The Power of Words

"There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication." -John Dewey

"Getting Students to Talk"

Check out this article on generating engaging, maeningful class discussions that let you be more sure that learning is taking place...

How Students Cheat in the Digital Age

Check out the slideshow on this site showing 10 common ways in which students use technology to cheat.  It brings up some interesting points about what constitutes learning, what's the nature of good assessment, and what kinds of tools should and should not be allowed to be used in class or on tests. 

As teachers, it's important to keep up with the technology that our students use-- if we are nervous around technology and uncomfortable using it, we only place ourselves farther away from our students' lives.  Our students are digital natives-- by knowing about the tools they use and knowing how to speak their language, we show them that their lives are interesting to us, that we are lifelong learners, and that we recognize the power their technology has when used for learning.  That last part is our most important job-- I was always surprised at how much my students knew about using the latest smartphones, applications, and programs, but how little potential they saw for these programs to be used to learn.  It was my role as a teacher to take them down that road.

One thing I took from this slideshow is that we need to re-think the format and substance of the assessments we give.  If our assessments focus on simple recall, factual knowledge, and memorization-- basically anything a computer can do faster and more reliably than a person-- what are we really asking our students to learn?  Outdated skills that won't enable them to be competitive in the job market?  If our tests are grounded in real-world application, 21st-century skills, and opportunities for real mastery of the work, then cheating either won't be possible or students won't want to cheat because they'll be vested in the interesting, challenging, meaningful work.

Carving Out our Own Space: Wiki-making in Room 5-10

I'd like to take a few minutes of your time to offer an analysis of a project in which my students, my co-teachers, and I are currently engaged. The over-arching goal of the project was to teach our students some research skills without resorting to the same methods that we learned as high school students. This goal grew out of a concern that the research methods we developed in college differed drastically from the index-card methods of yesteryear. Furthermore, we wanted to provide meaningful and practical learning for students whose careers eliminated the need for college yet still demanded the skills of finding and organizing information. Our dilemma, then, was to fit the important content of research skills into the new forms of our day.

Planning and Justification
As my colleagues--Julianna Tress and Judi Russo--and I fleshed out the details for the research project, we puzzled most over the medium of presenting the research. Conventional methods seemed cumbersome here: to have students research information in hard copy texts, take hand-written notes, and then present their findings in a 5 page paper seemed too abstract and foreign for our students. And so, we tried to imagine different mediums that would elicit the same skills--finding, manipulating and organizing information. We thought of websites, podcasts, video recordings of interivews, a documentary, and too many other ideas to list here. As we calculated the necessary (and available) technology, we ultimately settled on having the students create a wiki using the free, hosted software at Wikispaces. A wiki, we reasoned, would allow them to create a taxonomy of information, list sources for their research findings, and to work on writing the text in smaller chunks.

The Project
The gist of the project is a six-week group research project formatively assessed with deadlines and summatively assessed by a final product--a wiki. Each week, with the exception of the fourth, the students were responsible for handing in (sharing) a document that shows that they met the weekly deadline. The first week was slated for choosing a topic and generating questions to guide research. The second we planned to research answers to the questions, using both library resources and general internet resources. The third week was dedicated to organizing the information first through a mind map and then a formal outline. The fourth and fifth week were setup for writing and editing the copy or text to go on the wiki. And then the final week was to be spent transferring the text to the wiki and editing the style of the pages. Ultimately, the project should produce a five page wiki--each student in a group of four would be responsible for one of the four subpages with a joint effort on the front page.

