My Week in Tech - Formative Assessment

Classroom Action

Several teachers have been using https://www.frontrowed.com/ during RTI. A great way to get that math practice in while working with a small group.

All of these researched based help usually say something like students who put in 75 minutes a day have shown improvement in math. Well if you practice 75 minutes a day on math of course you are going to get better. That isn't to say the program is not useful, just that it is not trans-formative. It is a tried and true practice with just a bit of an edge because the work adapts to the level of the student instantaneously.

There are of course many similar programs out there, depending on what you want at a teacher could determine the tool you use. However, all should have at least some way to sign in and track the students, so that we know if they are actually learning or not.

Put your favorite tool in the comments or go to this survey and put it there. Some of my favorites are:

mangahigh.com

https://www.khanacademy.org/

Presentations to students - getting interactive

Wouldn't it be nice to integrate formative assessment into your regular teaching? I know it’s easy a quick half sheet of paper and boom an exit slip. But then you have to grade everything and what if they didn't understand the first thing you said and so were lost for the entire class period.

Some folks will create a quick Google form (like the one above, you can add videos as well) then use something like flubaroo to automatically grade it. The problem is that is still separating the discussion from the assessment.

Enter the web app Blendspace. It is a product one of the elementary teachers showed me Wednesday. It is a very simple way to add content and make quick multiple choice quizzes. Students don’t need an email to sign up so it is appropriate for the elementary crowd.

However, the questions are limited to multiple choice and sometimes you want students to be able to write or draw and answer. So here is a list of a few similar tools. Nearpod, PearDeck, Socrative, SmartBoard clickers, Classflow, and Junoed.

Of course the middle school teachers noticed the educreations app. Similar to the Show Me app and the Doceri app (more of a presentation tool). All of these are iPad apps which require an iPad and a way to get the iPad onto your projector, which can be done with Air Server.

Stuff from the web

Portfolio defense to graduate high school 

https://youtu.be/DUyqdku1iSE

From Envision academy charter schools. http://www.envisionschools.org/

Cool blog I found two great posts.

https://anethicalisland.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/how-do-you-choose-good-online-sources/

https://anethicalisland.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/personalize-my-learning-please/

Most people will like and probably use the first one right away, but the second one is great for technology. When you start asking “How do I create curriculum with multiple ways to learn the same content?” My mind goes immediately to technology. I might share one way to learn content in class and then offer a couple of youtube videos on my web site for further help. So when students don’t quite get what I explained in class they don't have to rewatch my same lecture a million times and hope it finally sinks in, they can watch alternative explanations and hopefully one of those sticks.

Cool kindergarten classroom 

Maine Township High School Visit

A visit to Maine Township High Schools. This was an interesting visit with myself and several staff members from Downers Grove. Maine Township has three high schools of over 2,000 students each. Each high school is startlingly different in its mix of students.
We started the morning early in the administration office. Dr. Thiele, the Assistant Superintendent of Technology and Learning, was happy to answer questions. As it turns out their students are required to pay for books. Two years ago when chromebooks really hit the market a lot of textbooks were up for renewal. The choice seems simple in hindsight, though they took their time and made sure to ask all stakeholders what they thought. Instead of buying new expensive physical textbooks they bought cheaper digital versions and chromebooks.
Those first version chromebooks were pretty fragile, but they changed plans right away and dropped the neoprene sleeves to buy durable cases for the devices. As a result their incidents of broken machines stayed low.
 I was happy to spend most of my day with the technology manager from Maine West, Neil Charlet.  The structure of the department was very impressive. I won’t explain the entire technology department structure because I didn't get into that, but the single school structure was strong. The technology manager seemed to be the bridge between technology and education.

There he is way in the back

 Under him were the tech support crew who managed the trouble tickets and the chrome depot (we’ll get into that later). He also worked very closely with the instructional coaches. Instructional coaches aren't tech people, they are half time teachers and half time coaches. While it wasn't a requirement to be a tech person, they were all 21st century teachers and were comfortable incorporating technology into their lessons. There was about one coach per 40 teachers, plus one per department who is a full time as a teacher, but worked extra as an instructional coach. Instructional coaches meet with all teachers three times formally and as often as people needed informally.

   

 Mr. Charlet met with the coaches to plan out the big technology instruction during the year. These would be the monthly in depth trainings on one particular project. These trainings would last half a day and teachers would get subs to free them up for learning. Then on Tuesdays he does a tech lunch n’ learn. Teaching a tool for use in the classroom.

