Teachers as Producers, Not Consumers, at Faculty Meetings

Many teachers  consider  faculty or department meetings a waste  of time. They often complain that a memo could have given the critical information, that a person talked to long about nothing, or that they had better things to do that would  help their students. An administrator can transform meetings so that teachers move from being passive consumers to active producers.

Instead of having someone talk about ways to improve student learning, have the teachers group together by subject area and go to a designated room.  Each subject area group can think of the students’ major learning blocks in their curriculum and have the team suggest specific strategies that students can use to overcome those blocks.  The principal, curriculum leader, librarian,  or technology integration specialist would have set up a private  subject area curriculum wiki such as pbworks (pbworks.com) for this group.  Someone  in the group will word process in the wiki each learning block and the strategies that the teacher suggests.  For example, a teacher may identify that students often have trouble in finding evidence to support a position such as in a Social Studies Document Based Question (DBQ) in which students have to find references from historical documents to prove a certain statement. A teacher may offer that she has students identify the key word in the original statement in a red highlighter and then has students highlight in red that word or any synonym each time it appears in the document. Usually the highlighted words become the key to the students finding sentence that provides the necessary evidence.   If any  teacher has a video, website, podcast, etc that he/she uses, he/she  can give that link to the recorder.  The recorder lists the learning block and all the strategies that directly help students overcome that block.   At the end of the faculty meeting, the teachers end up  with a large variety of strategies that can help students as  they encounter difficulties in their learning.

Furthermore, the teachers can check the subject area wiki anytime to remind themselves of the new strategies that their students can use. The teachers can add more as they counter additional learning blocks and figure out effective strategies to help their students.  The  wiki becomes a living document that offers teachers useful student learning strategies.

Tuttle’s formative assessment books:   http://is.gd/tbook

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Web 2.0 Use May Not Be Formative Assessment

As I look at articles, blogs, and conference sessions, I see titles like

Formative Assessment Through Clickers

Formative Assessment Through Cell phones

Formative Assessment Through the Class Blogs/Wikis

Formative Assessment Through Online Quizzes

Formative Assessment Through Twitter

Formative Assessment Through Flickr

These people are generally  using Web 2.0 tools to monitor students, the first stage of formative assessment.  They collect information about where the students are  academically.

However, formative assessment moves from the monitor stage to the diagnosis stage.  How does the students’ present status compare to the desired learning goal?  If there are learning gaps, what strategies will help the students overcome those gaps?

If teachers or Web 2.0 programs do not offer improvement strategies based on the students’ specific learning gaps, then formative assessment does not occur.  Formative Assessment is much more than just seeing how many questions the students can answer;  it helps students to improve through providing new strategies for learning.

For example, if students take an online quiz about a certain learning goal, what happens next? Do the teachers diagnosis the results to see how individuals do on each item? Do the teachers determine which minor goals the students have yet to learn? Do the teachers determine which strategies will best help each student? Do the teachers give formative feedback to each student? Do the teachers build in class time for the students to practice their new formative strategy?  Do the teachers re-assess the learning?

Tuttle's Stages of Formative Assessment

Do you use Web 2.0 tools to go beyond the monitoring of students to a full formative assessment?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Your Students, is available through Eye on Education.

Also, my  book,  Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment, is available through Eye on Education.

Wiki- Collaborative Notes Instead of Individual Ones

My classes use a wiki.  If the classes are sections of the same course, they share the same wiki. For example, my 8, 9 and 12:30 classes are all Writing and Research so I group them together on the wiki.  I  have been having students from each class take class notes and post them to the wiki.  As I read the notes on the same classroom  topic material, I notice  that although each student included the critical information, each student picked different things to emphasize more.

