Webquests

Dear Principal,

This summer I have taken a teaching with technology course, and we have learned about many different technology tools that would enhance the learning of our students. One of these is webquests.

Webquests are an organized means by which students research a topic on the internet within a rigid set of boundaries. They lead students through the process of web-based research step-by-step with multiple check points along the way. In doing this, students learn how to effectively and efficiently utilize the internet in a minimum amount of time. A teacher can thus use webquests as a scaffolding device to independent research projects while still providing students with a meaningful task.

More specifically, a webquest begins with a (usually interdisciplinary) hook that engages students with its real-life connections. This hook is followed by a section clearly labeled "the process," and each step gives students specific questions to answer and specific websites they can use, all while still giving them some choice in what they study. The webquest is completed with a final assessment piece of some sort - or the entire webquest itself may be the assessment - that has a very specific rubric. (You can see one example here.)

By being so specific, the webquest is a great tool to use as students first start experiencing and experimenting with technology. This would be of great benefit to many of our students, as many are not prepared to be sent straight into the vast world of Google, Wikipedia, and the like. Additionally, a multi-day webquest can also function as the structure for creating student portfolio pieces, as can be seen in the example linked to above that culminates with an editorial. This would serve to make science content area pieces far more advanced than they were last year, for it provided the structure many students need to lead them to a well researched and nuanced argument about a particular topic.

I hope this post allows you to see the great benefit webquests could be for student performance and achievement, and I urge you to advocate for their use in our classrooms.

Sincerely,
Me

Social Networking

Another case where I neglect to consider how the resources that I use could come into play in my own classroom. While I don't have a del.icio.us account of my own, I do use the site to find fiction of interest as well as other resources. It just didn't occur to me how incredibly useful this would be for my own students, particularly when they are doing research projects. It would give them a place to start from, and that would be really helpful for them. They could even share the sites that they find themselves with their classmates by adding it to the class account - much more expedient and helpful to all then them coming to me and letting me know about it.

I'll definitely be using del.icio.us for my student research projects from now on - it's a much better starting point than google (not to disparage google, as I love it, but - as Richardson said - it can really constrict what we find and doesn't always lead us to the best resources out there on whatever we happen to be researching).

Podcasting: Sending Your Voice out into the World

In Reading and Writing across the Curriculum, we created podcasts that summarized the main issues we talked about in a literature circle on Chew on This. We were able to create a product that allowed our professor to hear what we had talked about in our literature circles even though she wasn’t there. This is a really great tool for assessing discussions within the classroom – a teacher wouldn’t have to assess based on a few minutes she saw. She could have them podcast the entire discussion and then do a separate file with a summary. All the summaries would be listened to, and the whole discussions could be spot-checked to help ensure that students don’t get off-task during the discussions.

And that was just one example of the use of podcasting. After reading the chapter in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, I can think of many different ways to use it in my classroom: podcasts explaining concepts, screencasts of our lab experiments/activities, newsletters of a sort to convey what we’re learning about, group podcasts, individual podcasts, and let’s not forget using the podcasts of others to teach content. I have a lot of interesting ideas about how to use this medium in my own classroom, and I’m really excited about it.

Digital Storytelling

So now that I've finished my first digital story, I'm already thinking about others in the future. It didn't take as long as it could have, and I'm sure that it will become a much quicker process with practice. I like the idea of being able to make more than just a slideshow put to music, which was my own previous experience with similar technology. Utilizing the microphone just added an entirely new dimension to the process - something like combining a picture slideshow you could make in powerpoint and what I did with Photostory 3. The next step? Video clips - I saw a digital story online that combined both still image and video, and I thought it came out very well.

What I am curious about is how similar PhotoStory 3 functions. I know that it doesn't use video, but it does have sections for inputting both music and narration (though I'm not sure whether you can do both at the same time). It does have additional functions that Moviemaker doesn't seem to have - you can rotate your photos and crop them. However, adding the transitions between the pictures is a bit more complicated - well, there's more clicking rather, which can get annoying if you have a lot of pictures. It automatically pans in and out, so if that's all you want, then I would prefer it. I'm glad I went with movie maker for this particular story, as I wanted to use different transitions than that. I suppose, then, it's an issue of what you want to do with the digital story. Something simple with music or narration in the background and the ability to easily crop in on the faces you want to see (Photostory 3)? Or something with more varied transitions and the ability to slice and dice with your music and narration (Moviemaker)?

