Will I ever NOT be terrified of my students using the internet for Active Learning?

Will I ever NOT be terrified of my students using the internet for Active Learning? 

I have a hard time letting go of control in a teaching environment. I’ll just put that out there. I’ve never been the teacher who is comfortable in a loud, chaotic classroom “as long as they’re learning.” In my classroom, movement, unpredictability, and laughter terrify me.

 That being said, it is easy for me to avoid many opportunities for authentic learning. Authentic learning is best described as any learning the student does either on their own or that can have an impact in the 'real world,’ paired with the idea that not all learning is “particularly meaningful, relevant or necessary.” The idea is that the only relevant learning a student can do is best done on their own or in service to a question that they brought to the table themselves. Terrifying. This concept relies on the notion that children are naturally curious and yearn for information at all times. These notions are echoed in essays and interviews Ken Robinson  who claims “All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think.” There is a way to take this and, to use one of Robinson's words, turn it into fertile ground for education: Conversation.

Conversation is a lost art, and nowhere is that more true than in a classroom. In this world of standardized tests, Cornell notebooks, and exit slips, telling your principal that the best way to evaluate student learning is by having a group discussion is career suicide. Yet that is precisely what is encouraged by this model. Asking higher order questions, focusing on the ‘how’s’ and ‘why’s’ rather than the ‘who's’ and ‘what's’ have proven again and again to show results. Students are unsatisfied by surface level instruction and will undoubtedly want to know more.

“Students, today's lesson is that water is wet.”
“Teacher, is all water wet?”

“I'm sorry, I don't have time to answer that, we have to move on to 'all fire is hot'”

Sticking to the old model has produced educators who are forced to dismiss questions and students who do not feel empowered to take control of their learning. If they've learned anything at all, it's not to bother asking questions. If the response to the question had been something to the effect of “Yes, but are there wet things that aren't water? How can we look that up?” Suddenly you've empowered the very idea of asking questions in the room and engaged the children to access the entirety of their intellect to answer the question. Provoke them like this often enough and you train the students to make connections where no obvious ones exist and they start to become reflexive lateral thinkers.

Now for the terrifying part—allowing kids use the internet to satisfy their own curiosities. Will I ever feel comfortable enough to allow “free time” on the internet for my students? Probably not, and that is not good.

I picture students in my classroom using this free time on the computers to hack my gradebook, send a bomb threat to Washington, live-stream some unexpected classroom disaster that will go viral instantly, or completely crash the entire network beyond repair. When I get fired for this, the one question people will ask me is “Why weren’t you watching them?” All I will have to say is… “I was letting them participate in Active Learning, of course.”  

But, of course, I give my students way too much credit. Truth be told, the worst 99% of them could do is google inappropriate things. What needs to occur before any student-directed active learning projects can occur on the computers in my classroom, is some serious training. I need to know that students are familiar with the dangers and ethics of the internet. I need to find a way to instill a sense of responsibility in them when they are using our computers (as in… they won’t automatically have the urge to destroy the computer as soon as they touch the mouse). But most of all, I need to provide opportunities for guided practice. I need to TEACH them how to become active learners and use technology to open doors to fascinating universes.

I am currently open for tips on how to feel comfortable allowing your students to have free time on the internet. Surrendering control in the classroom can be a terrifying prospect, but if you set up an infrastructure early on that allows for free time to pursue projects, then you'll be able to push your kids in directions you never thought possible before and they'll think it was all their own idea! To boldly go where no teacher has directed them before. They may fall down a YouTube hole and discover the likes of Ken Robinson's musings on education. You don't give them a worksheet, you give them a concept and focusing on concept driven programs instead of specific topics and using projects and 'provocations' to point students in a direction but not lead them down a path, instead you let them google the path instead.  

            

Digital Struggles in a Virtual World

This week, I struggled with being able to motivate myself to use the internet. As I am sure everyone who assesses the internet this week is aware, it is not a fun place to hang out right now. No matter what side you chose during the election, we are all seeing hate spew from every seam of social media. Personally, upset and dismayed at the election results, I decided I would stay off social media until friends and family stop commenting. I began searching the internet for tools to use or my assignments, and still found that I could not escape the constant reminder of what our nation has become. Since I work in a virtual environment and attend school in a virtual environment, I found myself unable to escape the news stories and posts I wanted so desperately to ignore. Never experiencing anxiety caused by in internet, I was unsure how to handle this situation.

