Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Category: Web 2.0 Tools (page 1 of 3)

Virtual School Pedagogy – Oldies but Goodies

February 12, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Note: My international school is just starting virtual school for the current school year, so we are now just experiencing what many schools have been doing for most of the year. I posted the following to our Wellness blog.

I hung up my instructional technology hat a ways back, so I can’t offer the latest tools, tips, or techniques that many of our staff use in their virtual learning delivery. I can offer pedagogical strategies that have worked in the past and can definitely be supported through technology to enhance learning in virtual schools.

Concept/Mind Maps

Concept/Mind maps help students make their thinking visible, primarily when representing connections between ideas, events, topics, etc. Concept maps also can be used as collaboration tools.

An excellent way to use concept maps for virtual learning is to use an online provider like Mindmeister. Students can share their Mindmeister concept maps with you to access their thinking, especially for formative assessment of their understanding as the unit of study progresses. Virtual collaboration is supported if you partner with students or place them in groups to work together to use mind maps for multiple purposes. Here is a mind map template for essential questions one teacher provided his students. Look at a blog post describing how students used concept maps to answer the essential questions for their units of study at a couple schools.

Learning Activity Types via TPACK

Several American professors came together in 2010-11 to organize learning activity types (LAT) into nine subject areas supported by technology. They published articles about their efforts. Here is one. They provide research-supported pedagogies in their Learning Activity Types website hosted at the College of William & Mary School of Education. They apply the TPACK construct for planning purposes. Look to their website by going to the left side menu to select from the nine learning activity-type disciplines. The supporting technologies are from 2011, so adapt ones that still exist today and/or find the latest iteration or replacement tool that best supports each pedagogy. Image Source

Multimedia Essays (Media Mashups)

Writing essays is one of the most precious skills that we teach our students. But sometimes, our students can benefit from an alternative learning experience and assessment that engages the full range of their ICL skills. We can differentiate and add complexity to the standard writing process by having students create multimedia essays where they “mash up” various sources of media to communicate their thinking. At the time, a William and Mary doctoral student describes her work with multimedia essays in this podcast. Image Source

Personalized Learning System (PLS)

Students (and teachers) use technology to access information, to make meaning, to create and communicate their learning via a personalized set of resources for learning… a “go-to” 24/7 technology and information access toolkit – a Personal Learning System (PLS).

We guide our students to work as architects designing and maximizing their “learning flow” (think of the term workflow) while also engaging in time management techniques to increase efficiency and purposeful productivity. Self-directed and growth-minded students use devices, apps, Web tools, and information sources, putting themselves in charge of their learning. Here is a web resource describing what a Personal Learning System can look like and a planning document for students to work with. Image Source

Sketchnoting (Visual Note-Taking)

Our students live in a media-rich world. They think in images, video, and sound while constantly making neural connections. The creation apps on phones, tablets, and computers offer students pathways to draw, audio record, insert images/video, and embed hyperlinks to information sources, all personalized. This is where visual note-taking comes in. We can expand note-taking choices beyond text recording into multiple modalities by guiding students to use mind maps, colors, shapes, images, and digital grouping by dragging and dropping objects and connecting lines to record their thinking. Image Source

The Six Thinking Hats

Edward de Bono created this approach to decision-making and problem-solving that guides users to think in terms of types of thinking and perspective. We can apply them for individuals and groups of students to use as they process information. Here is a helpful overview and a teacher’s application in her classroom. Image Source

Thinking Routines

In the book Making Thinking Visible, Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morisson help readers understand the power of thinking routines to help students process big ideas and make their thinking visible. Teachers routinely use the thinking routines in their regular face-to-face classes. One can also choose from a variety of technologies to also use in virtual school. Here is a dated web resource on the supportive tools one can use. However, the application of the routines is sound. If you are new to the routines, you can review an article by Ron Ritchhart and David Perkins entitled Making Thinking Visible. Also, look to go through the Harvard Project Zero Thinking Routine Toolbox. Image Source