But back to that first sentence: my burgeoning ideas. I'd love to do one for my mom (read a poem I wrote and add in some appropriately sappy music) and also to create one with the majority of my picture from the Galapagos Islands. Actually, it would be cool to get out my pictures from when I went to Europe and do the same. A new kind of travel journal. Very interesting idea. You could add in music native to the places you visited too.

I was also thinking of creating class digital stories (or one team one) on "what is science" for the first week of school. On the first day last year I gave them all an index card, and each of them drew an image of what they thought science was. I could have the kids vote on their images (to choose the best ones, especially as I got multiple volcanoes and solar systems last year) and then either scan in their index cards or take close-up pictures of the cards. Then they could choose the best speakers (or I could draw names out of a hat...whatever), and each speaker could say the name of what's in the image or describe why it's science. I could add a little music in the background, and easily throw the thing together to show them on the last day of that first week.

They'd have created a really great representation of where they started off the year. Then I could possibly end the year the same way, and they could compare the two to determine what they as a class/team had learned. Additionally, this would give them an immediate exposure to what technology can do and make them part of the process - something my kids didn't get to do a lot of last year.

Digital Story: Darwin and the Galapagos Islands

Props to Kristin for giving me the idea for this.

• Title Screen: A Visit to Darwin's Enchanted Isles: The Galapagos Islands [image of South American coast, Ecuador labeled, and the Galapagos Islands]
• Science is about understanding how things work [images of machines, people's bodies, tree/flower, aquarium, food web, camoflauging bugs]
• But it is also about people and places [Isaac Newton under the tree, Benjamin Franklin and the kite, Einstein with his tongue out, Jane Goodall and the monkeys]
• Charles Darwin and his study in the Galapagos Islands show how one man and one place can make a huge difference [Darwin old and young, Galapagos Islands panned out, sign, volcano, beach, etc...include picture of Darwin in the Galapagos?]
• In 1831, Charlie Darwin was 22 years old [image of young Darwin]
• His father wanted him to be a doctor or a parson [image of Anglican parson]
• But instead [start fading out] he got a job as a naturalist on the Beagle and spent five years traveling the world. [image of the Beagle, map of its route]
• Of all the places he went [images of South America, Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, Australia, Cape Town], his travel to the Galapagos Islands is what people remember [sign at island with whale bone, red cliffs, beach]
• While he was there, when he wasn't swimming with sea lions [pic of same], twirling iguanas by their tails [image of marine iguanas on rocks], or trying to figure out how old a tortoise was [image of same], he was studying finches [image]
• Because of those finches, he came up with a great idea [lightbulb]
• But it was new and different...what would people think? [show caricatures, satirical pictures]
• So he didn't do anything. [picture of Darwin sitting in chair]
• Well, nothing other than a lot of scientific research and writing. [images of Voyage of the Beagle, pigeons, rocks, coral, barnacles]
• [black slide: 18 years pass]
• But when it looked like Alfred Wallace [image of young AW] might get all the credit for that great idea, Charlie knew he had to do something. [image of Origin of the Species]
• And so he made history. [Man is But Worm picture]
• He put the Galapagos Islands on the map [picture of map] and changed scientific thought forever [image of Ms. Davis in Darwin Research Station shirt in "thinking" pose.]
• Credits

Wikis and Getting my Geek on

The first time I came across a wiki other than the actual Wikipedia.org, I had no idea that wikis were something that people could create themselves. I thought that was just one really amazing site and not a type of open-source software that others could use. And then the student technology group at my undergraduate college started Willipedia, the "unofficial, collaborative source of information and diversion written by Williams people." The site has information about everything from the different dorms, professors, classes, and the like to definitions for "Williamspeak" ("your mom," "breakfast points") and the humor-driven pages for "my dad" and the Moocho Macho Moocow Military Marching Band. This is a rather long way to say that before this class I knew about and recognized the value of wikis (I've used the Star Trek wiki as well, which Will Richardson referenced).

