Lessons Learned

Look in most social studies textbooks, read analysis of historical events and one usually finds a common categorization of information. The categories often include the economic, social, political, religious, the arts and technological angles of what happened and why. And sometimes one finds a discussion of how geography affected several of these categories. Social studies teachers make these aspects of our study of society a mainstay to our teaching.

If you are not already teaching your students how we break the study of social studies down into these categories, look to use the  ESPRAT+G acronym. Much like using the 6+1 Traits of Writing to give our students a structure and language to talk about their writing, ESPRAT+G can do the same for the understanding of social studies.

I put a Web site together that I share with my students to help them better understand ESPRAT+G. Your students might find it helpful as well.

A portion of “learning” IB history is memorizing people, places, and dates. As I am not in the Core Knowledge camp but do believe in some level of cultural literacy, I do realize my students must have a certain amount of content for their exams. Thus, I am working to be creative in coming up with helpful content attainment practices that are fun for students to do.

Playing the American baseball angle, I have my students creating history trading cards that resemble baseball cards. The person, place, event, date, etc. is listed on one side with the other side filled with pertinent information. Here is an example of a homework assignment, class lesson and follow up homework for the Interwar years.

Before class homework description:

Trading History Cards: You are to research and write down on small index style cards information about the following topics. Some have been covered in your presentations so this will be review. Try to find paper that is a little thicker than regular paper. On one side you write the topic in large letters and on the other side you are to answer the following key questions: What/Who?, When?, Why Important? and Any Connections to other key topics, events, or persons? Your cards cannot be any larger than 9 cm by 9 cm. Do include a drawing, map, etc. if you can. 

We will have a little competition in class to see whose specific cards you would like to trade for the most. Each student/player will have to ask for and review a trading card from as many classmates as possible on all the topics listed below. When we meet and have our trading session, each student will be allowed to ask for 7 cards in total from other players. You will also write down on your personal scorecard how well you know each topic and who has the best card for each topic. We will count how many requests the top players have at the end of the game.

In Class:

Trading History Cards: You are to have your cards ready with the listing of the topics on one side and on the other side you are to answer the following key questions: What/Who?, When?, Why Important? and Any Connections to other key topics, events, or persons? You are to use your Score Card handout to walk around and ask as many players as you can to see some of their trading cards. You must see cards for all the topics listed on your Score Card and you are to not see more than two cards from one player. We will have a little competition to see whose specific cards you would like to trade for the most. Each student/player will be allowed to ask for 7 cards in total from other players. You are to tear off a request strip from the second page of your handout and give it to the person whose card you want. Go to your Score Card to write down the name of the person you requested the card from listing his/her name in the “Golden Glover” column. Even after you hand out all 7 of your requests, continue to list the name of the player who did the best job for each topic.  We will count how many requests the top players have at the end of the game to see who the top three players were. And at the end of the activity, take a few moments to self assess. Are you “hitting” above .300 signifying that you really know the topic or are you batting below .300 which means you need to do some more work to understand the topic?

Homework: You are to take the topic list from today’s exercise and voice record your explanations for each one. You hopefully have new material in your minds beyond what was there when you made your trading cards. You will come back to these recordings as you prepare for the exams in the spring.

I have written in a few venues about using voice recording software like Audacity or GarageBand to support learning. Working with my 12th grade IB history students, I discovered a new strategy to fit the needs of these students who have to document their learning to study for the external exams and to help them have one more way to construct their understanding.

I am having my students take the topic list, essential questions and unit questions for our study of the Interwar years and have them voice record their current understanding of each. This should especially help those students who struggle getting their ideas down from their minds through their fingers into Word documents. It should also offer another modality to support their efforts to take notes and outline. What I will be interested to survey is when they students review for their external exams to see how helpful it will be for them to listen to their sound files.

I keep reminding them that with six area exams, they will be on information overload trying to put two years of learning into their minds this Spring. The more they can hear their own calm, confident voice recordings before they take their exams, the more I think they will quickly remember and connect to their past learning.