 

The Chrome Depot is a cool looking (Thanks Mr. Charlet for the pictures), repair center for the chromebooks. There is one staff member assigned to manage the Depot, but the students do most of the work. If someone is having trouble with their chromebook they can stop in the Depot at anytime. If the problem can’t be fixed in 5 minutes they can check out a loaner chromebook (through the library system so it is as simple as checking out a book). The student crew can then examine and fix the chromebook, this is also the same system they use if the chromebook battery is dead, you get a loaner for a few hours and the staff charges your chromebook. No questions asked, at least most of the time.

 

This process also works well if the student has a broken chromebook, but needs to save up a bit of money to do repairs. Parts are fairly cheap and they don’t charge for labor, but sometimes a student needs to check out a loaner chromebook for a short period of time until they save up enough to pay for necessary repairs. Students do not get to take loaners home so there is an incentive to get their own device repaired.

   

 I also met with three teachers during the day. I asked again and again how they got their teachers so on board with the program. I guess it really boiled down to support and expectations. They did mention that the many of the biggests resistors before they started the program are now it’s biggest defenders.
 According to the site D 207 has created for information about their program teachers had a strong preparation in instruction before going chromebook in their classrooms.

  Teacher Readiness:

• 7 years already of GAFE
• 4 formal 1-2 hr training sessions leading up to the rollout
• 4 Instructional Coaches per building
• 1 Instructional Coach per department
• Continued iTech sessions and weekly lunch n learns
• Strategies for Designing and Achieving High Impact Instruction in a 1-1 Computing Environment

Overall I was impressed with the structure and support represented by Maine Township’s program. It seems to me the hardware and infrastructure, though complicated, is actually the easy part. The hard part it getting support to the teachers in such a manner that they don’t feel over burdened and are willing to make the necessary changes in their classrooms. Once they start doing that, it seems they become a programs biggest supporters.  

This Week in Tech - Writing and Games

Last Friday I visited a Maine Township High School. I didn't have time to write about my week. I'll put a reflection on what I learned there early next week. Today some classroom stuff from last week and this.

Writing

Working with letters and fluency in writing seems to be the theme. Not long drawn out essays, but the very beginning. How do our interactions with letters and numbers influence our learning. I love how this kindergarten teacher not only organizes her ipads by letter, but she went through the trouble of making individual backgrounds for each ipad.

    

Then there is this student working with numbers in three different ways - at the same time.


I’ve seen a couple of teachers teaching handwriting. Wouldn't it be nice to bring it back on a computer? Here’s how Might be a fun project for extension or fun way to practice handwriting. If you name everyone's personal font on a classroom computer they could write reports in their own handwriting. Finally, of course there is a long essay, but wait it isn’t. These older students were making alphabet books. A letter with a sentence and a picture, researched online and written on a Word document.

 

Stuff from the web:

Game based learning. At first it meant answering questions in some sort of competitive electronic worksheet. We still see it a lot. It isn't learning, it’s practice. Ask your kids how to cheat, if there is learning going on that’s what they learn. The nice thing is it is possible to pretest students and track their scores so they are at least working on problems in their wheelhouse. Next, we had a game reward system. Level up and stuff. Learning is more like a scavenger hunt. Fun, but can easily devolve into just another reward system. With prepackaged tasks and such it still doesn’t have much student input. On the other hand people are taking into account easier entry points and motivation. Think Angry Birds, a game with no instructions but gets harder and adds new challenges along the way. Now if we could harness that process for teaching multiplication or something that would be awesome. Perhaps, Angry Birds led us to games that are intentionally made to feel more like games and less like academics. Problem based learning for the gamer set. Included with these games are commercial games that were not created for the education market, but have found a niche, like minecraft. The difficulty here is connecting to formal learning. Games built for the educational market start with a standard and try to teach. It often makes the learning boring. Consumer games start with a story, they know they have to hook a person and make them want to come back. Their problem is connecting to formal learning usually doesn't happen, at least without help. Just like technology in general, it isn’t about what technology you use, but how you use it. There is a place for educational games that teach to standards, or more correctly let students practice. On the other hand there is also a place for games that allow students to explore and play in less formal ways. There is no one right way to use technology or games in the classroom.

