Technology in Class

I am initially hesitant to incorporate technology into my classroom just because I am wary of network reliability and the ease of use of some software, so I am excited to share the three ways in which technology has been beneficial in my AP World History class this year.

• Google Docs - An Upgrade from Moodle: My students at the start of the year were required to upload, via Moodle, their answers to 6 questions from their weekly assigned textbook reading before we discussed the content of the unit. The upside to this was that class time was fairly productive since they came in with background knowledge. The downside was that it meant a lot of grading on my part with every student turning in individual answers (total: 186 short essays to grade per week), and Moodle doesn't make it easy to provide feedback without downloading and reuploading documents, so I would ask students to see me one-on-one if they had questions about their grade. A recent professional development workshop, however, made me consider how to make this process a little more streamlined. 
• Every one of my students received a Google Drive account through my school, and through that account students are now required to send me their weekly answers via a shared document. 
• I have given them the option of working alone or with up to 2 other students, and they really like this idea because it means they can cooperate with friends even in another class section and divide up the work. 
• Ultimately, however, I want to make the 'collaboration' component more of a requirement, because right now they seem to be mostly just splitting up the work rather than peer-editing. 
• Nonetheless, and despite a few technical kinks that our IT department is working through, this has made grading the documents a lot easier as well, so it's been a success.

• Flipped Classroom: With our shortened school calendar putting more pressure on the pace of my AP class this year, I decided I needed to try a flipped classroom for one unit in order to minimize my lecturing and maximize the use class time as an opportunity to practice writing and applying content. So I spent a fair amount of one of my Saturdays trying to figure out what software would be most user-friendly and allow me to frame the material best.
• I first tried Voicethread, which a colleague of mine who is running an online course suggested. Voicethread is a great tool for generating discussions between classmates, and it is fairly user-friendly, but it did not serve my purposes since I was not interested so much in a forum tool as a lecture tool. But it is worth considering for future lesson ideas. 
• Another teacher suggested Camtasia, which is a software that makes it possible to audio record over a power point; the Camtasia record feature becomes part of the PowerPoint tool bar.  I may actually think about how to use this for future take-home assessments - my first thought is to make students responsible for narrating slides that we can then share - but for the purpose of a flipped classroom I wanted something that played more like a video and had a script.
• I ultimately ended up using Photostory, which is extremely easy-to-use. It gave me the chance to add voiceover narration, transitions, and music to slides of my choosing. The product is a lot like a Moviemaker video, but the ease of making a presentation with narration was great. Here's a 5-minute selection.

• Upside? My students were able to download it from our Moodle site and watch it outside of class, after which we did a few activities in class that gave them a chance to practice using evidence to write thesis statements. Many of the students said they found the video helpful, so it is something I would consider doing again in the future, especially since Photostory made it relatively easy.
• Downside? Putting together a script and choosing the right slide images took probably a good 4 hours for a 20-minute video. But it is something I can use potentially in the future again, so in the long-term it is an investment.

• Popplet: Since I felt like my AP class was having to rush through our 600-1450 CE unit, I wanted to create a project for students that would encourage them to organize the material in a way that incorporates the habits of mind required to analyze primary sources and consider continuities and changes over time. But I also wanted the project to allow them to share the results of their work with each other for future review. As I weighed my options, I came across this and this post by Indiana Jen, both of which give very useful advice for tech resources in the classroom. 
• I thought about creating a Google site for our class through which we could all edit and share items with our Google drive accounts, but the set-up for the various pages was more complicated than I expected (although I would consider creating a site over the summer to bypass Moodle in the future). In the end I decided to use Popplet, which is free and very user-friendly. Below is the assignment and grading rubric.

• The students had two days in class to work on this, and the results were very well-done, I think. I was very glad that the project allowed students to consider what it means to organize information, and I was particularly pleased by how many of them found primary and secondary sources that were not in the textbook. Indeed this allowed us to have good discussions about what criteria makes a source "reliable". Here are two Popplets that my students put together. 
• http://popplet.com/app/#/656107 
• http://popplet.com/app/#/656081
• In the end the majority of students said they enjoyed using the site and would visit their peers' Popplets, but they would like the choice of working alone or in a group. So I may consider this again when we review other units in the future.