Jeff and I concluded our second year of podcasting about shifting schools to the School/Learning 2.0 model. We would like to thank all of our guests who shared their insights and practical ideas to help students, teachers, administrators and parents work together in the shifting process.

You can listen to shows directly from the SOS Podcast page or subscribe through iTunes.

Here are the Essential Questions we discussed this past year:

How to shift when the administrators are not on board?
What prevents administrators from shifting?
What are some shifted practices in our schools?
How to recruit shifted teachers?
Once shifted, where do we go next?
How to make the shift systemic and sustainable in our schools?
Which comes first, shifted practices or 1:1 laptop program?
How to move students from being dependent to independent learners?
How are we preparing pre-service teachers to be shifted educators?
How to measure how shifted your school is?
How to do a school tech makeover on the cheap?
How can we help teachers take more risks in their teaching and learning?

The TPACK approach of connecting technology, pedagogy and content to use the power of their convergence is being covered in the May issue of Learning & Leading with Technology. Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler, the authors of the article, also share a wiki site that provides further information on the framework.

Judi Harris and Mark Hofer of the College of William & Mary will soon have articles also published in L & L on the TPACK theme. They recently took the theory and moved into the practical by creating their Learning Activities Type wiki. There you can find examples of regular instructional practices and assessments matched up with various supportive technologies categorized by ones that lead to convergent learning and ones that offer ways for students to show their divergent thinking.

Another resource for learning about TPACK is a podcast by the GenTech boys. Check it out.

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Mark Hofer, Steve Whitaker and Michael Kelly will join us on tonight’s SOS Podcast where we will be discussing this question of teacher preparation. It should be an excellent discussion as all three taught pre-service teachers at the University of Virginia. Mark now teaches at the College of William and Mary.

To answer this question I think of what we do with our colleagues in our schools to help them shift their teaching practices to more Classroom 2.0 practices. We have covered many topics in the podcast that support shifting individuals and schools but two in particular jump out at me when working with new teachers.

Risk Taking- I wrote about this in my previous post. We ended up needing to postpone that podcast discussion with John Mikton. It is now scheduled for April 30th. When working with university students, I am thinking one can start with the practices they already use in their lives for communication and learning. In most cases this will involve tapping into their everyday life experience of using cell phones, social networking tools, information literacy, etc. while guiding them to see that that already have learning networks in their lives.

Professional Learning Networks- So much to being a shifted teacher is about being a lifelong learner connected to one’s physical and digital learning networks. We again draw on the pre-service teachers’ natural proclivity to use technology to help them set up their RSS reader and to start connecting to the blogs, wikis, etc. that support shifted practices and new learning while offering examples of risk taking activities by educators from around the world.

John Mikton will join Jeff and myself to talk about this question on the Shifting Our Schools podcast taking place tonight. To start answering this question, I think the obvious starting point is with our teachers individually to ask them what needs to happen to help them try new ideas in their teaching and learning. I don’t see large workshops or sending folks to conferences as the starting point to help build a culture of risk taking. Large scale PD efforts can provide models of shifted practices and get folks excited to try new things but it still comes back to each teacher in his/her classroom. I think it says so much to talk to teachers a few weeks after returning from a conference to see how things are going in trying some of the practices they saw at the conference. Many times they haven’t acted on their excitement due to barriers in their schools.

We know the list of barriers that often affect teachers in many ways not just in not taking risks (i.e., not enough time, too much to cover in the curriculum, assigned tasks that don’t support student learning, parent expectations, etc.). Experience tells me that by talking with individual teachers, finding practices they are confident in using in their classrooms and then asking what they see as interesting in other classrooms or in their professional reading, we as learning specialists (instructional technologists, librarians, learning support, GATE facilitators, curriculum coordinators, etc.) can then help them take small first steps to try new things starting within their area of comfort.

