Brainstorming TechStyle

Ever do the dots and brainstorming activity? I've been to more than a few professional development workshops and in-service days, and have even led a few. Dots and brainstorming is a frequent, though not unwelcome, way to gauge the sense of the group.  If you've never done it, here is how it works. First folks brainstorm ideas on large sheets of paper around the room. Then it is customary to give participants five dot stickers and have them walk around the room and put the dot next to the ideas they like the most. It works. And there is something to be said for getting people up and moving around a room. However, there is also something to be said for doing things efficiently and being able to archive and share results quickly.

Dotstorming  replaces the get up and walk around the room dot placing exercise. Last week in a workshop led by Chris McCaffrey, he shared this really great tool with us. Most of the teachers at the conference were somewhat savvy tech users. They liked using Dotstorming and saw some immediate ways to use it with their students in their classrooms.

Folks pointed out that it has some similarities to Padlet, which is one of my favorite ed tech tools . What dotstorming offers beyond Pallet is the voting feature. What I also like about it is that students can comment on any item on the page. Nice! One can embed links to YouTube videos. Finally, one can export the entire dotstorming board to a spreadsheet.

It is a super simple and easy tool to use. It doesn't do all that Pallet does but it does some things Padlet can't do. It is also much simpler to use than Padlet.

I have embedded a dotstorming wall onto this blog. Add ideas and then vote with your four dots on your favorite ideas. (I don't think you have to join to participate) but I'll know soon. I'm taking a risk here and it may not work. If the embedded wall doesn't work, try participating through the link that I provide.

Beware, dotstorming is mostly free, but more precisely it is a "freemium" service. You can only have five boards (collections of ideas) in a free account before you have to pay (or delete a board).

https://www.dotstorming.com/topic/58a3a32607753220024b1d80

Update- It seems it did work! One commenter suggested that one would need a larger class to use DotStorming. For the polling feature- sure. For getting students to interact, share pictures, ideas, and for archiving student feedback, I still think this is a very solid tool.

EdPuzzle and Google Classroom

Whether your class is flipped or not, EdPuzzle should be on your shortlist of essential tools. Why is EdPuzzle essential and so useful?

For starters, take any video from YouTube or Khan Academy (and other sites). Make any video interactive, by embedding questions right in the video.

This allows for:

• self-paced lessons. It lets students move through content they already understand to focus on what challenges them. Students are also able to stop and review content they missed the first time the teacher taught it. 
• students to ask questions that they too embarrassed to ask in class
• teachers to easily add images, interactive graphs, websites and comments to a video lesson
• students to respond to teacher posed questions
• full integration with Google Classroom.

Take it another step. Tape yourself either during class delivering the content or in advance of class. Now your lesson is archivable and interactive in ways it never was before.

Last week, at a terrific math conference hosted by the local intermediate unit, called Google and the Student Centered Secondary Math Classroom. EdPuzzle was highlighted an essential tool for the presenters. I'll give the conference a separate post soon.


By the way, I rarely go to edpuzzle.com as I usually use the chrome extension to do my edpuzzling. It gives me all the utility I need and saves me some clicks.

Prussian Model

Bob Sornson writes a great article in Medium about the Cover and Test model of education that Horace Mann imported from Prussia in the 1840's. Check it out, it is a convincing read. He writes:

"Cover content, give tests, and sort students. Our existing system does this effectively, year after year, until a vast majority of our students have been sorted away from the love of learning, sorted away from the economic and social opportunities that are part of the age of innovation, technology, and learning..... 

As an observer and participant in this education system, the most amazing thing to me is how tenaciously we hold on to a model that offers such limited success. (my bold) 

The Cover Test Sort education model was never designed to help all students become successful learners. It may have generally served the needs of society in the late 19th and early 20th century, but ...., as learning and complex thinking skills have become more important for us to develop the academic and problem-solving skills that lead to good jobs and social opportunity, the CTS education model is failing our society.

• All students are limited by standardized one-size-fits-all instruction, but it is a special catastrophe for vulnerable children who are less able to keep up with the pace of instruction.
• By the beginning of fourth grade only 34 percent of American children are at proficient reading levels (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2013)
• Only 20 percent of fourth grade children who are eligible for free or reduced lunch are at proficient reading levels (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2013)
• Among 12th grade students — remember that a significant group of students has already dropped out by this point — 26 percent score at or above proficient levels in math, and 38 percent are proficient or better in reading (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2013)"

1943. School in 2017 in USA looks much the same. 

I'll be the first to say that many things ail American schooling. The Prussian model is only one cause of these dismal stats. Indeed, you can argue that poverty and socio-economic status play a larger role than any instructional method in the failures listed above. What I am struck by most, however, is that the solution offered to any of these problems is usually a doubling down on the Cover and Test model. Sornson is right; it is an amazingly tenacious model.  Kids aren't learning? More cover and test. Poor kids? Extra cover and test. Falling behind the Chinese?* Double down on cover and test. This system is so ingrained that most people find it hard to imagine a different model of schooling. Even worse, our schools perpetuate this. It is one of the most effective lessons we teach. Future voters and stakeholders and policy makers learn very clearly what school is "supposed" to look like. We at least teach that very, very well.

