Posts Tagged ‘teaching’

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NJ Students Collaborating

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Kristen Alloway of the Star-Ledger has written a nice article, Students discovering online collaboration, on how students are using various web2.0 tools for their own learning. Shown the tools and given basic instruction by their teachers, students are now taking advantage of these instructional aids on their own, absent specific direction, because they realize how beneficial the organization and collaboration is to their learning. "Students are writing on wiki pages, blogging about their classroom activities, recording audio files for band practice, videoconferencing with people around the globe and chatting online about literature."

The article goes on to address how students are using wikis, blogs, video-conferencing and instant messaging, all within the context of their classes.

"All of those things add up to higher levels of achievement," said Chris Dede, a professor in learning technologies at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. "It’s not so much the technology, it’s about how to make meaning out of the complex by using technology as a partner."

The article is an exciting glimpse into a practical, well-reasoned, and appropriate implemention of technology into students' learning.

 

[via @kloza]

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Essential Understandings

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

IntenseToday is Remembrance Day in the British Commonwealth, and Veterans' Day here in the United States. This is particularly relevant as the Education-scene in England is abuzz over a survey showing students' lack of content knowledge related to World War II.

  • One in six of respondents said they thought that Auschwitz is a theme park based on the Second World War.
  •  One in 20 said that the Holocaust was the celebration of the end of the war, whilst one in ten said they believed that the SS were Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven [the British version of the Babysitter's Club/ Boxcar Kids/ Nancy Drew].
  • One in twelve thought The Blitz was a huge cleanup operation after the war, a quarter believed that D-Day stood for “Dooms Day” and thought that a nuclear bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbour.
  • Around 40 per cent of children did not know that Remembrance Day was 11 November, while 12 per cent thought the McDonalds logo was the symbol of Remembrance Day.
  • A quarter of respondents said they do not think of the sacrifices made by the soldiers who died in war, but 70 per cent said they wanted to learn more about the Second World War at school.

While these results are certainly disturbing, it raises an old question about what is really important and worth knowing. What are the "essential understandings" (the Need-to-Knows), versus what are the less important details that fill out the larger field of knowledge? These are questions that we can hopefully answer for ourselves and our students - and they highlight the need to collaborate, and come to a shared understanding of what the level-wide Need-to-Knows are, versus the teacher-specific bits that complement the course outcomes.

I cannot help but think about the Curriculum Design & Review Process that we are formalizing this year, and the questions that process engenders. "Do we, as a level or a Department, have defined standards?" "Do we have clear performance expectations?" "Do we have communicated shared goals?"

"Do we gather learning results regularly and consistently?" As troubling as the British survey above is, the only way anyone can be troubled is because assessment results were gathered, the data analyzed, and the results published.

Good curriculum, good instruction, and good reflection are all required to help students learn the best content, skills, and attitudes that a school has to offer.

Photo credit:
Intense by cbcastro.

 

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Apple Keynote Demo

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Keynote iconBecause Keynote is different enough from Microsoft Powerpoint, and more Mac-folks are using it now, I ran three sessions of a workshop for the application last week. The Apple website does a better job of describing Keynote than I could, so I merely point you in that direction if you are interested in an overview of how Keynote is different from Powerpoint.

If you were not able to come to the workshop but would still like to see what was covered, here is the demo file that was used:

Keynote Demo

There are hints, descriptions, and directions in the Presenter Notes. To see them, go to View > Show Presenter Notes.

I recommend setting your Keynote application to look similar to the screenshot below.

 

Keynote setup
Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

 

As always, if you have any questions, please let me know.

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Getting It Wrong

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Scientific American has an excellent article summarizing recent research on how the brain learns, and how the cognitive process of learning interacts with the physiology of it. Getting It Wrong: Surprising tips on how to learn by Henry L Roediger and Brigid Finn is well worth reading by anyone who works creates situations in which someone learns a new skill or new content knowledge.

The short version is this: "People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail."

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Blackboards 2.0

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

There is a very nice article in today's Baltimore Sun, Blackboards 2.0, by Arin Gencer, about wikis being used to record and extend the learning from a class.

The wikis are being used in a variety of ways.

  • The "wiki for advanced placement U.S. history has become an extension of his classroom, a place where he can point his students to additional resources tied to what they are learning - such as a podcast lecture on the Salem witch trials."
  • Notes from class conversations are recorded in the class wiki, and then homework asks students to return to the wiki and continue adding thoughts.
  • Teachers have created a professional development wiki for themselves, where they post relevant PD links.

Catlink has a built-in wiki that is quite good for these purposes. [You can access the full help pages on the Moodle site.] By way of example: a wiki is just text that can be formatted as usual, and to make new pages & add new links, you simply surround a word in brackets.

Demo wiki

 In AP Psychology, I had the problem of students forgetting their summer reading by the time the AP test rolled around. The book they had read provided summaries of famous psychological studies and experiments that students needed to remember at the end of the year. To create some kind of permanent record of what they'd read, I created a wiki for the students to fill in. I created one page, and they did the rest of the work for themselves. The page that I created was a simple table that had a list of the book's chapters, and then an assigned student who had to then summarize that chapter.

