My blog has moved to http://donovanscience.com/
I decided to try to bring together my blog posts with all of my tech tips and classroom applications posts from my other site. All of my future blog posts and resources will be posted there from now on.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Post Spring Break = Time to Try New Things
Spring Break is a great time to refresh and to get ready for the final part of the school year. It can also be the time you use to prepare to try something new in the classroom. I did my first trial of a flipped classroom after spring break, using the time before and during the break to prepare my materials and to practice in order to be ready to try something new.
Many teachers will say that they are too busy during the school year to try too many new things, and I would agree that you have to be careful about throwing in too many new things and not having them work, disrupting learning for too long. There is a difference though between being careful and being scared or too unsure about trying something new.
Our job as educators is to be constantly trying to improve as there is no perfect way to teach so we must be always trying to find ways just to get better. If a teacher thinks they do not have to improve anymore, then they should be ready to retire or find a new line of work. Our students deserve nothing but the best from us and that means that we have to always keep working on getting better. Teaching is not for everyone, if you just want a 9-5 job that you can forget about when you leave work then you definitely should not be a teacher.
Spring Break also allows for new things to be tried in the classroom as students tend to come back rested and ready to try new things. Throwing something drastically different at them during the middle of a week when they have tests and projects due can cause a big issue with some students so using the time coming back from a break is the perfect time to try something new. It is kind of like when I would never change seating charts before a test, the students were so used to sitting where they were that changing that before a test could actually affect the stress level of some students.
The time after Spring Break is also great for trying new things as you can use the summer to improve them or scrap them for the coming school year. I spent a considerable amount of time that summer after I tried flipping my 9th grade Earth Science class to do more research on standards based grading and mastery style learning. I worked on trying to develop better standards and modified some of the procedures I had tried before the school year ended. This was also great time to connect with others to share what had worked and what we still had to work on. If I had waited till the Fall to try something new and it did not work perfectly, I am sure that I would have been more inclined to dump that idea and move onto something new. Instead I had time over the summer to fine tune it and make it better for the Fall.
The best thing to do is to start thinking of that change that you can make after break now, starting figure out what you want to change that relates to student learning in your classroom. Start looking up things you can do or try, identify those weak spots in your classroom or any area that you want to improve. Use some time over break to make sure you are ready to try it out when students return. BUT, make sure you do take a little time over break to relax. Just as it is important that students are ready after break to finish the year, teachers need to be recharged and ready for what may come.
Many teachers will say that they are too busy during the school year to try too many new things, and I would agree that you have to be careful about throwing in too many new things and not having them work, disrupting learning for too long. There is a difference though between being careful and being scared or too unsure about trying something new.
Our job as educators is to be constantly trying to improve as there is no perfect way to teach so we must be always trying to find ways just to get better. If a teacher thinks they do not have to improve anymore, then they should be ready to retire or find a new line of work. Our students deserve nothing but the best from us and that means that we have to always keep working on getting better. Teaching is not for everyone, if you just want a 9-5 job that you can forget about when you leave work then you definitely should not be a teacher.
Spring Break also allows for new things to be tried in the classroom as students tend to come back rested and ready to try new things. Throwing something drastically different at them during the middle of a week when they have tests and projects due can cause a big issue with some students so using the time coming back from a break is the perfect time to try something new. It is kind of like when I would never change seating charts before a test, the students were so used to sitting where they were that changing that before a test could actually affect the stress level of some students.
The time after Spring Break is also great for trying new things as you can use the summer to improve them or scrap them for the coming school year. I spent a considerable amount of time that summer after I tried flipping my 9th grade Earth Science class to do more research on standards based grading and mastery style learning. I worked on trying to develop better standards and modified some of the procedures I had tried before the school year ended. This was also great time to connect with others to share what had worked and what we still had to work on. If I had waited till the Fall to try something new and it did not work perfectly, I am sure that I would have been more inclined to dump that idea and move onto something new. Instead I had time over the summer to fine tune it and make it better for the Fall.
The best thing to do is to start thinking of that change that you can make after break now, starting figure out what you want to change that relates to student learning in your classroom. Start looking up things you can do or try, identify those weak spots in your classroom or any area that you want to improve. Use some time over break to make sure you are ready to try it out when students return. BUT, make sure you do take a little time over break to relax. Just as it is important that students are ready after break to finish the year, teachers need to be recharged and ready for what may come.
Friday, February 14, 2014
Tech Tips of the Week
Here are the Tech Tips I have posted onto my other site within the last week or so.