However, despite my recognizing their usefulness, I never considered their use in the classroom as a way for students to (re)construct their own knowledge. The whole idea, from student websites, to watching their edits to Wikipedia posts, to South Africa publishing their entire curriculum in a wiki, has me just amazed and excited. Wikis can revolutionize - are revolutionizing - the way we think about knowledge. It gives us all power; we are the constructors of knowledge, the owners of knowledge, because every single person has equal power over the editing and writing process (well, not entirely, as access to the internet is class-based and, in some cases, culturally based). It's just mind-boggling.

By using this technology in our own classrooms, we would be informing our students that they are not empty vessels to be filled with information by their teachers but teachers themselves, competent beings who are repositories in their own right, people who have something valid and valued to share. Communicating this idea to our students is what makes them true learners, it's what make confident enough to engage with a material and be able to truly understand it (I mean being able to do more than just parrot it back). It sends the greater message that we want to send to our students - we're all learners and all teachers - and that is just amazing and wonderful.

Digital Story Brainstorming

I was thinking of making a video for my mom's birthday, but now I'm not so sure. It seems to me that this is a video that I feel I'll need to spend more time than I have in class on. And it's occurred to me that saying it in this blog may totally ruin the surprise (hi, mom!), but, hey. I'm brainstorming here, so I think it can be forgiven.

Other alternative: I was considering doing a "what is science?" video to connect with the opening day activity that I have them do. They each get a notecard and have to draw an image or a symbol that represents what they think science is or what science means to them. I have a lot of images from various trips that I could utilize for this - the Galapagos Islands, fossils beds in Colorado, flowers in Aberdeen (Scotland)...

The issue is: which is more important? More necessary now?

I feel the pressure to do something that connects to school: this is an education class after all.

Note: Need script and storyboard. Use blank ppt slides.

Reflection 3: Edutopia Articles

Marc Presnky's article Adopt and Adapt resonated with me in several areas. As Alison noted, teachers are often the ones most resistant to change. We certainly don't like feeling stupid or ignorant, and so we avoid that which will make us feel so. Here in Jefferson County, the TIP program gives science and math teachers - and has now been opened to everyone - laptops and multimedia projectors to use in their classrooms. Despite this, there are multiple teachers whose laptops sat in the corner of their room or on their desks as they utilized their old overhead projectors. They were so used to these old tools that they didn't want to switch gears. As teachers, especially with so many of us being "digital immigrants" and not "digital natives" (or being somewhere awkwardly in-between), we must make a concerted effort to learn how to use these new resources. At times we'll likely get frustrated and want to give up, but if we don't accept that behavior in our students, how can we justify doing it ourselves? (And I am not even going to get into JCPS's own avoidance of new technology in their aggressive filtering...though apparently they've given in on the issue of blogger.com. Now if only I could check my gmail.)

Josh McHugh brings up a lot of good points in Synching up with I-Kid. As Alison noted, the younger generation is increasingly adapted to our new digital environment (re: Prensky's "digital natives"), and that our teaching must evolve along with these students. What I thought was particularly interesting, though, was an issue that came up in Prensky's article as well.

Prensky: It appears that students who write on a computer turn in longer and higher-quality assignments than those who compose by hand, even though it's still writing.

McHugh: Using the [DyKnow Vision] software [to analyze literature passages], the students' responses "were deeper than with pen and ink," Hamstra says. "The focus was really sharp. There's something about changing over to an electronic medium, something about that screen. It's psychological. It's a generational thing."

There is something about using digital media to write and analyze that ramps up student engagement and understanding. While reading Prensky, I just assumed that better papers came off of computers because it was easier to revise, but the success of literature analysis with DyKnow Vision seems to indicate that it's something more than that. What it is I don't know (it can't just be that they are digital natives, can it?), but it's certainly something that we need to take into account if we truly want our students to succeed.

