Constructivist Learning Theory 2

Phantom Regiment Drum & Bugle Corps
photo credit: Scutter via photopin cc

Just What Show Were You

Watching Anyway?

@joe_edtech

Today’s entry is going to sound very different than most of my posts. Though, I actually think it is very similar in message to my recent posts about students and learning. This is really still about constructivism, but today I want to write about how our prior experiences, how our previous theoretical constructions, dramatically affect our perceptions of what we see in the present.

When I was a kid, I very proudly marched with the Phantom Regiment Drum & Bugle Corps. Nope, they aren’t a high school or a college band. Drum & Bugle Corps are independent musical organizations, some sponsored by communities or the BSA, but most are independent organizations that live to compete with other Drum & Bugle Corps (for more information on that, you can check out the Drum Corps International or PhantomRegiment web pages).

I played the trumpet (at the time, I played the soprano bugle – ah, the good old days), and when I dream about the drum corps (yes, I do that a lot) I dream about the hornline. When I visualize drum corps, I think about what the hornline looks like marching together on the football field. And, after a decade of not attending a show, when I took my daughter to Rockford a couple of summers ago to see my beloved Phantom Regiment perform in their home show, I imagined that she would also fall in love with the hornline and dream of playing her trumpet in the organization some day.

My daughter Katherine (center - front) in the show
"Beautifully Imperfect" by Allegiance Cadets

It didn’t happen that way. My daughter’s best friend is two grades in front of her in school and has been performing in a winter color guard group for a couple of years. Katherine has watched her friend’s performances both in person and on YouTube, to the point of having them memorized. Though we sat hand in hand watching the Phantom Regiment perform their show Turandot that night, we saw two very different things.

I saw and heard a hornline playing and marching with power and precision. She saw a beautiful group of young women in the Regiment Color Guard majestically telling the story of Turandot through dance and an athleticism I never fully appreciated when I was a kid. We both heard the Nessun Dorma finale, and we both stood cheering the performance at the end, but our experiences were very different.

At the end of the night I looked at my little girl and I asked, “Do you want to play your trumpet with Phantom Regiment some day?” She said, “No Dad, I want to twirl a flag with Phantom’s color guard.” It was an outcome I hadn’t even considered.

When it comes to political philosophy, I am still a disciple of John Locke; however, I no longer believe that our students come to us tabula rasa.

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How much do their previous experiences affect what our students learn in our classrooms? What does this say about integrating technology into the classroom?

FTT - Actively Learn

Turn Any Text Into An Interactive Text With Actively Learn

@joe_edtech

For years I have started presentations on integrating technology into the classroom by saying 21st century learners do NOT have short attention spans, they are simply not engaged by the kinds of classroom activities that engaged us when we were kids. My 13 year old daughter provides me with a perfect illustration of my point. 

I have heard from her teachers that at times she seems bored with their lectures and with some of their learning exercises, so she must have a really short attention span. Well, I don't think so. The last time the two of us drove to St. Louis from our home in the Chicago Suburbs (by the way, the most boring drive on planet earth) she spent the entire 5 hours actively engaged in building a city on MineCraft - a game, I might add, that has graphics that are less advanced than the Atari Game System I played when I was a kid. (By the way, Cognitive Psychologist Daniel T. Willingham offers some evidence to back up my mantra in his recent article, "Smartphones Don't Make Us Dumb.")

So, if it isn't the flashy graphics and ear pounding soundtrack, what do you like so much about MineCraft? She says, "It's fun. I can make decisions about what to do. If I get stuck, I can ask questions or look up answers. And if I build something I don't like, I can quick tear it down and build it better." I heard her say those words and I translated it into classroom speak: inquiry, autonomy, interactivity, the ability to make mistakes and then fix them.

So what if we applied just a few of those things to the practice of reading her school assignments? What if instead of receiving a static textbook or handout, she read on her mobile device and her teachers were able to ask her specific questions about what she read, point out things that are important in the reading and explain why they are important, and even embed videos to illustrate the point or provide a little direct instruction while she was at home? ActivelyLearn.com does all of that, supports any electronic text, and is incredibly simple to learn. 

Here is a brief intro from the ActivelyLearn.com website:

To get started, all you need to do is navigate to ActivelyLearn.com, create a free account as a teacher, and then create your first class. There are thousands of texts and lessons already included in ActivelyLearn.com, they may already have the text you are using for class. Once you've selected a text to use, you can embed questions, highlight important passages, provide the students with notes, embed videos, and monitor each individual's progress as they read. In a worst case scenario, you can upload a PDF to the website. If you do that, you lose some functionality, but you can still embed questions on every page.