Three great articles on games in the classroom 
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/04/07/students-choose-learn-063/3/
https://synapse.pub/empowering-high-schoolers-to-build-from-the-perspective-of-a-high-schooler-84ace316e472?section=published
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/30/three-awesome-educational-games-hiding-in-plain-sight/  

Speaking of projects vs practice

The work for some projects takes less time than the actual creation of the vehicle to present it. This often happens in school. Sometimes by design. The time spent working and the organization helps students understand the connections between the different parts. A visual and tactical clue of how things are connected. So why is it in the technology world we don’t expect students to create. Instead we spoon feed them information and practice. Think of technology as the Swiss Army Knife of classroom tools. You can cut, paste, copy, color, write, share, or just about anything you can do hands on. Stop trying to figure out the tech and start trying to figure out how to make something.

My Week in Tech Integration 4/3/2015

I love when teachers change school from, "maybe someday I'll be able to do that", to "I can do that, I might even be able to do better". 

Some of the art teachers in the district use Art Sonia (artwork created from kids around the world can be shared and enjoyed by everyone). It can be a lot of extra work, but also has some advantages. Here we see one of our great art teaches showing students how to connect clay together. 

Last year when doing a similar project she would show students pictures of clay gargoyles to stimulate ideas. This year she also searched gargoyles on ArtSonia and used shared student work with her students. The conversation changed from, "I'll probably never make a gargoyle in real life", to "I can make something like that."

The skills learned in Art are of course transferable. The facility to use pens and other tools in art help us to concentrate more on what we are writing and less on how to write. As we practice coloring, drawing, writing letters, words, and finally sentences all of these skills combine to form writing. A higher level skills that allows us to think. 

While everyone knows that art is useful in education, it is very hard to quantify just how important, The science of learning is slowly evolving. The research is slow and often disregarded as lacking in rigor. 

The gold standard in research is generally considered a double blind study or a large and representative population. Think of a large drug study where thousands of volunteers of various ages and backgrounds who all have the same ailment. Half the people take the drug being tested and half take a placebo and nobody knows who gets what until after the test is completed. The results are carefully considered and written about, then completely different groups do a similar studies. Finally, if they all get the same or similar results we can say this drug works. 

Education is not like that. No two teachers are the same, even if they are asked to read a script exactly the same there are so many variables, like; class size, testing schedules, home life, nutrition, personality, mix of students, etc... that the results almost always end up as inconclusive or a very small effect, over time. At least that has been my impression as I periodically check in on the What Works Clearinghouse. 

That doesn't stop research of course. Lately (past 10 years or so) there seems to have been more of a push to look at underlying human functions and design learning based on that "brain" research. This isn't new really, B. F skinner built and sold learning machines in the late 50's and early 60's and he wasn't the first to think of it. According to Audrey Watters many of the technology revolutionaries today are just repeating these past mistakes. 

All that being said and done, there are some generalities we can say about effective teaching. 

1. When students care about an activity they do better. 
2. When we create we are more involved and tend to learn more
3. We put more effort when we know our peers are going to be looking at our work
1. Parents and teachers don't count
4. There is a zone of proximal development ( Lev Vygotsky ).
   
    If the activity is too easy we don't learn anything, but if it is too hard we give up before getting the chance to learn. 
1. This has less to do with the material and more to do with how it is presented and supported. We regularly present language arts, science, and sometimes math at appropriate levels for students.

What does this mean in the classroom? Here are three examples from this week. 

Some student work I found on the copier. 

When students ask about us, and they always do, don't be afraid to share. I have no picture, but I walked into a classroom on Wednesday and the teacher was cutting up grapefruit she brought back from Florida, which led to a quick impromptu lesson on fractions. 

Use technology to help create not practice. On Thursday at the middle school we talked about using Google Presentation to create vocabulary lists. 

Try this method of creating flashcards. (Can be individual, small group, or whole class)

1. Students create one slide with the word
2. Students create a second slide with a picture and definition
3. Put a cool transition between the slides
4. Put a cool transition before the definition comes up (so the picture is kind of like a clue)

Students can search the web for the picture or they could use Google Draw to create the picture, or even draw the picture by hand and upload it to the slide.

After this activity is done students who need extra practice can be asked to upload the best definitions and pictures to your favorite flashcard web 2.0 tool. So that everyone can use them to study and quiz each other.

Online flashcards

• https://www.studyblue.com/
• http://quizlet.com/
• http://www.cram.com/
• https://www.memrise.com/