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!

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:

• Google Lit Trips – This site has a literary focus, with many, many maps that summarize a host of books. A recent example is a visual summary of The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.
• Google Historical Voyages and Events – This site is devoted to a social studies theme. Categories include topics from world cultures to “History of Your Community” and personal ancestors’ journeys. A good place to start might be the projects in the “Historical Events” category.

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.

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 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!

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.

Just before summer began, I came across a couple interesting concept mapping tools for teachers to take the place of Webspiration, which transitioned out of their free beta program this past spring.  While Webspiration is a great tool for both brainstorming and analysis, it also comes at some expense for teachers and districts.  The benefits – lots of impressive templates, an intuitive user interface, and consistent software support – are what make Webspiration (and its locally-installed counterpart, Inspiration) viable for-profit products.

But there are instances where funds just aren’t available.   In those situations, I’d highly recommend Diagram.ly and Lucidchart.com While there are other mind-mapping products out there (notable ones include MindMeister, Bubbl.us, and Mind42), the two products I’m focusing on have one feature that, in my opinion, makes for more flexible and meaningful mind-mapping activities:  descriptive connectors.   In brief, if you want to take your concept-map from a brainstorm to an analytical exercise where students must show their thinking, ask them to label all the connections they draw between nodes.  In doing so, students will be building knowledge and not just depositing it.  Though there are other products, this one critical feature has moved me to recommend the two products below.

Of the online options out there, I’ve begun to prefer www.diagram.ly for situations in which students don’t need to collaborate.  It breaks the mold of many online tools because …

• no logins are needed (the app loads as soon as you visit the site)
• there are lots of pictures to choose from in the toolbar
• it allows you to “save” your progress locally on the the computer or on a flash drive in XML format and edit it again later, just as if the software was installed on your computer.
• it allows descriptive connectors, something that’s important to great mapping activities but not supported in many online concept-mapping tools

Limitations:

• It’s not collaborative.  There’s no way to share content unless you hand the file over to your partner
• There’s no way to embed the result (since the content isn’t hosted online).  If you want to display your work, you have to save as a picture file (.png or .jpg) and publish the image elsewhere.
• There’s no way to incorporate custom images.
• There are no templates.

For details about diagram.ly, the co-founder of JGraph, its sponsoring company, was interviewed a few months ago by tech news site DoesWhat.com .

In an interesting example of how brands use Twitter, as soon as I sent out a tweet about Diagram.ly I got a new follower, Lucid Chart.  This company was mentioned by diagram.ly as a competitor and I can see why — it has most of the the functions of Diagram.ly (with the exception of downloading content) plus synchronous collaborative sharing, custom image uploads, linking to other websites, and template creation.

Even better — it’s offering the product FREE to K12 teachers and students.

Limitations:

• It’s still a for-profit product (unlike diagram.ly, which is a “pro bono” service created by a company that sells diagram software), so the cost factor is in play even though they offer it free to educators at the moment.
• Not many icon choices. Update: Lucidchart has committed to offering this service to educators free of charge and I didn’t originally find the WEALTH of images and icons included in the Library section.  Check out Dave’s comment below.
• Students need a log-in.

If you need to describe connectors between objects, and still want collaboration, www.lucidchart.com might be worth a visit.

Just a few weeks ago, congress came to 8th grade.   Pat Williams, reading teacher at West Middle, reached out to a relative, Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver, and asked him if he would be willing to talk about his present experiences as a member of congress as well as his past as a young man actively involved in the Civil Rights movement. The congressman not only agreed, but invited his colleague, Congressman Bobby Rush, along for the conversation. The result? An interactive lesson in history, leadership, and personal responsibility — all through Skype.

Skype is a well-known, quick and easy way to invite others to chat, whether by text, audio, or video. Using only a computer, webcam, and internet connection, individuals and groups can contact one another from across the building or across the world. Increasingly, a good deal of collaborative work is done over some form of video-conferencing, and using Skype is bringing those types of opportunities into our classrooms.

What types of activities can be accomplished through Skype?

