Identifying Rocks

Students:

• How did you find this experience?
• Could you be a rock identification expert?
• What do you think a day in the life of a geologist is like?

I believe schools can take a proactive stance on cyber safety by offering PD to staff members so students are not given tech advice only by ICT personnel that they may see for only one period every other day. For teachers using a variety of web 2.0 tools, things can go from playful to pretty mean, pretty quick.

Image Courtesy of CC

Despite having an acceptable use policy, I surveyed my students last year with the question of who should intervene when cyber bullying flares up. Overwhelmingly, they said that it should be the students jobs to intervene. Most common reasons were that parents were not technology literate enough or usually in different rooms in the house and teachers were not involved with their social networks. I wonder if students actually have the will to intervene when they see disparaging comments from their friends.

One study from Patricia Snell suggests that cyber bullying (especially for girls) may be a sadistically social activity and the process of ganging up on someone may be a way to build comradarie amongst a small clique of friends. A good discussion point we had last night about this is that conflict is drama and drama is entertaining. When students see a negative conversation with sparks flying, they are drawn to it like fireworks on the fourth of July. Some people would rather watch an accident happen than rush in to help. Do 11 year olds have the maturity to step in as mediators, or will they take the side of their friend which allows them the most upward social mobility?

We’d like think of adults being more mature than this, but this is not true either. Every day we are bombarded with our choice of opinionated mud-slinging from talking heads from one side of the aisle to the other and instead of intervening with “Dear Jon- You should be more thoughtful of what you said to Rush.”, we take a side, plant a sign with our opinion and declare ourselves either with us or them. Opinions, propaganda and rumor mills are profligated by talk shows, news media and is a multimillion dollar industry.

Ann Coulter has made a living from negative comments. Image courtesy of CC

How should be having Conversations about Cyber safety with students?

Our advisory program (pastoral) has had some good resources and lessons about cyber safety and cyber bullying. What I have found most interesting through these discussion (and perhaps disheartening) is that students do and say things online and don’t think what they’re actually doing is bullying. One case is of friends who logged on to a friends account when she was away at the computer and sent a message to a potential suitor her and negating her chances. Another interesting one is “Sarah’s Secret” who learned that some classmates made a website with embarrassing pictures of her and she didn’t inform anyone. Not even her parents.

Image courtesy of CC

It seems like there are two approaches we can have: proactive and reactive. Although reactive conversations with school counselors and administrators will never go away, I think the rise of the networked educator will have a great propensity to discuss and  in a proactive way.

“Teachers that develop their own professional learning network join the ranks of technology resource facilitators by modelling appropriate use, digital ettiqutte and privacy settings”

I have felt this especially in the last three years as I’ve expanded my digital footprint. Where before, I would need a ICT professional to address such matters, I now find myself a little more experienced with such matters: at least enough to give the students case studies, think pieces and advice to make good choices.

Trying to build a school culture where cyberbullying is non-existant is like thinking a city can be 100% crime free- it can’t happen. But we can build a healthy community, build respect and keep the chatter to a minimum.

Related Posts

Managing your digital footprint as an educator

Why should we connect students?

Outlining the Problem

The problem which you’ll see below is whether students can apply their understanding of geometry to solving a number of challenges related to real-world applications in the setting of a construction company. The setting was the outdoor atrium and required a number of materials, notably calculators, trundle wheels, and a variety of measuring equipment.

I wanted to proctor this like a test, but knew that students would have to get out and measure items in a more authentic setting. The guidelines were that students could roam around and get measurements but that they need to work independently.We uses the GRASP scenario for authentic tasks which is:

Image courtesy of: http://xnet.rrc.mb.ca/glenh/CourseImplementation/grasps.htm

Grading Problems

The biggest with a problem like this is the standardization of grading. If a student measured one area section that was a meter different than their peers it created vastly different numbers. Usually, grading 20 math tests takes me 45 minutes, but with this, it took me twice as long.
Students: How did you find this experience?

Inspired by COETAILS

My graduate school course “COETAILS” has largely inspired this shift. Too often, student work is done by the behest of the teacher. But I think a change is happening. Around us, students are sharing their work with a larger audience. This pushes the boundaries of what we know, and develops a base of information from which we can learn. Students are constructing their own meaning and what not better way to do this by opening their work up to others. See some examples here, here and here.

Networking with a larger audience

My reason for doing this is that “critical review” is a clear standard that I think is often given lip service from teachers and other students. By having work on the blog, students can get the feedback that helps them drive their work forward. The question is: how do we get students reading and commenting on other’s blogs?

The easy solution is to partner students up yourself. However, I put a letter out to my teacher groups in the Edmodo community and found a half dozen teachers who instantly were interested in partnering our classrooms up. I did it on Twitter as well.

