I find it very useful, when reviewing models of learning to think about the kinds of questions that the model generates. It helps me to take an abstract concept and bring it down to a practical level. Which is why I found it helpful to see the questions in an article about the SITE model, a learner-centered way to thinking that can help with curriculum design.
The Sociocultural Sub-context
The Technical Sub-context
The Informational Sub-context How will users access know-how and data that might help them to use the technical system to achieve their goals or those of the community? What are the general education and literacy levels of our prospective learners or users? What is the user's ability to work with: books and manuals, performance support systems, coaches and supervisors, tutorials and instruction? What are the attitudes of users toward the informational sub-context? Do they see the informational sub-context as supportive? Do they see the informational sub-context as a set of obstacles? In education or any endeavor, it boils down to whether you can ask the right questions to get the job done, the issue addressed, or the problem solved and these questions are a great jumping off place. In term of applying this to increased engagement for Silent Sustained Reading using technology, the key questions I would pull, from each of the three subsets are:
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An excerpt from my Action Research Paper: What are the effects of Digital Tools (Nearpod) on reading comprehension and engagement? "According to a study about curriculum-based technology integration, (2009) effective teaching requires knowledge of both the activity structures/types that are appropriate for teaching specific content and the manners in which particular technologies can be utilized as part of the lesson, project, or design. In this vein, it is suggested that the use of an interactive digital response system can and should be used to facilitate book discussion sessions, but may not be appropriate or effective for administering traditional comprehension questions. When students were provided a list of comprehension questions before reading, they were more comfortable answering the questions as they went along through the chapter in the traditional approach. Some of the open-ended answers from students indicated that the wait-time in between reading and getting to the questions on the digital tool was a source of frustration. Having said this, questions used in the interactive digital response system should concentrate on bigger picture questions that include plot, character development and deeper thinking questions. Based on triangulated data collection, the researcher would recommend using Nearpod in the classroom to help with reading comprehension, focus and engagement at the high school level. The tool provides visual images to help engage multiple senses, provides a way for students to think about their own individual responses prior to discussing in a group, and provides a way of engaging with the material that echoes students’ digitally connected lives outside of the classroom. It is important to note that engagement levels were higher than those in the traditional method, but that further adjustments to when and where the tool is used could cause an even greater increase in engagement." In that vein, next year, I will be introducing the same classroom book to a new group of Game Design students and will be using Nearpod to deepen the classroom discussions of each chapter as we read. I would like to refine how I measure engagement with the material so that it better reflects engagement with the reading, regardless of whether the plot has flattened out a bit or not. I believe that concentrating more on discussion questions, instead of comprehension questions could help continue the study while eliminating the reticence on the part of the students to have to pay attention to "irrelevant facts and information" and allow us to think about the bigger picture of plot, character development, as well as ethical, social, and moral issues. I would also like to introduce a classroom book to my 3D printing/digital storytelling class and am reviewing books this summer. I believe that the make-up of the 3D printing class may vary a bit from the Game Design class and may include more students who are at the Below Basic, or Basic levels of reading, but will have to wait until I can see who is in that class. I am curious as to how Nearpod can help make reading more engaging to those students for whom reading may not be their favorite activity. I do not think my driving question will change, but I would like to go deeper with question and spend more time collecting data. I still have to figure out a way to measure engagement that provided useful and accurate data. I'm looking forward to exploring further. In a paper entitled "Qualitative Research in Information Management" Jack Glazier and Ronald Powell take a look at how humans process and use information and define the methodology, theory and body of findings as Sense-Making. In chapter six of their paper, they look at the Sense-Making Qualitative and Quantitative Methodology from the Mind's Eye of the User. They make the assumption that because humans are involved, there is a discontinuity in perception based on different conditions of the human depending on the time and space in which an event occurs. These differences come down to so many factors, cultural, physiological, almost any situational conditions. They describe a common problem with the way we have collected data in the past on how humans use information, in that the questions we ask come from a system standpoint, where the interviewee is asked questions that assume that they will bend to the will of the system, rather than the system changing to meet the needs of the interviewee. In 6 step, they outline how one can change this approach to be more user centered by focusing on the Situation/Gap/Help model. The study of information-needs places an emphasis on these 6 questions: 1) How does the individual see themselves as stopped? 2) What questions or confusions have been defined? 3) What strategies does the individual prefer for arriving at answers? 4) What success has this person had in arriving at answers? 5) How was he/she helped by answers or how did he/she put the answers to use? 6) What barriers did the individual see standing in the way to arrive at the answers? This could be a really powerful tool for my students when they are confronted with a gap in knowledge. For those students who get "stuck" or don't "get it" in class, it would be worth stepping back and doing a micro-moment timeline interview. The form that is in the paper could become a wonderful tool for students to think through how they bridge their own gaps and how I, as their teacher could help them when they feel stuck.
