525 Final Reflection

This was one class that I found extremely beneficial.  In looking back over our previous classes, we learned a lot of great tools that I was able to implement in my classroom.  Actually, when I realize all the tools that I learned through this program, it feels like I've been using them forever.  Speed of technology I guess.  But I was happy to get the chance to start analyzing these tools in terms of strategy in the classroom.  It's this line of thinking that will be the difference between effective use of technology and the "Do something, just do anything" approach.  

I think increasing my use of finding similarities and differences will be the biggest change in my classroom.  In the past, I always looked at that activity as just another way to reflect on a reading- something to throw in with a bunch of other strategies to bring some variety.  But this activity, as opposed to something like putting events in chronological order, really makes students think about the content.  And with a wide variety of potential answers, adding it to use of wikis, blogs, or other tools for students to share information can be very beneficial.

On a semi-related note, I taught my first lesson that centered around cell phone polls.  I had used them extremely sparingly in the past, but never as the bulk of a lesson.  The kids went nuts.  My last question was "On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you like answering questions this way?"  I had a bunch of "10"s, a "1000!" and one "Mr. Granger needs to shave his beard."  So I'll definitely be using it more in the future, but I'm not shaving.

Module 5- 525

Early on in this class, it struck me (and likely a few others), how high Identifying Similarities and Differences scored in effective practices.  Luckily, this is one that's easy to apply in my classroom.    Identifying similarities and differences between characters, themes, or conflicts can really help students to think more deeply about their texts.  I've also tried to start discussing synonyms and the slight differences between them as a way to build vocabulary with my remedial class.

Strategies like generating and testing hypotheses can be done with Language Arts, but really isn't as involved as it is an a Science classroom.  Students make predictions, and we eventually see if they came true, but that's not really much of a test.  There isn't a process for "testing" like an experiment, and novels are intentionally surprising.  So students usually alternate between guessing the extremely obvious, and applying something like The Sixth Sense ending to a prediction about Tom Sawyer.  But it is a good exercise to get kids discussing characters and what they would and wouldn't do. 

Homework is something that seems like an occasionally contentious issue in education, and I was glad to hear this course not go the way of Alfie Kohn.  I think homework is important if for no other reason than making sure students have attained mastery of the material.  There are plenty of times students can repeat a process minutes after I explain it, but even over the course of a few hours, their lack of full understanding becomes clear.  I'm not insulting my students here- there's no reason to expect mastery after one lesson.  For many subject areas, students need plain old repetition to fully understand something.  As mentioned, though, it is important that homework has a clear purpose and is connected to curricular goals.  The better the students understand why they're doing something, and can track their own progress, the more invested they are in their own learning.

Institutions vs. Collaboration

After watching the Clay Shirkey video, I was reminded what annoys me about things like TED Talks.  We get generalizations that sound like nifty "outside the box" thinking, but are really false analogies to the issue at hand for most.  If this was a speech aimed specifically and only at creating institutions to organize information on a topic versus community collaboration, it makes a good point.  If we try to say that this change has consequences in other arenas of life...well, maybe.

When he gave the Flickr example, the thing I kept thinking was "Great, I can easily get pictures of the Mermaid Parade or Iraq.  What's stopping me from accidentally getting a picture that is incorrectly labeled?"  And that's what I worry about when applying the community model to education.  What is more dangerous- information being slightly sparse and difficult to find, or plentiful and potentially incorrect?  I would say the latter is of greater concern.  As a student teacher, I remember being told "If you don't know the answer, don't try to fake it.  This isn't a term paper where you're supposed to know the answer.  These kids will believe what you say."

We look to collaboration in the classroom both in terms of resources, and as a way for students to process information and build knowledge.  In terms of resources, I know I'm skating perilously close to Wikipedia territory.  I'm going to dodge that bullet by saying that the far left of Shirkey's graph, in reference to Wikipedia, are highly concerned with accuracy of information.  The same can't be said for Flickr.  In that sense, Wikipedia takes on traits of both collaboration and institution in that those on the far left of the graph have been known to take an "edit first, ask questions later" attitude.  In terms of collaboration between students, we have to address the same concerns- if they are going to learn from each other, we had better make sure what they're saying is right.  This can probably be addressed with clearly defined group roles and redundant responsibilities, but it's not quite certain.

And this segues nicely into reinforcing effort in cooperative learning.  Keeping open lines of communication between the teacher and the groups can keep students interested, on task, and ensure that the information they are learning is accurate.  On long-term projects, Edmodo is a nice tool for this.  But even having students create blogs like this one would suffice.

Ultimately, cooperative learning can be effective and gives students a variety of skills.  However, it differs from a collaborative business model.  What does it cost Flickr if a few of their Iraq photos are labeled incorrectly?  But if we give students incorrect information, it could take years for that to be undone.

Subsumers!

"The appropriate level of inclusiveness may be defined as that level which is proximate as possible to the degree of conceptualization of the learning task-- relative, of course, to the existing degree of differentiation of the subject as a whole in the learner's cognitive background."

Of course.

While the article was a little tough to get through, it made an interesting point.  If I understood it correctly, they described the visual as an "anchor", and that the less knowledge students have, the more the advanced organizer or visual needs to include something the student can relate to.  This is ultimately the way I see advanced organizers and visuals used in the classroom- as a way to organize thoughts and encourage the building of schema while learning new information.  Tools like the ones we were given to review are excellent for times like this if students are able to work either as an entire class or small groups.  I feel that students working alone to organize new information often have a difficult time keeping it all straight.

I've tried to use visual and advanced organizers in my class with mixed success.  I often use Cause and Effect type charts to review difficult readings.  That usually helps with chunking a lot of difficult events into a simple summary.  I've also tried using Inspiration to create an outline for a research project.  That did not go as well.  There was just too much information involved and the kids got confused by all the bubbles and lines.  Nearly all of them ended up abandoning the bubbles and using the outline view.