ActivelyLearn will automatically generate an email you can send to your students to help them get signed up for your class, but I've created a one page handout you can share with them in order to get them signed up and signed on. (Click here for the "Signing Up For ActivelyLearn" Handout.)

ActivelyLearn works with any platform or device with an Internet connection, and there is a robust help section for both teachers and students. However, a trademark of most good, free online tools, there are a lot of support videos posted on YouTube and Vimeo.
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Are there other FREE tech tools you use to help support close or interactive reading with your students? If so, please tell us about them in the comment section below.

Constructivist Learning Theory - 1

photo credit: slark via photopin cc

The Origins of Constructivism

@joe_edtech

I am openly and unabashedly bi-platform. I even have my own support group on Google + Communities. However, I spent most of my professional life up until now primarily using and teaching with Apple products. As an Apple user it is impossible not to admire all that Steve Jobs was able to accomplish at that company. However, I read the Walter Isaacson book and can say with a great deal of confidence that Steve Jobs and I would not have been friends (although I maintain that The Great and Powerful Woz and I would get along famously, so Woz, if your reading, give me a call!).

Likewise, I am a constructivist, and as such I admire the extant learning theories of Lev Vygotsky. However, Vygotsky was a part of the Marxist establishment in the early Soviet Union and his real goal was to establish a unified Marxist theory of psychology and learning. Not surprisingly, he didn't achieve that impossible goal. And, as I concluded with Jobs, I doubt seriously Lev and I would have been friends. However his theories forced the world to think about children in realistic, scientific terms. Thanks to men of science like Vygotsky, people stopped thinking of children as the rough equivalents of botanical organisms, or developmentally equivalents of certain higher functioning mammals (Vygotsky, 1978).

Last Spring, I picked up Mind in Society, a collection of translated writings by Vygotsky, and I was quickly reminded why I admire his work so much. In just a few words, he says so much about how children frame and direct their own learning, and the importance of "social interaction" in that process. From just the first chapter of the book, Vygotsky explains why children shouldn't be compared to primates, or simply immature adults:

[T]he most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge. Although children's use of tools during their preverbal period is comparable to that of apes, as soon as speech and the use of signs are incorporated into any action, the action becomes transformed and organized along entirely new lines. (Vygotsky, 1978, Kindle Edition Loc 471 of 3148)

In other words, when the child begins to interact with his surroundings physically and socially, the child begins to construct theoretical frameworks that are purely human, and that is the beginning of real learning.
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If this is the learning theory we believe in, how does that affect the way we use mobile technology in the classroom? - (Sounds like a dissertation topic.)

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman., Eds.) (A. R. Luria, M. Lopez-Morillas & M. Cole [with J. V. Wertsch], Trans.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (Original manuscripts [ca. 1930-1934]). Kindle Edition.

FTT - Kaizena Voice Comments

What Would You Like to Say to your Students About their Writing?

@joe_edtech

I'm not sure if this is normal behavior, but when I graded essays, I was almost always talking to my students about their writing - out loud - even though they weren't there in my living room when I was grading. And although I sometimes said it very loudly, apparently they couldn't hear what I was saying. That is a real shame because some of those comments were pure gold!

The fact of the matter is that good writing is conversational, and the best way to help a student rethink and revise their writing is through personal conversation. Google Drive made it a lot easier to carry on a conversation with students in text, but sometimes it is very difficult to determine tone in a text message, especially for students. Wouldn't it be nice if our students could hear the things we have to say about their writing?

Kaizena is available on the Chrome Webstore

If you install the "Kaizena Voice Comments" App on your Chrome browser then you can actually carry on a real conversation with your students about their writing projects. Instead of inserting a text comment into a section or line of the paper, the Voice Comments App allows you to give verbal feedback on the entire piece of writing, or on specific lines.

In an increasingly digital world, this could be a great way to engage kids in the writing process. I would likely use Kaizena Voice Comments with my students at the beginning of the writing process. Imagine being able to hold writing conferences with every student after every draft without the hassle of trying to schedule those conferences. And to be able to do all of that without getting out of my comfy chair in the living room, again, pure gold!

For a step-by-step direction sheet on getting started with Kaizena Voice Comments in Google Drive, click here. Also, you can feel free to visit the DHS GAPPS Resources page at any time.

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Have an idea for using Voice Comments with your students? Please share with us in the comments box below.