Below is a great example of how the interview is conducted. I could imagine having students work in pairs to think through their knowledge gaps. This would also be a great tool for reflection at the mid-point or end-point of a project. Either way, I plan un using this as a great way to help students think through how they can improve and how I can improve the teaching/learning process. At the very least, the 6 questions posed above would make for substantive reflection or journal questions at the end of a project. I'm very excited to try them next year in class! It's the end of the school year and one of my children says that, now that the big test is over for his AP class, that they will be practicing Movie Based Learning. I loved hearing this and had to just laugh out loud. There are more types of learning these days than I can even keep track of. Problem Based Learning, Project Based Learning, Team Based Learning, and now, Challenge Based Learning.
After previewing this website, I have come to the conclusion that Challenge Based Learning is just Project Based Learning (PBL) with an emphasis on social action. This has been the route I have been wanting to take at my PBL school recently and I'm excited to see the basics of how to do this on this website. No matter what you call it, all of these X-Based Learning programs are quite wonderful. Yes! Learning should be "based" on real world problems so that the learning is meaningful and therefore lasting. I do see that these challenge based projects work because, at the heart of them is authenticity. I believe that all students, no matter what age, want to do real and important work. And even if they are young and practicing their skills, they can and should be expected to contribute to the world in positive ways. And in the process, teachers can guide students to make sure that basic skills are covered while the project is being completed. As a Digital Media teacher and a total fangirl of Adobe, I often get so excited to introduce my students to Adobe, but feel that this amazing introduction fizzles when students move out of my introduction class and no longer use the tools in other classes. Some move on to upper level classes, but many do not. What is the point of gaining skills and competencies that will soon be forgotten due to disuse? How do we get those creative skills to translate into other classes more seamlessly so students can continue to grow on their path toward digital citizenship? How do we allow for a more integrated approach to digital creative learning for students while still providing experience with high end "grown up" software that prepares students with 21st Century Skills? In a conversation with one of the Principal Product Managers at Adobe, Tom Nguyen, we talked a lot about what is currently happening in my Digital Media class at New Tech High. He asked all the great "empathy" questions to get a better understanding of his end-users' pains and likes. I answered from the teacher's perspective, but in reality, I know it's so much more powerful to get the students to give their input and thoughts about becoming new Adobe Creative Cloud users. Based on our conversation, my understanding of Tom's inquiry question is in alignment with my own questions as a Digital Media teacher. "How do we get Adobe tools into the hands of students so that they can continue to deepen their creative skills and their understanding of core concepts in all other curriculum? How do we eliminate the obstacles that currently exist in getting students access to Adobe software? What are essentials and what are the extra fun things needed in order to draw students in?
So, I propose that we bring in the students and open up the conversation. I've invited my students to comment on this blog post and answer a few of the questions I've got for them. And if you are not one of my Digital Media students but have something to say, you are welcome to join in on the conversation! Please leave your comments!
