11.03.2009

Module 5: Data Overload

Bridging digital divides


Preface:

The Shape of Assessments to Come



— Adrian Veidt, "Watchmen"
In particular [young teachers] say two things about their training in ed school. First, most of them say they did not get the hands-on practical teacher training about managing the classroom that they needed, especially for high-needs students. And second, they say there were not taught how to use data to differentiate and improve instruction and boost student learning. On Tuesday night, at a national town hall meeting with teachers, I asked the studio audience of about 100 teachers how they felt about their schools of ed. An uneasy laughter filled the room—not the kind of response that engenders confidence.

Teacher Preparation:
Reforming the Uncertain Profession
— Remarks of Secretary Arne Duncan at Teachers College, Columbia University. October 22, 2009

By the end of the fourth class of this Practicum, a generalized numbness wafts over the quiet air vent.  Although it could be a lack of oxygen, it's more likely that frenetic musings like, "so much information, so little time to process," are resonating throughout the classroom.  As student teachers morph into full time teachers, their cocoons are continually prodded with jargon like "best practices," "differentiated instruction," "classroom management," "alternative assessments," "item analysis" – phrases that do little more than add to the swampy morass within which the pupae mutate.  How can we stay on top of all of the data we're expected to assess and evaluate, let alone grade student exams and papers? How can we stay on top of it all?

Let's look at one piece of the data deluge: professional development. By the end of the first few months of teaching, you may find yourself talking exclusively to children. You may even find yourself talking as loudly as they do in the hallways, and not even realize it.  Keeping current with novel practices is an effective way to maintain connections with adults outside of the classroom.  We've talked a little about edublogs, but even the simple list we looked at three weeks ago quickly became too massive for any one teacher to stay on top of, so each of us skimmed one blog, and shared what we read over Twitter.  That's one way to stay connected.  But there is another type of technology that is very efficient at culling pertinent pedagogical pieces out of the terraflops of information posted daily on the Internet.  The technology is called RSS, for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.  Or even, "I'm Ready for Some Stories." Let's look at what RSS has to offer.

RSS Feeds

If you can click it, you can clip it!

Back in the day, "newspaper clipping" services would hire people to skim through hundreds of publications, looking for specific research topics, and compile lists of summaries of these articles for other researchers to access when they were looking for materials to use in an upcoming publication. Today, the Internet offers so much information that it is impossible for anyone to stay on top of all of the postings uploaded every day. So electronic versions of clipping services have come online in the past few years to help Internet users sift through all of the webpages.

Most newspapers offer a summary of the day's articles on the first or second page of the printed publication. RSS feeds do the same thing online.  How can you find these feeds?  If you are on a webpage that has a bunch of articles posted on it, like an online newspaper or blog, look for the orange icon to the right of the previous paragraph.  If you see that icon on the web page you are reading, click on it, and you will be wisked away to the RSS feed for that list of articles.  You will know you are on a RSS feed page by the layout of the page: very simple, no graphics, only a "Subscribe to this feed" box at the top, and a list of title and short summaries of all the articles.  If you click on any of the titles, you will be taken to the page where the full article is posted.  For example, the Department of Education has an RSS feed that summarizes current agency events and announcements. Click on the link and see what a RSS feed page looks like.

Many newspapers offer RSS feeds, some even narrow their RSS feeds for education articles only. oday, most Web browsers have aggregators as an add-on application, so you can read them the same way you would a web page.  If the web page can be aggregated as a RSS feed, the orange icon will be visible on the right side of the URL address window (where "http://www... is typed in).  If you can see it, click on it to get to the RSS feed page.  You should see the icon to the right of this blog's URL address at the top right of this browser window.  It's so easy to do, that many Websites have their own RSS feeds.  Here's a list of education articles published in United States newspapers.

RSS feeds for Newspapers
Clicking through each link one at a time hardly makes sense. So when RSS feeds first started coming out, people needed a software program called an "aggregator" to group the feeds together into easily readable and sortable articles. Even today, these "stand alone" RSS aggregators are useful, because we usually scan various education articles only when we have some free time to separate ourselves from our daily routines, looking for information that will help us make a small change, a little improvement on the ways we wander through our day.  It makes sense to have a separate icon on the desktop to click on when we are in a contemplative mood.  Here are some of the more popular aggregators. If you don't like these, try this list.

Stand alone software

Into the Mash Pit

So many RSS feeds exist now, that it can take the whole day just to read through the summaries.  Hardly a time saver.  So now we have software to clip the aggregated RSS feeds. Sifting through a bunch of RSS feeds, looking for a key phrase is called a "mash up," and was considered one of the best educational technology innovations in 2008. Instead of sifting through RSS feeds individually, you can mash them together, and look at all of them at one time.

