Teaching to reach every single student

As I have been reporting here, I have been working hard with my 7th and 8th grade students this year (for the first time) using blogs and podcasts. I plan on completing Will Richardson’s trinity by working with wikis in the next marking period.

My students have loved, loved, loved using blogs and creating podcasts, and their results with each have been extraordinary. Using the blog work as evidence, I can see that every single student’s writing has improved over the course of the year. Other teachers had told me to expect this, but it is nonetheless humbling.

By the way, I don’t think it is the “blog” that does it, I think it is the chance to do so much writing, and so much writing in public, and so much writing in public with a real audience that makes the difference.

The podcasts have opened up a different world in my classroom. While blogs are a community tool, we write alone. I have had my students author podcasts as a group project in order to review for an upcoming test. They decided on a topic and/or subtopic within this unit (Reproduction and Development this time), they worked as a group to decide on a format (lecture, skit, video). They then wrote the script, recorded, and edited their podcasts (with some help from me).

I devoted a few class periods for this work and marveled at the level of engagement I saw in the students. Each student was actively involved and invested in the outcome. And they really learned their material.

Given all this success, I have been asked to do some presentations to teacher and administration groups, which has caused me to wonder (and to try to explain) just what is happening. Since, I am a visual person, I had to put together a diagram:

I think that these tools (blogs, wiki, and podcasts) give unprecedented ability for students to author and collaborate on their work. And this collaboration can take place, easily, in or out of the classroom. And since this is happening in a public space, there is the opportunity for authentic interaction with people beyond the school walls.

I have come to believe it is the opportunity to author that matters to the students and to their learning, not the tools themselves. And since the the number of possible tools is expanding daily, I am very much looking forward to what kinds of student authoring we will see next.

It is great to think and write about the impact of internet technologies like blogs, wikis, and podcasts on students’ actively (and creatively) participating in/authoring their educational experiences. And it is great to see how other teachers are making use of these technologies in ways that make me say, “I wish I’d thought of that.”

But then it’s good, at least every now and then, to take and break and play, which is what I have been doing. I have been playing with some very cool online tools. And, needless to say they have a lot to do with all that noble, important stuff in the first paragraph.

So, here’s a little tool through the sandbox (at present).

First, there’s Gliffy, which is an online outlining tool like Inspiration. You can create diagrams using shapes and connectors, just like you’d expect, and you have plenty of templates to choose from. Once you edit the drawing and get it just so, you can dowload it in jpeg, svg, and png formats. From a usability perspective, the interface is very friendly and useful (see screenshot). Better still, you can email collaborators (or potential collaborators) who can then work with you on the drawing. This is what makes it great for me, the part about collaboration.

Continuing with the collaboration theme is Zoho, which is a suite of standard office (small and big “O”) applications like a word processor, spreadsheet application, and presentation creator. Zoho also has other tools, like a notebook, project manager, outliner — even chat, wikis, and meeting spaces. And they all seem to be free.

So, with these tools, I imagine an easy to follow workflow. Students (or teachers) are working on projects together requiring words, images, and diagrams. Maybe even a slideshow. We can all work on the same documents in online collaboration and then share our results with whoever.

Next, there’s Picnik. It’s an online photo editor with lots of neat features. Of course, you can crop, resize, correct exposures, and even apply some special effects. You can upload photos or get direct access to Flickr Photostreams, Picasa Web Albums, even Webcams. The neatest feature for me is the interface, which is fun and friendly, with lots of cool, widgety touches. Imagine editing for everyone, you might say.

So, imagine this workflow. I am on my way somewhere and witness something cool, say a duck driving a car. I whip out my cellphone and snap a picture. Then, I instantly upload the photo to my Flickr account and realize with a little tweaking I could win a Pulitzer. So, I open it in Picnik, make some adjustments, which saves it back to my Flickr account, from which I can post it to my blog and share it with the world.

