Category Archives: tech4practice

tech4practice is a collaborative blogging project between myself and fellow instructional technologist Bill Bass. My focus on that blog is to highlight integration projects that are working in real classrooms, giving practical evidence that these tools work to enhance learning.  I cross post articles from that project here.

Differentiation With (and Without) Technology

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Erica Babb, science teacher at West Middle, has been sending me a number of different student creations in the past few months – videos, prezi presentations, Weebly websites, etc. I wondered what was happening in her classroom that was allowing students to produce such varied and high-quality curriculum work with technology. When I spoke with her, her answer was a combination of pre-assessment, compacted curriculum, and student choice.

Pre-Assessment

Erica begins each of her units with a pre-assessment. Students who demonstrate proficiency on the assessment are presented with a choice: continue following the unit plan with the rest of the class or deepen their knowledge of the topic through independent study. The simple offer hands students control of their learning. Each is able to determine the path that would yield the most personal reward, increasing engagement and placing the locus of control squarely on the shoulder of the student regardless of his choice.

Process

Students who choose to pursue an independent study have a few steps to go through.

  1. Erica provides a handout outlining what a “compacted unit” independent study will look like for a student. Though much of the child’s time in class will be spent on an independent project, she must still participate in elements of the class where she scored poorly on the pre-assessment. Details of Erica’s compacted curriculum assignment for her “Earth’s Waters” unit is below:

  2. If a student elects to do the independent study, she then begins planning a deeper investigation of the unit topic. An independent study is not a free pass to learning any topic the child wishes to learn. The product created must continue the work of the present unit, but at a level of depth that goes beyond that of the learning activities of the larger group. Because of this focus, the project topic is somewhat limited, but the methods of presentation are many and varied, often including some element of technology in them. One example from her product possibilities for the “Earth’s Waters” unit is below.

  3. Once a child has chosen a presentation medium, she fills out a product proposal form, detailing her topic and medium she will then present to Erica for approval. Erica has created a rubric for each medium: booklet, brochure, pictorial journal, poster, PowerPoint/Prezi, report, song writing, and oral presentation.
  4. After Erica approves a child’s proposal, the child copies a portion of that plan onto a “Compacting Contract” that she and her parents sign.
  5. Throughout the unit, the child must journal in an independent study log about her progress each day as well as her work with the class during days where she is participating with the larger group.
  6. Finally, the student presents her project to the class and Erica gives her feedback through a general rubric of the student’s independent work.

Outcomes

Erica’s students have created some amazing products through this process – and it hasn’t been only the select few. According to her experience, a variety of students have been able to take advantage of this opportunity.

One particular story was of a young man who, overall, is not a strong student. For one unit, however, he demonstrated quite a bit of knowledge and earned the opportunity to create a compacted curriculum product. In addition to offering him a chance to grow his existing understanding of the unit topics, the “award” of independent work has given him a sense of confidence in his own ability to succeed.

Technology isn’t the focus of this approach – students are. Just as they should be.

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!

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.

Promoting Detail in Student Work with aMap

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For anyone who asks students to think their way through an process step-by-step, getting students to explain how details support their summary can be a challenge. If you’re interested to check out a more visual way to organize and force those processing steps, you may want to check out this week’s resource – aMap, a visual “argument” creator.

aMap is a visual map of the details that support an opinion. Students step through through a 4-tier process the aMap developers call “informal logic”, described below.

The underlying structuring of aMaps is based around “informal logic” – this is the logic people use to argue in everyday life. Informal logic has a four-tiered structure:

- Your position (I think . . .) – what you think overall
- Propositions (Because . . .) – reasons that support your position
- Arguments (As . . .) – supporting arguments that back up each of your propositions
- Evidence (Supported by . . .) – supporting evidence to back up your arguments

A sample argument and the resulting map is below. Every map can be either e-mailed to a teacher, or embedded directly into a website or wiki.

 

 

aMap has a few limitations:

  • There is a 3 “arm” limit, which means that the site only accepts up to three supporting details for any opinion.
  • Each element of the form is limited to 100 characters (less than for a text message).

The tool seems best for an introduction activity, or a review if students need work on clearly connecting details to a general opinion. If you like the concept and interactivity, but need something with a greater number of arms or more room to write, I’d encourage you to check out SpicyNodes.

For another “green” example in SpicyNodes, check out the example below.

 

Screencasting – information, differentiation, and feedback

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Screencasting is great way to deliver audio and visual information to your students. If you have been looking for a way to record your lessons, or you’d like to deliver some formative assessment of student work using your voice as well as your pen, check this post for information about Jing, Screenr, CamStudio and other tools that make this happen.

Making a “screencast” simply means that you are creating a video using your microphone and whatever is displaying on your computer screen. A program captures both the audio and video and then makes them into a seamless package you can upload to Moodle, e-mail to a student, or drop onto a flash drive.

Three popular tools that make this happen are Jing, Screenr, and CamStudio.