An easy way to see how this works is to look at Pageflakes. Like Adrian Veidt, we now can gaze upon one webpage, and scan news feeds, podcasts and videos, in search of everything we want to know about education. But you still have to let your eye rove, looking in many different places, seeing many different things.  Suppose you just wanted educational articles that had something to do with YouTube.  To funnel our search to those parameters, we need weld a Yahoo pipe, which is another example of a mashup. What's wonderful about Yahoo pipes is that they are open source, so anybody can see what RSS feeds are being used to make up the mashup by clicking on the 'Edit Source' link.  In this case, I used the list of newspapers above to create the mashup, and searched for any news article with the search term, "YouTube."  Only two came back, both from CNN.  Of course, you could type in whatever search term you want in the search box.  Or create a new pipe, this time using the edublog RSS feeds listed above. This time seven postings with the term, "YouTube" come up.


And a Little Video for My Friends


In past classes, RSS is about as far as I could go.  But this cycle I finally have some time to add some new techniques to this course.  If there's one additional computer skill I use all of the time in the classroom, it's playing videos onto a white wall of my science classroom.  Those of you who took my science class know this all too well.  So I'm going to add one more piece of technology you can add to the classroom: a simple way to play videos you download from the Internet in your classroom.

A Cautionary Note before we start.  Videos, like any creative expression, are generally protected by copyright law, which means you can't just copy something off the Internet and publish it (that includes showing it in your classroom) without the author's consent.  Two classes ago, we talked about plagiarism, today, from a legal standpoint, we're talking about copyright infringement.  That means if you don't get the author's permission, either through direct contact, or through the terms of the author's license, e.g., creative commons licenses, you could be liable for monetary damages.

Sometimes an author will allow you to use his or her expressions so long as you don't make any money using them.  As an educator, this "fair use" is often the case when you download something off the Internet for your class – you aren't planning to make any money off of what you downloaded, if teachers did, their profession wouldn't be one of the most underpaid in the country.  But suppose you then include those downloaded expressions in a unit plan you develop, and then publish them as part of a professional development workshop you took part in, and you hope the publication of that unit plan will help enhance your reputation in the field.  At this point, we may have moved away from a "fair use," into a derivative work.

What makes a publication you created, but is in part based upon other people's expressions, a "derivative work," isn't easy to define, just look at Teacher's Domain's Open Educational Resources license.  You may think, I'm not going to make any money or fame on this cobbled together lesson plan, so why worry?  Most teachers, even though they probably won't get any material compensation for their lessons, tend to hold on to them like truant children, never letting them out of their sight.  But if your work is actually a derivative work, you have little to no say over how that lesson gets distributed throughout the halls of learning, because you used someone else's expressions to make your lesson plan.  So be careful when you're using other people's works in your lessons, if you aren't careful, your lesson may end up being someone else's. If you want to see how convoluted these derivative webs can be, just look at what happens when someone uses someone else's test prep book in their class.

Think about the graphic at the top of this posting.  I scanned it from my "Watchmen" graphic novel, Photoshopped it, and then uploaded it.  Is that a violation of its copyright?  Probably not, it's just an excerpt from the novel, I'm using it in a way not intended by the authors, and I'm not making any money on it, and it's unlikely anyone else can.  But if I did published this blog in a book format, with the intent of making money from first-year teachers buying the book to help them implement technology in their classrooms, I should contact DC Comics to get permission to reproduce the graphic. 

All that being said, I'd like to end this class with sharing a few techniques on how to spice up your classes with online videos. The simplest way to do this is if you have an Internet connection and a video screen or projector in your classroom.. If you can play Internet streaming video in your classroom, all you need are the links to educational shows online.  Here are some of the best:
Of course, almost all network broadcasts are available online. Even commercial series, like House, Bones, CSI, can have some hook that can be used as a motivation for a science class.  Besides simply going to the network website, the following aggregators can help you find a TV series that might have something to do with your class. You'll need a lot of bandwidth for these sites.  The first links have an international flavor, with many sites from foreign countries. If you want to find more of these websites, here's another list.
As a general rule, it's unwise to rely on school network servers to be there for you when you need them for a class.  An entire book could be written about the relationships between educators and the IT folks who are contracted to service their needs at schools.  Suffice it to say that most experienced teachers have a laundry list of concerns they have about interacting (or even trying to find) the tech guys responsible for keeping the computers working in school.  So it's generally best to download a video to your computer, that way you'll always have it available. There are two ways to download a video off  the Internet.  You can cut and paste the URL of an online video into another web page that will save it to your computer.  Here are some of the most popular websites for both options.

OnlineThe other way is to download some software you can run on your computer, and cut and paste the URL into that software.  Some of the software will run in the background, and when a video appears in a browser window that it can download, a popup message will notify you of the video's availability.  Or, the software will add a button to the browser's toolbar, and it will flash and jiggle when you start playing a video in your browser window. Just like RSS, many web browsers now have addons that will do the same thing as the standalone softwares.  Here are some of the more popular standalone softwares.


Standalone
Most online videos are in a Flash (.flv) format.  Once you have downloaded a file with a .flv extension, you will need a player in order to watch the video.  There are many decent freeware brands to choose from, which means yet another list...

YouTube – Bootleg Bruhaha or Educational Extravaganza?


Had enough yet?  I'm almost there, I promise.  There is one more key piece you need to know when downloading Flash videos.  Most of the TV websites listed at the top of this posting won't let you download them.  Some will, like the Discovery and National Geographic channels, and you should always try until you're certain the website completely bars downloading.  There are three websites that will always work: YouTube, Google Videos, and DailyMotion.

