The Reflective Educator

Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

Tag: education (page 9 of 13)

May 27, 2010 / 0 Comments

Museum of Math

An organization called the Museum of Math is having a contest to promote how Mathematics can be fun and exciting.  As per their website:

"Mathematics illuminates the patterns and structures all around us. Our dynamic exhibits and programs will stimulate inquiry, spark curiosity, and reveal the wonders of mathematics."

The idea of an organization which is dedicated to spreading the word about how mathematics is evident in the real world is fascinating to me, because this is a question I always have to answer.  Every single one of my classes, every year that I teach, asks me why they are learning math.  The relevance of mathematics for the typical high school student to the real world is really hard to see, especially if one is is learning the material in the more traditional way mathematics can be taught.

They are having a contest to promote both their organization and the love of mathematics.  From their website again:

Enter our Twitter contest and tell the world why you love math! The best tweet with hashtag #MathIsFun will win a free iPad. Contest ends June 1, 2010.

 

May 19, 2010 / 1 Comment

How my PLN helped me yesterday

Yesterday I posted a question on Twitter.  It was a pretty simple one, I was looking for examples of portfolios people have created because I needed to find an example to analyze as part of one of my graduate courses.

Within 10 minutes, I had a bunch of different examples from different people in my Professional Learning Network (PLN).  Here are their tweets (these images link to their examples).

All of these portfolios would have worked for my purpose, but it was great to ask a question of my PLN that I could never answer easily with a regular search engine.  I also know that these are examples that people wanted to share, which suggests that they are exemplars which makes it even more useful to me, since I want to eventually produce an exemplar of a portfolio for myself (although I suspect that may end up just being a subset of what I have posted on this blog).

 

May 12, 2010 / 0 Comments

Midway reflection on Apple Digital learning program

We are currently in the middle of what is known as the Apple Digital Learning Program.  I first learned about this program at a technology workshop sponsored by Apple way back in December, and through communication with my local sales representative, we submitted an application to host the DLP at my school.

How the program actually works is that you submit applications, or a set of joint applications from your school.  If Apple approves your application, and they have the hardware available, they will send you a set of very new Apple Macbooks, 10 iPod Touches, 1 digital camera, 1 digital camcorder, and 1 airport extreme base station.  You can use these devices free for a month, and then ship them back to Apple, of course if there are any problems during the month, your school is liable for any damages.

The process of getting applications back from my staff wasn’t too difficult, although it took a couple of times of putting out the word to the teachers to get some applications in.  We ended up submitting a set of 6 applications from our school, one from each of an outdoor ed teacher, a humanities teacher, a music teacher, a science teacher, and two math teachers with myself included.  

The box that arrived a couple of weeks ago looks like the picture on the left when you first open it.  The objective is to get it to look exactly like this as possible when you return the box.  There’s a decent lock on the outside and wheels on the bottom of the box.  We’ve discovered that moving the box around a lot is a pain, so we’ve moved classes of kids instead.

We had a workshop that where we worked with a wonderful instructor from Apple, her name was Julia Leong.  She was brilliant, I highly recommend having her attend your school for technology PD, even if you aren’t able to participate in the DLP.  The feedback from the teachers after the workshop was very positive, although most of the teachers are fairly technologically minded people so they didn’t have too much trouble picking up the skills and ideas Julia shared.

During that workshop, I even made a movie which was loads of fun!

The feedback from the students has been tremendous!  They have LOVED being able to use the Mac computers and have definitely appreciated that the teachers are learning with them.  The projects the teachers have been working on with the students have almost all been about creating and sharing ideas.  One of the nice things about having all of the teachers we do involved in this program is that it actually means that every student in the school, with the exception of our 12th grade students who are currently engaged with their IB exams, will get a chance to work with the laptops at some point.

We are only a couple of weeks into the program, but already I can see some possibilities that these computers offer for technology.  The first is that iMovie is extremely powerful software and makes editing movies a breeze, including some pretty advanced techniques.  My favourite part of the Mac iLife suite is how each program on the computer seems to communicate so easily with each other.  The integration between the programs is nearly seamless.

For example, I had students film themselves throwing a ball to a partner using the built in webcam on the laptops, they then learned how to crop the movie and overlay a transparent image of graph paper over their movie.  From this they collected data about their graph, which we are going to use later to determine the equation of of the motion of their graph.  We did all of this in a single block, with a group of students who had mostly never used either a Mac or iMovie before.

I recommend trying out this program at your school, it can be a way to really show your staff that educational technology is a really valuable way through which students can learn advanced ideas and skills.

April 28, 2010 / 4 Comments

Reflection on using back-channel chat in class

Today we had a joint project in Science and English where students pitched a product they had "invented" which would help solve the global water crisis.  Their product had to be greed inducing and their pitch had to include some of the scientific background required to understand how their product works.