40 Studies wiki

Students merely clicked on the question mark next to their name, and the wiki created the new page for them, and automatically linked to it. All students needed to do was type in their summary on the new page, and save it. This is a great tool, as the teachers and students around Baltimore are finding.

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OrganicPad & Clemson

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

OrganicPad logoI am currently sitting in a presentation by Sam Bryfczynski, a Computer Science graduate student at Clemson, who is working closely with the Chemistry department at the university on developing a pen-computing based application, OrganicPad, that allows students to free-hand draw chemistry molecules. The teacher's program creates an ad-hoc network that the client-applications connect to. This allows the teacher to push assignments out to the student laptops, and students to submit their work to the teacher for display on the class screen. The program can also automatically correct simple errors, such as too many bonds between certain elements. As cool as the program is, I am also fascinated by how it is used in the classroom - and by how the issue of tablet PC availability is solved.

Even though almost every student at Clemson has a laptop, a small number have tablets - and this program's use in class requires a tablet pc. To overcome the obvious problem here, the University has a departmental set of tablets that students check-out upon entering the class. So even though the students have their own laptops, they use a school machine when using the application in class. This is perhaps a solution that many secondary schools can pursue as they go 1-to-1. The students do not necessarily need to have a tablet PC of their own to utilize pen-based applications in the Math and Science disciplines.

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Wireless lecture

Monday, October 12th, 2009

This bit of lecture utilized a presentation application (like Keynote or Powerpoint) that interfaced with students' laptops (to force their screens black, push files out to students, and pull files from students into the teacher's machine.) With the tablet laptop, wireless internet, and wireless projector, the lecturer, Matt O'Brien from Brisbane Boys College, Australia, is able to move freely around the room while lecturing and engaging students in questions and dialogue.

wireless lecturing

Neat stuff!

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Google Docs

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

 ... is an amazing invention.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA

We aim to develop "leaders in collaboration," here at Saint Ignatius College Preparatory. Web-applications such as Google Docs are the way of the future. I believe that every teacher ought (and I use that word intentionally) to teach their students the (current) tools and habits of collaboration.

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Twitter in a college history course

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

In a previous post, I'd promised to discuss how Twitter was being used in a college History class. This is about just that, one, concrete use of Twitter to enrich what goes on in a classroom. Dr. Monica R Rankin is a professor of Mexican and Latin American History at the University of Texas at Dallas, and she used Twitter last semester in his US History class.

She published a webpage for her students that included videos on how to set-up a Twitter account, how to follow the class account, and how to post messages that could be viewed by everyone in the class without actually being connected to those individuals (without Friending, in Facebook-speak.)

Students would post questions during lectures, summaries of lessons learned, summaries of group conversations, or general questions about the readings or course to the stream, and other students, Dr Rankin, or her TA would respond. All of this would be organized using hashtags, a way to index tweets, making them searchable. Dr Rankin posted a website listing the appropriate hashtags, which could then be searched using hashtags.org, showing a conversation stream.

Twitter convo

Dr. Rankin's experiment with Twitter received so much national attention, at the end of the semester, she wrote-up what her original plan had been, how it worked itself out, best practices learned, and concluding thoughts.

I am hoping to use twitter or some other similar technology in my graduate course in the fall semester of 2009, Introduction to Latin American Studies.  I hope that social media will allow students to have contact with other people around the world who have similar interests in Latin American culture.

At one of the workshops in mid-August, a group of us brainstormed ways in which we could use Twitter in class, and came up with several ideas similar to Dr Rankin's uses. There are still obstacles to using technology to enrich our classroom interactions though; namely, not all students have laptops, smartphones, or unlimited textplans - any one of which is necessary to implement uses of Twitter similar to Dr Rankin's.

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Moodle’s Online text

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

One of John Harrington's original dreams, when I started at SI, was to have a paperless class. I just found an easy way to move further in that direction by using CatLink (for our wider audience, that's our branded Moodle install) and the "Online text" activity.

Online text

This option allows you to set a due date and point value for the assignment, just like the other options do, but it eliminates one of the primary hassles associated with students uploading a Word document. In the past, I have had students write an essay, or even just a paragraph, and upload the Word or PDF file to Moodle - but the hassle was reading and grading the assignment. I had to download and open each file, which was more time consuming than shuffling piles of papers.

Prompt

With the online text option, students type their response directly into a textbox and submit it; there is no file to download and open. When you are ready to grade, you can just cycle through each student's response, entering comments and grades as you go.

Grading box

Being able to click the "Save and show next" button allows for fast and easy grading of these online submissions. Note in the above screenshot that the student's work is displayed in the window; there is no file to download and open separately.

When you have cycled through and graded all of the papers, entering the grades in your gradebook is quite easy as well. The list of student names and associated grades can be sorted alphabetically, allowing you to visually move back and forth between the list in Moodle and your gradebook. Additionally, if you have taken the time to setup Groups in Moodle, you can filter the list view by class period - further easing and speeding up the entering of grades.

List view

I'd never used this feature in Moodle before, but I'll certainly be adding it to my repertoire now. (This is an especially good tool in case the school is ever shut-down for an extended period of time.) If you have any questions, please let me know.

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