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.

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.

Open up the test item template.
Go back to the Adobe file.
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.'
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.
Once all of the text is highlighted, copy the text (Edit | Copy or Ctrl-c).
Go back to the test item template, and paste (Edit | Paste or Ctrl-v) the text into the document.
Hit the 'Enter' key.
Make sure the 'Format Paragraph' option is selected.
Delete any extra paragraphs '¶' in the question section. You should have two ¶ marks at the end of the question.
Save (File | Save or Ctrl-s) the Word file. Make sure to give the Word file a name you can remember.
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.'
"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.
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.
Hit the 'Enter' key and save the Word file.
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.
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.

Select the question stem. Click on the Question Mark button.
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.
Select the text section below the graphic. Click on the Text button.
Select the answer section. Click on the Answer button.
Save the test item document.
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.

.

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:

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.
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:

Curriki (slow load)
Merlot
Connexions
Thinkfinity
Scholastic
Top 20 Education
Kathy Schrock
Federal Resources for Educational Excellence
NEA Lesson Plans

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 :

What is a blog, and describe three examples of edublogs on the Internet, including URL addresses.
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.

.

10.10.2009

Module #1 Addendum

Okay, so our first class had some bumps in it. But you're all good students (I know most of you already, and Dr. Gardner wouldn't have passed you if you weren't). So here's the homework I assigned yesterday:

Get in groups of 3
Get an Aim
Align your Aim to State, City and National Standards
Use ERIC to find 2-3 research articles related to the lesson
Create APA citations for the ERIC articles

In addition, please reread the Preface to yesterday's blog posting and click on the links in the text as well, and do the following:

send me a reply tweet with your definition of what the "digital divide" means.

To send me a reply tweet, log into your twitter account, and in the "What are you doing?" box, begin by typing "@ boricua_edu_tek" then write your definition of the digital divide. Then click the 'Update' box.

P.S. Did we all figure out that Obama was humbled by receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Enjoy your weekend.

10.08.2009

Module 1: Writing the Body Electric

Bridging digital divides

Preface:

Leaving the sage on the stage for the guide on the side

Collaborative environments are virtual workplaces where students and teachers can communicate, share information, and work together.

— 2009 Horizon Report: The K12 Edition

Good teaching is about learning, learning is about experimenting, experimenting leads to better teaching. So this cycle I'm revamping my lessons for this course, trying to make them more accessible to both digital natives and immigrants. What I've learned from teaching this course is that already, some students in this class will have instinctively, maybe even eagerly, clicked on the two hyperlinks already tagged in this posting. Those students are our digital natives, the "netgen" students. In their world, "everybody has MySpace." Of course today, MySpace is old school, everybody today is on Facebook. So Friend me! (lol ;-)

For every digital native in this class, there will likely be a digital immigrant, someone closer to my age who learned how to read in about the same way that classrooms were organized back then: chairs in a row, students placed alphabetically into them in a linear fashion. You had to read chapter one before you could read chapter two. These people experience brain freeze when they read "two hyperlinks" and "tagging" in the previous paragraph. And three more hyperlinks in the next two sentences!

Our digital immigrants have politely read the two paragraphs above, like all the books they have read in their lives, without feeling they had the right to put their hand on the mouse, and click on the words in different colors. They'd be interrupting the professor's words, hardly acceptable behavior for the disciplined student. And sitting right next to them, the digital native is reading a few sentences, clicking away to some other text, hiding an IM or two under the table, returning at his or her leisure to these words that I have spent the morning writing up. The digital native will call this multitasking, the digital immigrant will call it "CPA," or "continuous partial attention." Between these two sets of students is the "digital divide."

This buzz word has several connotations. The earliest, and still most common definition of the digital divide is shaped by class and access, that is, there is a technological divide between affluent communities who can afford to buy new computers every two years, and low-income communities who can't. But the distinction I'm trying to convey here is more one of culture and use of technologies. Young students are always going to be more tech-savvy than the adults getting paid to teach them. Someday the young ones in our class will gain the years we digital immigrants already have, and in the future they too will be outflanked by the new young turks, impatient with their teachers' insistence on using "mad boring" technologies like Wii, Sidekicks, and Second Life.

Here's the bottom line. Teachers today need to communicate with students in ways that are different from reading a book cover to cover. Reading and writing between teachers and students need to be more interactive, allowing students to choose variations on a path to mastering the day's lesson. The products of a class should be collaborative, a permeable boundary between teacher and student allowing focused, filtered, and framed questions to enhance the knowledge of both.

Module

Using Social Software to Write Collaboratively

What we're moving into is the use of Web 2.0 in the classroom. Let's take a simple example to get our feet wet.

Everybody tweet me @boricua_edu_tek their definition of the "digital divide."

We have just used some social software in our classroom! Great! Now all we have to do is figure out what that means...