Given the ubiquitous nature of YouTube on the Internet, several website have been created that organize YouTube content in ways helpful to educators.


Rapprochement



What I have attempted to offer you in this last part of this last module is the awareness that Web 2.0 is too variegated to issue blanket statements like "block YouTube" or "downloading is copyright violation."  All of us, as teachers need to explore the many sources of good and bad information across the Internet, and make our own, independent decisions about what and how we will deliver online information in the classroom.  As soon as we delegate pedagogical decisions concerning Web 2.0 to people who are outside the classroom, the quality of delivery will start to decay, until both teacher and student are reduced to passive button clickers who receive, but do not comprehend what they're watching.

What I have attempted to offer all of you in this Practicum is the awareness of various online technologies you have at your disposal, and some techniques that are helpful in delivering these contents in the classroom.  Relying on other people to do these technological things for you will only stunt your development as master teachers. Through current news stories I have highlighted the fact that teacher certification classes in the near future will require education students to master skill that will help first year teachers manage their classrooms more effectively, rather than sitting a Masters of Ed "Mickey Mouse" class, listening to someone summarize a chapter from a book that will not help them once the bell rings, and the adult is alone with all of the children.

When we looked at test prep techniques for the Regents, it was obvious to me that skills like "standards alignment" and "item analysis" are not techniques that are not commonly addressed in educations classes.  And given the obsession with "teaching to the test," resistance to these skills is understandable.  But the result as been the development of a $1 billion dollar industry that exists entirely outside of public education.  The Kaplans and Princeton Review feed off the fear parents have about their tweensters failing a test which will make it impossible for them to get into a good college.  Because teachers haven't mastered these test prep skills, schools have to designate part of their meager annual budgets to buying these test prep books, which teachers resent as encroaching on their freedoms in the classroom, and students hate because instead of learning what they want, they're told what to study and how.

Outsourcing educational instruction from teachers and students sharing a space in a school every day to private businesses that deliver slick shiny packages, but no guarantee that the products will be effective unless teachers do what they tell them to do gets us no closer to enhancing the quality of instruction for students.  The only way I see to achieve actual improvements is for teachers, not consultants, to master new medias, like Web 2.0, for themselves and bring the digital world into the classroom.  Hitting the play button on a DVD player offers only limited experiences for classroom instruction, either you're listening or you're not, and it's hard to take notes with the lights off...

We've gone many places during this Practicum, and I know some of you feel like you've gotten lost along the way.  But I'm will to bet if you feel that way, it's because I've shown you a lot of different educational opportunities that are available on the Web today.  Of course you're not going to use them all in your first year teaching.  But hopefully, as you travel down your own educational pathways, you'll remember sometime mentioned in this class, this blog, this wiki, that you can use as a reference point to developing your own technologies in the classroom.  And that's the bottom line, we have a choice as educators, we can depend on others to deliver educational technologiesto us, or we can make them ourselves.


Evaluation

Homework #5


Deliverable #1: Each student will use either the newspaper or edublog mashup to find three postings about a professional development topic. Each student will post the URLs for each of the posting to the group wikipage.

Assessment

To Date


 I have checked through all blog and wiki postings and compiled a list of completed assignments to date on the class wiki page.  I strongly urge each group to dedicate some time over Thanksgiving to complete these assignments.  Classroom presentations will be delivered on December 4th.  I will be online over the holiday to answer any questions you post to your wikipages or over Twitter.

Based on your Twitter responses, I have compiled the following list of completed in-class assignments.  A "-1" means you completed the assignment.  The assignments for each week are:
  1. "Digital divide" definition
  2. Edublog choice
  3. Three Educause technologies you would like to integrate into your classroom
  4. "Poof paper" definition
If you haven't completed these assignments, please Twitter me with your missing responses.
quy_grades
first_name
 last_name
 #4
 #3
 #2
 #1
Alexis
 Cabrera
 -1
 -1
 -1
 0
Shabana
 Choudhari
 -1
 0
 -1
 -1
Dina
 Di Salvo
 0
 0
 0
 -1
Janny
 Diaz
 -1
 -1
 -1
 -1
Kim
 Epps
 0
 0
 0
 0
Margarita
 Estevez
 -1
 -1
 -1
 -1
Aldona
 Gierlarowiec
 -1
 0
 -1
 0
Doreen
 May
 0
 -1
 -1
 0
Corrine
 Mojica
 0
 -1
 -1
 -1
Yadira
 Obando
 -1
 0
 -1
 0
Maria
 Quezada
 0
 0
 0
 0
Tabatha
 Quinones
 -1
 0
 0
 -1
Diana
 Rivera
 0
 0
 0
 0
Naika
 Rodriguez
 -1
 -1
 -1
 -1
Vickyana
 Rodriguez
 0
 0
 0
 0
Jessica
 Sanabria
 0
 0
 0
 0
Jamarie
 Santiago
 0
 0
 0
 0
Ana
 Soto
 0
 0
 0
 0
Nicole
 Spinelli
 -1
 0
 0
 0
Yinorah
 Varela
 0
 0
 -1
 0
Dorthea
 Walsh
 0
 0
 -1
 0
 .

