It has been a fascinating process to begin a Research Action project for my masters program. The first thing we were asked to do was a Literature Review, to find other researchers scholarly papers and see what others have done so far to answer similar questions to mine. After spending quite a bit of time researching and reading what seems like a TON of scholarly papers, I've decided to change my original question from "How can I foster reading stamina in my classroom?" to "What affect does the use of digital tools in the classroom have on reading comprehension, engagement and stamina?"
My Game Design class is about to embark on the reading of a book by Ernest Cline called "Ready, Player One!" Interestingly enough, it is the class themselves who requested that we read this book, so I believe that there is already a bias toward engagement by using this book. However, isn't that what we want in a classroom? I'll go with that bias any day of the week! Interestingly, when I put together the SRI (Scholastic Reading Inventory) scores for each of my students in that class, totalling 38 students, I found that most of my students in this class are reading at proficient or advanced levels already. I wonder if the content of the class "Game Design and Visual Effects" has anything to do with this class self-selecting and attracting those students who already have a love of reading. I also wonder if students with lower SRI scores can not gain access to my upper level Digital Media classes because they are busy in support classes or credit recovery for other classes in order to graduate. I also wonder if there is a common theme here. Are gamers also readers? That's a great question for another Action Research project! In my study, I am going to use the book we have chosen as a means for trying different digital tools to help the students further engage with the text, either before we read, or after we read a chapter. I will use video, online chatting and podcasts to extend the reading and then test the students on comprehension and reading speed. I will have to figure out a separate way to test stamina. A baseline survey will be done about reading aptitude and attitudes as well as how often and for how long students access reading texts through social media, online articles, texting, online and printed books, magazines, and newspapers. I will ask students to self-asses with regards to reading and compare that to existing SRI data about each student. I'm really excited to implement this action research and have the box of books ready and waiting for an unveiling tomorrow! We will be begin reading silently this week, with no data collected as I collect parent permission slips and put together the tests for comprehension. The amazing thing is that there are quite a few resources online for the book, including pre-done comprehension and discussion questions. And the great thing about this book is that there is NO MOVIE yet, which allows us to really explore this novel, without the influence of other media!
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Let's look at what other teachers are doing in the classroom. I will use three different case studies to explore ways in which other teachers are successfully engaging students in learning through the use of technology. All three case studies are live-linked. Take a look at them yourself if you'd like to learn more! AccorEpic Fail or Win? Gamifying Learning in My Classroom A professor in Teacher Education used a series of game-based learning strategies to help students master skills and processes. She used the 3Dgamelab and Gradecraft to help implement her strategies. Students could choose "quests" that took 20-25 minutes each to earn badges and experience points. I was drawn to this case study because I currently use a game-based learning app, Classcraft to work on classroom behavior issues, but do not use it to teach and track learning. The piece I am most interested in pursuing in terms of augmenting my own use of classcraft has to do with how to use the software to personalize learning. According to the article: "Personalizing Learning The software provided large amounts of data on each student, allowing me to identify skills they were working on, how long they spent on a quest, badges earned, and standards met, as well as reading their feedback on each quest. All this data was used to further personalize and scaffold learning paths." I know that Classcraft has a quest function and I would like to explore that option further. I like the idea of taking the attention off of grades and more on learning and this approach seems to help with this. The professor knew that students were learning when they completed the quests set forth for them. Per the professor's own words, "I gamified my classroom in the hopes that students would no longer ask about their grades. Ultimately, students did focus more on academic and grit skills (especially when I began returning quests instead of simply assigning low grades to mediocre submissions). " I found this article to be very helpful with tips, tricks and very specific recommendations on how to gamify the classroom. I rate this article 4 out of 5 even though it was more of an article than a case study. Social Media: Making Connections Through Twitter In this video, there were many different ways that social media was used to create connections, from teacher to teacher within a school district, students to student within the district, connecting students globally and locally, and connecting students to experts in their fields of study. There is clear evidence of learning happening on so many levels with social media. For example, one student tweeted a question to an astronaut and to NASA. "Can you see the night and day line from space?" a student asked Thornton when they were studying night and day. They both responded. They answered not only that question but others as well, and tweeted back a picture." Students are excited to see that people are engaging with them, and that they can get responses from experts, like NASA. "They do appreciate the fact that people are responding to what they do," one teacher says. When a teachers's class was studying simple machines a few years ago, one of his students asked, "What about a straw? Would a straw be like one of the simple machines?" To aid their class discussion about the materials they were using, on teacher called attention to the drinking straw by tweeting out, "Would the straw be an example of one of the six simple machines?" This sparked an online debate between scientists around the globe and the students in that class were able to see that online conversation unfold. I think the most exciting piece of this process has to do with students' questions being valued, heard and answered so quickly from a variety of experts. It lends a sense of authenticity and reward that is often missing when questions arise in class. I know that, in my Digital Media classes, we often have technical questions that come up. Just last week, as students were submitting their game board projects to thegamecrafter.com to send the game to print, a handful of them encountered problems with uploading their files. The sizing of the files was off by a pixel and no matter how they tried to fix it, they were not getting results. Frustration was clearly mounting. I went on with a few students and entered the chat room on thegamecrafter and asked for help. Not only did we get our questions answered within seconds, but, about five professional board game designers became very curious as to what we were doing in class. It opened up conversations in ways that seem to blow the walls off of schools and I'm very excited to try more of this with Twitter. Next time an interesting question pops up, I am going to stop what we are doing and open up the discussion to the rest of the world through social media. I like the idea of deepening the discussion, lending credibility to the original question and creating outside relationships with experts in their industries. This can be implemented tomorrow in my classroom and I think that will be my plan! I rate this case study 5 out of 5!