According to Wikipedia, social software encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. Here are some additional references to help flesh out its definition:

Twittering is part of a subset of social software called microblogging. It simply means posting a short sentence or two online telling your friends what's going on with you at that time. Tweeting is ubiquitous to the American psyche. Our President uses it. Even dead Presidents can use it. We can follow Lady Liberty online.

Hundreds of Twitter feeds are available for educators. Here are some of the more popular ones.

There are even lesson plans that use Twitter! Here's one on facilitating reading Jane Austen's Emma. Bank Street College developed a lesson plan as well.

For the rest of this class, we will be using Twitter to begin developing our own lesson plans.

Researching Lesson Plans

Let's start by getting into groups of 2-3 and choosing a content area for a lesson plan that your group will create. Send me a tweet (@boricua_edu_tek) that includes:

The names of everyone in your group
Your content area (Math, Science, ELA, Social Studies, Arts, Phys. Ed., Family & Consumer Science, Health, or Career Development and Occupational Studies)

The group that posts first gets that content area. No two groups will have the same content area.

Once I have tweeted an OK to your group and content area, think about a lesson you would like to teach in that subject area. Tweet me the Aim of your lesson.

At this point, your group is ready to start researching online educational resource to help your group write your lesson. The first place to start is to answer the following question:

My lesson plan is aligned to what City, State, and National standards?

Answering this question will take some time. Let's look at an example of a lesson plan I used to develop this week's science class. We are now going to look at two windows at the same time. When you click on this link, a second window will open, and you will see in the second window a lesson plan on life science/ecosystems. After you click on the link, you can come back to this page by clicking on the button that says "Blogger: ..."

The first thing you see in this lesson plan is a description of the National Science standards that are aligned to the lesson. Next are the New York State Living Environmental standards that have to do with this lesson. New York State standards have "Standards," which are broad summaries of the general topics that are explored over a semester, "Key Ideas," which are parts or phrases of a Standard that require more detailed explanation, and "Performance Indicators," which can be covered over a couple of classes. You will be providing the same sort of information in your lesson plan.

Here are the Standards resources your group will need to use to figure out what standards are aligned to your lesson's Aim.

While one or two in your group are grappling with that question, the rest of your group can be looking at this question:

What published articles can help me write my lesson plan?

By far, the best online educational database to answer this question is the Education Resources Information Center, otherwise known as ERIC. Here is the procedure to find articles on ERIC:

Check the 'Full-Text Availability' box on.
Type in keywords (important words in the Standards are good).
Click the 'Search' button.
If you find an article you are interested in, click the 'ERIC full text' link at the bottom of the summary of the article, and you will download the full article.

After you scan/read the article, and find it to be helpful, you will need to write down all of the pertinent information so that anyone else who would like to read the article can find it easily. Educators usually use the APA Citation Format to memorialize helpful educational articles. Here is what the citation should look like:

Author, A. A. (1996). Title of ERIC document (Report No. AB-12). City, ST: Sponsoring Entity. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 123 456)

Institutional Author. (1996). Title of ERIC document (Report No. AB-12). City, Country: Sponsoring Entity. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 123 456)

Many people can explain this citation technique better than me, so here's an explanation from Indiana Wesleyan University. If you're still confused how to write an APA citation, here is an additional resource.

I think that's enough for one day, so let's recap what each group need to accomplish from this class.

Evaluation

Homework #1

Deliverable #1: Students will form groups of no less than two and no more than three students. Each group will decide which content area (math, science, social science, art, or language arts) they will research for their lesson plans, etc.

Deliverable #2: Each group will choose an Aim for a lesson plan appropriate to the chosen content area.

Deliverable #3: Each group will identify the National, New York State and New York City standards that align to the Aim, using the Educational Standards listed on the class wiki.

Deliverable #4: Each group will use the ERIC search engine to locate 2-3 articles that pertain instruction and delivery of that Aim.

If you have questions outside of class, tweet me!

Fall 2009

4.03.2009

Module #5: Plagarism & the Demise of Critical Thinking

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. 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.

Keepin' it Current

Back in the day, "newspaper clipping" services would hire people to read through hundreds of publications, looking for specific research topic, and compile lists of summaries of these articles for other researchers to access when they were looking for current materials associated with an ongoing research project. 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 projects" have come online in the past few years to help Internet users sift through all of the webpages of interest.

Most newspapers offer a summary of the daily articles on the first or second page of the publication. RSS ("really simple syndication") feeds do the same thing online. For example, the Department of Education has an RSS feed that summarizes current agency events and announcements. Many newspapers offer educational RSS feeds as well. When RSS feeds first started coming out, people needed a software program called an "aggregator" to translate the feeds into readable articles. Today, most Web browsers have aggregators as an add-on applications, so you can read them the same way you would for a web page.