WebQuests

WebQuests are a natural pedagogy for virtual schools because they’re already web-based. They connect inquiry and research skills to students working in teams using their communication skills to present their findings. WebQuests are online research expeditions built by teachers that put the students into roles to find information from selected sites and other resources as they attempt to solve a real problem and/or answer a question. The students in teams analyze, curate, and then use the information to create a learning product to demonstrate their understanding. WebQuests are NOT internet scavenger hunts with students just going through a list of links. True WebQuests have the students performing in the authentic roles of historians, economists, mathematicians, etc. The culminating project is usually a performance task in which the students present their findings while playing their roles or applying the learning to produce a product. Image Source

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A significant wellness connection for these pedagogies is that they engage students in PERMAH while exercising their Character Strengths. Collaboration amplifies Relationships with students using their strengths of kindness, leadership, and teamwork, to name just a few character strength applications. The process of creating definitely has students applying their strength of creativity within the pillars of Engagement and Accomplishment.

So how do we take these oldies but goody strategies and other current innovative and effective practices to spread them throughout our virtual school? One approach would be to form a virtual school design team in each division who become busy bees finding out what’s happening in virtual classrooms elaborating on ideas, and making connections to new approaches. They then cross-pollinate throughout the division and potentially between divisions. 😁

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Home Learning Support Plan and More

February 12, 2021 / / 0 Comments

One thing is to meet with parents to provide a list of home support strategies. It is another to provide a method to help them apply the strategies. The image to the left is a screenshot of one parent’s effort to work with her child to complete a home support plan template I provided her.

The support strategies list provides strategies for building routines and health (i.e., diet and sleep), the physical learning environment (essential for virtual learning), organization skills, and self-control while supporting independence. One can, of course, come up with other categories.

I work with the students to design their personal wellness plans they then take home to share with their parents. The wellness plan is student-centered and managed with some parental coaching. The home learning plan is parent managed with input from the child. The older the child, the more he/she takes ownership of applying the strategies.

And then there is, of course, the Personal Learning System (PLS) and plan that I work with students to complete and implement to have agency over their learning. 🙂

Virtual School Design Team

February 16, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I mentioned in my Virtual School during SARS post that we formed a leadership team for our virtual school at HKIS that included green hat thinkers. I also wrote about the grade-level teams dividing up the work by the various strengths and talents that the team members presented. While our VS Leadership Team at HKIS did all the organizational, logistics, and curriculum design work, I am now thinking of a new approach to separate leadership and curriculum design into two teams.

Elementary schools have leadership teams made up of administrators, grade-level team leaders, a leader for the specials, possibly a representative for other groups, and of course the instructional coaches. This can add up to a lot of people. While performing their normal duties this works just fine and it can work for running the virtual school with all stakeholders having a voice while receiving information back from the leadership team.

What might be unwieldy is the curriculum collaboration design work that needs a special skill set from its members. This is where a portion of the overall VS Leadership Team could provide the nucleus for a VS Design Team. The VS Design Team not only provides ongoing curriculum development but also works as a skunkworks for longer-term research and program design especially if the virtual school continues over the long term. Additional members would be the teachers who have the strengths of creativity, curiosity, and zest along with a good understanding of using technology effectively. They would need to be especially creative regarding pedagogy. The tech background doesn’t have to be a prerequisite as the instructional technologist can lead out on how to make the instructional strategies viable for virtual delivery. This is where school leaders who really know the talents of their staff can review their profiles to construct the VS Design Team.

The instructional coaches would be the main communicators working with the grade levels and specials teachers. They would be the busy bees gathering the learning outcomes from the teams and bringing that information to the VS Design Team to then do their design work. This would especially be the case for the transdisciplinary units of study.  The team’s work would go into a lesson database (curriculum mapping tool or Google Docs for example) with the coaches returning to the teams to unpack the strategies and fine-tune them for delivery.

The value of this approach is that the VS Design Team would not only come up with delivery approaches that could be used across grade levels but also would cross-pollinate by curating and iterating the ideas that come in from the teams. It is important to note that there must be trust and buy-in from all the teams to hand off some of their design work.  One cannot have the VS Design Team come up with instructional strategies that are then ignored by some teams.