In fact, I am imagining this workflow for a school wide (maybe a district wide) project to mark Earth Day this year. My idea is to have the students and teachers take pictures of the natural world around them. They can then upload them to my Flickr account. I can tweak them if needed, and in no time, we can have an album to share with our take on Earth Day 2007.

I’ll report back on how it goes.

Blogged with Flock

I am in the middle (well I will be in the middle once Spring Break ends) of another round of podcasting with my middle school science students. This time, we are working together to prepare review materials to close out our unit on Reproduction and Development.

Some highlights (for now): I have a group preparing a video podcast which is an interpretive dance illustrating the human female reproduction system; another group is doing some hand animation for a video podcast on the human male reproductive system; and another group preparing a rap celebrating asexual reproduction.

In the middle of all this comes this article from the San Luis Opispo Times, describing a course in a local school teaching podcasting:

They’ll develop a variety of skills while working with new technology. “Public speaking is involved, audio editing, script writing, organization and presentation,” Bissell said. “They’ll be introducing background sounds like they do on NPR sometimes, to make it a little bit more exciting, and using background music, too.” After the students create their podcasts, they will upload them to the school’s Web site for downloading by the general public. Bissell has several ideas that he wants to suggest to the class, including an interview with the oldest person in their family, tutorials on how to repair or construct something, and a video of their favorite hobby. San Luis Obispo Tribune | 04/01/2007 | Atascadero High curriculum: Reading, writing and podcasting

The thing that excites me the most about this is what happens next. What worlds open up for the students now that they have this set of tools? How do they choose to explore and document their world(s)? And how will they share those explorations with th erest of us?

This is a brief update on what I have been working on for the past week in my school.

After some time sharing with other teachers in my building about blogs and what has been happening to and with my students since I began my (science) class blog back in October, some things (meaning blogs) have really started to happen.

Last week, I set up edublogs for two of our English teachers, one in 8th grade; the other in 6th. One of the best parts about the whole process was demonstrating that it takes minutes to set up a blog and BAM!! you now have a brand new tool to use with your students.

As many of us have discovered, a blog is not just one thing. I imagine this is particularly true in an educational setting. (Note to self — look for articles about this).

The point is this, these two teachers are now thinking actively about what this tool will allow them to do with their students.

Then, on Monday, I was helping one of our Spanish teachers record some dialogue podcasts (the whole language/dialogue thing seems perfect for podcasts to me). In figuring out how and where to post them, I arrived at the solution that she could post them on the blog she didn’t yet have. BAM!! Now she does.

Right now I am really charged up on the idea that we build it (the blog) and they (the amazing instructional moments) will come.

Earlier, I wrote about presenting at a technology conference for educators in New York. I had the chance to speak about using podcasting as a instructional tool (and a powerful one) in my 7th and 8th grade science classroom.

Here is a video podcast of that presentation.

Enjoy!

Recently, I have been having conversations (both with myself and others) about what would it be like to decentralize the (traditional) information flow in school (starting with my classroom) from teacher-centric to student-centric.

I have been thinking about it mostly in terms of grades, since my third marking period grades will be do so and there will be the usual scramble to follow up with students who are missing work and coordinating getting all of that in, etc. etc.

One of the biggest stopgaps is me. I am the holder of all of this information and it is (so the story goes) my job to manage this information and report it out to students and their parents. So I have been wondering about how to decentralize this information.

Then, I saw this piece on Will Richardson’s blog. He was reporting on having listened to a two-year old talk TED presentation by Charles Leadbetter on organizing organizations. He was the part that knocked me out:

He finished with a great
point: Imagine you took all the children currently in school and had
one percent acting as co-developers of education, creating and
publishing materials. What would that do to our educational system?
Imagine the potential in that. Weblogg-ed

So, I am trying to imagine this.

And, in my imagining, I see all the things we have been talking about, like blogs, wikis, and podcasts. I see students becoming, like Hall Davidson says, citizen-journalists, not just observing their world (or worse the already proscribed world of adults) but rather participating and connecting with it in ways that were impossible until recently.

