Year: 2010 (page 3 of 20)

I get asked a fair bit, are interactive whiteboards (IWB) a worthwhile investment for schools? The answer I have to say, is no. To follow my reasoning, first ask the question for whom are they interactive?

They seem like they are interactive for teachers. They give the teacher the opportunity to interact with material and to demonstrate materials for students in a more engaging way than the traditional white board. This is provided that the teacher has the time to develop the materials in advance for the students, or the time to find said resources that have been shared by other teachers. It is also provided that the teachers have been given some training on how to use the IWB as very few teachers will experiment and figure out the full potential use on their own.

This is a false interaction though since given that the teacher has invested the time and training into developing the materials themselves, they are not interacting, they are intraactive instead. The teacher is reacting to their own creation, rather than something new created by someone else which we could really call interactive.

If we allow students to use the IWB a real problem is suddenly you’ve turned a parallel activity (as in an activity in which all of the students are doing something) into a series activity (each student takes a turn doing something). Changing parallel activities into series activities is inherently inefficient and in the classroom, inefficiencies lead to kids who are not engaged, who do not have something to do. The activity will be interactive, but only for the small number of students who are actually engaged in using the IWB.

So don’t spend your money on IWB for your school. Spend it on individual devices for the student, or a class set of video cameras, or some other device which is really interactive. Spend it on staff training in the use of technology for all of your teachers. Spend it on anything which will introduce real interactivity into your classrooms.

Update: There are students who have a variety of different issues with fine motor skills and one large advantage of interactive whiteboards for these students is that they can actually manipulate mathematical objects and even type whereas pencil and paper or laptops may not be useful for them. When the technology is being used for the purpose it is designed (as an interactive surface) then I think my objections above do not apply.

I just watched @Nardwuar at #TEDxVancouver. He is amazing, and I can’t believe I had never heard of him before. What an inspiration!

Nardwuar is a citizen journalist who interviews music stars and politicians. He has a couple of suggestions for life which he shared which I think are excellent advice.

1. Just ask. Don’t be afraid to ask because the worst thing that can happen is that you can be rejected.
    
2. Do your research in advance and find ways to be creative.
    
3. You will learn something in every thing you do. If you think you know everything, it’s time to quit.
    
4. Be curious

I think this is good advice for our students too.
 

I had a student, let’s call him Jose, who had 100% attendance all the way through school. He attended almost all of his classes, he participated in class discussions, he did everything he could to understand and learn what we were teaching. Jose worked very hard, at least during class, and always made sure to turn in his homework. He was a nice kid. He was very polite and was well respected by his peers. He graduated, a feat only matched by about 35% of the freshmen with whom he started high school.

The problem was, Jose was illiterate and we all knew it. He struggled to complete even the most basic of sentences in his writing and couldn’t read the side of a cereal box. However Jose managed to meet the requirements for graduation because of a few simple things he had learned.

1. Always do your homework, even if you have no idea how to complete it. It’s okay, teachers are grading for effort anyway.
2. Never cheat. It makes teachers mad at you and people are mad at you are less likely to pass you.
3. Come to class and ask questions and try your best all the time. Your participation mark will be excellent!
4. You can take your Regent’s exams (NY state exams) multiple times.
5. A 65% is the official passing percentage (at least in NY) but no one fails with a 60%.
6. 20% for participation and 20% for homework is 40% leaving the final 20% to come from assessments in class, or 20/60 (which is close to 33%).
7. You can get 33% on tests if you fill in everything with whatever you know and guess for the multiple choice, with a little bit of luck.

I don’t think Jose ever got more than 65% for anything he turned in, or for any of his classes. He met the minimum requirements which, honestly in the school I was in, were not that stringent. He failed some of his classes, but because of our credit system, he could easily retake classes, even multiple times, and still graduate in four years.

We failed Jose though because he left high school completely unprepared for the real world. We had certainly not given him any skills he could use because our school focused on "getting students to pass the Regent’s exams". He didn’t learn enough academic skills to continue his studies, although he did attempt University, at least for a semester and yes there were universities which accepted him, thanks to open enrollment.

Jose came to school and wanted to learn. He really respected teachers and did everything he knew how to do to be successful. He was a model student in every way, except he struggled with the written word. There is something seriously wrong with a system which lets a student like Jose graduate unprepared for life. 