An additional design approach is to nurture the real innovators on staff to let them do mini-pilots playing a bit in their virtual sandboxes. This approach is supported by the School Retool “hacking mindset” approach to redesigning school cultures to be more nimble and innovative.

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It is important to remember that the first couple of stages of virtual school mainly deals with setting up systems (i.e., delivery, communication, etc.). The next phase has the teachers in a more comfortable place where creativity and innovation really can come into play as they deliver their math and literacy curricula. The longer virtual school lasts, the more important it is to find ways to strive for helping students move up Bloom’s Taxonomy aiming for concept learning while building in collaboration for learning and for social-emotional support. And the longer virtual school lasts, the more the grade level teaching teams need to teach the units of study. So if your units of study involve inquiry, project, and problem-based learning, look to your VS Design Team to find age-appropriate ways to support these pedagogical approaches.

To balance the big ideas and efforts to try small pilots look to bring in your learning support teachers to fine-tune your design efforts. They specialize in individualization breaking learning down into concrete step-by-step processes. Just as we naturally differentiate for content, process, and product in face-to-face learning, we need to do the same with our virtual instruction. Some students will only need a little explanation while others will need lots of scaffolding, especially when working in teams on project work. Count on your learning support teachers to help with this process.

There is one more member of your VS Design Team- the counselor or as I say, the Wellness Coach. The longer students are away from the normal social-emotional support of being in school with their classmates and teachers, the more they need very intentional sharing of information and strategies to support their well-being. I would add wellness as a subject area for teaching teams to incorporate into their lessons. The Wellness Coach is the person to find out what teams are already doing regarding wellness to then share their activities across grade levels. The Wellness Coach can curate those activities and add new ones to have a central database of lessons to help students learn about their wellness while also providing activities for each of the PERMAH pillars guiding students to engage their character strengths.

One final thought is that we don’t need virtual school to bring innovators together to create, craft, and share powerful instructional and assessment strategies. If our schools are truly innovative learning communities, we of course find ways to nurture and cross-pollinate our ideas also during regular school. 🙂

 

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Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash

Mind Mapping and Learning Support

November 8, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I believe in mind/concept maps, having written about them over the years. Mind maps support UDL while often enhancing learning strategies (e.g., brain dump, chunking, grouping, showing connections, etc.) When web-based mind mapping tools like Mindmeister came onto the scene, we made a giant leap in how digital mind maps can help Replace – Augment/Amplify – Transform (RAT Model) learning that previously used analog tools. The collaborative nature of online concept maps between students and teachers can help the process, create, and communicate one’s understanding.

In chats with a learning support teacher and a history teacher, I made a mental list of how digital mind maps could support their excellent instructional strategies. The following are their strategies and my take on how concept maps could augment/amplify or transform learning.

Brain Dump: The teachers described what we sometimes see in students who struggle to get their ideas from their minds down their arms and out into text. Brainstorming for ideas and just getting the story out of one’s head are supported by mind maps. One can keypad the ideas or use voice-to-text tools to support this process. Mind maps with this function go a step further by giving students a big digital bucket to make their ideas visible or intentionally saving them from separating buckets from the start. This connects to…

Chunking: Voice-to-text or typing in mind maps helps students break information down into more bite-size pieces. Students can take the whole brain dump, cut sections and paste them into their branch cells. They can also do their initial dumps into individual buckets. Mindmeister on a mobile device allows for voice-to-text by using the microphone key on the keypad. Digital mind maps provide a place to embed images-sketches-connection arrows-video-audio-web links, in other words, sketchnoting. 🙂 Back to UDL, giving students multiple ways to express their ideas is supported by concept maps.

Jigsaws: When topics and research are divided between individuals or groups, an online mind map can provide the workspace to curate information, resources, images, etc. When the jigsaw comes together, the connector tool shows relationships. Tools like Inspiration that give you the text box on the connector augment the learning pushing students to think and label the connections.