We styled the actual presentation space itself much like the television show Dragon’s Den.  This meant that one person was presenting an idea to 5 students, who had to judge the idea and based on its merits decide whether or not to fund the idea.  This meant that at any time, 5 students were involved in judging and 1 student was presenting.  Unfortunately this left the rest of the audience with nothing to do but watch.

Anyone who has worked with adolescents can tell you that 3 hours (which is how long it took to go through 30 presentations), even if it is broken into two 90 minutes sessions, is a long time for them to hold their interest, especially if they have nothing to do.  Traditionally teachers have often solved this problem by having everyone take the time to evaluate each presentation, which means that students have to be somewhat actively listening in order to do their individual evaluations.  Unfortunately this generally doesn’t work as well as expected given that even this task can be boring and students will often decide on arbitrary marks/comments for their peers, just to make sure the task is completed.

So what we did for this particular set of presentations was set up a back-channel chat for students to use while the presentations were going on.  The idea was, give the students something to do which is engaging and interesting and allows them to express their opinion.  Our instructions were pretty simple,  be respectful and remain on topic.  

The system we used is called "Ajax Chat" and it is an open source web script that we set up on one of our school’s web servers.  This had the advantage of being free, private, and easy to customize.   I made some small customizations before we used the system, for example I first removed the extra menu for users which stopped the students from being able to send private messages, switch channels, and add emoticons to their chat messages.  I kind of felt that all of these would be distractions from actually using the chat.  I also disabled sounds for the chat, as I didn’t want a whole bunch of beeping to  be going on all over the room as each student submitted messages.  Finally I created user accounts for all of the students and sent them individual emails (to do the emails I used Excel + Word + an email merge through Outlook, which was an enormous time-saver) with their unique passwords which I hoped would reduce the number of students logging in as someone else.

At the beginning of the chat, I was pretty lenient about the student’s behaviour because I knew that none of them had used this kind of technology in a school context before, and I wanted to allow them some room to experiment.  After a few minutes of a bit of chat chaos at the beginning, I started asserting control over the chat room and let them know which of their behaviours were inappropriate, and which were good.  When a student went off topic or started spamming the channel, or other types of inappropriate behaviour, I kicked them out of the chat room for 10 minutes, at first with 3 warnings, and then later with 1 warning.  Sometimes the other students would laugh about this, but generally they got it, if you broke a sensible rule using this tool then you wouldn’t be able to use it anymore.  Once the students came back to the chat room, they were better engaged and more respectful.

 

You can see from the part of the chat log up top that this was a reasonably successful test of back-channel chat with this group of students. Most of the conversation was on task, perhaps 99% of the comments were focused on the presenters during the entire three hours.  I feel like students really had an opportunity to express themselves, and some students who were normally a bit quieter in the classroom participated more in the chat.

The strengths of the chat room were that it greatly increased the amount of student engagement with the presentations.  I often noticed students asking clarifying questions and checking to make sure that they heard the information given in the presentations correctly.  One student even said, "Wow I learned something new today!" in response to another student’s presentation.  People also were generally good at giving constructive feedback, and recognizing how the students were doing during the presentations.

One of the problems was that as time went on, students would log out of the chat room and not come back. The noise level in the classroom didn’t increase much toward the end of the session, but it was clear that the level of student engagement was lower.  I don’t think that this is unusual for any kind of activity of this length with middle school students, but it does mean that the students who went up first got a lot more feedback about their performances.  That being said, those students got to see a lot more examples of good pitches and model their pitches after previously successful pitches.

I can see why educators have been raving about back-channel chat and am definitely planning on using it in the future, especially for situations where audience feedback is difficult to do and silence is expected, but where it can be so powerful.  I think in a regular classroom setting with a teacher lecturing up at the front, it’s easier for students simply to raise their hands and ask questions,  but in large lecture halls, moderated back-channel chat should most definitely be used.

For people interested in the customizations that made this activity work a bit more effectively, I’ve uploaded the script here (remember that 99.99% of this was created by the very generous programmers at BlueImp.net).  For the technically minded, you’ll need a web server capable of running Php files, and access to a MYSQL database in order to install this web chatting script.

April 2, 2010 / 0 Comments

New social network for Canadian teachers

Just this night I started a new social network for Canadian teachers.  Although there are some national organizations for teachers already, there does not appear to be any free social networks for teachers to join.  There are some regional social networks, for example BC has an Edtech network and Ontario has a social network for teachers from their province.  This new social network is hopefully filling a void in Canada, although it is entirely possible that such a network exists and it is cleverly hidden from my internet searches.

Canadians do not have an educational secretary like the US does.  Education here is divided into provincial and territory regions and each region handles education differently.  There is some oversight from the Federal government, but it is mostly focused on specific issues, and does nothing to connect teachers from across the country.

