This post is the vehicle of that change.  Below you will find elements of the entire day: our agenda, the slide deck we used, our introductory video, and – the most important piece – the results of brainstorms and discussions about units and lessons that the teachers here actually teach.

Nothing here is perfect.  What you see is only a snapshot, but it’s real.  Behind these artifacts sit a lot of laughter, discussion, and undocumented creativity.  Please keep that in mind if something seems incomplete to you.

We invite you to participate.  If you happen upon this page, please read at least one of the units below (they’re short) and add an idea from your classroom or an approach that’s worked for you.

The units are published through Google Docs, with comment permissions enabled. If you are unfamiliar with commenting on Google Docs, it’s very straight-forward.  You can …

  • place your cursor anywhere on the page and click “Insert”–>”Comment” in the menu bar above the page, or
  • highlight a word or phrase and use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl” + “Alt” + “M”

Many thanks to those who signed on to be our reviewers - @joedale, @sylviaduckworth, @HJGriffin, @tmsaue1, @matthewmangino, Laura Gibbs, @Lauren_Scheller, and @mjmergen - and to any of you who decide to help!  If you do take your time to look at even one of the units, please let me know via e-mail, Twitter, or comment so that I can thank you personally.

In the keynote address we used for this development, Dean Shareski asks a question about sharing:

“If learning shouldn’t be confined to the four walls of your classroom, should teaching?”

Many people talk about bringing an authentic audience to the work of kids.  We hope that projects like this one will help bring that same experience to the work we do as teachers.

Thanks for reading,

Drew McAllister

Resources

Our Agenda

Our Slide Deck

MCL Jan 4 Professional Development

View more presentations from drewmca.

A Remix of Dean Shareski’s 2010 k12 Online Conference keynote (11:26)

We stopped the video at 3:59 to allow teachers to discuss specific quotes mentioned, let the video play to the end, then discussed certain quotes and concepts one more time.  Thanks to the great folks at NADSFL for this idea and the discussion questions.

Eileen Rodriguez-Kiser presenting on Mark Prensky’s work “Teaching Digital Natives“, tailored for the language teacher

Units by language professional learning community

 

 

The Sharing Project – An Invitation

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This coming Jan. 4th, the curriculum coordinator of modern and classical languages in Parkway and I will be facilitating a workshop focused around principles of Understanding by Design.  We have three goals:

  • To update the guaranteed curriculum for our district, housed on a web space we call the Online Curriculum Guide,
  • To provide the opportunity for teachers to share what’s working in their classrooms and be inspired by one another, and
  • To promote the idea of sharing, not just among colleagues in our district, but beyond district borders.

To bring the importance and impact of online sharing home, I will be posting the unit designs and aligned activities to public Google docs that I’ll link from this blog.  What I need is an authentic audience for these teachers.  Lesson activities and UbD plans will be created from French, German, Latin, and Spanish teachers,  grades 6 to 12.  So, if you would be interested to read some amazing work created by fellow teachers, pick up a few ideas along the way, and leave some encouraging/constructive feedback, we’d be most grateful.

For those interested in the outline for our development, we’ll begin the day with a portion of the video below, Dean Shareski’s keynote address for the 2010 K12 Online Conference and our draft plan for the day is posted online.

 

Update 1 (12/29/11): 

Some have asked for more detail on what this will involve.  The day of the development, Parkway language teachers will be meeting in language-specific, level-specific teams.  The first part of the day they will be examining the Essential Questions (EQs) and Enduring Understandings (EUs) that drive our curriculum.  They will be tweaking or updating a few of these over the course of an hour or so.  After lunch and a teacher-led presentation on motivating students through engaging uses of technology, the same teams will then revisit the lessons examined earlier and brainstorm current classroom activities that help students grapple with overarching questions and deeply learn the enduring understandings.  The EQs, EUs, and coordinated lesson activities will be entered onto Google docs assigned to each group.  I will publish links to those documents here the afternoon of Tuesday, Jan 4.

