Thinking About Learning

I’ve had one week of summer vacation, and I’ve now had enough mental rest to objectively reflect on the growth of technology integration in my school this year.  This was the first full year that every classroom had a SMART Board, projector, and audio system.  That was a huge catalyst for change for teachers in instructional practice.  Additionally, my school experienced phenomenal gains in student achievement this year, which was hugely due to the increase in teacher collaboration and common assessments through the PLC model.   But as indicated by Marzano’s research, I also partly attribute the increase in achievement to the increased use of interactive whiteboards.

As part of my self-evaluation process, I conducted a survey of my teachers to gain some insight into their perspective on growth. (View the results here.)  I was impressed that over 70% of the teachers felt that their use of technology had grown between 50%-100%.  Even more eye-catching was that 97.6% tried something new using technology with their students this year.  During the 2 years I have been a TIS at my school, I have been so impressed with the openness of my faculty to new ideas for technology integration.  Every time I asked a teacher to participate in a project, each one has always agreed!

One example is that this year my 2nd grade team really branched out with PBL.  Every 2nd grade student in my school learned about using the Internet for research (I got to teach that lesson!), used Open Mind 2 mind-mapping software to organize research findings, exported OM 2 to PowerPoint, refined the PPT, and then presented an oral multi-media project.  It was an amazing leap in technology growth for our 2nd graders.  I can’t wait to see what these students will accomplish in the future!

I know that all of my teachers had tremendous growth in the area of technology this year.  I had 15 teachers who were new to our school and district.  Many of these came from districts that did not have the technology resources we have.  They were required to take the TTCA, our district’s level 1 technology competency test.  After some tutoring, they all successfully passed the test and have made great personal gains in their use of technology.  It was a great year at my school, and I’m already beginning to think about how to guide growth next year!

I recently had a conversation with my district Director of Technology, a TIS friend, and my former Global Horizons teacher partner about the merits of Twitter and the possibilities for the educational use of Twitter.  Here are some of the links that have helped shape my perspective:

9 Reasons to Twitter in Schools (Tech & Learning)

Tech Crunch: Impact of Twitter on the world

Times article: Great Britain considers Twitter for the  primary curriculum

Twitter as a District Communication Tool: School district in New Zealand uses Twitter to disseminate information to parents, students, and staff (Chris Dawson)

Teaching with Twitter: 10 great instructional ideas for the classroom from Steve Wheeler

Best Practices in a Twitter-enhanced High School Classroom: Practical explanation of how to manage Twitter use in a classroom along with ideas for using Twitter as an instructional tool from Teaching Paperless.

Can We Use Twitter for Educational Activites?: Presentation by Gabriella Grosseck and Carmen Holotescu

A Twitter Code of Conduct: An article from BusinessWeek about Twitter’s impact on the business world

My own 2 blog posts about Twitter:

Changing the World, Can Twitter Change Education?

Twittering Teachers and PLN

Here’s a link to all of my DIIgo bookmarks about Twitter.  The list includes Twitter apps, news articles about Twitter, lists of Twittering teachers, and Twitter in education.  This doesn’t even scratch the surface!

It’s amazing how something so simple as a 140 character reply to the question, “What are you doing?” could have such a huge global impact on society. Tech Crunch reports,

Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million.

Businesses use Twitter as a source for free advertising.  Politicians use Twitter for campaigning.  Celebrities use Twitter to increase their celebrity status. (Can anyone explain why Oprah felt a need for this?)  Twitter is having such an impact on the corporate world that according to  BusinessWeek,  some companies are developing social media codes of conduct for employees:

To prevent sensitive information leaks, blemishes on a reputation, and other potential liabilities of a Twittering workforce, companies are drafting new employee codes of conduct and educating workers about what they should and shouldn’t say on the site. The basic rule: Don’t be stupid.

Why is Twitter taking the world by storm?  Clive Thompson sums it up:

Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter … is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.

So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it’s experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can’t explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends… It’s practically collectivist — you’re creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.

I love the phrase, “creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.” I have been Twittering for about a year and a half, and I only follow educators.  My primary purpose is personal professional learning.  Twitter is my best source for professional development.  I’ve been slow and selective about choosing people to follow, but I have developed a wonderful network of like-minded professionals around the world.  As I interact with these people in ongoing short phrases, we have a shared understanding of what it means to be passionate about the role of technology in education.  We share great ideas, our successes, our frustrations, and things we’ve learned in the midst of the sprinkled tidbits of our personal lives.  Teacher collaboration has been identified as a key factor in raising student achievement, and through social networking tools like Twitter, I can collaborate and learn from the best around the world.

So my question is this: since Twitter is such a powerful learning tool, how do we go about harnessing that collective learning energy for use in schools? Great Britain is considering recommendations for updating the primary curriculum,  suggesting that children should be familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter by the time they go to secondary school.  They may consider dropping traditional content in favor of emphasizing informational technology, according to the Times.  Although my district is very proactive in the area of providing technology equipment for schools, it still has a very conservative stance on blocking many useful social networking tools like Twitter that enhance learning.