Routines and Protocols: My Web Resources for Learning site demonstrates ways technology can support and enhance visible thinking routines. The NSRF puts out an extensive listing of protocols to review to see where concept maps come in handy. Look through the routines to see where mind maps are listed as the supporting tool.

Templates & Charts: Question prompts around text, etc., are a mainstay for teachers providing students with scaffolding using labeled textboxes, charts with input areas, listed procedures, supporting vocabulary with text, and drawing areas to visualize the words. Focusing on mind maps, one can see how they support sequencing, grouping by categories, cause, and effect, big ideas supported by details, compare and contrast, etc.

There are entire websites dedicated to mind maps and how they can support a great many instructional strategies and thinking processes. My effort here hopefully connects to what others are sharing.

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Personal Learning System (PLS)

December 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

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Students (and teachers) who use technology to access information while using digital tools to create and communicate develop a personalized set of resources for learning – a “go-to” technology and information toolbox – a Personal Learning System (PLS). They work to maximize their “learning flow” (think about workflow for those in the work world). 

Finding and using active, organized, and collaborative tools are critical to managing individual and group learning projects. Self-directed students use devices, apps, web tools, and information sources, putting themselves in charge of their learning. Students also need to be project managers who engage their PLS as they plan for long-term assignments while often working as team members. 

Active and independent students in command on the bridge of their learning ship are ready for blended to full-out virtual learning opportunities. Engaging with the school Learning Management System (LMS) and other platforms for collaboration and creation furthers our students to trek into expanded learning beyond the school and regular hours of learning.

A Personal Learning System (PLS) can include supportive tools in a variety of categories. The following are a handful of options among many. 

  • Creation- Learners are shifting away from generative software that ties their creativity to a device. While there are many cloud-sharing services, it is making more and more sense to use web-based creation tools for 24/7 access and collaboration with partners and teachers. The list is long for these style creation tools, with several noted bloggers constantly writing about new options for web-based creation tools and tools that support all the PLS categories listed here. Here are a few bloggers to follow. Kathy Schrock | Larry Ferlazzo | Richard Byrne. There are several curated lists of tools to keep an eye on. 101 Web Tools | 21st Century Tools | Top 100 Tools for Learning
  • Communication– We use e-mail, phones, and social networks to connect with others. Examples: Gmail, Hangouts, texting, phone calls, Skype
  • Collaboration– Communicating to share ideas, work on projects and innovate draws upon and develops skills for 21st-century learning and the workplace. Technology facilitates the process of developing, organizing, and sharing those ideas. Examples: Google Apps, Moodle (LMS), MindMeister
  • Curation of Information– Personal Learning Systems are more effective with a place to store, organize, and share the digital information we consume and create. Examples: Google Drive and Keep, Scoop. it! along with a Scoop.it! collection of PLS tools, Dropbox, Diigo, Pocket,
  • Documentation of Information– We need places and modalities (ex., voice-to-text) to record and responsibly cite the ideas we gather from others and make our thinking visible. Examples: Noodle Tools, Evernote, Notability, MindMeister, Siri, Google Now, PaperPort Notes, Google Docs for typing and voice recording to text, Audioboo
  • Project Planning– Planning for projects that involve creating a learning product engages students in using many tools in their learning system. Watching students use their Information & Communication Literacies (ICL) and their PLS tools can be a fascinating aspect of teaching. Scaffolding does need to be in place to support students, whether working individually or in teams, as they manage their time and resources to be efficient and productive. What can support this process is to provide students with a project planning template with guiding questions and supportive ideas to have them create their plans. Regarding ICL, the plan could be called the ICL Project Plan. This blog post offers a few ideas about guiding students to create an ICL Project Plan. 
  • Reference and General Information Gathering– Remember when we had a dictionary, thesaurus, calculator, and an encyclopedia within easy reach of our workspace? Today we have online versions of each and various apps on our devices. Examples: English dictionary/thesaurus apps, Spanish dictionary apps, French dictionary apps, language translators, Britannica, iTunes for Podcasts, Chrome Browser with Extensions, and one’s school library Web site with its list of databases. Adaptive technologies like the Rewordify Web site help students simplify text above their reading level to make it more understandable. The growing Open Educational Resources (OER) is another area for students to connect to for information. 
  • Task and Time Management– The paper planner and calendar do not provide all the services offered by a web-based event and task management calendar. We can now easily access our time management systems across our computing platforms and integrate appointments and tasks into our e-mail. We can often share our appointments and timelines with team members to support collaboration. Examples: Google Calendar, Todoist, Wunderlist
  • Tutorials and Courses– Developing lifelong learners who know how to learn independently is one of our primary goals. Knowing where to go to not only gather information but also learn specific skills via online tutorials is so essential. Examples: iTalki and Duolingo for languages, Vimeo Education and Khan Academy for across-the-board tutorials, Knewton for individualized tutorials, and iTunes University.