These tips and others can be found on my other site at http://bit.ly/ahstechint.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Audience of More Than 1
One key thing that can happen when students have easy access to technology is that their work can be shared with so many other people. When we have students produce work in class that just goes to the teacher, there is an audience of 1. If we have that same student share that piece of work with others, they have a much larger audience and often times this can have a positive impact on engagement and learning. Many students put in the minimum effort when they know that the teacher is the only person seeing what they create. They focus on how much they have to do to get the number of points that they want instead of taking real ownership of what they are creating.
Ways to increase the audience
Issue to watch out for
Our students want to create, and they should not have to hide their creations or only show them to the teacher. They should be able to use the technology that they already use in the classroom to share their learning and achievements with others. Our job as teachers is to help them learn how to share out, how to protect themselves and to protect their own creations. But our job is not to hid them or to make them only produce for ourselves. Give your students an audience of more than 1 and you will see learning happening like never before.
Ways to increase the audience
- I would first start by just sharing with the other students in class. This can easily be done by using a Google Doc that students put the links to their work in or you could even use a form to collect the work and share the results with everyone. You also could just create a class group using Google Groups and then just have the students share their work (view or comment only) with the group so that they could offer feedback. I would suggest having guidelines and showing how to leave proper feedback, reminding students that are jobs are to learn and to help others learn, not to discourage learning with ill comments.
- Using a blog to have students posting their work to and sharing with others is another road you can head down. You could use free tools like Blogger, Weebly or even a Google Site. A teacher could use the script pagemeister to produce a separate page for each student on their own site to get started. The student would have more ownership of their learning if they were the owners of their own blog, which is why I would suggest eventually moving towards a tool like Blogger or Weebly or even having them create their own site. Imagine a student who creates their own site in middle school and uses it to share their learning all through middle school and high school. That student would have a great record of their learning which would allow them to reflect on how and what they have learned.
- Have students create their own podcast, or vodcast, and share that out. Have them interview others and have others share their work through their podcast. Let them create what they want and they will surprise you with how much it improves their learning.
Issue to watch out for
- Of course privacy has to be a real concern when sharing online, whether it is the student sharing or the teacher sharing. One thing that might help is to use either only first names or to use a made up name to protect the identity of the student.
- One teacher, that I saw that had students create blogs for their class, had the students use just their first name and last initial. The teacher and the students knew who each other were but not anyone outside of that group. This made it so the student could share out without having others know exactly who that person was.
- You have to find the right level of privacy for your students, and the parents, that makes them feel comfortable but also allows them to share their work with others.
Our students want to create, and they should not have to hide their creations or only show them to the teacher. They should be able to use the technology that they already use in the classroom to share their learning and achievements with others. Our job as teachers is to help them learn how to share out, how to protect themselves and to protect their own creations. But our job is not to hid them or to make them only produce for ourselves. Give your students an audience of more than 1 and you will see learning happening like never before.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
1:1 Round 2
This is not my first time going through the implementation of a 1:1 as I was previously at another school before and during the first 3 years of the 1:1 there. There we gave our students the white MacBooks and we had some successes as well as some, well, we will just call them not-successes.
There were many variables that caused initial problems, such as new administration, a state site visit and a switch from a block schedule to an eight period day. Due to all of those changes there wasn't a lot of time or energy that first year to do a whole lot. There were definitely some changes that happened to improve the learning environment but not a lot seemed to change overall. The integration of the technology into the classroom and into the learning was slower than would have been had we been able to only focus on that as opposed to the other changes.
During year 2 and year 3 there was a lot more that was done, more pd and more opportunities to learn from each other. Some teachers would make certain changes to their teaching style or would integrate certain tools in order to help the students, and the students would actually ask the other teachers to do the same. While teachers were required to have a class site (or blog depending on how you look at it) there were different ways to go about this and some teachers would only do the bare minimum while others would attempt to create a truly blended learning environment.
It took me a little over a year before I found the way that I really wanted to use the new tools in the classroom. While looking for examples from other teachers I had stumbled upon examples from a flipped classroom. I also found out how others were using mastery style learning and standards based grading in connection with technology in order to create a more student-centered learning environment. My focus was just on integrating new technology, it was on how I could best use these tools to better meet the needs of my students. I understood that there might be a lot of work to change but I felt that if it helped my students learn, then it would be worth it.
I think the best indicator of success for a 1:1 is the change of instruction to better meet the needs of the students. Did the changes that took place end up positively affect the student learning that was taking place? Did the teachers try to find new ways to help students or did they just digitize the old methods and tools? Are the teachers willing to try new things and even fail along the way, as long as they keep trying in order to improve?