Imagine a classroom where differentiated instruction results in students using MP3 players, cell phones, laptops, and gaming devices to pursue individual learning goals.  They interact with students around the world via Twitter, Ning, or other social networking vehicles to ask questions, collaborate, share resources, and share learning in real time.  Immediate response, immediate feedback, immediate dialogue about learning.  Twitter is changing the way the world communicates.  Why should our students be the last to benefit?

Last week someone shared a link to Myebook on Twitter.  This is a cool, free application that allows you to create a digital flash book with pages that “turn.”  There are 2 ways to create: upload from a PDF (fast & easy) or create from scratch (which allows you to customize your pages with color, backgrounds, frames, templates, etc).  I decided to create one from scratch to get a feel for how it worked.

Then I tested the PDF option with a student project:

There are so many ways this could be used in school, not only for Language Arts, but in every content area.  Primary teachers could use it to create class books, and older students could create individual books.  Teachers could create an end of the year memory book for their class.  Content can be uploaded from your computer, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Bebo, Photobucket, and more.  Books can be designated as public or private.  Each book has its own URL, and embeddable code is also provided.

Recommendations:

• Make sure you have Flash 10 loaded.
• Don’t allow students to go to the Myebook main page.  People post a variety of books, and some content is definitely not suitable for students.  I plan to share and manage by using the URL links.
• For most elementary students, the easiest option would be to have them create their content in Word or PowerPoint and save as a PDF.  Then you upload the PDF, and the ebook is quickly created.  Older students would enjoy creating their own and customizing.

I’ve been working with a fifth grade class to create an online interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” story.  I first tried this several years ago using Tony Vincent’s templates from his Learning in Hand site.  The first time, I had students from 2 different classes working in pairs to write the story on a wiki.  That ended up being a lot of stories to manage!

This year I tried something a little simpler.  I met with a class several times and we brainstormed/planned the story using Open Mind 2, a mind-mapping program.  OM 2 lets you attach text or other things to its branches.  Attachments are indicated by the paperclips at the end of some branches.  We wrote the text for the beginning of the story together as a group and planned an outline of how the story would progress.

Then students worked in pairs to write the story parts for the remaining branches.  Each pair then created a PowerPoint slide of their part of the story, and I hyperlinked them together.  The plan was to save the PPT as a single web page, but when I did this, it created an mht file, which will only work in Internet Explorer.  Then I used iSpring to convert the PPT to html, and this seems to work.

During the project, I received an email from Ms. Hughes that said, “I am so excited!  Most of my groups in my homeroom have finished their first drafts and have started revising.  They are doing such an awesome job of writing, working together, and having great discussions about their writing.   I am really impressed with them … it has been a great learning activity.”  Six state ELA standards were addressed during this project.

Here’s the story:
The Mystery of the Old, Abandoned House (When reading, click on the refresh button to return to the beginning of the story.)

My TIS friend, Mike, has been exploring the educational use of the iPAQ Travel Companion, a GPS-enabled Windows Mobile device.  He invited another TIS friend, John, and me to join him.  This GPS device also allows you to upload video, audio files, and html files.   Using mscape software, we prepared instructional content based on the Pacific Theater of World War II.  There were lots of great film clips from Discovery Streaming.  After several months of planning and preparing, we were finally ready to test it with a small group of 5th grade students.  As is always the case when exploring new technology, there were a couple of glitches, but overall things went very well!   Mike inserted a map of our school playground into the devices and set the GPS coordinates.    As students began, only the first location, Pearl Harbor, was visible on the screen.  Students began to walk to that location.  When they reached the “hot spot,” the content about Pearl Harbor automatically began to play.  When that content had finished playing, the next location popped up on the screen.  I had prepared questions that students had to answer as they moved through the content.  Each student had a role: device manager, reader, or recorder.  The roles rotated for each new location so that everyone had a turn to be the device manager, which was obviously the most fun! This picture shows what students saw on the device after they had visited all 7 locations.

On of the advantages of using these handheld devices for learning is that this activity provides for visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners.  We were especially pleased with our students’ enthusiasm about this learning experience.  They enjoyed being outside and walking to find the next hot spot with the GPS.  One of the greatest benefits of the use of educational technology is the high level of motivation and engagement it produces.

We are working on other content as well.  John created a lesson using a cell diagram for a map, I created another WW II lesson on the European Theater, and Mike created a high school activity on energy choices.  We see a lot of potential for the use of augmented reality for learning!

To view a short video of students using the handhelds and of them talking about the experience, visit our school website, iWarrior.

Finally! Scientific research from a reliable, respected source about the effect of technology on student achievement!  I have been heavily engaged with educational technology for more than 6 years.  For 4 years I taught fifth grade in a technology-infused classroom, and I’ve been a technology integration specialist for the past 2 years.  I knew from the beginning that the use of technology had a positive impact on student learning, but most of the benefits I observed were non-measurable with a test: higher motivation, increased engagement, improved student focus, development of problem-solving skills, more collaborative learning, improved student behavior with fewer office referrals, growth in digital literacy, and increased student efficacy.  While all of these effects are significant gains for 21st Century learners,  the bottom line comes down to student achievement, and up until this time, I knew of no data-rich research that documented the impact of technology on student achievement.