Ultimately I am really enjoying these tools in the classroom, and while I was surprised by how some of my students were reluctant to try these items out because they prefer pencil and paper, in the end even they were somewhat converted to the benefits of these methods. The drawback I could foresee in using all of these many resources on the internet, however, is the amount of log-in names and passwords the students would have to keep track of. This is why I want to utilize our Google drive a little more frequently, so we can share items all in one place; I hope to get some more ideas in the future with regard to that.

SBG 4: End of term

We had a professional development day at my school recently and I, along with my friend in the math department, was asked by the administration to share with the faculty how we have used Standards Based Grading in our classes. It can be nerve-wracking to speak to your colleagues about what you are doing in class, but I was happy that our presentation was well-received, and I honestly hope this will give me the chance to speak with other humanities teachers about how to refine and improve my system. Preparing for our presentation was a wonderful opportunity not only to reflect on how SBG has been going in my class, but also to talk to the other teachers who are using it this year, and thus I want to share some of the conclusions I've reached.

WHAT'S WORKING

(Some) Students are taking it seriously: Looking over my statistics, almost half of my entire freshmen class has come in at least once for reassessment on the unit goal standards, and I can think of two students in particular who've found the opportunity for improvement to be empowering.

I'm getting usable data: In calculating the final grades, I can see how my students are doing individually on standards and how they are doing as a whole with skills and content. So, for example, I have one student who is really struggling with the 'Using Evidence' standards, but not so much with the 'Writing' standards (i.e. they can articulate themselves, but often fail to answer questions). Another example is that I can see that over the course of the term students are getting better at trying to bring evidence into their writing, but they haven't improved much in terms of organizing their writing. I'm excited by this since previously I may have had some intuition that these were trends for my classes, but now I actually have some quantifiable data.

My own lesson planning is getting better: See my last post. Long story short, having these unit goal standards has really forced me to backwards plan smarter. I have also decided to give the questions at the end of the unit rather than at the start, because when I gave them at the start we never really referred to them again until I assigned them (granted, I could do better with that), and students would forget to leave room for answering them in their interactive notebook, which also made their notebooks less organized.

WHAT STILL NEEDS SOME WORK

Converting to percentage grades: Essentially I have converted my standards scale to the 4.0 scale, so that a '3' equates to 85%. Some of my other colleagues, however, have decided that a '3' is equivalent to 75%, which forces me to consider what it really means to 'master', 'succeed', 'develop', and 'begin' a standard. I've had some interesting conversations about this. First, one math teacher who has '3' equal a 'C' in her conversion argued that the area in which there should be more nuance is between students 'succeeding' and others 'mastering' a standard, and thus she has added a 3.5 to her standard scale. Furthermore, the best argument against my scale is that as it stands, it allows a student with mostly 1s and 2s to pass my course (as a beginning/developer) with a low 'C'. Nonetheless I think I will stick to my standard scale at the moment. I think that in assessing kids in their argumentative writing, there is a need to have more gradation between students who are really struggling with even understanding a concept (e.g. bringing in evidence) and thus get a 1, versus those who may get it conceptually but can't apply it - say a '2' performer. Thus there are fine gradations at the lower end of the spectrum. Which brings me to my next point...

Can I create a rubric for my standards?: What does it mean to support an argument with evidence? How can you quantify the difference between a student who brings in persuasive evidence well, versus one that does it weakly? In other words, I need to try to fine-tune the differences between a 4, 3, 2, 1. I think that would help me solidify my thoughts about my first point above; hopefully I can research this on the internet to see how some other schools set up their standards.

I need more modeling: The majority of my freshmen have never been asked to write critically, so for a while my standards really meant nothing to them because they had never really seen good writing in English. It was not until students who came to talk to me about their writing one-on-one began to write much better essays that I had models which to show the poorer performing students, and that has been a bit of a game-changer. We read the model essays together and discussed what made it strong: using transition words; having a logic and a flow to ideas; being selective about what they brought in as evidence. All of this became much more evident to all my students when they saw a peer could manage it. My goal next term, when we have more time in class compared to the wacky calendar we had this term, is to model more writing in class together. I have small white boards that I have used to have them draft paragraph summaries and arguments - hopefully we'll get a chance to do that more often together to see that writing is a process.