Edmodo is a great tool for developing connections between interested teachers with similar learning goals.

The Response

As a warm up the following period, I partnered up and gave them some prompts to consider when making a response that related to the nature of science and math. What was cool though, is to see my students get readers from other students on the far side of the world. Some of these students left their own blog URL their blogs which my students added to their readers.

How Does Peer Feedback Help your Science and Math Skills?

The most important question is: Does this help them learn? Without carefully crafted questions, I find that peer review is very shallow and superficial. For instance, when my students started making tutorials on specific math problems, most of the feedback was related to their presentation, not their math skills. Students told me: “They said I should talk louder.” and other comments like: “There was a lot of noise in the background” which don’t really correlate to enhanced mathematical understanding.

Comments can be very insightful if students have good prompts. Despite going over commenting guidelines, some students (like the first one pictured above), revert to a social, texting-type voice.

Any unsupervised activity tends to lose its focus if the teacher is away. My students are so accustomed to leaving comments all over the internet through social websites like “facebook” and “myspace” that they are more concerned with saying something rather than having something to say. In short, their comments are often meaningless. I think commenting is something for which they’ve had no (or very little) guidance for, so when asked to give a critical review, they revert to superficial evaluation.

To solve this problem, I asked them to show me their comment before publishing so it met my expectations and would translate to a learning experience for both the viewer and creator. We had a very powerful debrief about it later and I asked some of the students to share how comments from their readers actually improved their skills.

Considerations for the future

This has been a very powerful learning experience for both the students and myself. Interestingly, I found that some of my students didn’t want to share this work. I have a number of students (some high fliers who are extremely shy and some struggling students that don’t want their work to be scrutinized) that would prefer not to open up themselves to a larger audience. Furthermore, as an assessment, there is also a tendency to cheat (perish the thought) on projects that span two or three class periods. For a final assessment of scientific skills, to ensure accountability, consider using a hard copy for writing and then posting a polished version on their blogs if they’re interested. When I asked my students about this option for our next summative assessment, 75% of them said they’d be interested in sharing their research on their blogs.

To manage this appraisal in the future, I will give them a choice. All work will be done in class, but as extension activity, students can blog about their research findings and publish to the web later. That way, they’re not being forced to do it and will do it on their own terms. Perhaps they’ll see the benefits from other networked students and wade in, getting further away from their comfort level as they lose site of the shore.

Google Sketchup is a rendering program that allows students to build 3D objects.

Overarching Questions

I think it’s so important that learned skills promote higher order thinking. It’ easy in geometry to merely ask them how to make calculations but it’s good to be able to see how these would fit into an authentic situation, say, if they were a carpenter. Our essential questions for the unit were as follows:

1. If you’re designing a piece of furniture, what do you need to be able to measure?
2. If you were designing a bookshelf, why do you need to be able to calculate surface area and volume?
3. Is a piece of furniture better if it’s simple or complex?
4. What is the relationship between the cost of a furniture item and its complexity?

For my students, I’m curious to hear your perspective about this project. Feel free to write on any of the prompts below!

1. This was a “self” evaluation but I checked to make sure that your evaluation was accurate. Was my evaluation of your evaluation fair? Why or why not?
2. Did this project help you improve your geometry skills or merely reinforce them? Explain.
3. Was the 3D model different from the isometric picture the same or different? Why?
4. How was your experience using “Google Sketchup”?

Last month was the Vietnam Tech Conference in Ho Chi Minh City. Our school hosted it with another and it brought together over 300 educators from Southeast Asia. I presented on Google Forms, and learned a few other web tools, but I left asking myself: “What blew my hair back?”

It was not actually a workshop or session, but actually a comment made in passing that I’ve been thinking about in the middle of the night. It was disturbing and said so matter of factly by my co-worker, Robert Appino. What he said was this: “Our middle school students are very active bloggers, but when the go to high school, they stop.” Participating high school teachers confirmed this as well.

Why did this bother me so? You don’t have to convince me on the power of e-portfolios (whatever their form) to show improvements of student learning over time or to collect artifacts of a school’s curriculum as students progress through it. However, Robert’s comment highlighted a symptom of the state of digital citizenry: students are blogging only because we tell them to. They only blog for school related topics and after a student publishes a post, teachers consider their work done.

I wake up thinking about this. Some of my students have done some amazing work on their blogs and through other electronic media, and I wonder if they do so because I make it a requirement. As I’ve started to work more and more with blogs, I asked my students point blank yesterday if any of them felt that anyone was reading their blogs. Overwhelming, they said “no”.

A snapshot from our school’s youtube page. Most projects have very few views.