This got me thinking... If an adult such as myself is finding it difficult to stay positive with all of these constant reminders of our nation’s discontent, how are our teenage virtual students handling this? Students who attend virtual school are forced to use the internet daily. Students attending regular school can escape the negativity if they choose to. I am interested to study how times of great tragedy affect virtual students vs brick-and-mortar students. I believe this is where curriculum curation can be absolutely heroic. While we can’t change a student’s default homepage results, we can change which websites they are forced to visit while completing one of our assignments. I took note of which pages I used that contained links to pages with negative ads, news stories, or blog posts during the creation of my digital story. It was almost all of them. There were very few pages I had preselected that totally filtered out the possibility of seeing a news headline with a link to negative content. This made me aware of the importance of selecting resources with no changing ads or rotating links. I will need to spend more time searching for these resource and making changes to my curriculum page.

 As far as my educational concerns, one aspect of this activity I personally struggled with was deciding how to narrow down my digital story. The historical person I chose accomplished so many important things. It was difficult to choose what to include and what to leave out. This lead me to believe my students would also struggle with pulling out the appropriate amount of information. “But it’s all important if it happened to them in their lives!” I can already hear my students complaining…. I will need to provide them with guidelines to the specific type of life-event they should provide in their story. Since they are only in 5th grade, they are still struggling with the concept of main idea and relevant details. They are not coming into the assignment with a background in history, like I am, so they will not know which life events are relevant to their historical figure’s importance in history. I will need to figure out a way to solve this problem before they tackle the project. One possible way to solve this problem is to provide a link to a web resource that lists their person’s most important accomplishment and ask them to ‘work backwards.’ I will ask the students to list a few events and cross off the ones that do not have a direct correlation to their memorable accomplishment. With some explicit instruction and guided practice, I believe this is feasible. Another possible solution to this problem is to provide the students with a “student friendly” version of the rubric I will use to evaluate their assignments. After allowing them to read the wiki curriculum page and explaining the assignments, they will work with a partner to score each sample digital story. We will then discuss their ratings and why they think each one deserved a certain score. This will hopefully provide them with an idea of what I am looking for in their digital storytelling projects.

An Example of Digital Storytelling

Click here to view my Wiki page for this class project's curriculum page.

Dreaming about Digital Storytelling...

If I could get my 5^th grade students to master the art of digital storytelling, the possibilities for social studies projects would be endless. I taught a mixture of reading and social studies, and I loved how excited many of the kids were to learn history. 5^th grade is often the first time they are introduced to interesting historical concepts, ideas, and people. They have not been classically conditioned to automatically think about taking a nap as soon as the teacher asks them to open their social studies textbook. It is a mistake to think that history should be taught merely by reading from a book. Teachers should strive to make history come alive for students—after all, it is the real-life story of us!    

One idea a teacher could use to make history come alive is by having the class create virtual autobiographies for a historical figure the class is studying. For example, if a class was completing a unit on the American Revolution, each student can make an autobiography for all the major-players. If that person was alive today, telling you about their life, what would they say? What photos would they use to capture a particular element of their life? Students would use a tool such as Animoto or Voicethread to create presentations with audio content. Their voice becomes the ‘voice’ of their assigned figure. This project is similar to the ‘living museum’ project popular among elementary students, but it is incorporating technology students can use to portray their figure without limitations.  

Digital Storytelling

A demonstration of Sway as a digital storytelling tool

Sway Survey

Sway Survey

This week, I decided to take on the challenge of gathering feedback for my blog posts. I am fully aware that my Sway Tutorial is not perfect, but I feel like it served its purpose by demonstrating some of Sway's amazing features. The purpose of this survey is to gather data that I will use in a future project. Please complete the survey and let me know what you thought!

You can complete the survey here, or within my Sway presentation. The best thing about Sway is that the presentation is always 'live.' This means that even though I posted the link over a week ago, I was able to instantly add the survey on the last page without changing the link on my blog. I can think of a few times when I created a presentation and then thought of something else I wanted to add, but it was too late and the link was already sent.

My First Attempt with Microsoft Office Sway

This week, I decided to attempt to make a tutorial to show fellow educators how to use the Microsoft Office tool, Sway.

This proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be. Turns out, making tutorials is hard. I have a newfound respect for those who publish new tech tutorials frequently. It is an art within itself. I struggled with thinking of ways I could use the features within the tool to demonstrate creative uses for the classroom.

Here is my link to my Sway presentation. Even if my presentation does not blow you away, I do recommend watching the embedded videos. I enjoy this tool enough to attempt to spread the word.

Check Out my Sway by clicking on the link, or view the embedded version in this blog post!

