Happy Holidays!!

My students this year helped me to create this Macbook Christmas  tree.  Every student in class arranged their laptop and kept it from falling asleep in order to get this photo.  We had to work together, problem solve and had a great time in the process.  We have even bigger plans for next year!

The holiday season is generally a good time when it comes to technology.  For many of us, it is the one time of the year that we load up on new techno stuff and spend our days off trying to get them up and running.  Popular gifts this year included smart phones, gaming systems, television streaming devices, tablets and fitness bands.

My favorite use of technology, of course, is education, and you don't need to be in school to use it for that purpose!  I use my ChromeCast most often to watch documentaries and my tablet to read from (though I always prefer the paper copies).  One of the best new education technologies is the fitness band. They have gone from digital pedometers to tiny personal computers that keep track of sleep patterns, calorie consumption and activity. It takes a tedious and difficult task and simplifies it. For all of those New Year's resolutions involving health goals, there is no better investment than a fitness band! 

And now for a Public Service Announcement...

PSAs have come a long way!  The Public Service Announcements on television and the web are some of the most watched and most enjoyed forms of media.  What were once didactic and static are now surprising and poignant. PSAs have the ability to make a point stick like no other form of media...which is why they are PERFECT for education!

There are so many applications for PSAs in the classroom.  In history classes, students could create PSAs about wartime preparations, or ways to avoid the Black Plague in Sixteenth-Century London. In Science, they could propose conservation methods for water, or how to limit your carbon footprint. In English, students could do a PSA over an issue from a novel that needs to be resolved or to provide advice to a specific character. And, obviously, in Health and Phys. Ed, students could do PSAs over current health issues and the benefits of good nutrition and exercise.  Elementary teachers could use them to promote character education by having groups of students create PSAs about bullying or being trustworthy.

In order to create a PSA, a student must know how to effectively reach an audience through ethos, pathos and logos.  They have to understand the role media plays in society.  They must use solid writing and editing skills, have a clear understanding of their content and know how to use technology to solve problems.  PSAs encompass much of the learning we want students to achieve, and they do it in a way that works with all learning styles.  When it comes to assessments, PSAs could very well be the "perfect storm".

Check out this PSA I made for a class.  This one focuses on hunger, and focuses mostly on appeals to pathos.  For this PSA, I had to make certain that all of my content was original and that my music was not copyrighted.  It is much more challenging for students to create this way.  (Teaching students how to steal other people's work is never a good idea.)

Can you think of at least a million ways you could use these in your classroom?  I can't wait to get started!

The Proof is in the Pudding

One of the capstones of education is the belief that a student's understanding or mastery of a skill or topic can be determined through assessments.  Typical assessments that have stood the "test of time" are essays and tests.  In formal education, tests have been the most popular means of assessing student knowledge, mostly because they have been deemed the most "objective" means of determining such. Assessments that are open to interpretation, such as essays and creative projects work well to assess a student's ability to write or create projects, but to determine true, objective understanding, a test has always been best.

Fast-forward to 2014.  The concept of objective assessments has been expanded through the use of rubrics, which are meant to take the subjectivity out of subjective assessments.  An essay rubric, for example can explicitly state that the student must give three examples from their reading in order to earn full credit, or that only two mistakes are allowed in order to exceed the standard.  While rubrics have certainly made subjective assessments LESS subjective, they still are by no means objective. In our current climate of accountability, it is crucial to many that students be assessed in a way that cannot give them an advantage over others.  This is why our high stakes tests to assess whether or not a student is at their grade level have gotten even more prevalent despite these positive changes in assessment.

Denver Post cartoon satirizing the effect of standardized tests on public education.
Source: Mike Keefe, Denver Post, 2002

The question has been raised, are tests the only form of objective assessment?

In my personal, and professional opinion, the answer is no; which brings me back to the title of this piece. "The Proof is in the Pudding" is a saying that goes back to the early 14th century, and means "To fully test something, you need to experience it yourself". Authentic Assessment, is the best way to determine if a student has mastered a particular skill or concept. Anytime a student is actively engaged in authentic activity, it is pretty easy to determine whether or not they have met or exceeded a standard.  Tests, while objective, do not prove that a student can accomplish a given task in context or over a sustained period of time.  Tests can be studied for, and then forgotten. Authentic assessment provides a way for students to use their skills or knowledge as they would need to in the real world. It is a much more authentic assessment of a student's ability.  As the cartoon above illustrates, workplaces hire employees based on what they can do, not by how well they did on tests. Tests are an authentic assessment of whether or not a student can pass a test, which makes them a pretty lousy indicator of a student's success in other skills. I understand that not all knowledge can be assessed authentically, however, I am a strong believer that whenever it can be, it should be.  

My Technology-Infused Classroom

Ta-dah!  My first EVER video blog is here!  I actually enjoyed doing this quite-a-bit more than I anticipated, so I don't think it will be my last.  Check out my definition of a technology-infused classroom inside MY technology-infused classroom! (It's like Inception, but not even close.)

Two things I learned while doing this blog entry:  #1 - I don't know how to control which part of the video shows as the thumbnail, hence, the HORRID image above when this video is not playing.  #2 - It takes a REALLY long time to upload video blogs to YouTube.