If we want to move ahead and truly prepare our students for the future, we need to provide access to the tools needed to succeed, and not just in an isolated computer lab. What do YOU think? How can we get there? What would you like to see in the education world? What would be ideal? Where can we integrate Adobe knowledge with other Common Core and STEM knowledge? What I learned from a wonderful keynote speech by John Seeley Brown In the process of watching this keynote speech, the concept of peer-based learning or learning cohorts really spoke to me. The speaker said that the key factor that determines college success has nothing to do with high school grades, ACT or SAT scores, high school ranking or any of the typical measures we think of. The most influential variable in success in college is whether or not the student participates in study groups. He went on to talk about a group of 5 kids from Maui. One of the 14-year-old boys decided that he was going to be a world champion in surfing. No one from Maui had every climbed the ranks of the surfing world. This young boy decided he would do it. He gathered his buddies around and that created what Brown calls "Joint Collective Agency" or a "Questioning Disposition." This mean that they would watch each other surf, they would watch a ton of videos of those who were at their peak performance, they would go out and try new moves, give each other feedback, study related sports such as skiing, dirt biking, sailing and many other ways to move the body through the air and water. They studied the shapes of boards, they looked for new moves in skateboarding, ski boarding, you name it. And they supported each other in a cohort of learning. So, that one determined boy grew up and realized his dream of becoming the first world champion coming out of Maui. But guess what? Those other boys also grew up to become world class champions as well. This hit me particularly hard as I have a son of 16 years old who is hoping to one day soon play professional tennis. Tennis can be one of the most isolating sports out there. It's just you against your opponent across the net. But what if he could find himself a learning cohort, a group of high level players that he could study with? This speaks so closely to my heart. It is like my children's nursery school teacher always says, "Together, We're Better." I work hard to create a community of learning in the classroom, where we ALL make each other better simply by pursuing a craft and body of knowledge and skills together. In my practices with putting together learning groups for projects, often I build a team that I think will be balanced with different leadership styles, personalities and abilities. However, I wonder if instead, I ought to be building groups based more around interest than around the concept of balance. The only way you can truly get a cohort of like minds, is to let those like minds gravitate towards each other and toward the subject matter they are most interested in. I am going to continue to experiment with how to create groups that serve everyone in my classroom, that allow for that "Questioning Disposition" due to shared interest.
There are a number of tools I will be leveraging in my Action Research project for my graduate work. I am exploring the question, "What affect does the use of digital tools in the classroom have on reading comprehension, engagement and stamina?" There are two ways that I will use technology for this research, the first is to introduce new technology to the students and then measure it's effects. The second is to use technology as a tool for recording observation. In the first case, the technology I am testing is the Nearpod application, an interactive digital response system for students. I was first introduced to Nearpod last year at a Northbay CUE (Computer Using Educators) conference at American Canyon High School. I was immediately impressed and began experimenting with the free version of the software.