Flickr Presentation

KY-SC-HS.3.4.7: Students will
- classify organisms into groups based on similarities
- infer relationships based on internal and external structures and chemical processes. Biological classifications are based on how organisms are related. Organisms are classified into a hierarchy of groups and subgroups based on similarities that reflect their relationships. Species is the most fundamental unit of classification. Different species are classified by the comparison and analysis of their internal and external structures and the similarity of their chemical processes.

Our flickr presentation that acts as an introduction to classification can be found here. The slideshow will allow students to practice the act of classification themselves on everyday objects such as cars, chairs, and flowers before they are introduced to the way that scientists classify organisms. This is meant to get them thinking about the necessity to have one means of classification so that a group of people, i.e. scientists, will have a shared language for grouping their objects of study, i.e. organisms.

Reflection 2: Blog, Wikis, Podcasts, chs 3, 5, & 7

Richardson's book is revealing itself to be a really helpful "how-to" resource for teachers inexperienced with technology. However, for those who are more experienced with blogging pages and hosts for pictures, the new (to us) information he provides can get lost in the midst of prior knowledge. Despite this, I do feel like I've learned more about the resources I already use and have been exposed to other versions of resources I've used (Flickr seems to be a much more useful photo host than Photobucket, for example).

I do think that Richardson does himself a detriment for not including LiveJournal at all while discussing the ability to connect socially with others on your topic of interest as well as the ability to gather different blogs together. LiveJournal has personal journals as well as communities and a "friending" feature. Students could all have their own personal journals, and teachers could require them to "friend" each other - this would automatically provide them with a page that collected all the class posts together. They could also have RSS feeds sent into this friends page and could "friend" communities of interest (on whatever they're researching etc). The community feature could allow the teacher to create a community blog for the class that any of the students could post to as well. Of course, the teacher would have to ensure that the students were using the site responsibly and not coming upon or searching for inappropriate content, but this is true of any blogging site and the internet in general. In the world today, there is no escaping the internet and what can be found there. As Richardson noted in one of the earlier chapters, students need to learn responsible behavior, and using blogging sites is a fairly good way to do so.

In my first sentence, I noted how much these 3 chapters (3, 5, 7) function much more on the level of a "how-to" guide. Richardson spends most of these 3 chapters telling readers about different blogging resources (ch. 3), RSS feeds (ch. 5), and Flickr (ch. 7). However, he also makes a hugely important note on the ability to "create more relevant connections to the ideas and sources they need and then be efficient readers" (p. 86) as well as "create and connect content" (p. 109). That is why these myriad new resources can be so helpful as educational tools. A large part of critical thinking is the ability to create connections - that is an essential analytical tool. While students can learn these skills through more physical resources, the internet in particular is a resource that is uniqely suited for use in teaching students how to make connections. Additionally, our world is becoming more and more technological and internet-focused. Our students will need to know how to think critically about "ideas and sources" found on the internet - not being prepared to do so will leave them woefully unprepared for their futures (as I noted in my last reflection post, I believe - see tag to find it).

Richardson, Will, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Tools for the Web, Corwin Press (Thousand Oaks, CA), 2006.

Research Strategies

List of Research Strategies

• Google
• Wikipedia
• Online bibliographies
• University online catalog search
• Periodical/journal databases
• Browsing in subject section in the library
• Online communities for that topic: LiveJournal communities, Yahoo!Groups, newsgroups, blogs, etc.
• Discussion with professor and others students of that subject, other teachers
• Gheens Professional Library

I find that I use a lot less of these resources now that I'm in college and no longer a full-time undergrad student.

ETA: (Other people's strategies)

• Kentucky Virtual Library (userid: kids, pw: boston99)
• EBSCO host (check out Searchasaurus for searching by reading level)
• Google Notebook (as opposed to physical notecards)
• Easy Who Is (checking owner of site)

Technology Autobiography: A Girl and Her Technology

The first time I ever used a computer, it was a TI-99 that plugged into our television. We didn't have the internet until about 10 years later, though, when I was in 9th or 10th grade. Of course now I could not live without my laptop and high speed internet. I'm online every day - definitely too much a lot of the time. I have 2 laptops (one issued by the school), a digital camera, and I plan on buying an i-pod in the near future. I think that technology, particularly computers, has absolutely revolutionalized the way that we learn, the way that we think, the way that we speak, the way that we live.