.

.
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10.30.2009

Module 4: writing responsibly

Bridging digital divides


Preface:

Poof Papers


—  The anxiety of influence

October 2009, Harper's Magazine

We spent the last two weeks talking about the overwhelming importance of test taking in elementary grades.  It should stand to reason that early on in a child's development, the necessity to cheat on exams is commuted to acceptable behavior. Our youth learn from us how important "the high stakes exam" is, not to them, but to us teachers, so that we can keep our jobs and keep our administrators off our backs.  And as our children grow older, cheating cultures become more ingrained, so much so that copying someone else's work is even considered cheating anymore.  Many colleges are developing plagiarism programs, action plans, and many higher education conferences are devoted to the issue. There are even scholarly journals dedicated to the subject.

Online dissertation writing services abound. Or you can simply download a term paper , or spend $20/page for a custom paper from the Internet. Some Internet essay providers even use the word, "cheat" in their business name. Even sneak peaks at the GMAT and the SAT are for sale. There are lists of cheating techniques out there! It should come as no surprise that YouTube has videos showing students how to cheat with a Coke bottle. Or that cell phones with cameras can be used to cheat on an exam.

It shouldn't be surprising that cheating is on the increase in schools, as well as the Internet sites that provide plagiarism services. Students aren't the only problem, sometimes faculty members fail to monitor academic dishonesty.

Dr. Howard Gardner, better known for his "multiple intelligences" theory, is now focusing on the deleterious effects of not doing good work in our jobs. In conversations he had with people working in various fields, he found that everyone
... knows the difference between what is ethical and what is not, but the disturbing thing is how many people said they cannot afford to do the right or honest thing if they want to get ahead in their careers. He says there is a tension between the people they want to be and the people they think they need to be to succeed.
The results of these conversations have been compiled into a "Good Work" project. More reactionary responses to rampant plagiarism include a plethora of software teachers can use to find key phrases in a student's research paper that are linked to known plagiarized material. The most popular software are listed below.
Even more disturbing is the more and more common belief that cut and pasting off the Internet satisfies "research" today. You can't even get a cup of coffee in Brooklyn while reading the NYT Op Ed page anymore without running into someone glomming off the 'Net.  Even our Vice President has been busted on the charge.

So at least think about what you can do in the classroom to keep plagiarism at a minimum.

Lesson Plan Templates

Avoiding the rush to insanity


All that being said, there are times where you as a teachers are going to copy things over and over again.  These empty forms are called "templates," and are used in many ways in the classroom.  Consider the following scenario:
It’s Monday morning. All of the school work you promised yourself last Friday afternoon you would accomplish over the weekend didn’t get done. You let two overstuffed subway trains go by before you could cram yourself into the third one, so you’re already a little late getting to school. After clocking in, you trudge to your mailbox, and find a slip of paper from your AP stating that the Region will be in tomorrow, observing classes, so make sure you have an appropriate, student-centered lesson ready, with a lesson plan similar to the one discussed at the last PD meeting.

We already know how to grab some helpful educational research off the Internet when designing a lesson plan. But our problem isn’t completely solved yet – we have less than twenty four hours to get that information into an acceptable lesson plan format that the AP recommended at the last PD meeting. How can I quickly “cut and paste” the information, making minimal revisions? In this lesson, we will look at how we can use Microsoft Word to create a document that can be used to quickly create a new lesson plan. You have seen how to get information off the Internet, now let’s look at how to process that information so that it can be easily used in the classroom

When we’re under the gun to make a lesson plan, many teachers (myself included) have been known to simply write one out using pencil and paper. This is a completely acceptable solution to the problem. But let me offer a few insights on why you should try to develop a routine where you use a computer to type in your lesson plans. First, once you get into the swing of it, there isn’t much difference in the time spent writing the lesson up, especially if you have a working template like the one we will develop in this lesson. Second, if your AP sees you typed up your lesson, you’re not likely to get much grief about it.

But here’s the most important reason. You’re likely to conclude that because you’re slapping this lesson together in less than an hour, it’s not your best piece of work, and you’ll likely throw it away after the term is over. Imagine yourself two years down the road, reading some of your “best work” during your first year teaching. Do you think you will be completely satisfied using your first year lesson plans in your third year of teaching? The odds are you will at least want to revise them, making them better, based on your additional years of teaching experience. But if you wrote them down, pencil on paper, you will either scratch out the bad parts or, more likely, have to completely recreate the lesson.

And that’s the bottom line. When you type a lesson plan into a computer, you are completely free to revise, cut and paste, do whatever you want with it when you revisit the topic next year. Lesson plan writing should primarily be an editing function, not a writing function, you want to minimize the time spent doing these things, remember? After three or four revisions, you will likely have a lesson you love. But if you have to rewrite the same lesson three or four times, pencil on paper, you’re not likely to have much love for it, in fact, you’ll likely experience feelings like the ones you described at the beginning of the “Getting Started” problem. We want to avoid those feelings, and using technology is one way we can minimize them.