In this study, not only where students asked to teach the class an important concept, but they were also asked to make sure that they addressed many different learners buy presenting a slide show, coupling that with handouts or notes that require some fill-in-blank spots to keep students engaged and creating a place for students to process the information through pencil and paper. Then students were asked to create some kind of engaging activity such as a crossword puzzle, word search, game or other interactive approach.
I personally love when my students are asked to bring something new to the class to learn and share that knowledge with us all. Last week I had one student teach about Bartyl's Taxonomy in Game play and one student teach about how the brain learns when we play video games. Both of these talks were highly engaging and seemed to keep the attention of ALL of my game design students. After looking at this case study, I think I would like to more formally introduce this idea of students bringing their own lessons to the class and have them think through their presentation more deeply. I did notice that after both presentations, there was a lively discussion about the subject matter that seemed to engage most of the students in the class. It was a pleasant reminder that we ALL can benefit from taking on the teacher role and that asking a student to do more than just get up and talk asks them to stretch themselves as teachers and learners. I know I can put more structure in place in my classes to support this concept and allow students to shine. It's a very authentic way of assessing and practicing Oral Communication. I just wish I had videotaped both presentations. They were so good and shared information that I knew nothing about! It's so awesome to learn something new from my students! I give this case study as 4 out of 5. As a part of my Masters program in Innovative Learning I am being asked to create an Action Research Question. Here are the preliminary thoughts I have and where I think I'm headed with a question I would like to further explore through data collection and inquiry-based learning. I can't wait to investigate further and will share my process here on my blog as I go! Research Question: How can I foster reading stamina in my classroom? Subquestions: What obstacles do students face with reading? What cultural or socioeconomic factors come into play when students are presented with reading opportunities? What role does community expectation play in fostering reading stamina? Are we concentrating less on reading stamina at the high school level than we did before the internet? Does the 1:1 environment decrease reading stamina? Does moving to more screen work and to less book work decrease reading stamina? What I plan to do: I’m interested in reading about how others foster reading stamina and then I would like to try to apply those techniques in my own classroom. I would also like to investigate the phenomenon of lowered reading stamina to see if this is actually the case for 1:1 classrooms and how that might effect what I do in my classroom. Context/background for my question: I have a sneaking suspicion that as we move more and more toward screens, and more and more toward getting our information through video and audio, that reading levels and stamina are declining. I believe that this decline leads to students who can not access information on a deep level and that we are raising a whole generation of scanners, who only read for surface understanding. I believe that when we limit our reading to surface level reading, we lose all sorts of access to complex thinking, reasoning and discernment. With more and more information available to students through the internet, the ability to discern pertinent information on any given topic is more important now, more than ever. It is not enough to let others curate our information. We must be willing to curate our own points of view on a given topic, read all supporting documentation on a topic and be able to analyze and synthesize all that written information. Personal Biases: I have altered my own reading habits over the last few years due to the kindle, Facebook, Twitter and websites. I used to be able to sit with a book for hours at a time, reading until my heart’s content, but now, I find myself gravitating toward shorter articles, getting my news from Facebook, reading more and more about public opinion, opinion that is not necessarily backed up by facts and evidence. I find myself having a harder time sitting down with a book for long periods of time and read a lot fewer novels and more FB posts, and I used to consider myself to be an avid reader. I AM reading more current events, which feels good, but maybe not much of substance regarding those current events. I also have a personal bias toward reading in general and have very high expectations for myself for reading. My own three children are not that into reading and that alarms me as a parent. |
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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