A few of the tools we were told to review seem very useful- some I will probably start including in my classroom in the very near future.  Bubbl.us seems easy to use and fairly straightforward.  It would be a nice tool to use for a simple daily activity.  Webspiration and Mindmeister get immediate points off because they charge and I'm poor.  I did get the trial version of Mindmeister, and it seemed to have a few more features than Bubbl.us did, but seemed less intuitive.  Exploratree and Education Oasis seem like very handy resources.  My district brings in a speaker on organizers every year- Sue Beers.  Even though her site looks like it was built by the neighbor kid, she has a ton of organizers and ideas for aiding reading comprehension.  CMAP was confusing and I still have no clue what it is.

Feedback

Feedback that Fits
I liked having the chance to reflect on feedback around this time of year.  In all the rush to get everything organized to start the year right, I forget that setting up routines and structures to maximize feedback to students should be starting now.

Being a Language Arts teacher, I often consider how to give feedback on large written assignments.  The example listed in the article was a little too familiar- I often find myself proofreading a piece of writing, then not really saying much about the writing itself.  I may correct ten spelling and grammar mistakes, but only make one or two comments on the writing itself- which is the goal of the assignment.

I had also not really considered how students may react to written feedback.  The article describes how students can mistake a teacher's comments as validation of their own perceived stupidity.  I like the idea of really concentrating on a few, doable steps.  I've heard other teachers in the past debating whether it's better to cover a paper in red ink- so the student knows all the mistakes, or just concentrate on a few types of mistakes and mark all of them.  Teacher 1 would say that if you let a mistake go unmarked, you are essentially saying that that writing is acceptable.  And I do remember, as a student, not knowing how to correctly punctuate something, getting the paper back unmarked, concluding that I had done it right, only to be corrected years later.  As frustrating as that was, I don't think it compares to a student who is already scared to write seeing a paper with more red ink than black.

Electronic Feedback

I have used both Rubistar and Quia in the past, and have enjoyed both of them.  I have used Quia mostly for games for students to play, but I have always wanted to use it for the electronic quizzing.  I think it would be good for students to see their score and their mistakes immediately after they take the quiz- while the whole thing is fresh in their mind instead of three days later.  I do use the games pretty frequently for review, and the kids really like them.  I've always been sort of skeptical about the value of some of them, however.  There is one game- Rags to Riches- which is supposed to be like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  The kids like it, and they want to get to a million, so they do it the best way they can find- play it a bunch of times and memorize the correct answers.  It's great if I was trying to get them to do that, but I don't see a lot of understanding being built.  Their Jeopardy game, on the other hand, is great.  The kids love it, it's simple, and I always rotate speakers on each team (at random) so no student can just zone out and not participate.  Even if they have no clue what the right answer is, they listen to their teammates debate over which one is the reflexive pronoun, and they get some good review that way.

Rubistar is also a nice tool, but doesn't really do much you can't do in a word processor.  I've always liked the idea of using a rubric where there is a description for each point.  The student understands why he got a 9 out of 10, rather than having a vague understanding that his writing was pretty good.  The only annoying part of using that style of rubric is that I often find myself saying "Well this section should be an 8 out of 10, but not for the reason listed in the box."  It's a pretty minor inconvenience to have to make a little note on the side, but I'm usually pretty bitter when I'm stuck at school after practice grading papers.

I like that both of these tools fights the battle of a student getting a paper back, and not getting much from the feedback because they hardly remember the assignment in the first place.  Quia does it by giving that immediate feedback, Rubistar does it by adding description to a grade that will inevitably get back to the student quite a while after they created the work.

Reflection
What is the purpose of asking students to...set goals?  It can be a useful way to help students identify learning goals in a lesson or unit while feeling like they have a stake in their own learning.
I can think of a time I asked students to...and was pleased with the results.  I'm still a little bit baffled by how well this worked, but Reading Mazes.  It's a simple little 3-minute reading assessment.  I had kids take them every other Friday and they would keep a chart of their scores.  They went absolutely nuts.  I never predicted that sort of response.  I think part of it was being able to see their own learning over time.  Another part was that there was no judgment in the score.  If a kid got a 27, he didn't know if he was a genius or well, not so genius.  So they just focused on improvement.  And they succeeded.  All their scores went consistently up for the whole year (except a dip after spring break, which showed up for nearly every student).
I can think of a time I asked students to...and was not pleased with the results.  In my first year as a middle school teacher, I tried to get my kids excited about their book groups by having them blog about it.  I liked posting and discussing on my favorite baseball blog, so why wouldn't they like this?  We even used a site where the kids posted under anonymous names, so nobody would be embarrassed to say what they really felt.  Unfortunately, I was packing to many new things into this.  They were writing about concepts they had just learned in books that were intended to challenge them using technology they were unfamiliar with.  It was too much at once, and they shut down.  The kids wrote next to nothing and had no conversation.  Next time, one new thing at a time.
What kind of technologies can I use to help students?  Edmodo has really gained popularity in my school as a way to get kids talking to each other.  And the polling feature can be used to check understanding of the group or to just get their opinion on something.  I also plan to start using polleverywhere to do the same thing in class.
What questions do I have about using technology to use...in my classroom?  I'm not sure I understand this question, but I'll do my best.  The largest question I always have is when does technology stop becoming an aid, and actually become a hindrance.  I mentioned polleverywhere in the last question, but is that any better than giving little whiteboard squares and markers to the kids, then just have them hold up their answers at the same time?  I know we get excited about technology, and the kids would too, but I often ask, "Where is the line between using technology usefully and using it just to use it?"