9/30/16

9/30/16 Blog Post
9:09 pm

9/23/16

How To Encourage Positive Digital Communication

                In a recent article published in the August 29, 2016 issue of Time magazine, Tyranny of the Mob: How trolls are ruining the internet, author Joel Stein claims the web is turning into a “sociopath with Asperger’s. Stein claims that if you release too much personal (emotional) information on the internet, your interpretation of the internet’s reaction can be devastating. “Psychologists call this the online dis-inhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building.” (Stein, 2016.) So, the question for us teachers is, how can we try to stop this culture of hate and intellectual waste online? These Digital Natives still seem to be holding on to the idea that anything that happens online is not part of their real life. The skills they use for communication on the internet are completely separate from the skills they use to communicate in school and with their friends face-to-face. It is part of our job to prepare our students for the future, and it is obvious that ALL aspects of the internet are going to be part of our future, including the dreaded “comment section” on websites.

ISTE 4 states teachers must “promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information” (2008). In order for us to teach students how to behave like we are part of a civilized society on the internet, we must follow what I like to call Common Sense Teaching Rule #1: Show them how. However, to show students how to communicate appropriately on the internet, we will need to use online communication tools in class. This can be frustrating when one does not consider the “big picture” when engaging in online communication with their students.

Lead By Example

 At my previous school, all teachers were required to have our students work in an online reading program that was supposed to increase their reading comprehension skills. Within the program, there was a ‘chat’ feature in which teachers controlled the settings. Teachers decided if students would be able to message each other, message the teacher, or post on a message board. They also had the option to shut the feature off. So, a few months went by and we all used the program with our classes. We were all surprised to find that the program trainers were coming back to our school half way through the year to do a follow-up professional development session (Follow-up training?! That almost never happens!). During that second session, the trainer asked us how we were enjoying the messaging feature in the program. Eight out of 9 teachers in the room said they had completely disabled that feature after a few uncomfortable experiences. They spoke of students posting on the message board with incorrect grammar, or posting about topics unrelated to the program content. One teacher mentioned that a student posted his opinion of a story the class was assigned to read, but his posting indicated that he did not understand the main idea of the story and he had confused all of the other kids. Another teacher explained that she disabled the messaging feature because too many students were messaging her asking for help with their assignments. I hate to admit it, but I also disabled the feature a few months prior to this meeting. I felt bad when a student would send me a message that I was not able to respond to. With all of my responsibilities as a teacher, I figured I did not really have time to be reading all those messages and responding in a timely manner. 

  Looking back, I am horrified to think about all of the missed opportunities we had to model digital etiquette in our classroom. If I was participating in that meeting today, that conversation would have gone in an entirely different direction. Here are some of the things I might say to those teachers if I realized how important it was for us to model behavior in online communities.

To the teacher who disabled the message board due to postings containing improper grammar: What message are you sending to your students when are essentially taking away their ability to express their thoughts on a story just because they are having trouble spelling? This might discourage the students from ever posting in an academic setting again. You are essentially telling them that they are not welcome in this community. Most of my 5^th grade students do not know how to use any features in a word processing program, including spell check. This would be a wonderful opportunity to have the students practice typing their responses in a program that will check their spelling and grammar before they copy-and-paste their response online. Teach your students that there are tools they can use to avoid mistakes and to proof read their work!

To the teacher who disabled the message board due to students posting unrelated messages: Why not use this as an opportunity to teach your students about the appropriate placement of their comments? Demonstrate that there is a time and a place for their ideas, but this particular message board exists only to discuss a particular assignment. Maybe this serves as an indication that the students need a safe place where they can communicate about non-school related content. If a student is posting about his basketball game in your ELA message board, this student is not aware of the separation of social media for personal/academic use. This student will be “that guy” who inserts a link to his pyramid scheme website in the comments section of a CNN article.

To the teacher who disabled the message board because of incorrect responses: I literally cannot think of a better opportunity to teach your class the “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” mentality. Kids need to learn that there is a possibility information someone posted online might not be completely true. They need to do their own research in order to determine what is true and what is incorrect. They also should practice expressing their concerns in a positive, respectful way. The teacher should model how a response to a posting containing inaccurate information should look. “Billy, I like your idea about the story, but did you read the part about ______?”

To the teacher who disabled the student-to-teacher messaging feature because too many students were messaging her asking for help: Isn’t it your job to help your students? Think of it as incorporating reading and writing with communication skills: the student needed to think about how to ask a question in written form, and then they need to read your response and use the information you gave them to solve their problem. I would argue that a teacher providing help via live-chat is providing assistance that requires students to think more deeply about an assignment than the teacher who just answers a question verbally. By disabling this feature, you are sending the message to your students that their questions annoy you and you want to shut them out.