It is important that educators join together, in large numbers we have a stronger voice.  We also need to be able to communicate with each other because it will help improve our individual practices, and this will be good for our students.  

If you want to join this network, it is free to do so.  All you need is to go to the following website and sign up.

http://canadianteachers.ning.com

April 2, 2010 / 0 Comments

Massively collaborative educational research

The book Wikinomics has really got me thinking about how collaboration happens in our society.  One of the area where I think massive collaboration would be really useful, but where it is underutilized is in the area of educational research.  Imagine the power of collaboration that we could have if hundreds of educators collaborated to run a research study.  I’ve written about this before, but I have a new perspective since reading Tapscott and Williams.

Let’s look  at some of the benefits of being involved in such an undertaking.

First, each educator would have their name attached to a valuable piece of educational research.  So much research in education is done with tiny sample sizes that tend to invalidate the purpose of the research.  A large sample size does not guarantee that the research is valid, it still needs to be done with care, but it does tend to reduce things like selection bias, small sample size effect, etc…

Second, we could do research on a wide variety of different socioeconomic backgrounds, different parts of the world, and be able to analyze our data from many different perspectives.  We might even have enough data to spawn multiple educational research papers on our chosen topic.  We could release our data under a Creative Commons license, and let other educators remix and look at the date in different ways.

Finally, the amount of work each educator would have to do would be a lot less.  Designing a study, collecting data, researching sources, analyzing data, and writing an educational research paper are all time-consuming tasks.  Dividing up these tasks over a larger group, even with the additional overhead of maintaining coherence in the research, would greatly reduce how much work each educator would have to do.

If you are interested in participating in such a research study, please sign up at this form.  There is no specific topic or agenda set yet, just an initial examining of the interest from the educational community.

 

March 28, 2010 / 0 Comments

How are teachers participating in our new collaborative culture?

I’m reading Don Tapscott’s and Anthony Williams’ "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything"[1] for the first time, and loving it.  In the book, Tapscott and Williams focus a lot of their examples on the ways businesses are changing rather than on how teachers are adapting.  I thought it would be appropriate to list some ways teachers are participating in the new mass collaboration culture.

First, it’s important to note that as a profession, teachers have always had collaboration, all that has changed is the scale of the collaboration.  Rather than collaboration within a school, teacher’s are now collaborating on a global scale[2][3].  Teachers collaborate to build curriculum, write textbooks, examine student work, build lesson plans, investigate issues related to school improvement, all of this with other like-minded educators from across the planet, all on a scale not seen before.

Collaborative curriculum and textbook writing is changing the way educators gather their resources.  Connexions is "an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web." according to their about page.  It is more than that though, because of the way the site is structured[4][5][6].  Anyone can download the publicly accessible textbooks from their site, and can ask permission to join any open projects because the materials are licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license.  The site is very successful with 16141 modules developed as of the writing of this post.  Each module is equivalent to a unit of study in a course, so there already many more modules available than the typical student will ever learn in the course of their lifetime.  Even the state of California has joined in on the action, estimating that they will save taxpayers $350 million by choosing open textbooks.

Teachers have also been forming their own social networks. Classroom 2.0, EduPLN, and other similar regional social networks have sprung up as teachers recognize the value in a diverse set of opinions on education.  Rather than being closeted in the isolation of their individual classrooms, teachers are meeting virtually with other educators in order to improve their practice.  On a weekly basis on the social networking site, Twitter[7], teachers have been chatting on a wide range of topics, using the hashtag #edchat to manage their conversations.  Less formally, teachers are collaborating on the site in smaller groups, and finding interesting uses for the microblogging site in their classrooms[8].

This new form of mass collaboration between teachers is crucial for our survival as a profession, given the rate at which knowledge is growing[9].  Our ability, in small groups or as individuals, to process the information available to us is limited and as a result, we will soon no longer be able to choose the most appropriate curriculum for our students because the amount of information to sift through is too much.  Working on the large scale, in peer groups, we may have a chance to avert this fundamental crisis in education as each member can contribute to the solution, allowing for a much wider range of information to be processed.  Essentially peer collaboration allows teachers to work in networks and increase their individual efficiency, much like networking computers increases their computational power.

References:

1.  Tapscott, D. & Williams, A. (2008). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything from Portfolio Trade

2.  Riel, M.  (1995). Cross-classroom collaboration in global learning circles, The cultures of computing, Wiley-Blackwell, 1995, 219-242, retrieved from Google books on March 28th, 2010.