A Nearpod representative got in touch with me when I requested pricing for my school. I mentioned that was about the teach a workshop on practical tech in the classroom for the Napa County Office of Ed. and they quickly comped me a premium version of the software so I could really get the most out of all they offered. As a teacher, it is tough to spend much time exploring new tech while teaching at the same time, but I did continue to present the software and use it sporadically in my Digital Media 1 class. I continued to like it, but knew I was underutilizing the functions. So, when it came time to think about my Action Research question, I knew that I wanted to really explore what using Nearpod was really accomplishing in my classroom. I wanted to take a closer look at how using the tool to it's fullest could help with reading engagement and whether or not could I see evidence that contributes to increasing reading engagement. In this way, Nearpod is at the center of the research testing. What is its effect? How can I measure it's effect in a valid way? What I am finding, as I continue to experiment with Nearpod, is that I can look back at each class session and review the answers that each student typed in during the session. I can ask both open-ended and multiple choice questions, I can take polls and use fill-in-the-blank questions. I can see student answers in real time, making on-the-spot adjustments as I teach. Students can also get immediate feedback as to which answer was correct as I share correct answers with the whole class as we proceed through the presentation. The answers are shared anonymously so those students who are more quiet, can participate and have their work shown, without embarrassment. I can see immediately, who is participating in the discussion and presentation and who is not. I can show individual answers, or the whole community's response to a poll. I am wondering that the effect is of being able to combine the elements of visuals and text questions to create a powerpoint/quiz combination that makes engaging with the material easier for all involved. I can control the advancing slides on each screen and all students don't need to see the SMART board, they only need to see their own screens. In this way, everyone is able to access the slides but we do so communally. I'm eager to see if I can record any differences in engagement from this learning tool. The data I will be collecting with be triangulated through both qualitative and quantitative data. I will be using Google forms to ask students to rate their level of engagement using a Likert scale both before and after they read and answer questions about the text. I will have them use a more traditional classroom method of engaging in text by having the students read and then answer a series of written questions first. I will than have them do the same thing after reading a new chapter, but rather than just answer the questions traditionally, they will answer the questions through the use of Nearpod. In addition to having them self-assess their levels of engagement, I will also keep a journal of structured and unstructured observations of the class from the moment they enter the class to the moment they end the reading assignment. I will make notes on what students say that pertain to the reading assignment, body language, interactions with me and between students, and then look for patterns in my observed data. In this case, the technology of choice to record these observations includes tools that make note-taking most accessible such as pen and paper and Evernote to jot down observations that happen in the moment. I also, will be accessing pre-existing data from our school data backpack including SRI data collected in the fall of 2016. It would be extremely beneficial to look at SRI data in the fall, then make a concerted effort to use SSR and Nearpod in a classroom, and then look at SRI data in the spring. I am hoping that next year, when I have more time, I can use that much under-utilized data to inform practices and see if I can find a correlation between the data and classroom practices around SSR and use of technology. I did, however, use the pre-existing data this year to get a clear picture of who my students are, where they stand in their reading levels and used that data to establish a baseline understanding of each individual student. This week's homework for my graduate work in Innovative Learning was to be about Darling-Hammond's book "The Flat World of Education" but this week turned out to be very different for me. We were also given the assignment of checking out two collaborative online apps, Voicethread and Wevideo. After a first look from all my team members, we decided that we wanted to find something more engaging and fun for the classroom. Researching new apps is both time-consuming and sometimes frustrating, if you are looking for free apps, however, there are many great apps that have a Freemium model where you get SOME of the functionality for free and if you like it, you ask Administration to pay for the premium version. What I vaguely remember from a Google summit, was the mention of Google apps for education, also known as GAFE. Yesterday my teammates, Julie, Gary and I went searching around to see what was up. What we found was a plethora of choices that can help with online collaboration. Here's the link if you want to explore. Once you download the app, or what looks like a plug-in or extension, you can then access your app, either through the apps website, or through creating a new document in google drive. We chose the bottom app show above, Powtoon, which is an app that allows you to create your own cartoon animations. It has a collaborative function that you can get after you pay for the premium version, so we simply video conferenced, shared a screen and one person drove the app while everyone else contributed ideas and direction. After we had our main script done and recorded through our Zoom/Powtoon combination, the login was shared between us so we could individually continue to work on the animations offline. This app was tremendous fun to work on and seemed to get us more engaged than we had been with the other two suggested apps. I'm really interested to explore the other apps listed above like Metta, Movenote, and Pear Deck.