* Arguably, China seems to do cover and test well. But many consider the Finnish system to be the best in the world. The Finns to not Cover and Test.

Music to My Ears

It is easy to gauge success as a teacher of students. It is harder to gauge success as a technology integration specialist. Why I am thrilled by this success is because this came from the teacher! I only planted a seed awhile ago. But I never said, "Hey, for this assignment why don't you....." Our gifted music teacher did this by herself. She asked for help in its execution, but it was her idea. Hearing her interest in doing this was indeed "music to my ears".

In his SAMR model, Puentedera explains that  the best use of technology falls in the transformative stages of modification and redefinition. In her music composition class, +Michele Zuckman,  gave an assignment that did just this. For starters, she had students use Noteflight to compose their scores. At the very least, this component of the assignment already shifted the learning to the Augmentation level, though I feel parts of it sit at the Modification level as without a keyboard students can compose and then listen to the music they have created, which I feel is significant task redesign. More importantly, using Noteflight (somewhat) easily allowed for the next steps of the assignment of which you will read after the fold.

When All You Have is a Hammer...

I wish I found this image for my last post on teacher comments.
Lotta work ! Lotta learning? 

I was Googling for a google site called something like "Not an Essay" which listed things a student can do instead of writing an essay. (If you find it, can you link to it in a comment? I'm still looking for it. I thought I book-marked it; clearly I didn't.) instead, I came across this terrific post called "This is Not an Essay" by Lee Skallerup Bessette.

My reaction? ?Yes, Yes and more Yes!"

She writes:

It is important to understand norms, to be able to replicate them.* But it is also important to interrogate why these norms exist and to be able to see the process for what it is: a process.

 “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. – Proverb”

Set word or page-lengths, prescribed number of sentences per paragraph, limiting the number of paragraphs to five… All of this focuses the student on the form, rather than the content and purpose. The purpose of any essay then becomes, to meet the prescribed formatting requirements, rather than to communicate to a reader. Form and content are intrinsically linked, and students know that. They practice it every day. Except when they are writing for school. (my italics) 

It's a must read. 

Why? Because this all gets to bigger things. Either we teach the kids to challenge the system or conform to the system. 

If we don't help kids to learn ways to express themselves beyond "the hammer" of an essay- a medium which they will never use beyond their formal education- we've done them a disservice. We've made it harder for them to change the system with their words.

* I very much like that she does not fall into binary thinking. It is important to understand and replicate norms. I am not advocating abolishing the essay. It is important. But it isn't the end all and be all of student writing.

Margins Part 2

Just came across this link through my Google+ feed in which David Webster says the same thing more eloquently than me. He writes:

This seems to match my experience. I have asked students, increasingly, about their working processes. This has been interesting in all sorts of ways, but it was notable that none ever mentions that they refer to previous written feedback. Ever. They would probably have to log back in to an Electronic Management of Assessment system to retrieve it, or in the ancient times (still in effect in some lands), find that crumpled paper in the bottom of a bag.*** An obstacle too far. So what can we do instead?

Filling in the Margins

Recently, I suggested that if you ask students if they read your comments, you'd find out that more than half of them don't. I was talking with a colleague, +Layla Helwa  last night who said the exact same thing. The students check their grade – and put it away! All that work never read, all that work for nothing…and as we increasingly move into paperless digital management systems, I expect even fewer students are reading teacher comments. If they aren't reading it on papers handed back to them, they certainly aren't going back into an LMS or Google Classroom or eBackPack to find what you've written.

I don't have easy solutions to this, though I do have some ideas.

1) Consider audio feedback. Record your feedback. Some of our marginalia is hard to follow. And while some of our savvier students will know the traditional symbols and shortcuts we use, most won't. I know that I've had students thinking I've been agreeing with them when I've tried to point out agreement error.

Do you really think a student is going to read any of the comments
accompanying this or any grade below a B for that matter? Where is
the learning? 

2) Insist that students rewrite. I have a colleague, +Jeanette Kelleher, who lets students rewrite for a new grade as many times as they want. You want to have students learn from their mistakes, here is great way to get kids to read corrections.

3) When I taught middle school language arts and social studies, I had students keep an errors sheet. I made a deal with them that I would usually correct only two things per paper and never more than three. In return, they had to add these corrections to their error list and check the error list before submitting new assignments. They were not allowed to make the same mistake twice. The error list was part of the portfolio and turned in with the folder containing the newest assignment. By the end of the year, I'd have 40-50 errors students would repeatedly check for. This took some work though it was highly effective. I wouldn't add misspelled words to the list. However, I would add errors such as its vs. it's. 

4) This suggestion doesn't solve the short term problem and good teachers do this to some degree. I encourage you to be even more intentional. Keep track of common errors and frontload the instruction next time; whether that next time is the next week or with the next year's students. 

5) Use portfolios to promote self-reflection. Make the students responsible, at least in part, for deciding how well they are learning. It's a weird game we play. If we step back and think about it, we'd realize it. We don't really ask students how good they think their work is. It is almost as if some of they are saying, "I don't know how good this is; here, you decide."