This post originates from the Personal Learning System page of the Web Resources for Learning Web site. Also, check out the Edtech Co-Op podcast, where a couple of years ago, Mark and I talked about the announcement from Apple for iBooks and our thoughts on how students could personalize them. The show offers our initial thinking about personal learning systems.

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Teaching Google Apps by Using Them for Lesson Delivery and Blending Learning

September 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Drive LessonPingis important -As I teach a series of Google Apps lessons to our Grade 3 and 4 students, I am sharing the Google Docs directly with the students. I use Google Docs to write up the lessons I share during my classes via a projector and screen. Providing students with words and images is essential as I verbally present the goals, activities, and check-ins during the lessons.

After the lesson, they can refer to them as they try the apps. The lessons offer differentiation by including links to online tutorials for students who want to extend their learning outside class. This is the first step to building a blended learning component of our ICL curriculum. In time I hope to use our learning management system to offer communication connections for students to help each other with questions as they learn the apps. They could use the chat feature built into various apps, but our elementary school has them turned off.

Pre-service Teacher Preparation

May 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

 

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We celebrated the recording of our 50th Ed Tech Co-Op episode, talking about pre-service teacher education. Pre-service teacher education has been in the news lately, prompting prominent bloggers to share their respective views, emphasizing the skill sets our future teachers need.

Look at the Mindshift post on changes to teacher prep programs and Scott McLeod’s post on what teachers graduating from teacher prep programs should be able to do. 

From time to time, we talk about pre-service teacher education, with Mark sharing what he is seeing at William and Mary. The 50th show hopefully can add to the ongoing discussion about how we prepare our future educators.

Here are some rough notes that I put together before the show. We covered many of them but not all.

 

Notes for pre-service teacher podcast:

While I think we need to teach the instructional skills and methods needed to be a teacher, I think we need to approach our pre-service teachers much like we do our K-12 students. We want them to be independent and skilled at knowing how to learn, adapt, and design in a hopefully ever-changing educational landscape.

We want our young and second-career teachers to have the ICL skills that we want them to help develop in their students. If a new teacher has her ICL toolkit well constructed, she can adapt, develop and move towards the shifted practices we want in our schools. This also involves being flexible, wanting to constantly grow and learn, desiring collaboration, being willing to take risks, etc.

We also want the pre-service educators to think of learning goals for lessons/units in terms of concepts first supported by skills and content. The skills and content help one’s students gain an understanding of the concepts. The dissonance is that, in many cases, the new teachers will see standards and standardized tests that mainly focus on the content knowledge. The trick is helping the pre-service teachers learn how to design lessons that use the content to get to the concepts. This will take care of the testing while also developing the students as thinkers learning about ideas while making connections in their learning.

Another skill is how to design student-centered constructivist learning activities that are also scaffolded enough to really work. This takes time, lots of experience, and knowing what each group of students can and cannot handle. The design process needs a great deal of creativity and imagination.

It is essential to develop the mindset and skills to work as a designer engaging creativity while being willing to take risks. We also need to help future teachers become TPACKers with the knowledge that building a team of TPACKers, including the learning support specialists, is better. Mark and Judy’s recent TPACK paper covered how collaboration helps one TPACK. Thus it makes sense to train teachers to reach out to one another to connect to the distributed expertise in one’s building and in one’s PLN.