Social Media Research

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Research on Social Media in Education

@joe_edtech

This blog post is essentially a summary of an article titled "Social Networking: Boundaries and Limits Part 1: Ethics" which appeared in the March/April 2014 edition of Tech Trends, an AECT publication. The APA citation is below.

Some of my recent blog posts have focused on getting the most out of social media tools for professional development, and making meaning out of noise by curating stories from social media. But, occasionally I like to share some of the research in the field.  Last Spring's edition Tech Trends magazine included an article that started by summarizing some of the statistics about how many of our students are using social media on a regular basis and for what reasons. I had to share...

• According to studies from 2010 and later, 74% of kids 13-18 have at least one account on a social networking site, and most have more than one. (I'd like to point out that most of this research was completed before the explosion of the use of Twitter by young people.)
• Students don't just use social media for communication, they use it for news and research. One study cited by the authors suggests that as many as 68% of high school students use social networking to research colleges and universities.
• The prevalence of social media amongst college students has caused professors to change instruction. According to a 2011 study cited by the authors, up to "91% of college faculty reported using social networking for professional and/or educational purposes. According to the faculty responses, 70% viewed utilizing social networking as a valuable tool for teaching in the classroom."
• In that same study, 58% of college professors suggested that social networking is an important way to support collaborative learning.

It is logical to conclude that these percentages have increased sharply since the research was completed in 2010 and 2011. And that leads us to another couple of conclusions. First, it is important for us to spend time in K-12 teaching students appropriate social networking skills because they will likely need those skills when they are in college. Secondly, by the time they get to high school, a majority of our students are already using social media. If we don't spend time teaching them social networking skills and digital citizenship ethics, we've given them the Internet with no safety net.

The article covers several other items that are worth discussing, but one that I can't pass up has to do with "Social Role Theory." The authors say, "A faculty member is placed in a potentially problematic ethical position when he/she takes on the dual role of teacher and friend to a student when utilizing social networking" (26). In other words, in K-12, it is important to provide our teachers with ongoing professional development in effective and appropriate ways of using social media with our students, and for each school district to provide clear guidelines and policies for teachers and administrators to follow. 

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Aragon, A., AlDoubi, S., Kaminski, K., Anderson, S., Isaacs, N. (2014) Social networking: Boundaries and limits part 1: Ethics. Tech Trends 58(2), 25-31.

FTT - "Free" Images and Videos

From photopin.com

Getting Great Digital Resources & Respecting Copyright Laws

@joe_edtech

There have been some very well meaning and good-hearted teachers that I have worked with over the years who have either misunderstood the "Fair Use Exception" to the US Copyright Law or simply decided it was too difficult to live within its legal restraints. But as we move to a more digital world, don't we want to teach our kids to be good digital citizens? Don't we want to teach them to respect digital copyright laws? And more importantly, don't we want to teach them about citation and attribution before they go to college and are really expected to know it?

A full discussion of the "Fair Use Exception" is still coming, but for today let's just beat the dead horse one more time. I've heard teachers say, "Since I'm using it in the classroom, Fair Use allows me to use anything." Um, no. But there are enough resources out there that you can provide your students with several different avenues for finding images and media that they can use in their projects while respecting copyright laws. In a previous post, I told you about Creative Commons Search as a great way to find digital images and media. Today I want to tell you about two more: PhotoPin for digital images and Next Vista For Learning for digital media.

Photo Pin is an easy to use search engine for Creative Commons licensed digital images. That means you can use them in any classroom product you'd like as long as you cite the source. Go to photopin.com and search for an image or a topic. A pop up box will appear with the different sizes that are available to you. Download the one you want. Then simply copy and paste the HTML Attribution code onto your website, blog, or whatever.  

Next Vista for Learning is actually the brain child of Rushton Hurley, a fantastic speaker I first came to meet at the ISTE Conference last Fall. He talked about the power of using, analyzing, and creating digital media in the classroom. Next Vista for Learning has videos to search and contests to enter. The front page of the website explains that "Next Vista For Learning provides a library of free videos made by and for teachers and students everywhere," and just like most of the images found in PhotoPin, all of the products are licensed Creative Commons Attribution, which means you can feel free to use them in any project or on any classroom website as long as you cite properly and give credit.

Search for great videos for and by teachers on Next Vista for Learning

So, while they might not be the commercially created videos or pictures your students would really like to use, Next Vista for Learning and PhotoPin give us access to beautiful digital images and media that can greatly enhance our digital curriculum, and they give us excellent opportunities to teach about responsibility and digital citizenship.