I don’t have any answers for this problem but I do know that Jose would have been far more successful if we had not accepted the absolute minimum from him. We needed to set higher standards and then provide him with additional support to meet those higher standards. We needed to invest more in Jose’s future rather than just passing him onto the next person.

Article directed at our school’s parent population, reposted with permission from my school’s monthly magazine, The Imprint

Twitter is what is known as a micro-blogging site and social media tool. The idea is that each person that signs up has the ability to post short messages of no more than 140 characters to the service, either through a web browser, a special program, or directly by sending text messages to the service. Some people have used the service to publish inane updates about their breakfasts and other uninteresting things, but increasingly it is being used by professionals who want to connect with other people in their field.

Twitter has become a real-time human-driven search engine. The results that are posted are primarily the result of real people deciding what information is relevant and what information is irrelevant. Unlike Google, the information posted is not ranked by popularity, but instead it is all carefully chronologically arranged. As well, many mobile phones today can receive updates from Twitter directly, turning it into a mobile search tool.

If you want to know more about the Twitter service and how it works, check out this video by Common Craft called “Twitter in Plain English”: http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for a little over two years now and it has transformed the way I gather information and resources. I use it as a filter on the Internet that helps deliver the most relevant and most useful resources to my fingertips. I’ve learned that I can make Twitter useful by being selective about what I share.

Currently, I have 3392 people I am “following” on Twitter and 3102 people who are “following” me. This is my personal network on Twitter. How the system works is that I only view updates from the people that I am following, and updates I post get sent to the people that are following me. I follow educators from around the world, and most of the people who are following me are, themselves, educators.

When I post updates to Twitter, I talk about useful things I’ve found. I don’t talk about what’s going on in my life, I talk about issues that are relevant to my career. As a result, people consider me a reliable source of information on educational technology, assessment, mathematics education, and other areas in which I have expertise.

Think of the people I’m following as my personal team of research assistants, who filter through the Internet and post relevant information for me to find. On the other hand, when I post a question, I generally get multiple responses. Think of the people that are following me as an army of educators, who collectively can answer any question I pose to them.

I also use Twitter as a direct communication tool with other Twitter educators. There are a large number of Twitter users that I connect with on a regular basis, and every week we have a discussion about issues in education using the #edchat hashtag. You can check out what #edchat is by checking out this website: http://edchat.pbworks.com/

Teachers all over the world have started using Twitter as a major source of information about their profession. I very rarely have to do my own Google searches anymore, I rely on the fact that the educators in my personal network are willing to share. This tool can be incredibly powerful and can transform your own search habits, provided it is leveraged effectively.

We have been having a lot of discussion on #edchat and in the educational blogosphere about the state of education. We basically have two camps, one of which believes that what we need is more accountability and assessment of students. We’ll call that camp A. The other camp believes we need a model which includes more personalized instruction, a focus on skills more than content, and that we need to use of real world tools in education. We’ll call that camp B. You might be somewhere between camp A and camp B, but most people I’ve heard give an opinion are either in A or B.

The problem is, I don’t see many people talking about how you get from camp A to camp B. We need to talk more about the route between what we are doing and what we would like to see. You can get people to agree with your vision, but unless you give them some idea on how to get there, they aren’t going to follow you.

I think that the relationship between formative and summative assesment looks like the following.

According to Wikipedia:

Formative assessment is a self-reflective process that Intends to promote student attainment. Cowie and Bell define it as the bidirectional process between teacher and student to enhance, recognize and respond to the learning. Black and Wiliam consider an assessment ‘formative’ when the feedback from learning activities is actually used to adapt the teaching to meet the learner’s needs. Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick have re-interpreted research on formative assessment and feedback and shown how these processes can help students take control of their own learning (self-regulated learning).

Summative assessment (or Summative evaluation) refers to the assessment of the learning and summarizes the development of learners at a particular time.

Summative assessment is characterized as assessment of learning and is contrasted with formative assessment, which is assessment for learning.

Is my graph appropriate? Is it possible to have an assessment which is both used to guide the learning process and help the learner is therefore formative and also be a snap-shot of what the learner knows? Or are formative and summative assessment mutually exclusive?