We also need to help pre-service teachers understand that they cannot design their units all at once and must use their research skills to find what others have already done. There are many repositories of lessons, units, and whole course curricula. We need to help future teachers live by the 80% rule to get a good chunk of new lessons created, but with the knowledge that it isn’t worth trying to get them totally complete. One learns so much in teaching them that the extra 20% isn’t worth the time and effort. Learn what works and doesn’t for next year’s iteration and improvement.

Help new educators start with sound analog teaching and assessment strategies to develop their “learning activities types (LAT)” matrices. They can then look to technology to replace, amplify or transform (RAT model) their solid pedagogy. And, of course, we should help our new teachers build their PLN and PLCs, if possible, to not have to reinvent lessons and to keep the personal learning going beyond school-provided PD opportunities.

Educators should have the skills and hopeful desire to teach in a blended virtual learning environment driven by student and teacher questions, with students needing to be independent and active– not passive. Suppose we will give our students more ownership and control over their learning. In that case, we need teachers willing to use WebQuests, learning management systems, social media tools, etc., to give students avenues to personalize their learning.

Yet, if we expect our students to be independent and active learners, we must help them develop the disposition to make intelligent choices when using Web-connected devices. We keep spending lots of money putting Internet-connected devices in front of students without doing the work of preparing them to be disciplined, focused, and dedicated to using the devices for learning and not being off task. We love constructivist individual and group learning, but our students must use the tools effectively while employing dispositions that guide them to be independent and active learners. This is another area where a strong ICL program needs to be in place, especially in our elementary skills.

eFolios, Reflecting, Documenting and Workflow

February 21, 2013 / / 1 Comment

I am going to ramble here, but the thoughts are all connected just as we work to help students connect their ideas and reflections. 🙂

eFolios:

We piloted eFolios last year in the Fifth Grade. One goal was to help our students reflect on their learning while setting goals for future growth. Teaching students how to reflect and make connections in their learning is a challenging task. Yet, it should be central to every school’s culture and mission.

To also guide the students to find evidence to support their reflections is an additional skill that takes time for students to grasp. We supported the reflection process by having the students respond to guiding questions around our Portrait of A Graduate (POG) attributes (Independent Learner, Communicator, Community, and Balanced) while providing evidence of their work toward reaching the POG attributes. The students met with their parents at the end of the year as part of our student-led conference system, using their eFolios to communicate their growth. This year, the eFolios are being rolled out to the rest of the Middle School students.

We use the eFolio module of our learning management system (Haiku), where we insert a template with directions and questions to guide the students as they reflect and record their ideas into the template. Here is a link to a draft of our eFolio template. It provides one approach to have students review their learning from a course perspective and one with the Portrait of a Graduate approach. As noted, we had the students use the Portrait of a Graduate focus. The template can provide practical ideas for other schools using eFolios or looking to do so.

Our grade-level advisers are now working together to review the guiding questions in the template for each of the four POG dispositions. The questions are being refined and differentiated for and within each grade level. As we know, a Fifth Grader’s ability to grasp complexity and work with open-ended questions can be quite different from an Eighth Grader’s.

A further connection is to consider having teachers and administrators develop eFolios as part of their professional growth experience. eFolios can also be used in partnership with teacher coaches and administrators to be used in teacher appraisal systems. This leads to the next topic of how students and teachers document the evidence/artifacts to be used in their folios.

Documenting Information:

I have written several posts about students creating their personal learning systems of Web resources, software, and hardware tools. I will remember to include teachers and administrators in future posts as they also work to use their personal learning systems to gather and document information, curate it, and communicate their learning and professional growth.

The students at our school are using their iPads to document examples of their learning. The next step beyond using examples of work from Pages documents, links to Prezis, video projects, etc., is to help our students use their technology literacy to choose tools to record their thinking about the work they are producing.

Many of us have moved from paper and pencil to digital tools to record ideas, reflections, goals, etc. On the iPads, the students might use Evernote, Notability, mind maps, voice recording, and the camera for screenshots, still shots, and video. A wide variety of apps assist us in recording our thinking.