The task for my generous reviewers (a big thank-you to @joedale, @sylviaduckworth, @HJGriffin, @tmsaue1, @matthewmangino, Laura Gibbs, and @Lauren_Scheller for being willing to do this – anyone else want to participate?) will be: 

  • view documents relevant to your language(s) of interest 
  • leave comments of praise or suggestions of additional activities
  • complete these tasks by 12:00 noon, CST (-6 GMT),  Sunday, Jan. 8

I plan to send a note to Parkway teachers encouraging them to view the documents that Monday, Jan. 9.  

Update 2 (1/5/2012) – the full list of units is now available

If you’d like to participate, please let me know via Twitter or leave your contact details in the comments below.

Thanks for considering,

–Drew

 

Moodle vs. … the web?

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One of the joys of my job is to facilitate professional development tied to instruction of Moodle, our district’s choice for a learning management system.  This winter is the second time I’ve run the course on my own, an opportunity I thoroughly enjoy, and yet, this year, something has changed.

That change is the advent of teachers who are proficient in multiple online tools.  After all, if a person is proficient with wikis, blogs, edmodo, glogs, etc., what could Moodle profitably offer?  That is, if I can productively navigate public and private spaces on the web, and teach my students to do the same, am I not doing a greater service to students by teaching them through the whole of the web rather than plunking them down in a walled garden?  Wouldn’t it be better to simply manage a website as my home base and operate my “classroom” from there?

If I were to duplicate the functionality of Moodle in our current installation, I could generally accomplish …

  • persistent resource sharing through a website creator.  I’d probably use Weebly so that I could build static pages with resources while also hosting a blog for updated announcements.
  • discussions with Edmodo.  I’d need to capture the link if it’s a question I want students to think about over time, but I could do that without too much trouble and connect it to my website.
  • assessments with Edmodo.  A knowledge of the iframe tag would allow me most of the ability to insert images from around the web, but not upload my own images into assessments.  I could embed Vocaroo audio prompts.  Truly, most teachers might not use these features, but math and foreign languages are growth areas for Moodle in our district and visual/audio elements are key to them.
  • voice assignments through a combination of Edmodo assignment prompt and Vocaroo audio recording.  Students could send me the link or embed it into the assignment field.
  • chat through Today’sMeet links pushed through my blog.
  • gallery walks of digital content through discussions on Edmodo
  • student turn-in through either Edmodo or a combination of DropBox and DropItToMe
  • glossary-type activities through a wiki builder.  Wikispaces sites might be good for small group work, while Google Sites allows page-level permissions, which would be great for paired groups or individuals.

Things I could not accomplish easily without Moodle …

  • differentiation through grouping.  Moodle allows teachers to deliver additional materials and experiences to subsets of their student population without the rest of their students knowing such materials exist.
  • archiving, sharing, and reusing experiences.  Modules like the Sharing Cart (or the import feature alone) promote activity sharing across professional learning communities.  While the Library feature in Edmodo closely compares to this, it  seems focused more on resources than learning experiences.
  • arranging both resources and activities according to units.  The relative permanence and topic-based arrangement of activities available through Moodle means that students have one place to go to find both resources, activities, and other working spaces (i.e. blog spaces or wikis that I’ve set up to make up for the deficiencies in Moodle 1.9)
  • full assessment layouts, with multimedia automatically displayed.  There are certain circumstances when teachers need students to answer a set of questions about a certain text or artifact.   Moodle allows for the arrangement of questions onto “pages” and includes additional assessment format settings that allow teachers to create quizzes that go beyond the question-by-question format.
  • inline feedback on text assignments.   The “inline comments” setting on the online text assignment allows teachers to give feedback to students directly into their text products.

This post is an exercise for me to help me think this through – I’m interested to hear other thoughts.  Abandoning Moodle almost seems a catch phrase on the blogosphere in the past six months, but Moodle has brought so many functions under one roof for us that I hesitate to recommend another solution.