Now that students have gotten use to note taking, we are moving onto collaborate notes. The first person posts  his/her notes and writes his/her name.  Then when a person from another section of the same course logs in to post his/her notes, the second person reads what the first has written and adds to the notes or clarifies information; he or she adds her name where she added info.  Likewise, the third person from another section does the same and adds examples if there exist.  The quality of information has increased drastically. The initial notes get transformed into a complete set of notes that will help anyone who is absent.  The notes serve as a great reminder of what we covered with specific examples. The wiki notes demonstrate that students collaborate to advance everyone’s learning.

How do your students collaborate?

My new book,  Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment, is available through Eye on Education.

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Your Students, is available through Eye on Education.

Digital Age Assessment: Learning in Web 2.0 (NECC 09)

How do we assess  students’ learning in these in Web  2.0 environments? We want to go beyond assessing the mere mechanics of using these tools; unfortunately, most current rubrics for Web 2.0 learning devote only a minuscule amount (usually 16% or less) to actual student academic learning. We want to refocus our assessments to reflect the students in-depth and comprehensive standards-based learning and the 21st Century Skills.

Change Web 2.0 assessments to assess standards-based learning and 21st Century learning!

With minor changes, the following assessments can be modified for any Web 2.0 tool.

Pre-assess your students’ Web 2.0 projects to raise the academic learning and 21st century skills.

The following are  “rubrics” that assess  standards-based learning and 21st century skills.

Wiki/Blog

Images/Photo/Flickr

Video/YouTube

Podcast

Social Bookmarking

Twitter

Videoconferencing

General Assessment: Prensky’s 21st century skills

General Assessment: enGauge’s 21st century skills

General Assessment: Partnership for 21st century skills

I welcome your reaction to these assessments as we try to help students improve in their academic content and develop 21st century skills.

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Woeful Book Wiki Turned to Wow Book Wiki

As I prepare for my NECC presentation on assessing Web 2.0 tools, I have visited many schools’ wikis, websites, etc.

I’m feeling more and more discouraged.  I’ve noticed that most wikis are simply an online collection of student work. For example, all students in a class may do a book report and these book reports are posted to the class wiki.  The students post their book report and the project is done when the last book report is posted. There has been no interaction among students or other adults.  They have only worked in one learning style, linguistics.  Likewise, the students have paraphrased  (summarized) their book; they have not analyzed it.

Let’s look at another version of a book wiki.  The teacher asks all students to select a book that has friendship as a theme. They read their book and post an explanation of  how the book demonstrates friendship (analysis level of thinking). They create a drawing or a concept map that shows the specific  friendship in their book and post that to the wiki.  Then the students select at least three other book reviews to read. After they read each review, they comment on how their own book’s theme of friendship  is similar or different to this student’s review. They come up with an example of that book’s friendship from their lives and post it. Then the class has a discussion on various types of friendship.

Let’s change wikis from just a collection place to an interactive high-level thinking learning place.

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Improving How We Use Wikis for Better Student Learning

Here are some handout notes for the session:

Harry Grover Tuttle, Ed. D.
Instructor, writer, consultant
harry.g.tuttle   at   gmail.com
Blog: https://eduwithtechn.wordpress.com

Purpose: To improve students’ learning through changing how we use wikis in our classroom.

Formative Assessment Focus

Improvements:

• 1. Teach the mechanics

  2. Identify the learning goal/purpose

  3. Explain the quality of responses

  4. Use students’ notes

  5. Organize the class

  6. Provide in-class and out-of-class resources by learning style

  7. Avoid common web topics

  8. Make learning “collective wisdom” instead of  “collective stupidity”
     

  9. Have exemplary work and reactions to the exemplars
     

  10. Build in real and varied interaction

  11. Build on the past

  12. Make group work transparent

  13. Have a student-help-student section

  14. Carefully use outside experts and other classes

  15. Co-create with students

A wiki has been created for you to add to  http://wikiforbetterlearning.pbwiki.com/

A mini version of the presentation is available at slideshare

Dr. Tuttle’s book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students which is available from Eye-on-Education includes numerous ways that technology can be used in formative assessment.