The Problem Areas
Before talking about why we really like the project, let me outline a few of the problematic areas we have found as we've been working with the students.
1. One week was insufficient to teach mini-lesson on research methods and to give students time for guided practice. The obvious solution to this would be requiring students to complete research outside of classroom, but our general modus operendi has been to keep all of the work in the classroom because of our students' general resources at home and at public spaces.
2. Allowing students to select topics for research necessitated a wider variety of research venues than we anticipated. Topics such as Jersey Shore, partying or even vice in Camden were not easily researched using the wonderful resources that our school library has. Instead, we had to modify, en media res, to help our students find appropriate and informative websites, articles, etc.
3. We ran into a great deal of pacing problems as well because this is our first time working through the project. We've been discovering a great deal about the constraints of working with technology in the classroom. In a certain sense, this has been teaching us all a great deal of patience as well as ingenuity with computers and internet browsing. On some levels, I see this as a bit of success because it's building skills in our students to make them less dependent on a school setting with a teacher looking over their shoulder. Still, we've learned a great deal about adapting projects and stretching our expectations and parameters.

The Success
Throughout the project, we've met with an agreable disposition from our students, and as many of you know, this is a success in and of itself. Even our most problematic students have been at least absorbed in their work, and therefore, they haven't had the opportunity to engage in "non-learning" activities. This has been a certain success for us, at least from a class room management perspective. But we've also had some academic successes: our students have developed (or honed) their analytic skills as they have appraised various websites, databases, and search engines in pursuit of the questions they have developed. While this is a bit more staged than an organic research opportunity (think about the last time you watched a how-to video or looked for reviews of a particular product), the formalization of what we all are already doing has provided the students with an opportunity to reflect upon their learning and skills. This is somewhat like reading poetry: the formality of the poem forces us to become reflective on its means as well as its meaning. Pardon the literary analogy.

Here's the meat of my post, and my real reason for taking the time to write it. Despite the difficulties and experimental nature of our project, we have met with a great deal of academic and interpersonal success. By finding out the kinds of things our students are interested in and guiding them into an organized knowledge about that topic, we've begun to establish a different and perhaps better sort of rapport with them. I'd like to think that this rapport is based on our willingness to learn alongside our students, adapt to real world circumstances, and engage in academic activities that might actually matter to them. In my mind, this is the goal of teaching in the 21st century. And though I detest buzzwords and trendy ways of discussing things, I have to admit that this kind of timely project provides the context in which our kids can at least possibly thrive, learning skills that actually prepare them for the digital world in which we--as American adults--are already thriving. This is mainly a philosophic arrangement of the successes we have encountered as we've been doing the project, but we will keep you up to date via comments as we meet--one hopes--with continual success as a group of learners in room 5-10.

Writing College Essays

The article below offers some good advice on college essay-writing.  What else can we, as a dapertment, add to our knowledge of teaching the art of college essay-witing?  If you have done this with your students, please post on the topic and I will add it to the department site. 

So much of teaching college essay-writing depends on the question, really.  I used to say that they had to be sure to do two things:

1) Make it personal and sincere.  It's easy to see right through platitudes.

2) Answer the question directly.  Being circumspect shows that you're either avoiding the question or can't organize your esay well.

Here's the article.

Google NGrams

Hi teachers-

I'm really, really excited about this new tool from Google.  Google NGrams allows you to search trends of words appearing in a database of 5.2 billion words from all of the millions of books Google has in its digitized Google Books catalog.  It's a very interesting tool in that it's a window into people's thoughts over the past 500 years.  I can only begin to imagine the new research opportunities available to students.  The discussions that you could generate with this tool are limitless.  Check the tool out here, and see below for a few examples.


            

 

This should be a really fun thing to play with over Christmas.  Let me know how you're using it in your classroom.  And keep those success stories coming in!  I'll post them after break.

Thanks, and have a great break,
Marc

What Kind of Person Are You?

I know many of you like Dan Pink and his works... if you're not familiar with him, I highly recommend reading A Whole New Mind, his book on right-brain thinking and Drive, a fascinating study in what motivates people and what doesn't-- especially useful for teachers.  In the meantime, check out this short end-of-year self-reflection guide:

http://www.danpink.com/archives/2010/12/there-are-two-kinds-of-people-in-the-world

Also see relevant Dan Pink info on http://www.first180.org/.