3. Zong, G. Developing preservice teachers’ global understanding through computer-mediated communication technology, Teaching and Teacher Education, Elsevier, 2009, 25, 617-625

4. Baker, J.; Thierstein, J.; Fletcher, K.; Kaur, M. & Emmons, J. (2009). Open Textbook Proof-of-Concept via Connexions, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10, retrieved from Google Scholar on March 29, 2009

5. Frydenberg, J.; Matkin, G. & Center, D. (2007). Open textbooks: Why? What? How? When?, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, retrieved from http://www.uensd.org/NUTN2008/program/Sessions/materials/OpenCouseware_paper.pdf on March 28th, 2010.

6. Hylén, J. (2006). Open educational resources: Opportunities and challenges, Proceedings of Open Education, 49-63, retrieved from http://pascal.iseg.utl.pt/~ssantos/Blog_Recursos_Varios.pdf on March 28th, 2010

7. O’Reilly, T. & Milstein, S. (2009). The Twitter Book O’Reilly Media, Inc., retrieved from Google Books on March 28th, 2010

8. Grosseck, G. & Holotescu, C. (2008). Can we use Twitter for educational activities, 4th International Scientific Conference, eLearning and Software for Education, Bucharest, Romania, retrieved from http://adlunap.ro/eLSE_publications/papers/2008/015.-697.1.Grosseck%20Gabriela-Can%20we%20use.pdf on March 28th, 2010

9. Kurzweil, R. (2001), The Law of Accelerating Returns, published on KurzweilAI.net, retrieved from http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 on March 28th, 2010

March 28, 2010 / 0 Comments

What building strong student relationships can do for you

 

When I first started teaching, I worked at a tough school in Brooklyn called "The School for Legal Studies."  I moved to NYC just before I started working, so I felt lucky to have found an apartment a couple of blocks from the school.  The people I worked with mostly thought I was crazy to live in the same neighbourhood as our school, but to be honest, it really wasn’t that bad of a place to live, except possibly for the hundreds of 6th legged "roommates" with whom I was always at war.  It had some fringe benefits as well.

The most immediate benefit was that I had a very short trip to school.  I could roll out of bed, shower, and throw on some clothes and be at the school in 10 minutes.  This meant I had a bit more spare time available to me and I needed all of it, starting teaching was a very time-consuming task for me.  It also turned out to have another fringe benefit, something that never would have occurred to me.

In the middle of my second summer in NYC, I lost my roommate and realized I was going to need a new place to live.  So I looked around and found another apartment which was still close enough to school that I could walk, but was a lot nicer looking.  I rented a U-haul van and arranged for a buddy of mine from school to come and help me move my stuff.  I parked the truck in front of my house and had just opened up the back to put in a box, when I heard a voice behind me say, "Yo! Mr. Wees, what up son?"

I turned around, and saw 8 of my students standing behind me on the sidewalk.  It wasn’t that unusual for me to run into students from my school in the neighbourhood, many of them lived near the school too.

"Mister, you movin’?  Let us help you," said one of the boys.  10 minutes later, every single one of my boxes and pieces of furniture from my apartment was carefully carried from my apartment and placed gently in the truck.  They wouldn’t let me lift a finger to help them, "We got it Mr. Wees, you lay back," they told me.  The students didn’t ask for a thing for their help, but I gave them some money to buy a couple of pizzas because it was near lunch time.  They wandered off happily, and just after they had left, my friend showed up.

The reason those students helped me was not because they thought they had something to get out of it, but because I had built a strong relationship with them over the previous two years.  They respected me, and saw me as someone who respected them.  We really had nothing in common at all, I was from a small island off the West coast of Canada, they were kids who grew up in the more dangerous parts of Brooklyn.  This didn’t stop me from building a solid rapport with them and I know it was a large part of why I was successful in the classroom.

March 28, 2010 / 0 Comments

Participation in school culture

Just recently we had a very different type of auction at our school. Some teachers and many of the 12th grade students auctioned off various services for charity.  For example, one of my colleagues agreed to dress up in drag and take some kids for an ice cream.  Another pair agreed to set up a pizza lunch for the kids.  The funds at the end of the event are going to our global humanitarian fund.

I agreed to have my head shaved, and three 8th grade girls paid for the right to shave my head for $30.  I also had to carry around their books for the day, which ended up being a bit of a logistical nightmare and was abandoned after a couple of periods.

It is important that teachers participate in school culture and at some schools, events like this one just aren’t possible.  If the teachers are unwilling to see that building relationships with the students is crucial to school success, then the school will fail.

Now I’m not saying that every teacher has to shave their head, but some sacrifices might be necessary in order to help your school function.  If we rigidly stick inside what our contracts tell us to do, then a lot of the relationship building crucial to school climate and culture may not happen.  I gave up one of my lunch hours so that these students could create a memory that they will probably have forever.

As they were shaving my head (after some demonstrations and lessons from an experienced head-shaver), one of the girls said, "This was TOTALLY worth $10."  I was thinking the same thing.

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