There are wikis , online generators, Excel spreadsheets, and webpage lists on lesson plan templates. I have a simple Lesson Plan Template to help build your lesson plans. The following list offers even more resources.  All you need to do is type or copy/paste your information into the template, and save it. That's it!

Evaluation

Homework #4


Deliverable #1: Each person Twitter a response to this question: how can a teacher minimize plagiarism in their classroom? 

Deliverable #2: Each group will find a lesson plan template off the Internet that they are comfortable using to create their lesson plan.

Deliverable #3: Each group will use the template and fill in their lesson plan.
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10.23.2009

Module 3: Beating the blue book blues

Bridging digital divides


Preface:

Beating the blue book blues

...By the time Ms. Campeas has issued her decree, class [at George Washington High School]  has been in session for five minutes. I quickly distribute Kaplan workbooks to the students. I toss one Frisbee-style to a student whose corner desk is so thoroughly barricaded I cannot reach him. With a little sideways lurch, I wriggle between the groups of desks into the small hollow that seems to be the room’s dramatic center point. Students observe me quizzically (though some must look over their shoulders or turn around completely to do so). One rangy boy slumped heavily in his chair notices the Kaplan logo on the book, covers his face with long-fingered hands, and announces, “Not this again. Not Kaplan. I hate this shit.” Ms. Semidey stands between the science table and the chalkboard at the front of the room, a pair of scissors gripped tightly in her hand. Her Kaplan teacher’s manual lies unopened on the table before her. ...
—  "Tyranny of the test: One year as a Kaplan coach in the public schools"

By Jeremy Miller
The daily news deluge about standardized test score results, like the ones we talked about in our last class (here's some more blogs: Schools Matter and Education Notes Online), underscore the fact that knowing what our children know, even through "watered down" exams, fraudulent or not, are here to stay.  Today's classroom, once entirely dedicated to a chalkboard, posters, and students' arts & crafts, now must vie for space with multi-million dollar businesses like Kaplan and Princeton Review and politicians demanding "accountability."  All of the millions of dollars taken out of public education and put in the hands of private test bank businesses has barely budged the national assessments a blip. The result? New York does a poorer job at GED preparation than Mississippi.  Maybe that's why the DOE just dedicated $350 million to figuring out a new way to "improve the quality of assessment." A simple solution? Give teachers the technical training they need to design their own test banks, and keep all of those millions of dollars in the public schools where they belong.

And yet, for many first year teachers, assessing student mastery of content and skills delivered in class is often only an afterthought.  Understandably so, after wading through lesson plan writing, standards alignment, materials gathering and classroom management techniques – forget about the actual delivery of the lesson in a time and space pressured classroom container with scores of partially attentive children – teachers don't have a lot of energy left to do much of anything.  By the day before Thanksgiving or Christmas vacation, we just want to get the lessons over with, and collapse into blissful sleep, hopefully after, and not before, we can touch our beds. 

It took me years to figure out a simple truth about assessments: design them before you start writing your lesson plans.  If you know exactly what you intend to measure, before you start figuring out how you will deliver the content, you can streamline your lesson to focus on the techniques students will need to know to succeed with your assessment.  Many times young teachers don't manage time efficiently during delivery of their lessons, and then have to improvise an ad-hoc decision concerning what to cut out of the lesson, contemporaneous to delivering the lesson.  When facing this dilemma, many first year teachers will cut the most important part of the lesson, the summary, simply because, from a linear perspective, the summary is the last, and therefore least, important part of the lesson.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The summary is the first time a teacher gets feedback from the class, giving the teacher a sense of whether or not students "got the lesson."  Without this immediate feedback, it's likely that the teacher will move on to the next lesson on the next calendar day, not knowing whether students mastered yesterday's material.  And if you are one of those teachers who drop the summary, when do you think you will first get feedback on the success of your lesson? All too often, on a "high stakes" exam.  And if students didn't get it then, you are going to grade a lot of failing exams, and have to offer a lot of explanation to your students, their parents, your supervisors, their political bosses, indeed, the entire education matrix.

Module

Deconstructing Regents


So how can we design simple assessments, for the summary of a lesson, aligned to state standards? In our city, it's all about the Regents, baby.  The best way to find Regents questions appropriate to your lesson plan is to go online to its archive and find the appropriate subject matter:
Unfortunately, Arts, Physical Education, Health, Family and Consumer Sciences, and Careers don't have Regents questions.  If you are designing an evaluation for those subjects, the best you can do is do a "teaching across curriculum" arabesque, and, from your lesson plan, associate a questions from one of the bulleted content areas to your lesson.

Let's say we wanted to create a Science Regents question for a Grade 4 lesson.  First, due to all of the political nonsense plaguing the most recent bunches of New York exams, go back to 2007, and look for the Rating Guide for that year's exam. Go to the next to last page of the document (page 17), and look at the item map that links each question in the test to relevant standards.

Let's say my lesson is aligned to Standard PS 5.1. Question 9 is appropriate for that standard. So let's download the Spring 2007 Grade 4 Science Regents Exam and create a question that we can save as a Word document.