When I think back, for example, to how I researched science projects in elementary school and compare it to my research projects in undergrad, the steps you use are so different. No more card catalogs or sifting through the library's booklet on their periodicals. It's all right there at our fingertips, whether it's a serious research project or the absolute necessity to figure out the rest of the song that you just can't get out of your head. "I'll google it."

Google, LiveJournal, YouTube, Amazon.com - this are daily parts of my life. It's bizarre to think how different my life would be without them, and it just makes me love it all the more. I can make slideshows of my students and put it to music with Windows PhotoStory 3, I can type "Mars" into Wikipedia.org and find everything my students need to know and more besides. I can look on YouTube and see raps students and teachers have written about math and science and literature (and more besides, I'm sure). And that's just related to teaching.

I have two blogs not counting this one, an account on Facebook.com, 4 email accounts, an extensive organizational system for my hundreds of favorites, and so on and so on. I just love technology.

And this is why I wish I could use it more in the classroom. It is essential that our students know how to use computers and the internet for more than talking to their friends on MySpace and listening to their favorite songs. These types of technology are becoming increasingly integrated into our lives - by the time they grow up, they will need to know how to utilize this technology in order to work and live. You already have to apply for financial aid (the FAFSA form) online - there is no paper option. What's next? We are doing our students a mahor disservice - we are harming them - if we do not prepare them to function and thrive in a technology-based society. I don't think everything should be on computers - there are times when hands-on is the best option - but computers need to be an integrated part of everyday classroom life. These resources can help our students learn more effectively, but learning to be comfortable with technology is also key.

(I find this aspect of blogging confusing. As a social blogger, it is somewhat difficult to switch codes to a more academic speech when I am so used to blogging informally. My apologies for that. I am trying.)

Reflection 1: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts chs 1-2

Will Richardson. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.

(Richard really needs to stop saying Weblog. It's annoying me. Blog blog blog.)

Blogging, though, really is something that has changed the Internet and the way people communicate. Of course, it's more than just blogger (and I think that Richardson overemphasizes this particular site, as Live Journal for example houses more than 13 million blogs) and blogging, there's YouTube and more recently Twitter, which presidential candidates are using to communicate with the public and that people are using to communicate with each other and to create new ways of spreading information. Barak Obama texts into Twitter to let his constituents know what he's thinking or doing ("At the University of Iowa envisioning affordable universal healthcare by end of first term. 10:32 AM May 29, 2007 from web"). It's a new step in sharing information, but a bit different than what Richardson notes in the book.

Is Twitter less valuable than blogging? And is there really a heirarchy of blogging, as Richardson seems to think? "Real blogging" and "not blogging"? Is a blog where someone expresses their opinion innately less valuable than one where someone expresses their opinion using linked content?

(Of course, this may just be because I'm biased. I have 2 separate blogs on LiveJournal, and it is a bit jarring to read for class and discover that Richardson doesn't think what I do qualifies as blogging.)

But however you define what a blog is, I think that they can be an incredible tool for learning. Majoring in women and gender studies in undergrad (the other major was biology), my blog and the blogs of others that I met were an incredible tool for learning, communicating, collaborating, and gathering information.

I wish that we had the ability to do the same for my students. Communicating with authors, as Richardson's students did with Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees), connecting with other students in other parts of the world, filing/organizing student work, communicating with parents - it would just be amazing. And then I inevitably hit a wall - I have students that don't even know how to use Google. They just type a long question into the address bar. Portfolios have a stranglehold on the computer lab, and JCPS has a stranglehold on the content we're able to access. Any sort of means of effective communication with the outside world is cut off - preparing my classroom for my first year of teaching, I wasn't even able to visit a newsgroup to figure out how to hook up my classroom VCR.

The district cuts our students off - and us as well - from this massive resource. How does one respond to that? What do you do?

The First Post

A professional blog...now that will be different.