That said, I don’t see Moodle as a panacea.  We’re still using 1.9 because Nanogong is just that good, but I know that means we’re outside the benefits of updates that came with 2.0.  I know it doesn’t have a ‘Web 2.0′ look and that it lacks the type of collaborative features available elsewhere.  I know that my blogging, wiki, and collaborative writing solutions must be “outsourced” to other tools.  I know that Moodle doesn’t “do” mobile.  I know these things, and yet having all the above interactions available in one place with one student login persuades me that it’s worth it.

What do you think?

Digital Life -a presentation for parents

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This past week I was invited by the PTO of the middle school that I serve to talk with parents about Internet safety and digital citizenship.  More than two years separate this presentation from the last one I gave to parents on this topic.  It’s amazing to think how very much has changed in such a short time, and this year I wanted it to be different.  Parents are facing a very different environment, and, more than my voice, they need to hear one another’s – and their children’s.

My focus for this presentation was to get people talking – to one another in the session, and to their children when they returned home.  My mantra for the night was “Use everything I say as an excuse to talk with your kid.  Ask them if they agree.  Ask them if I’m crazy.  Just get them to talk with you.”  The conversation has moved from “safety” to life skills, as it should, and parents have so very much to offer their kids in this area.

My slide deck is below.  The frequent references to “talking points” are just that – links to share with children for whom life is, and will be, both digital and analog.

 

Digital life

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DragOnTape – A Video Mix for Instruction

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This week I got an e-mail asking for a tool that could pull clips from individual YouTube videos into a single film. The best tool to make something like that happen is DragOnTape.com , a website devoted to mixing and mashing YouTube videos. The video below has a quick introduction.

 

 

If you’re interested in using YouTube in your classroom for other purposes, I’ve written a couple other posts that might have just the information you’re looking for. Check out:

  • Teaching with YouTube: Tools that allow you to make individual clips of videos, add captions, and create a chat window to view videos with friends
  • Video Resources for the Classroom: A number of websites that have reviewed many thousands of videos and picked just the right ones to use in the classroom.

For a nice introduction to YouTube as a publishing platform for teachers and students, check out Bill Bass’ post Tips for Using YouTube.

 

If you have any additional questions about these or other tools that bring the world into your classroom, feel free to contact me.

Performance Assessment via Google Maps

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As high school approaches the end of the first semester, and middle school students begin looking towards a new trimester, performance assessments are on the minds of many.  How can we know what students really understand?

If your content has any connection to physical location, perhaps you might consider allowing students to display their knowledge and skill through a customized map. Check the post below for a number of resources that will allow your students to examine the math of existing buildings, plot the course of a person’s life, or animate a story with words and pictures — all using tools freely available.

For drawing on maps quickly and easily

Scribblemaps.com allows you to draw on any map, whether it be one with roads, or with buildings, or only topography. Students can create accounts and save their work online, tweaking their creations both at school and at home. A sample annotation of the Cardinal’s stadium is above. Beyond marking up maps, ScribbleMaps can also generate blank maps (at least at the country level) that may be used in some curriculum areas.

For plotting the course of a person’s life

Whether real or fictional, the stories of people’s lives hook students into understanding and “living” the big ideas in our curricula. One way for kids to present their understanding of a life is through a map that includes primary source materials. Two websites have a host of examples of these sort of assignments, all built in the free tool Google Earth:

Keep in mind that you will need Google Earth installed to view projects from the resources above.

For animating a story in words and pictures

A recent resource for animating the types of maps featured in the two sites above is Animaps.com.  Animaps allows students to easily drop place markers, photos, and descriptions into a Google Map, and then animate each element to show up at a specific time. Similar to the trips and events that are described above, animations created with Animaps give stories a sense of space and time. The difference between animaps and the trips created with Google Earth is that with Animaps no software is necessary to install. Maps can be created and saved entirely online. Students can turn their products in by simply sending their teacher a link.

So, if you’re looking for a different take on performance assessment, and maps might hold some possibilities, give the resources above a look, or feel free to drop me a note.