How could I ever survive without the Internet?

When I first entered teaching in the mid 90's, the Internet as a classroom tool, did not exist. Today, I can't imagine what I would do without it.  My classroom is equipped with wireless Internet and each of my students has a MacBook Air. I have an interactive whiteboard, projector and an Apple TV.

A Typical Class

Students working doing group research to answer
specific questions as a pre-reading activity.

(1) Before class, students often use the Internet to check their grades on Powerschool, our school's web-based grading system. (2) I am taking attendance using the same program as they are doing so. (3) Each class begins with me projecting a question of the day from the College Board on the board and asking students to answer the questions at their desk.  Correct answers are put into a drawing for monthly prizes.  This is when homework is collected.  (4) Students may often hand in paper or electronic copies of their work. I log into Airdrop and some students "give" me their assignments there.  Others quickly send me links to Google docs or send me attachments in email.  Airdrop and Google Docs are new to us, so until everyone gets used to using them, I accept assignment from all formats.  Hopefully, we will get to the point where I have everything on Google Drive to streamline the process.  Once homework is handed in we generally work on text.  Most of our texts are available both in print and online format.  (5) Students that may not have brought their texts will use their computers to follow along.  During the readings, we review our objectives, discuss the rhetorical strategies used by the authors and ask questions about the readings. (6) Usually, there are items within the text that students to use the Internet to find the answers. The second half of class is spent doing work, applying their knowledge in some way.  Often, those assignments asks them to compare the ideas of different rhetors and then refine their own ideas about the topic.  (7) They may use the Internet to find supporting materials or to research other points of view. (8) They will then create their documents in Google Docs submit them through Doctopus where I can view and grade them using a Goobric.

Students working at the Washburn-Norlands Living
History Center Library, scanning documents to upload. 

And that's a typical class.  As you can see, we have used the Internet around 8 times for different reasons. If we didn't have Internet, everything that engages students in the learning would be missing. The Internet is not just a tool in my classroom.  It is a necessity.

An Atypical (but hopefully some day typical) Class

This year, we have a class that I team-teach called "Hands on History". I work mostly with the technology for the course. This new class takes students beyond regular Internet research by having them actually create the information that other historians will use for research.  In partnership

with the Maine Humanities Council and the Maine Historical Society, our students are scanning primary-source documents from the civil war into an online exhibit on the Maine Memory Network. The irony of the project is that much of the process takes place at in a Civil War Era historical mansion, so there is no Internet. Students actually use my iPhone as a hot spot in order to upload images. They are CREATING Internet resources. It is unlike anything we have ever done before. They use scanners, digital cameras, do transcribing and research to upload their final projects for the world to see.  The students are going beyond using the Internet to CREATING the Internet.  It is a powerful way to learn and is unbelievably satisfying to teach!

Goobric: Assessing Student Work

This is a video that explains Goobric, an add-on to Doctopus that allows me to grade student assignments right in Google Docs!

Technology, Instructional Strategies and Teaching for the 21st Century

My classroom today looks far different than my classroom ten years ago. The photo above shows two groups of students working on Power Point presentations on various aspects of Anglo-Saxon Culture as a prelude to reading Beowulf. Ten years ago, these students would have been reading an intro in a text book. Because the text books had been around (and would be around) for decades, they would not be allowed to annotate in them, but would be forced to take notes on the reading. Chances are, they would have answered some comprehension questions, or taken a quiz (that most would have failed) about the content they were asked to read so that I could assess their knowledge. Today, the students are actively engaged in teamwork, research, problem solving and presentation skills. They must find the knowledge, sort it for importance, create a digital presentation and then teach their aspect to the rest of the group, then the rest of the class. Yes, it takes more time to do it this way, but the result is definitely worth that extra effort. This photo is proof that technology can engage students in ways that traditional texts could not. The classroom was silent as they researched independently, and then it roared to life when they began sharing their information and figuring out how to do their presentations. They were attentive when watching each-other present; way more so than when I do the presenting.

Instructional strategies and technology work together to bring new life to the classroom. Understanding how students learn best is paramount to using technology effectively. One area that technology has bolstered immensely is inquiry guided learning, where students are provided with questions that require research to answer and then independently go about finding the answers to those questions, just like in the example above. Without technology, this would be a logistical nightmare. Students would be running amok in the library, all trying to read the same books. Many would simply stick with the "easy" or "safe" method of reading in their assigned texts. With many students and limited resources, I would have a few students working hard and most hardly working. Technology opens a door for my students by allowing them access to almost any library in the world. They can learn form videos, podcasts, journal articles, personal blogs and primary documents. They can present their findings to me, the class, the school or the entire world in any number of digital formats. While instructional strategies have been around for decades, the effectiveness of those strategies can be amplified by partnering them with technology, and I can prepare my students to not only understand the underlying Anglo-Saxon belief system that resulted in Beowulf, but how to problem-solve, research, collaborate, create, present and evaluate for the 21st century.

Edutopia has great web resource with inspirational videos and content for using technology centered instructional strategies across the disciplines.  Check it out here. http://www.edutopia.org/technology-integration