• Guest teachers – Bring the expertise of your colleagues into your classroom, from across the district or across the state
• Outside experts- Whether it be with an author, congressman, or practicing professional, guest speakers who relate to your content can bring additional validation to the work of your classroom.
• Partner classroom – The most meaningful conferences are connected to long-term relationships. Establishing partnerships with schools across the states (or the world) give students a sense of connection to people they may never meet face-to-face.

What steps should I move through if I want to make this happen?

1. Find someone.

Who do you know? Who do your friends know? Who uses your subject outside of an “educational” context? Answering these questions can connect you with any number of individuals. Ask your colleagues. Ask your professors. Ask everyone on Facebook. The worst that can happen is nothing. The best (and more likely result) would be that someone knows someone who’d be happy to chat with your students. If you’d like to try other avenues, check out listings of teachers interested in connecting. Skype in Schools, Skype in the Classroom (sponsored by Skype), the EduSkyper’s Phonebook,  and ePals are all websites where teachers look for partner classrooms.   Skype-an-Author connects authors to classrooms.   HEC-TV and Cooperating School Districts have active networks as well.

2. Find a time.

This is especially important for any conference outside your time zone. There a number of online resources to help with this. Keep in mind that international times may mean that your conference occurs before or after school.

3. Prep for the day

Meaningful interactions generally involve some prep work – whether it be a Skype conversation or a typical classroom discussion. You might co-create questions with students or ask them to do some background research on the person or issue.

4. Double-check your connection

Be sure to do a practice run using the same computers you’ll use the day of the conference. Check to see that your computer is connected to your data port (and not operating Skype over the wireless connection). Take the time to make sure everyone is on the same page (and has the same version of Skype).

5. Enjoy the interview

Pleasant introductory and concluding remarks make the conference feel more like an event.

6. Debrief with students and send a thank-you

Chatting with students about the experience gives you a valuable chance to hear their perspective on the conversation. Sending a thank-you, especially a tangible one, is a nice way to send your appreciation to your “virtual” guest.

The biggest barrier to coordinating a Skype conference isn’t the technology. It’s asking someone to participate in the pattern of your classroom and, to a degree, adapting that pattern to make this a worthy use of your students’ time and effort.   But making that happen can give your content an even larger context and connect the work of your students to the world outside your classroom.

Skype icon courtesy of YellowIcon

This is cross-posted over at Tech4Practice.

This week’s tip focuses on a couple quick tools for your practice, for those impromptu moments that you just need a resource that works. Today I’ll highlight an ad-free online timer that’s ultra-quick to use and an interactive map that creates blank maps quickly, with the added ability to scribble directly on top of them and save your notes.

E.ggtimer.com

E.ggtimer is a quick online app built for one purpose — to give a countdown from a specific time. What makes this any different from other timers? Two specific reasons:

• Its ad-free, simplistic display (check out the screen shot below)
• The ease of starting the timer. To start the countdown, you can visit the front page of the website (e.ggtimer.com) or simply type your starting time directly into the URL. For a two-minute timer, type e.ggtimer.com/twominutes. For one minute and thirty seconds, type e.ggtimer.com/oneminutethirtyseconds.

Simple. Easy.

ScribbleMaps.com

ScribbleMaps is a relatively new site that has collected multiple mapping programs (Google Maps, OpenMaps, etc.) and added a layer of impressive functionality on top.

For quick use (our theme for today), at the bottom of ScribbleMaps is a menu of the variety of maps available. The default is Google, but selecting “CloudMade Plus” and then “Fresh” from the color offerings gives a simple, blank world map that can be annotated with ease.

For those using Smart Notebook, this can be a quick an easy way to collect blank maps of areas around the world. Just click the “Smart Capture Toolbar” icon and take some snapshots. 

For those with experience with Google Maps and Google Earth, you’ll appreciate the number of options available in ScribbleMaps Pro (currently free while ScribbleMaps is in beta). For detailed information, check out an impromptu manual put together by bloggers over at the Crossing Boundaries project.

Have another quick tool you couldn’t live without?  Drop it in the comments.

(Cross-posted at Tech4Practice)