Dr. Robert Marzano, one of our nation’s leading scholars in the field of educational research, has begun studying this issue and recently presented his findings in the keynote speech at CUE. Using 85 teachers across the nation who taught one class using an interactive whiteboard and another “control” class without the technology, he examined the effect of the use of an interactive whiteboard on student achievement.  He discovered 4 variables that affected results: overall years of teaching experience, length of time in months of experience in using a whiteboard, percentage of time the whiteboard is used in the classroom, and teacher’s confidence level in ability to use the technology effectively.  The research showed that optimal student achievement gains (the “sweet spot” according to Marzano) are possible with these conditions: a very experienced teacher who has at least 2 years of experience using an interactive whiteboard, uses it about 75% of the time, and is confident in his/her ability to effectively use the technology.  According to Marzano, such a teacher may expect up to 30 percentile point gains in student achievement.  Marzano admitted that all research is equivocal, and that ultimately the most significant factor in student achievement, with or without technology, is teacher quality.

His suggestion for effective use of technology was to focus on content, not the bells and whistles.  He also gave a reminder of the importance of keeping track of which students are getting it and which are not.  That point led Marzano into commentary about formative assessment and the use of technology for record-keeping.  He asserted that assessment should be an instructional technique, not a labeling technique. It’s important to examine lots of data over time to get the best picture of a student’s progress.  The most significant acievement gains came from tracking student progress over time using a rigorous rubric-based model.  The implications are that teachers need professional development in both effective teaching and the effective use of technology to maximize growth in student achievement.

Last week I listened to a Discovery Education webinar with Tony Vincent, “I Didn’t Know You Could Do That with IPods.” One of the best things I learned was a great tool for converting YouTube videos into MP4, FLV, AVI, MPG, and other file formats. It was exciting to discover an easy way to be able to use YouTube content in the classroom.  YouTube is blocked in my district, so I previously haven’t spent much time exploring and searching, but I have been amazed to see how much good educational content is out there! My math coach and I recently received an iTouch through a grant, and we’re working on finding and creating math content that would be useful to students.  I’ve downloaded over 30 videos in a short amount of time. It’s so easy!  All you have to do is type in the word kick in front of the word youtube in the video URL.
Example: http://kickyoutube.com/watch/?v=skX6RnnIkuM#VQsQj1Q_CMQ

Here are a couple of my favorite YouTube finds:

Multiplication Tables: Created initially in the computer lab at the juvenile detention center in Portland, Oregon, these catchy, rap-style videos will be very helpful for students needing help learning multiplication facts.

Learning Upgrade: This company offers online courses in reading and math, but they have loaded a few of their professionally done videos to YouTube.

Just saw this on Twitter: 100 Best YouTube Videos for Teachers

I recently introduced Photo Booth during staff development sessions for my grade level teams.  We only have 3 MacBooks in the building, but I would love to see my teachers use them.  They had a lot of fun playing with the special effects, and I now have in my possession some “leverage” pictures and videos if I’m ever in need!  It was tempting to post a few here, but I’m resisting.  Here’s a list I compiled of some ways Photo Booth could be used in the classroom:

• Book talks
• Reader’s Theater
• Oral reading/student self-evaluation
• Maintain a digital record of reading progress over the course of the year
• Biography “living history” presentations
• Weekly class news report
• Demonstration of science experiment
• Character education development: take photos of students expressing various emotions (Source: iLearn Technology)
• Grammar dictionaries: when studying verbs, take pictures of students acting out verbs
• Digital poetry portfolio
• Social Studies “You Were there” newscasts
• Point of view debate over historical events such as Trail of Tears or Hiroshima
• World language conversations/skits
• Stop motion animation (claymation)
• Infomercial (nonfiction informational writing)
• Commercial (persuasive writing)
• Writing prompt: Something has just happened to you that has caused you to go through some drastic physical changes.  Take five pictures of yourself using Photo Booth where you show the progression of your drastic changes, from the beginning stages to the end result.  After you take the pictures write a narrative or a news article explaining what happened to you. Be creative! ( Source: Stepping Forward: Personal and Digital Learning in the 21st Century)

On a different note, I just completed a survey Sue Waters is conducting about Your Top 5 Web Tools for Managing your Workload.  She’ll share the results on her PLN Yourself wiki.  Check it out!

There are a variety of ways to create audio and video files that can be played on iPods or other media players.  Here are a few ideas:

Creating podcast content with a Windows computer:

• Record a podcast on an iPod and load it into iTunes.
• Record a podcast on a laptop in Audacity and export as an MP3.
• Create a PowerPoint and convert it with Authorstream.
• Create a video using Windows Movie Maker and use a converter such as Jodix or Zamzar.
• Use SMART Notebook recorder to record a Notebook lesson and convert the .wmv file to an Mp4.

Creating podcast content with a MacBook:

• Create a Keynote Presentation, record narration, and export as an Mp4. (If you do this, add a blank slide at the beginning after you record, but before you export. It’s a quirk, but necessary to get the file to play correctly on the iPod. )
• Create a recording in GarageBand and export to iTunes.
• Create a video with iMovie and export as an Mp4.