And finally, to myself, the teacher who disabled the student-to-teacher messaging feature because I did not have time to respond to all of my students’ questions:  You need to find time to respond to the students’ questions daily. What message am I sending to my students if I require them to spend a few hours working in the program every week, but I don’t spend any time in it myself? How am I supposed to foster an online learning community if I am not present in that community? The students need practice with online communication, and they need to feel like their messages actually go somewhere. By ignoring them, I was only adding to the beliefs that messages sent out over the internet have no consequences and are not “real.”

Final Thoughts 

           In a previous post, I said “Older teachers talk about computers as if they were weapons: the single force that will destroy the American Education system.” It is time for ALL educators to realize that computers are not destroying our education system—people on the internet are. We must fight to teach out students how to use their education to make the internet a place worth having. We can’t allow our students to treat the web as “I’mRight.Com.” We must teach them how to appropriately express themselves online, as well as in person. It may not seem like much, but including activities for students to practice basic communication with any online social tool will lead to the creation of ‘good habits’ on the internet. Our digital happiness depends on it. 

Funding: A Lazy Excuse for Ignoring Technology Education in Elementary Classrooms

My very first day as a teacher, I expected to walk into a classroom of 5^th graders who knew more about computers than I did. I actually used to have anxiety about my students knowing how to use our class computers for evil without me noticing. I started thinking about ways to use technology in my classroom before I was introduced to a curriculum guide. What I found was a classroom full of digital natives that had no idea how to use computers for anything besides gaming, Facebooking, and watching Netflix (I would have said “streaming videos,” but if I used that term, the students would have no idea what I was talking about). Imagine my surprise when I gave out our first project assignment. I thought it would be simple: research an explorer (i.e. Christopher Columbus, Ponce de Leon, etc.) and create a poster to present to the class. There were specific questions that had to be answered on the poster, such as “What did your explorer discover?” or “Why was his discovery important?” I assumed this would be a very simple project the students would be able to finish in about three days.

Our first day in the computer lab working on this project was a disaster. Here is a list of things I was shocked to learn the students could not do:

• Locate any type of word processor on the computer
• Copy and paste text or an image
• Change fonts in a word processor
• Use spell check, or even realize that the squiggly red line under a word means something is wrong with it.
• Save a document or a picture
• Locate a document after its been saved
• Conduct an efficient Internet search.
• Shut down a computer

I did not understand why the students seemed as computer illiterate as I was when I was 10 years old. Hadn’t these students grown up with computers and iPads their entire lives? My parents didn’t even own a computer until I was 11, so at least I had an excuse. This led me to wonder, what are these kids doing with their technology? Everyone always talks about how these kids are the most digitally connected generation of all time. Older teachers talk about computers as if they were weapons: the single force that will destroy the traditional American education system. From what I witnessed throughout my time in the classroom, they have nothing to worry about. Weapons can’t destroy anything if no one knows how to use them.

In a recent interview, "'We Don't Have Resources to Keep Up with Technology,' 2016 US Teacher of the Year, Jahana Hayes claims “We don’t really have the resources to keep up with technology in the way that other industries have….We train students on programs that end up being obsolete by the time they go into the workforce” She is correct about one thing: most of the programs our students use today will be obsolete in a few years. However, the skills we can teach students while using these programs can stand the test of time. Think about how long you have been using a PC and all of the ways it has evolved. When system changes occur, we adapt. It takes only a few days to “get used to” using a new version of a previous program because we have a solid foundation of knowledge on the way a program works. We become familiar with a program’s jargon, the way it’s functions are organized, and what it’s best tools are. I know that the way I learned to save a file the very first time I ever saved to a floppy disc paved the way for my daily usage of the cloud.

The monetary and logistical limitations of constantly outfitting out classrooms with the most up-to-date technology are obvious. We don’t have the money or the resources. But what we do have are teachers: an entire industry of people dedicated to preparing students for life beyond the classroom. To solve the problem of technology becoming obsolete by the time a big purchase is approved by the school board, teachers should be focusing on teaching their students basic skills we tend to take for granted. The pieces will begin to connect faster for our students than they did for us and they will soar. I guarantee you will never hear a student say something like “Man I really wish I never learned how to type in school. Practicing basic computer skills like typing and learning how to search the Internet sure was a waste of my time. Now let me get back to practicing my cursive writing…”