Let's break Question 9 into the pieces we need to reproduce in order to provide our students with a "summary question" for our lesson.  There are four basic sections to a Regents question, the question stem, a graphic, text that follows the graphic, and an answer list.

It's very important to recreate Regents questions as accurately as possible.  Why?  Children are experts when it comes to non-verbal cues.  If you hurriedly scratch out an assessment question right before class, run it through the copier sideways so part of the right side is cut off, and then pass them out with an exasperated look on your face, do you think your students are going to take the question seriously?  On the other hand, if you hand them a carefully crafted question that has the look and feel of a Regents question, the odds are they're going to be a little more invested in getting the right answer, simply because "it's better to look good than to feel good."

There's another reason for taking the time to design a Regents-based question.  It's very easy to tweak a question you've already saved as a computer file and make several similar ones, with different answers.  This means that once you have a bunch of Regents questions created for a section unit taking up a week or two of classes, it's easy to create an 'A' and 'B' test, and hand out the 'A' tests to the odd numbered rows or tables, and the 'B' tests to the even numbered one.  Cheating in a class where half the class has one test, and the other a different one makes it next to impossible to copy answers.  Additionally, if you handwrite out a assessment question, what are you going to be doing next year, when you're teaching the same material?  Exactly the same thing, instead of simply tweaking your already prepared Regents questions.  An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of last-minute "wailing and flailing."

The goal of this module is to offer you the skills necessary to reproduce any Regents question you may find appropriate to your own summaries.  Making a bootleg, I am sorry to say, requires a lot of tech savvy.  I have looked far and wide for a cookbook recipe for minimizing the pain required to create your own testbank of Regents questions, aligned to your own personal lesson plans,  but alas, I have found none.  So all I can offer is my own bumbling, fumbling explanation of how create mad bootlegs of Regents questions.

Testing 1, 2, 3...


Once you've identified a test question that you would like to reproduce, you first need to download the Regents exam, preferable to your memory stick or computer hard drive (so you can access the entire test whenever you want in the future) or to the desktop of whatever computer you are currently using.  I have downloaded every year's Regents exams going back to 2003, and have saved them in a special 'Regents' folder in my computer.  That way I can reproduce Regents questions, even if I'm not on the Internet.

Once you have downloaded the Regents file (File | Save Page As, or Ctrl-s), open it up independent of the Internet browser.  We will need to use the Adobe toolbar to get the job done.

Once you have opened up the Regents exam, scroll to the question you are interested in copying (Question #9) and follow this procedure.

  1. Open up the test item template.
  2. Go back to the Adobe file.
  3. Make sure the text highlighter is enabled.  To make sure, click on the Tool Menu tab, click on the 'Select & Zoom' item, and click on the 'Select tool.'

  4. Highlight the question section of the item by "clicking and dragging," that is, use the mouse to roll over screen to just to the left of the first letter (not the question number!) you want to copy, click and hold down the left mouse button, and while holding the left mouse button down, move the mouse to just to the right of the last letter you want to copy.
  5. Once all of the text is highlighted, copy the text (Edit | Copy or Ctrl-c).
  6. Go back to the test item template, and paste (Edit | Paste or Ctrl-v) the text into the document.
  7. Hit the 'Enter' key.
  8. Make sure the 'Format Paragraph' option is selected.
  9. Delete any extra paragraphs '¶' in the question section. You should have two ¶ marks at the end of the question.
  10. Save (File | Save or Ctrl-s) the Word file.  Make sure to give the Word file a name you can remember.
  11. Go back to the Regents exam.  Now we are going to copy the graphic section.  To do so, we must first pick the 'Snapshot' selection tool.  Click on the Tool Menu tab, click on the 'Select & Zoom' item, and click on the 'Snapshot tool.'

  12. "Lasso" the graphic by rolling over the the screen with the mouse until you are at the upper left corner of the graphic.  "Click and drag" until you are at the lower right corner of the graphic.  Let go of the left mouse button.  The graphic will automatically be copied.
  13. Go back to the test item template, and paste (Edit | Paste or Ctrl-v) the test just to the left of the last ¶ marker. Make sure the graphic is on its own line.  If it's not, delete the graphic, hit the 'Enter' key, and paste the graphic again. 
  14. Hit the 'Enter' key and save the Word file.
  15. You may need to resize the graphic.  If you do, click once on the graphic so that its handles are visible. Hold down the Shift key.  Click and drag the bottom right handle until the graphic is the size you would like it to be. Let go of the mouse button.  Then, let go of the Shift key.
  16. Go back to the Regents exam. Reselect the text highlighter (Step 3).  Copy and paste the text and answer sections into the test item template.  Save the Word file.
Now we are ready to format the Word document so that it looks like a Regents exam. Relax, we're almost done.
  1. Select the question stem.  Click on the Question Mark button.
  2. Select the graphic by moving the mouse cursor to the left of the graphic and clicking the left mouse button once.  Click on the Picture button.
  3. Select the text section below the graphic.  Click on the Text button.
  4. Select the answer section.  Click on the Answer button.
  5. Save the test item document.
  6. You're done!