We agreed that Powoon would be a GREAT app for 4th-12thgraders. The animation we made was about Creativity and when we are done with it, I will post here. In the mean time, check out GAFE and find some great online collaboration apps and digital storytelling tools! Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert is an educational researcher whose work examines literacy, learning, early childhood development, teacher development, writing and children's literature. "Freddy" is CEO/President of The Text Project. According the Text Project website: " Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) has had a long career as a literacy educator, first as a teacher’s aide and teacher of primary-level students in California and, subsequently, as a teacher educator and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, Colorado-Boulder, Michigan, and California-Berkeley. Her research, which addresses how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts, has been published in numerous scholarly journals and books. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers (Center for the Study of Reading, 1985) and Every Child a Reader (Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, 1999), she has contributed to making research accessible to educators. Hiebert’s contributions to research and practice have been recognized through awards such as the American Educational Research Association’s Research to Practice award (2013)." The Text Project provides high quality and open access resources for teachers, teacher educators, parents, tutors and students meant to strengthen essential reading skills. The online resource provides the latest current news on literacy from Common Core State Standards to information on text complexity, vocabulary and assessment. The primary focus of "Freddy's" work has been on identifying text features that support reading development among beginning and struggling readers. She has also contributed to related literatures, particularly on how knowledge of vocabulary influences students' learning from text. Hiebert has recently addressed the issues of how words should be selected for instruction in reading and how word selection differs for narrative compared to informational texts. This is a particularly relevant issue as the CAASPP pushes students to read more informational texts than previous tests. As we move toward a more modern, digital world, she is encouraging teachers to revisit Silent Sustained Reading (SSR) in the classroom. She also encourages teachers to understand how to choose the right level text for each student during SSR. Her work with studying reading focus, stamina, comprehension and speed helps to inform my action research, as I explore SSR in my classroom and how reading can be deepened through digital tools. The idea of work stations is something that I'm very familiar with, since this is the learning model we used when all three of my kids attended a cooperative nursery school. It allowed for student choice, one-on-one attention when needed, time to explore and to go at their own pace and engage with the learning at their own level. I see, now how that model can be adapted for high school and that really excites me. In this video case study found on teachingchannel.org, the teacher worked on creating five different work stations for providing an environment that allowed for personalized learning. Before breaking into groups to work at a station, a mini-lesson was taught from the front of the room about how to engage and interpret informational text. What I saw happening was a lot of independent learning. Students were able to access expectations for each station through assignment sheets, examples of final product provided through written and video product. There was also an overall expectation of trust that students would work while the teacher was working with others. The students were able to meet one-on-one with the teacher to get their answered while others were using the assignment sheets to make sure their learning was directed and focused. I also LOVED the logs they were expected to keep at each station that required that they talk about what they did that day and, more importantly, how it went. The teacher could then go back and read those notes to see how things were progressing with each student. We do a lot of independent work on projects and I often feel out of touch with certain quieter students. If they had a way to write out how they are doing, it would help me identify who needs extra help and who does not. In many ways, this log echoes what we do in our stand-up meetings every day where students report what they have done and what they plan on doing that day, as well as any impediments they might experience in getting closer to their goals. However, I do not attend every group's stand-up or Scrum meeting and so am no privy to what is discussed in each group meeting. The logs make the learning visible to both the students and the teacher. The other piece that hit home for me was how the students interviewed experts out in the field at the beginning of the project, when they had the most questions. I really keyed into the idea that students need time to prepare ahead of time with their questions and that working in smaller groups gives the interview a more genuine and intimate feeling. Students in a smaller group are then required to participate and may feel less intimidated to ask a question than if they are interviewing someone with the whole class. We do a lot of video conferencing with adult experts but it's generally with the whole class, and although many students are engaged and excited about these sessions, I know I'm still missing those quieter students who tend to stay under the radar. I also think that in smaller groups, the students can really OWN the conversation and would take a more active role in asking questions and giving answers.
Overall, this case study gets a 5 out of 5 because it really speaks to how I already teach in my classroom, but helps me see how some structured strategies would supercharge our learning environment and help those students who need more help in directing their own learning. I can also tap into things I know so well from my preschool parenting days and bring those concepts into the classroom to foster more personalized learning. |
AuthorLisa Gottfried is a CTE teacher with 20 years experience as CEO of her own Video and Motion Graphics Production house. She currently teaches Digital Design at New Technology High School and at Touro University in the Masters of Innovative Learning program. She loves her job and her students! Archives
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