In Sean Nash's Blog post he discusses how the comfort level with seven elements will determine if you are ready to undertake the 1:1 change or not. A big message throughout those seven elements is, are you willing to give up teacher centered strategies and move towards student centered ones instead. We have to make sure that we are truly focused on the student, no matter what initiative is being introduced or what changes take place. If we are not focused on the student with each step we take, we will not succeed.
There were many variables that caused initial problems, such as new administration, a state site visit and a switch from a block schedule to an eight period day. Due to all of those changes there wasn't a lot of time or energy that first year to do a whole lot. There were definitely some changes that happened to improve the learning environment but not a lot seemed to change overall. The integration of the technology into the classroom and into the learning was slower than would have been had we been able to only focus on that as opposed to the other changes.
During year 2 and year 3 there was a lot more that was done, more pd and more opportunities to learn from each other. Some teachers would make certain changes to their teaching style or would integrate certain tools in order to help the students, and the students would actually ask the other teachers to do the same. While teachers were required to have a class site (or blog depending on how you look at it) there were different ways to go about this and some teachers would only do the bare minimum while others would attempt to create a truly blended learning environment.
It took me a little over a year before I found the way that I really wanted to use the new tools in the classroom. While looking for examples from other teachers I had stumbled upon examples from a flipped classroom. I also found out how others were using mastery style learning and standards based grading in connection with technology in order to create a more student-centered learning environment. My focus was just on integrating new technology, it was on how I could best use these tools to better meet the needs of my students. I understood that there might be a lot of work to change but I felt that if it helped my students learn, then it would be worth it.
I think the best indicator of success for a 1:1 is the change of instruction to better meet the needs of the students. Did the changes that took place end up positively affect the student learning that was taking place? Did the teachers try to find new ways to help students or did they just digitize the old methods and tools? Are the teachers willing to try new things and even fail along the way, as long as they keep trying in order to improve?
In Sean Nash's Blog post he discusses how the comfort level with seven elements will determine if you are ready to undertake the 1:1 change or not. A big message throughout those seven elements is, are you willing to give up teacher centered strategies and move towards student centered ones instead. We have to make sure that we are truly focused on the student, no matter what initiative is being introduced or what changes take place. If we are not focused on the student with each step we take, we will not succeed.
Technology as the Mutliplier
One thing that many people have trouble with when viewing the effectiveness of technology in the classroom, is that technology can not solve bad teaching. In many classrooms you will see techniques that are not effective but they are still being used, due to many reasons such as a lack of time to develop better methods or even a lack of energy by the teacher to get better. When technology is added to these situations, the technology by itself can not improve the learning going on in the classroom.
Technology acts like a multiplier where it can help make good teaching great but it can also help make bad teaching worse. If a person is using methods that do not focus on student learning but instead of a set instructional path, all technology will do is make this more efficient or give the teacher new ways to keep doing bad things. If a teacher is student centered and using formative assessment tools, project based learning or any other method that has shown to be very effective, then the technology can amplify the effectiveness of that classroom.
One key is to look at who is using the technology. If the teacher is the main person to use the technology in the classroom, there is little the technology can do to help the students learn more effectively. That becomes a prime example of a teacher-centered classroom. If the teacher is the focus of the classroom and the focus of the technology use, then the learning taking place will most likely not be improved by just using new tools.
If the students are the main ones using the technology, then there is a greater chance that the use of better tools or techniques can have a greater impact on student learning. But giving new tools to the students without having the proper environment for the learning to take place will not result in success either. There is a deep connection between the effectiveness of technology, and any other tool for that matter, and the environment of learning that is set up by the teachers and the students.
Technology acts like a multiplier where it can help make good teaching great but it can also help make bad teaching worse. If a person is using methods that do not focus on student learning but instead of a set instructional path, all technology will do is make this more efficient or give the teacher new ways to keep doing bad things. If a teacher is student centered and using formative assessment tools, project based learning or any other method that has shown to be very effective, then the technology can amplify the effectiveness of that classroom.
One key is to look at who is using the technology. If the teacher is the main person to use the technology in the classroom, there is little the technology can do to help the students learn more effectively. That becomes a prime example of a teacher-centered classroom. If the teacher is the focus of the classroom and the focus of the technology use, then the learning taking place will most likely not be improved by just using new tools.
If the students are the main ones using the technology, then there is a greater chance that the use of better tools or techniques can have a greater impact on student learning. But giving new tools to the students without having the proper environment for the learning to take place will not result in success either. There is a deep connection between the effectiveness of technology, and any other tool for that matter, and the environment of learning that is set up by the teachers and the students.
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