If you're a stickler like me, you'll notice that the Elementary Regents exams use the New Century Schoolbook font. If you really want to make your assessments look like the Regents, you might want to invest $30 in buying the font.

Finally, New York isn't the only place to find assessment questions.  I have a wiki page that lists other states' sample assessments, as well as the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam that's been creating such a bru ha ha of late.

Evaluation

Homework #3


Deliverable #1: Each group will upload their aligned Standards to their group's wiki page.  

Deliverable #2: Each group will find one Regents question aligned with their standards.  Each group will copy, paste and format the Regents question in the test item template, as a Word document.

Deliverable #3: Each group will identify one NAEP question aligned with their standards.  Each group will identify one other state assessment question, from the wiki page, that is aligned with the lesson plan standards.


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10.16.2009

Module 2: Filtering the phalanges (lol)

Bridging digital divides


Preface:

Seizing the means of the feeds


May I be granted ...
... the serenity to accept the pages I should not edit,
... the courage to edit the pages I should,
... and the wisdom to know the difference.

— the Wiki Prayer
So far, we have looked at microblogging, specifically Twitter, as a way to develop collaborative writing between teachers and students (although only about five have you have completed the Twitter homework as of this morning...).  We also looked at the ERIC search engine, one of the best sources for educational research on the Internet.  Today, we're going to expand our knowledge about educational social softwares to two fundamental dynamos of educational technology: blogs and wikis.

Blogs (more formally, "Web logs") broke into the public consciousness in 2004, creating an infinite source of information channels, each one a personal online diary, providing hyperlinks to Web sites of interest and posting personal commentaries for the world to read, ponder, and discuss.  Educational blogs, or "edublogs,"  seek to harness the power of blogs to offer instructional resources for the classroom.  They are well established tools in many different content areas.

Let's see how information flows through microblogs, to blogs, to more tradition news organs:

11:43 AM Oct 14th from web US DOE Twittered "Nation's Report Card: Mathematics 2009, on NAEP scores for grades 4 and 8; Sec. Duncan's statement on results."   Later that afternoon, the edublogs caught fire, finally, a day later, the traditional, "dead tree" newspapers delivered now day old news on Page 1, right column.

But there is an inverse function to these information flows -- a Twitter cannot be verified for its accuracy, blogs are not required to enact due diligence to ensure what they post is true, but the New York Times can be held liable for printing lies.  So if you're doing academic research, a New York Times article can be cited, but not a blog or Twitter.  It's the price you pay for being first to post, last to tell the truth.

At best, blogs can be a thorn in the side of traditional medias and markets, digitizing the epithet that "the emperor wears no clothes."  They can be excellent, convenient fact checkers (in blog form or Twitter!), pointing out bald faced lies being passed off as truths.  Given their 21st century nature, they also can be a ripe field for finding ways to incorporate social software (like Twitter!) into the classroom.

At worst, they devolve into "flame wars," expressed as vile comments to a controversial blog posting.  Back in the day when RFCs were ubiquitous to Internet culture, everybody who was "logged in" knew how to behave, because everybody was pounding out telnet commands on flickering green vt100 emulators -- they were all part of the same "digital native" culture.  Then, in the 1990s, Prodigy and AOL started selling Usenet connections to their customers, relationships ruptured, and nasty conversations erupted.  The result, "information superhighway rage,"  where people access the Internet not to learn, but to devolve into petty squabbles that accomplish nothing.

I said last week, this "digital divide" is not so much about a difference in access, as it is a difference in culture.   So when a troll flames a newbie, netiquette breaks down, just like teachers' early experiences in the classroom, when we first understood what "unaccountable" student conversations looked liked.  Flame wars, like unmanaged classrooms, are people shouting at each other, as if they were on cable TV.

Like so many of my earlier blog postings, I have to leave a topic incomplete, knowing that I haven't made my point clear to everybody (the Twitter responses make that clear...), but like life and children, at some point you have to let go, regardless of how you could make the posting better, more clear.  So keep thinking about the digital divide, and how it disrupts the 21st century classroom.  Let's move on to today's experiential section, looking at some examples of educational blogs, or "edublogs."

Module

Developing an virtual toolbox


When I taught high school Chemistry, the principal of the school, Bruce Billig, was fond of saying at Professional Development sessions that teachers should take what we learn about better teaching techniques, and "put it in your toolbox." I was more interested in developing my own toolbar, developing teaching aids accessible with a click of a mouse on a button.  What we're looking at in today's class are the massive data flows on the Internet, and how to channel them in ways that will help us find the educational resources we need to develop better lesson plans.

Often, blogs are little more than esoteric diatribes about meaningless jargon and unending drivel.  On the other side of the blog bust are posts which are little more than jigsaws of web links that supposedly have something to do with the title of the blog posting.  Think about how I have been writing this blog, how I present the material in each posting, what this blog's relationship is to the class.  At the very least, you should see this blog as a resource for people late or absent to a class.  Instead of holding on to extra copies for students who couldn't make a particular class, I can simply say, "read the blog posting for that class.  All the materials you need are online, so just click on the links, and read the 'Evaluation' section at the end of the posting for the homework assignment."  Writing edublogs can help teachers lay out before the class exactly we want to accomplish, like a lesson plan, but in a format easily accessible to students.