A Wickedly Good Wiki Idea – Class Learning Notes

In one class I teach, students are required to stop periodically and write in their learning logs a summary of what they have just learned. I supply the topic or learning term and they supply the summary. Sometimes I provide a summary, sometimes the class provides a summary but, usually the students write their own summary of the learning.  Such learning log entries can make great wiki entries so you can assign one or two two student to post  the learning from the class.  Students who are absent can quickly find out the important learning from the lesson (what was really important in that chapter?) and students can review the class learning before doing homework based on the class learning. Such posting help in the class review of what we learned last class which starts each new class. Such posting serve as a history of the learnings in the class over the semester or year.

Posting learning logs creates a powerful learning wiki.  So how do you use a wiki to improve student learning?

Common educational vocabulary Formative Assessment

I think that every six months or so every school district, state education, and educational publication should publish its current definition of all educational terms. I  have looked at four different educators’ definitions of formative assessment and those definitions differ drastically.  One educator feels that formative assessment focuses on teacher instruction.  Another feels that it focuses on the assessments that are given periodically. The third concentrates on formative assessment as the weekly quizzes that a teacher gives.  The fourth sees formative assessment as the feedback that teachers give students. Since these educators do not define formative assessment in the same way, they get confused when each other talks. They do not have the same language.  Therefore, they  do not work together.

When will teachers accept a common vocabulary for the good of all teachers?  When will educators become a community of learners instead of educators on different pages? Let’s work together to help improve student learning!

Use a district wide Wiki to share  and develop common definitions and provide examples of that definition. Have educators build on the components of that definition.

Wii, Web 2.0 Learning, and Improving Student Learning?

I got to spend about 2 hours with Wii sports -bowling,baseball, tennis and golf. I am not very coordinated; you could say I’m ambispastic. I bowl with either hand, both equally poorly. When I play virtual bowling, I do even worse. Being virtual does not make me better.

So how do we prepare our students to be better at learning in Web 2.0 environments? Just popping them into Twitter, Wiki, Blog,  Social bookmarking, etc. does not make them any better learners.  How do we as teachers prepare them for and create environments that are more than just social environments  but that are truly learning  environments?  How do we structure an environment that creates in-depth thinking? That promotes comprehensive thinking about a learning goal? That causes the students to make the connections among big ideas?

I do not need to hear more student chatter, I want to hear more ahas.

How do you structure your Web 2 environments to be be powerful learning environments?

More on Local History & Technology

Someone emailed me that they liked the idea of having students do local history but they were not sure where to start.

Some ideas for Buildings:

Have each student pick an “old” building in town and take many pictures of it – its position among other buildings, the cornerstone , old signs on it, what it looks like from front, both sides, back, and any interesting features. Then they post the pictures to a class wiki under the name and location of the building.

The class invites many senior citizens who have lived in the community into the class. Or the class goes to a local senior citizen center. Each student, in turn, shows his/her pictures. The senior talk about the the building and its meaning to the community. The seniors are either emovied or podcast to record their memories. Someone will have to keep the conversation focused on the building since memories can extend out to many other things. A student will word process any other topics that come up as the senior talk. Another student serves as the recorder for each building; the recorder word processes the critical comments on the building such as its previous names, what other types of stores were in that building, what people owned it, what local events were associated with it.

Later on the class consolidates its information about each building with the student who selected the building as the “chair” for that building. The students read any local community histories or “old” newspaper clippings that pertain to the building. They integrate that information.

Next, the class reinvites the seniors in to hear what they have collected. After each building, they wait for the seniors to react. Again, their reactions are emovied or digitally recorded. Again, a student recorder makes notes of any new information. Later on, the chair person revises the history and reposts it to the class wiki.

Then the class works with the local newspaper to write a local history column about the community. After giving the history of a building and its role in local history, they invite the readers to add additional information, photographs, etc.