The Keillor Effect

I notice this same phenomenon on our school’s “Youtube” site. We have thousands of videos but most of them have under 5 views. Since the emphasis has been on content creation, teachers seem to be happy when students publish their work for purposes of grading, but don’t do anything with it afterwards. I think we’re seeing symptoms of what I call “The Keillor Effect” coined by Garrison Keillor in this quote:

Teaching Students How to Network

One of my classes recently finished up a project on basic two step geometry. Rather than let these projects languish with no views I gave them some tips to Twitter hashtags that they may consider, always sharing to Google + and the pros and cons of sharing to Facebook.

Students upload media but share it to a variety of social media sites to gain readership.

It’s amazing how attentive and engaged they were. Usually, with my typical math class, I can tell when students are drifting in and out with yawning faces as not so subtle signs. However, in this case, they were captivated. Many of them confessed to having their own youtube site but not knowing how to get readers and viewers. I’m reminded of Mizuko Ito’s work in which she notes that students are increasingly becoming content creators and helping them refine their craft is essential to keeping their interest with this medium. Once they do, their interest takes flight.

Using Media as a Teaching Tool

There are many notable uses of the above. It’s a differentiated project where students can choose a problem right at their ability level. As a multi-step problem, there are higher level elements of Blooms taxonomy at work. Students also have a more personalized learning experience rather than “One size fits all” which leads to apathy. Above all these, what really interests me is the ability to use warm ups or even homework as a time to view and give feedback around stems related to mathematical reasoning and nature of science such as:

1. Note the method of deriving the solution and
   demonstrate a conceptual under-standing of the derivation by solving
   similar problems.
2. Develop generalizations of the results obtained and the strategies used and apply them to new problem situations.
3. Express the solution clearly and logically by
   using the appropriate mathematical notation and terms and clear
   language; support solutions with evidence in both verbal and symbolic
   work.
4. Use a variety of methods, such as words, numbers,
   symbols, charts, graphs, tables, diagrams, and models, to explain
   mathematical reasoning.  
5. Communicate scientific procedures, data, and
   explanations to enable the replication of results. Use computer
   technology to assist in communicating these results. Critical review is
   important in the analysis of these results.

Turning Standards into Commenting Prompts

The media is diverse. There are many standards. But how do we translate and amalgamate this into a learning experience? As a warm up in the beginning of class, I took standards and turned them into the following questions:

1. Could you use the work that this group to solve a similar problem? Give an example.
2. What problem strategies did this group use when solving this problem. Can you suggest another?
3. Did the makers of this video “leave out a step” or go into “too much” detail? Explain.
4. Can you suggest a different approach to solving this problem?
5. Did this help you learn? Why or why not was this effective or ineffective?

Commenting can be a powerful tool in blended learning environments and provide a record of discussions that are often forgotten.

What Teachers Can do to Foster Connected Classrooms

1. Consider putting all your students blogs on a blogroll. This makes it easy to access and all blog URLs are in one place. A number of teachers have some great classroom blogs with their blogrolls easily accessible.
2. Network. See if other teachers are interested in having classes comment on each others work. Communities such as Edmodo or “#edchat” on twitter are great starting places to ask for partnerships. The spring (now) is a good time to start experimenting with networking in order to have a system in place for the next school year.
3. Become a blogger or video creator yourself. It’s difficult to understand how to help in the digital realm if you have no experience to speak of. You don’t necessarily have to blog or create videos on education either. Blog about your hobbies like parenting, running, or diving. Make videos about the things you like to do such as cooking, or how to swing a golf club. You’ll grow alongside your students.

Personalizing A Learning Experience

There have been many implications of this work for me as an educator. For starters, I have a greater database of work to help my students learn which makes my life much easier. I can make this media accessible for reviewing later and students quite like looking at the work of their classmates rather than some stranger on a video. In an age of learning through digital citizenry, shouldn’t we teach good digital citizenship?

I like this for a variety of reasons. Although we have done a number of investigations on paper, they cannot be shared with a greater audience. With the blogs, students can share their work with the world and have a digital portfolio of the work that they did. Also, in times when binders get trashed at the end of the year, the blog platform is a good long term portfolio. Students are copying and pasting the following into their dashboard and going to work!

Problem/Question:

How do(es)                                                                              (independent variable)

affect                                                                               (dependent variable)?

Hypothesis:

If                                                                  (planned change in independent variable),

then                                                              (predicted change in dependent variable).

I think                                                           (restate relationship above),

because                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        (include background knowledge AND provide references to support your prediction).

Variables:

Materials List:

Include a detailed list of materials (including quantities) needed to carry out the experiment.

Procedure:

Include an easy-to-follow, step-by-step, set of instructions repeating the experiment.

Data:

Graph

Conclusion:

Connect to the Hypothesis – Was it supported or rejected?

Make a concluding statement related to the Problem – Use data to support the statement.

Explain the Data – Provide reasons why the data is what it is and how it connects.

__________________________________________________________

Evaluation:

__________________________________________________________