So a blog should be written to satisfy the needs of the reader, not as a therapeutic device for PTSD patients.  The infamous "list of list" pages, where a topic is mentioned in the title of a blog posting, and all that follows is a list of links to materials related to the topic is a common trope in blog writing.  But it's only a static page of information, reflecting all of the online research done in making the list.  As soon as the blog entry is posted, the page grows old, neither updated or revised, an electronic dusty book.

A lot of teachers' blog pages are very similar, listing outlines of content, sample exams, student rankings, but never showing what is most important in education: how learning new concepts can reshape our understandings and perceptions of the world around us.  Instead of writing a list and saying, "there, I'm a technologically savvy teacher," we need to push ourselves, just like we push our students.


OK, that's enough for me, and probably too much for you.  Let's see how we can take a list of online resources, and integrate them into an interactive lesson.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to gain a fuller understanding of  "edublogs."  Rounding up the usual suspects, most "edublog lists" will include the following nationally renown resources.
Here are some edublogs with a local NYC bent. 
And here is a vaunted list of lists!
Since this is Earth Science Week, here's a blog on GIS Education.



So let's take our eyes off this blog, and use some social software to do two things:
  1. From the list of edublogs listed above, find one that you find interesting to read.  Twitter me the name of the edublog.  First Twitter, first claim!  No two students can choose the same edublog.
  2. Read a posting from your chosen blog, and tweet a one sentence summary of that posting.



Writing Wikis


Blogs are primarily teacher-centered devices.  Many experts believe that blogs are not a helpful tool for collaborative writing projects.  The social softwares expressly designed for online collaborative writing projects are called wikis.  "Wiki" is an Hawaiian word, meaning "fast."  Wikis allow students to easily create and edit their own writings, and create links to other web pages. The most common wiki is of course, Wikipedia, which is an open-source collaboration of hundreds of writers, offering information that some argue isn't entirely reliable.  Although some studies indicate Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica, remember the difference between blogs and "dead tree" sources, the same difference apply to wikis -- if you plan to cite a reference in a research paper you are writing, you are always better off citing an established publisher that predates the online revolution, like NYT or Britannica, etc.

That being said, wikis offer an easy way for students to memorialize their writings for teacher evaluation.  Every student who has taken this class since 2007 has his or her work uploaded to our class wiki.  Instead of having a stack of student papers sitting on a desk, collecting dust, waiting for a teacher to read them, uploading student work to a wiki makes evaluation easier.  Teachers can pick away at evaluating student work whenever they have a few minutes between classes, on the weekend while waiting for the pot of chili to amalgamate, wherever there is Internet access, instead of carrying around a brick-heavy backpack, with stacks of papers.

Like blogs, wikis can offer a matrix of information about a specific topic, like lesson plans, by anyone who is willing to upload their work, to anyone who is interested in downloading their information. Over the years, my students have developed one of the best lesson plan wikis on the Internet.  Soon, all of you will be contributing to our lesson plan wiki.  For example, here are several lesson plan wikis:
And here are some more general content providers that aren't wikis per se, but offer materials that could be useful in the classroom.

 To learn more about blogs and wikis, several online resources and seminars are available to help educators get comfortable using them.  Of course, we could always use ERIC to find existing educational research on blogs and wikis!  I typed in 'blog' and 'wiki' into the search engine, and came up with the following papers, cited in correct APA format, of course.

Ray, J. (2006). Welcome to the Blogoshere: The Educational Use of Blogs (aka Edublogs). 330 South Campus Ave., Indianapolis, IN.: Kappa Delta Pi Record. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EJ 738 088)

Poling, C. (2005). Blog On: Building Communication and Collaboration Among Staff and Students. 1710 Rhode Island Ave NW, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20036: Learning and Leading with Technology. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EJ 697 316)

Lawler, C. (2008). Action Research as a Congruent Methodology for Understanding Wikis: The Case of Wikiversity. Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK.: Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EJ 840 803)

'nuff sed.


Evaluation

Homework #2


Deliverable #1: Each group will upload their Homework #1 research (APA citations) to their group's wiki page.  

Deliverable #2: Each group will find 5 lesson plan Webpages that offer a lesson plan that pertains to the group's Aim, and are not already on the lesson plan wiki. Each lesson plan reference will include a hyperlink, and a few sentences describing why this is a good lesson plan for your Aim. Please use the bulleted web sites above as a starting point to finding your lesson plan web sites.  

Deliverable #3: Each group will access the linked resources on this blog posting to answer the following questions on their group's wikipage :
  1. What is a blog, and describe three examples of edublogs on the Internet, including URL addresses.
  2. What is a wiki, and describe three examples of education wikis on the Internet, including URL addresses.
Deliverable #4: Each student will tweet a response to the following question: after reading the article, "7 Things You Should Know About..."  list three educational social softwares you might use in your classroom in a Twitter to the class profile.

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