When the students finish this local history of the buildings, they give copies of this local history to the local library, the local historical society, and the town government. They have learned much about their community through real life skills of interacting with people, writing for an audience, writing and revising, incorporating various sources of information, etc.

Backing up data

Over the years I’ve had two laptops die on me. Yes, I had backed them up – a few weeks previous to the crashes. But I still lost much data. Two students last semester had their flash drives toasted so that they could not get data off of them and they needed the data for their end of the course portfolio.

So let’s check: How often do you back up

Your computer?

Your files at school? (How often does the school back up student files?)

Your bookmarks if they are not online bookmarking?

Your wiki or blog- in case your provider does not back it up?

Your flashdrive?

Do you back up your information to at least two different storage device – perhaps an external harddrive and a DVD?

Do you store those backups in two different locations – one at home and one at work? Don’t keep both in the same location! The house of a person I know was destroyed in a fire and all of his multiple backups were destroyed.
Do you save critical files online such as in your Google docs or email them to yourself frequently?

How do you protect your valuable work?

Teaching or Educating with Web 2.0 Tools

If teaching is to impart (or stuff in) knowledge & educating is to nourish (or pull out), which do we use technology for?

Any technology can be used for either. A wiki can be used to push stuff in such as a chapter summary or it can be used to have students think through the pros and cons of a real life situation.   Just because a technology is a Web 2.0 does not make it an educating technology.   Videoconferencing can deliver lectures (teaching) or have students share similarities and differences in local folktales (educating).  Social bookmarking does not necessarily educate, it can just provide lists of websites (teaching).

How do you use Web 2.0 Tools?

How to make Wikis and Blogs Collective Intelligence

THE magazine has an article on 6 technologies that will impact education in very near future. The writer used the term collective intelligence to refer to Wikis and Blogs. I agree that wikis and blogs are collective. Are they intelligent? Ithink that depends on how the teachers have their students use these tools. As a comparision, are all classroom discussions intelligent ones in which students grow academically from the discussion or is it a an exchange of opinions?

Here’s two things we can do to improve the intelligence of the wikis or blogs.

When students do add to a wiki to build a collective body of information, how do they use the information once they have created it? For example, if students find articles on different article on the same topic (immigration), summarize the articles, and post to a wiki, we simply have a collection of articles. What do we have the students do that uses that collection? Do they compare/contrast the articles? Do they search for the bias in each article? Do they create their own article that incorporates an in-depth view of the pros and cons of the issue?

When students post their ideas to a blog or even twitter about the ideas, how do students grow from each other’s comments? Are the students’ comments ones that challenge ideas, ask probing questions about it, give another view(perspective) of it, show connections, provide alternative explanations, or explain how to do it? How do their comments move them along the learning path?

Identifying Student Learning Success for Them

Do  you have an attitude of “I know quality when I see it” for assessing student work  or do you have an attitude of “I insure that my students know what quality looks like” when assessing student work?

Have you posted exemplars to the class wiki/blog?  Have you  had students rework the rubric (or whatever  assessment tool) so that it is completely understandable to them? (A great wiki collaboration learning experience). Have your class created a rubric or assessment tool to assess student work through using the Smartboard?

How do you use technology to help students understand the quality that is expected of them in their standards-based learning?

Wiki as Presentation Tool

If your students have worked collaboratively to create a learning product through a small group wiki, then why not have them present their product via the same wiki? They already have the information from all of its stages -from brainstorms through various drafts. They can copy the information to a clean wiki page and organize it. They can either link to other presentation pages or they can move all information to one long scrolling page (put in about 12 blank lines between each aspect so that each aspect shows up by itself on the screen). They do not have to go to PowerPoint to do their presentation.

This type of presentation is especially good to demonstrate changes in thinking, growth in the project, and increasing levels of complexity. Students can show parts of their early brainstorm and then show their final product. They can show the various decisions that the group went through. Group members can add their feedback to each other and any teacher feedback and show how that feedback was incorporated to create a better product.

Have your students used a wiki for presentation?