So many RSS feeds exist now, that it can take the whole day just to read through the summaries. Enter one of the best educational technology innovations in 2008, where RSS feeds are "mashed up," or sifted through for keywords that the user is interested in finding in articles. Let's look at my Yahoo pipe as an example of a mashup.

3.27.2009

Module #4: To Boldly Go Where..., Well, You Get the Picture

WebQuests

Escaping the dusky textbook

So far, we've looked at online educational resources and the nature of "educational social software." Blogs and wikis are by far the most common ESSs used by teachers today. Another genre predates the ubiquitous Web 2.0, the WebQuest. It dates way back to the 1990s, a time when Kathy Schrock owned the educational Internet. What is a WebQuest? Here's a definition:

A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity, where some or all of the material a student interacts with comes from the resources on the Internet. WebQuests eliminate the need for a student to search, sometimes endlessly for information on a topic, since prescreened links are provided in the WebQuest. Another benefit to using WebQuests is that they are easily created and support any curriculum topic. They are motivating and highly interactive, allowing students to use real life resources that are up to date.

WNET has an excellent online workshop about WebQuests. You might even be able to get professional credits for viewing it. Bernie Dodge's WebQuest About WebQuests is another good example, showing how to design roles for each of the students.

Educators need to view the WebQuest in two ways: how to design and evaluate it, the other is what each step of a WebQuest will look like to a student. Let's look at the final product first.

Instead of writing traditional text with links to click on, WebQuests are decidedly nonlinear, and take a constructivist approach to learning. Usually, the quest is divided in the following sections:

Students typically complete WebQuests in cooperative groups. Each student in each group has a specific research role. Let's look at one of mine, and see how they work.

Creating online inquiry

Framing student exploration

So we're back at the main issue of this colloquium: how to create educational writings that aren't like dusty books, that are more than static lists of information. Creating a storyline line for students to move back and forth through, allows students to learn at their own pace, a hallmark of differentiated instruction. Students searching out what they are specifically interested in, while keeping the focus and objectives of the online research intact is the goal of any successful WebQuest.

Building a WebQuest is easier than you may think. It's important to gather all the materials you want to include in the online lesson before you organize it into the above steps. Here are some additional resources to help you craft your WebQuest:

Bernie Dodge's WebQuest Resources
A Road Map for Designing WebQuests
Writing WebQuests for the Classroom
WebQuest Resources
Filiamentality
Zunal
Today's cutting edge is the Virtual Quest, sited at Second Life's Education Island

Evaluation

Homework #3

Let's recap what we've done, or should have done, by now:

Each group searched ERIC for relevant education articles (and APA citations) that relate to their lesson plan.
Each group uploaded their content area, relevant standards, Aim, ERIC summaries/citations to their wiki page.
Each group found 3-6 Internet lesson plans/Websites similar to their own lesson plan, and uploaded their results and summaries to their wiki page.
Each group completed the Blog WebQuest and uploaded their answers to their wiki page.
Each student posted a comment to this blog, identifying 3 kinds of ESS software listed in the "7 Things You Should Know About..." resource, and describing how you might implement them in your classroom.
Each group has created a lesson plan, using the Lesson Plan Template.
Each group has created several Regents based assessment questions to use during the Summary part of the lesson.

And now for today's homework.

Deliverable #1: Each group will use the materials they have gathered so far to develop a WebQuest. To do so, please follow the below steps:

Search for Web-based content that applies to your lesson plan (please use more than Google).

Organize the Introduction, Task, Process, Evaluation, Conclusion, and Teacher Page from your Internet materials, using one of the following templates if it helps.

Use an online resource to generate your WebQuest. The best free one is filamentality, another one is Quests 2 Teach. If you prefer to save your WebQuest to disk, you can use aclearn.net, seneca, or teach-nology.

As an alternative to #3, I am using Quest Garden to design my WebQuests. If your group would like to use my password to access the website, let me know, and we'll work something out.

That's It!

3.13.2009

Module #3: Classroom Assessments

Finishing Up: How can we know students learned the lesson?

Here is what each group should have completed so far:

150 word summary of your research for your lesson plan, including

NYS Standards – Make sure to include Key Ideas and Performance Indicators
(Note: use the National or other State Standards if there are no New York State Standards)
How the research informed your lesson plan
How you plan to implement what you learned from your research into your lesson plan
4 APA Citations

Six Website links that have lesson plans similar to one you created, and descriptions that will be added to our link list.
Complete the Online Collaborative Writing Project, which will help your group define the words, "blog," and "wiki."

Common Blog Features
Blog Characteristics Sheet
Blogger Planning Sheet
Process Rubric Sheet

Adding content to the Wikispace webpage, including

150 word summary
Lesson Plan Websites
Lesson Plan Websites
Definitions of Blogs and Wikis