One theme that runs through many of our podcasts about shifting practices and schools is leadership. While learning specialists can make a huge difference in supporting teachers and learning in the classroom, it is our administrators who can really help push the shift by modeling risk taking setting a tone for the school that trying new ideas is expected. By communicating to the larger community through a variety of communication avenues (e.g., blogs, email, Twitter, various presentations tools in parent meetings, etc.), the administrator takes risks with new technology while inviting parents to understand and expect risk taking as part of the school culture. Celebration of teachers and students taking risks should be central to the shift in culture. While much of the focus will be on successful risk taking, we cannot forget to highlight the times when the results didn’t quite work out and learning took place.

If we work with individuals while having the community as a whole assess the nature of our current school culture, we can gather the information needed to create an action plan to build a climate that supports risk taking. While this process might take some time, if we start right away having our learning specialists work with teachers to share their opinions about barriers and needed actions for support while having our administrators lead by example, we can start helping educators take more risks in their teaching.

Panda Smith shared an online educational tool with me today called Jog the Web. It provides a slide show, step by step approach of taking viewers through Web sites allowing the author to annotate and ask guiding questions for each Web page. The viewers can reply posting their comments and/or ask questions. As a WebQuest designer, I find myself wishing for the opportunity to “be with” my students to ask questions and guide them as they read linked sites from my WebQuests. While I provide scaffolding via questions to be answered they are not so specific to each Web site or its individual pages. Jog the Web provides the further scaffolding opportunity that I am looking for.

The students with stronger research skills and more adept at answering complex questions can skip the steps thus supporting the differentiated nature of my WebQuests. Now by using the Jog the Web designed tracks within my WebQuests, I have a much more precise way to differentiate the multiple pathways students can take in doing their research.

Outside of WebQuests, Jog the Web provides a nice way to create short learning tasks along the lines of Web scavenger hunts. To get a feel for the potential of this tool around a topic we all know so well, check out the 21st Century Skills track created by Elizabeth Holmes.

And if you are familiar with Jog the Web, what are some ways you are using it?

Do you want to “hook” your students into your topic of study? How about immersing them in the images and discussions of your subject? While we use bulletin boards for images to display information about our units of study, how about also displaying information digitally? You can put together a slide show to run continuously on your classroom television, projector & screen and on your classroom computers to surround your students with images from the unit you are studying. An example would be to show people, architecture, art, food, social scenes, etc. for a social studies unit. As inquiry driven educators, we want to put those hooks out there to lead our students to pursue answers to their own questions.

With so many recordings of famous speeches and podcasts on so many topics, it also works to either download the files when possible or set the home page in your classroom browsers to have direct links to podcasts that tie into subject matter. If you are a 1:1 laptop school, look to create a Web page with the podcast links, images and research links for your students to add as a tab to their browser home pages.

A nice source for images and screensaver software is Webshots.  Download their slide show presenter and start adding images from their vast photo database to construct a show that fits your curriculum needs. Don’t forget to check out their community pages where Webshot members share their best shots for you to download. Also think about challenging students to find more images or draw their own (think literature lessons where students draw their pictures of characters and scenes) to be added to the collection.

Cheers to Mike Lambert for starting this practice many years ago in my son’s classroom.

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Hsinchu International School (HIS) follows the common principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES). One of these principles is the “demonstration of mastery” via the Exhibition. The Exhibition is the public demonstration of student learning. Our 8th and 10th grade students did their Exhibitions this past week before fellow students, faculty, and parents. Next year we will have our first graduating class who will join the other two groups in Exhibition evenings as they move on from Institute I (grades 7 & 8 ) and Institute II (grades 9 & 10).

I was very impressed with our students especially noting that most of them are ESL students who come to HIS with very little experience presenting before an audience. They quickly have opportunity for crafting their presentation skills as HIS students routinely share their learning from their class Expeditions during our twice weekly all school gatherings.

The 8th graders focused their presentations on how they were making progress towards reaching our Five Student Learning Outcomes. They used examples from their classes using images, video, audio recordings and text to document their learning. As one of the Learning Outcomes is “Effective Communicator”, I especially enjoyed how the students used good speaking skills, authentic images and excellent design in their presentations.