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Have a favorite site or search engine for finding Creative Commons Digital Media? Please share it in the comment box below.

Book Review - The Element

Hafnium - An Element :)

photo credit: sbisson via photopin cc

Helping Our Kids Find Their "Element"

@joe_edtech

Usually in April, as we get close to state testing time, I find myself a little disgruntled with the standardized testing model we've adopted for all of K-12 education in the United States. Whenever I need a "pick me up" I turn to Sir Ken Robinson's TED talks, which focus on the kinds of educational reforms that I am still hoping to see in my lifetime.

Last summer as I contemplated the coming Common Core Testing regime and I decided to delve a little deeper (plus I was a little jealous that 2014 was the year I decided NOT to go to the NSBA Conference, and Sir Ken Robinson gave the day 2 keynote). This year I read his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. In it he tells stories - he is like most teachers, a very good story teller - about people who overcame incredible odds to be successful in "Their Element," the place where their talents and passions converge, and usually in conjunction with a the support of a community of like minded people. 

The Element also comments on the current state of educational reform, and although he wrote it in 2009, his conclusions are nonetheless valid today, because even though the administration in Washington has changed, the direction of educational reform has not (see Diane Ravitch's book Reign of Error). The focus is still on having students pass a very narrow set of multiple choice tests at various times in their educational careers in an effort to make sure that schools and teachers are teaching them a narrow set of skills so that they can be accepted into a competitive college.

There is so much that is good in his book (focusing on teaching, identifying and following your passions, overcoming obstacles) that it is almost impossible to find just one thing to highlight. However, I'd like to focus on a theme that he develops both at the beginning and at the end of his book, and illuminates throughout. From the Afterword, Dr. Robinson writes, "Education is being strangled persistently by the culture of standardized testing. The irony is that these tests are not raising standards except in some very particular areas, and at the expense of most of what really matters" (p. 248).

The "what really matters" is that which ignites our passions and gives meaning and purpose to not just educational pursuits but also our lives. In the 21st Century, we are going to need students who are creative, who can think, who can problem solve, and who can innovate. This book offers a long and passionate answer to that problem, but this paragraph is particularly important, and should be the basis of a national discussion:

The curriculum of educations for the twenty-first century must be transformed radically. I have described intelligence as being diverse, dynamic, and distinct. Here is what it means for education. First, we need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of diversity. Too many students pass through education and have their natural talents marginalized or ignored. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages, and math all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education (p. 246).

And if you don't think this is true, I want you to think back on your high school years (nearly everyone who reads this is involved in education in some way). What sparked your interest in high school? Did you study music? Art? Computers (that was kind of out there when I was in high school)? Do you think studying what you loved made you a better overall student? Or took away from learning "the essentials?"

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As a new administration begins in Springfield, a new Congress sits in Washington, and local communities begin the process of electing new school boards, how do we begin to have serious conversations about education in this political climate? Does it have to be Us v Them? Right v Left? Can we come to a national consensus on the purpose of education?

FTT - Randomizers

photo credit: vial3tt3r via photopin cc

Tools For Random Selection or Random Grouping

@joe_edtech

Happy New Year! And while 2015 is just getting underway, Semester 1 at Deerfield High School is rapidly coming to a close. For a lot of you that means students will be presenting in class and reviewing for final exams. But how do you choose presentation order? How do you really mix up the study groups? In this post, I'll offer two online tools that will help you select student names truly at random and one downloadable tool that will help you select random student groups. 

Random Name Picker

First, for random selection, Random.org and Random Name Picker are two free and easy to use Web 2.0 tools for selecting students at random. Random Name Picker, part of a larger suite of free web apps from classtools.net, adds a visual element to the process of picking names. Simply copy and paste a list of students and then spin the wheel online. If you have a free account, you can save your lists to use again later. Also, this tool is HTML5, which means it works on Chromebooks, iPads, and other mobile devices. Random.org is less visually stimulating, but has many more options. On Random.org, you can pick random names, lists, numbers, or number sequences. (As an aside, you can also generate random passwords for your online accounts.)

If you are comfortable using Excel, you can download a tool created and generously shared by one of my colleagues. Click the link here and download the Excel file called "RandomGroups." When you open the spreadsheet, you will need to enable editing and enable macros (Excel will prompt you to do so.)

Copy and paste your class roster in column B under the "Roster" heading. Then simply enter the number of groups you want to create, click the "reset all" button, and then click "fill all." If you need to, you can still add or remove individual members of any group.

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Have a better way for choosing at random? Please, tell us how in the comment section below.