Jing

Jing is the most full-function tool of the three. Sporting both an image capture and annotation tool as well as a video recorder, Jing enables teachers to take screen shots with a keyboard shortcut as well as videos up to 5 minutes in length. Teachers I have known use Jing as a way to capture equations, record directions for playback from their websites, and, at least in one case, record a physics animation in order to use it on an online assessment. I recently came across a foreign language teacher who is using Jing to record her feedback on student papers.  She writes:

“As long as I have been grading papers, I have been talking to myself while I grade — a habit that drives everyone around me nuts, except for those of my colleagues who do the same. And truth be told, I’m really not talking to myself, I’m talking to the student whose paper I’m grading, except my words float uselessly unheard into the atmosphere, never to help develop anyone’s writing at all.”

For this teacher, the ability to capture her thoughts via video has been helpful for her own understanding of student progress as well as beneficial feedback for her kids. If you’d like more info, you can read her full blog post.

Jing’s drawbacks are that it is a program that must be installed, and there is a five-minute limit to screencasts you capture.

Screenr

Screenr is an entirely online tool – one that is as available to students as well as teachers – and it creates a nice collection of your videos once you’ve created them (an example of my ‘channel’). It still has the same 5 minute limit as Jing.

The potential for Screenr, especially at the secondary level, is that students can create these videos just as easily as their teachers. Students can create tutorial videos on the use of specific websites, short narrated presentations (conveniently limited to five minutes), or teach mini-lessons as part of an assignment.

CamStudio

CamStudio is another program that must be installed on your machine, but it allows you to record as long as you’d like. This allows teachers to record full lessons or lectures, if they have a specific need to do so. I prefer this tool to others, like the built-in screen recorder in Smart Notebook, because it won’t slow your computer too much and you have more options for saving different video file types.

 

Awesome Screenshot

If you’re only looking to capture and annotate web pages, I’ll throw one more tool in for good measure: the Awesome Screenshot tool, a great Chrome and Firefox extension from the social bookmarking service Diigo. If you ever wanted to capture a screenshot of an entire webpage, this is the tool that will help you do it.

 

For more information about screencasting, check out the latest “1 Tool at a Time” webinar or a curated assortment of videos and posts on the subject on this Scoopit! page.

Know of another great screencasting tool? Feel free to include it in the comments below!

Promoting Peer Assessment – Using Blogs in Comm Arts

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When Erica Rogers and Dan Barnes, communication arts teachers at Parkway West High, were redesigning a cumulative activity for their English III students, they were looking to create an activity where students would be writing and revising work throughout the year, culminating in a final portfolio of work.   Applying a simple, stable technology took this project to another level of engagement and effectiveness.

The goals of the redesign were 3-fold:

  • Show student progress over time
  • Archive the work so it could be displayed as a portfolio
  • Enable peer commenting for draft versions

The solution: a blog for each student.

Blogging is in no way a new technology.  It’s been around since at least 1995, one of the earliest and easiest ways to publish on the web.  The concept of blogging is simple – create a post and publish it for others to view and comment on.  Blog posts can be organized in a host of ways, making it easy to view an author’s growth over time, and blogging is a uniquely public act — every page is searchable and shareable.

The Process

Erica and Dan chose to apply blogging to their project in order to capitalize on its archiving and publishing abilities.  Students …

  • were grouped together with peers from other classes, creating an authentic audience for their work.  Students were given due dates for posting their work as well as for adding their comments.
  • posted both a draft for comments and a final version for review.  This established a sense of growth that both the student as well as his peers could see.
  • were required to comment in specific ways that were designed to promote valuable feedback to their peers.  Comments were defined, focused, and assessed by the teachers.  You can check out Erica and Dan’s feedback forms here and here.

This, in addition to in-class peer edits as well as teacher-edits, constituted a third round of feedback for every draft.  But what Erica and Dan noticed was that it was the audience of “strangers” that seemed to make this feedback cycle something different than the others.

Feedback from Beyond

Creating for a public audience changed how many kids went about the drafting process.  Erica sums it up nicely,

“Why would you want to create something you weren’t proud of?”

Students were concerned how their work was going to be perceived by students outside the bounds of their classroom, and they created with this in mind.  Students cared about the feedback they were delivering to and receiving from others, even going so far as to greet their teacher at the door with “My partner hasn’t posted his paper yet!”  The public nature of the publishing process meant that failing a due date didn’t mean that a student was frustrating her teacher – it meant she was letting down her peer.

An Example and an Explanation

 

Check out the blog to the right for a sense of what students were working on.   I’ve linked Dan’s write-up of the experience, a paper he recently completed for graduate school where he describes the positive impact of this application of technology on his students’ achievement.

In all, this project stands as a nice reminder that powerful uses of technology don’ t have to be complicated uses of technology.

Simple tools applied to specific needs can increase student investment and motivation without overwhelming the teacher.