I think the imagining is really worth it. Will you join me?

Blogged with Flock

I had the pleasure to spend the day at the Tech Expo 2007 Conference hosted by the Lower Hudson RIC (Westchester County, New York).

While I have been a part of the Web 2.0/Read-Write web community for most of the last year and have greatly benefitted by blogging and being blogged (so to speak), it was very exciting to be with a group of educators actually dealing with bringing ourselves and our students into a new world.

And I saw and heard some amazing things from other teachers. There was a Middle School Spanish teacher, Faith Braut who is doing some really great things with podcasts with both her Spanish and ESL students. She even does testing via iPods. Check it out! There was a High School teacher, Geoff Curtis who is using podcasting to engage students in Current Issues in Education.

One of the keynote speakers, Hall Davidson, whose enthusiasm was completely infectious, challenged us to work with our students using the tools already in their pockets - cell phones and iPods especially. He carried the flag for empowering them to be citizen journalists and using their cell phones to record podcasts (via Gcast), take photos (via flickr and others), and shoot video (via youtube and others). He even did a nifty live demonstration of gcast, having an audience member call and create a podcast. All in about a minute or two. Literally.

The other keynote speaker, David Jakes, talked about what makes a new technology “sticky.” What was particularly impressive to me was that he had his presentation already posted to his wiki, so I could follow along on my laptop, checking out links and other ideas as he spoke.

The bottom line for me was finding myself inspired by great teaching. People, educators bringing themselves fully to their students. People just like me. A community.

Like I said, inspiring.

Blogged with Flock

This Thursday, March 15th, I will be giving a presentation on using podcasts in my middle school science classroom.

The basic point I am going to make is that podcasting is a way of involving every student in a way that allows them to make choices (what material, which format of podcast) and to do something (unlike many school assignments) that have permanence.

I hope to see some of you there. (Here’s the information on the conference).

And here is a link to some of my students’ podcasts.

It has been a long time since my last update. Nevertheless, lots has been happening in my classes and with my students.

I have continued to have all of my 7th and 8th grade science students (all 100 of them) post weekly assignments to my class blog. Typically  this means that they read an article that is related to science, then prepare a brief summary and (more importantly) a reflection expressing their reaction(s) to the article. The second part of this typical assignment is for the students to post comments on the work of 3 other students. (This blog work is all done anonymously to give the students the freedom to be themselves as well as some protection from the outside world.)

This has been good for a number of reasons. As I have been told by other teachers using blogs, this public forum tends to have the effect of improving the work of all students. This has definitely happened. I can say without flinching that the work fo each of my students has improved over the past 15 or so weeks. Frankly, I cannot think of many other things I could do (or do do) to produce that kind of result.

But there are other reasons why this blogwork has been valuable. The place of learning has extended beyond the classroom and school walls, and the students are engaged in a weekly discussion on their own. This work has some permanence. I can have the students (and I have done this) look back over the blog postings to and reflect on their progress. And the learning is taking place in public. Now I have about 1500 samples of student work, from a heterogeneous group of students across most of a school year. At any point, I can refer them to other students’ work as exemplars of some discussion or another.

I look forward to what is coming next.

The other day, there was a very interesting posting to my class blog.

About a month ago, two of my students reported on research by a geneticist involved with sleep and memory, and posted their reports to the my class blog. In their reports, the students raised some questions about the research.

Yesterday, that researcher responded to the students questions in the blog itself. This is incredibly exciting!

So far, in less than 8 weeks, we have interacted with a graduate student from Ohio who was doing research in the instructional use of blogs. My students participated in a survey, which formed a key part of a paper she has prepared.

Earlier this week, we heard from an author of an article from National Geographic, who was impressed with a student’s critique of his work. And now this.

Frankly, I expected to see the benefits of blogging in terms of students connecting with one another. But I never expected to have them connect with the world at large so quickly.