The tools are easy to put into the hands of our students. The more significant challenge is to help the students be more reflective about their learning and go to the next step to record their ideas throughout the year. Making this recording habitual is another teaching and learning task that will take some time. But once the students, teachers, and administrators get into documenting their thinking, they will be ready to bring their learning artifacts and reflections into their eFolios.

Workflow:

Mark occasionally mentions how he manages his workflow on the Edtech Co-Op podcast. This led me to think further about how our Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) curriculum includes targeted lessons to help students not only find information but also help them manage and eventually communicate their understanding. An example of an ICL lesson is when we teach how to use Noodle Tools for research documentation, synthesizing information, and creating a Google Document to communicate one’s findings. Here is a link to a post from our school blog that covers it.

What we need to work on regarding eFolios is helping students build a system for processing and synthesizing their recorded reflections to then publish their understanding in their eFolio. This workflow challenge will need to be differentiated for groups of students and eventually individualized for each student as they build their workflow system, including one’s personal learning system tools to use in this process.

As I like to provide tangible examples of ideas presented here, I look to review a WebQuest we used several years ago at an international school in Taiwan. The Middle School there started in Grade 7. As the school’s culture was very progressive and one where students used a lot of technology, we created WebQuest as an orientation to the Middle School, connecting it to the students’ study of culture in the social studies curriculum. There were no iPads or similar devices during that time, so WebQuest doesn’t include any information about apps. If I were to write up a similar WebQuest for my current school, it would include information on using iPads/Android tablets and smartphones.

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Using Blended Learning to Support Student Research

January 24, 2013 / / 0 Comments

How are your teachers using blended learning tools to support their students in doing research? How about a practical example of one teacher using Noodle Tools, Haiku (LMS) and Google Docs?

All Middle School of Alexandria Country Day students do a mid-year research project on topics of their choice. They dress up for an evening get-together of students and their parents, where students give speeches from their research. The evening is called “Speeches & Sweets.”

For a full review of one teacher’s efforts to use blended learning to support students doing research, please look at a detailed post on our school blog.

Authoring a Digital Book

January 22, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Introduction from the Second Grade Online Science Book

I wanted to create an iBook for our second graders. Especially after our podcast with Peter Pappas, I felt on track to use his provided tutorials to complete the job. But then, the reality of finding the appropriate media led to a course change. My story is reported through my school blog, Innovative Practices at ACDS.

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One of the difficulties of having young students do online research is finding websites written at the appropriate reading level. Last year, the second-grade teachers and the instructional technologist tried a WebQuest for the second-grade science unit on germs and healthy habits. Most of the sites we found were written for a much older audience. This year, we decided to pull information from websites and books to write our digital book to replace WebQuest. One important consideration would be to match text with helpful images and video to further the second graders’ understanding.

We looked at the possibility of creating an Apple iBook. We could write the book using iBooks Author and then download it to a class set of iPads. We would need to download any video to insert into the iBook. One difficulty is finding a video that was shared under Creative Commons agreements. A second consideration was that it could not be in Adobe Flash, which needs to be supported on the iPad. A final deal breaker for the iPads was that the students could access the book from home to reread the text and review the videos. Learning about viruses, bacteria, and fungi takes work. It would be necessary for the students to access the book repeatedly.

An essential aspect of having technology literacy is choosing the right tool for the task. In this case, it became clear that publishing on the Internet would be the way to go. Flash-based videos could be embedded or linked to the pages of the book/website. Students could access the digital book from school and home. The book could be updated on the fly as the students provide feedback and as new resources are discovered.

While the web-based book fulfills these criteria, it does not allow students to personalize the text and media. Underlining, highlighting, and taking notes in the book, as in an iBook, is only part of using a website as a book if one uses browser add-ons. In time, we will have the students use the MindMeister web-based mind mapping tool to record their questions and understanding for easy access, whether reading the book at school or home.

If you missed the link to the book at the start of this post, here is another link to get you there.

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