Reassessment ideas: For the students who have come in for reassessment, I have given them the opportunity to redo their unit goal questions using a creative writing format. In particular, I have asked them to write a dialogue for me. This has been successful because it forces them to think about how a conversation flows, and thus how that should even work when writing more formally. How do you anticipate a reader's thought? How do you connect ideas? It's also inherently Socratic, and so while I like this reassessment, I want more ideas. I have thought about students doing a multimedia project for me (a video/documentary) or writing me a letter or filming themselves teaching a friend, but I would love more ideas. I also know it would be best if students could come up with their reassessment projects, but frankly many of my freshmen are not at a point where they fully understand the full range of what it means to 'assess'...they were so used to being spoon-fed at their previous schools that at this point they need coaching to stimulate their creativity. But any ideas would be wonderful!

Surveying the students: I plan to give my freshmen a quick survey at the start of the next term to see how well they feel they understand SBG and to ask why they don't make reassessment or tracking their progress more of a priority. I think I can guess at their answers (e.g. lost gradebook password; struggling to organize all obligations) but I hope it'll just be one more way in which I can include reassessment as a part of my daily lesson plan.

Using it in AP: I had a couple of AP teachers ask how I would use SBG in my AP class, and my instinct was to reply that it should actually be easier since the College Board provides a lot of standards for us already. It also made me think using SBG would be ideal for my AP class because this year I found that many of my AP students are perfectionists, and they were incredibly panicked before our final exam this term. It was clear that the pressure they were putting on themselves came out of a fear of not doing well on this exam because it would hurt their grade, and it was draining for me to play the psychiatrist for a week to get them to calm down. Using SBG could really help alleviate the test anxiety because it teaches them that making mistakes is a part of the learning process - it's not something to be aggressively avoided. I want to turn that into a mantra! And I would hope that someday, if we can get a consistent SBG system in place, students at our school would find themselves understanding how they learn, and to target their weaknesses, so that when they go to college they won't have such test anxiety. And while I understand colleges won't have reassessments or SBG, I do believe it will foster habits (particularly in reflecting on objectives and weaknesses) that will help the student be an independent learner so they can feel better prepared for summative assessments. 

Professional Development

If you are considering summer professional development opportunities, I would highly recommend looking into the Taft Educational Center (TEC) workshops at the Taft School in Connecticut. [See http://www.taftschool.org/tec/default.aspx ] I just finished up my week-long course there, and it was a sublime experience.

Before I get into the heart of the matter -- which is the substance of the professional development I got -- let me first entice you with some logistical items. Although the Taft School is not an easy place to get to, the TEC did a nice job of providing transportation info for how to get there without having a car. The dorm room was comfortable and the food provided by TEC made me feel spoiled. Three meals a day plus two coffee/tea breaks in which even the snacks provided changed daily, plus a social hour right before dinner in which complimentary wine and non-alcoholic drinks were provided - let's just say I had all the more reason to use the splendid athletic facilities at TEC, as well as run in the multiple bucolic fields of campus!

If this description of the facilities has perked your interest, let me get into the real joy of being there: the workshop itself. I was first introduced to just how beneficial my week in Connecticut was going to be in the shuttle provided by TEC to get to campus. During that ride I had the most invigorating conversation with another teacher named Louise who had signed up for the AP Art History workshop. There is nothing quite like talking to teachers from other schools to gain some perspective on your own school -- regardless of whether they are in your discipline, or whether they are from public or private schools. 

As the week progressed I got to meet lots of other interesting teachers because the TEC purposely (but not forcefully) structures opportunities to interact with other educators both in and outside of your particular workshop. Through these interactions I got the chance not only to commiserate with other teachers about their experiences (particularly with regard to boarding school life), but also to appreciate certain aspects of my own school. My discussions with college counselors were also insightful, especially when comparing the challenges of American and international students. I also, of course, spoke to other history teachers about how they structure their curriculum and organize class material. For example, I already plan to stay in touch with one teacher about how to use music more interactively in my AP class. Furthermore, in talking to a variety of teachers, I came to realize how my teaching is different from American teachers because my audience (i.e. international students, but mostly Jordanian) is different. I can't make references to some things that American teachers can simply because my students wouldn't get it due to cultural or language barriers, and yet at the same time I was struck by just how much I can reference due to globalization! 

My particular workshop was on Latin American Civilization taught by Prof. Fernando Gonzalaz de Leon, and it was simply a productive and enjoyable experience. To keep it succinct, here's a list of what made it so positive and why my 5 days flew by:

• The professor ran the workshop more like a graduate seminar so that we had a lot of reading every night (about 100 pages) from The Penguin History of Latin America and then based our two 4-hour daily sessions (run more often than not as Socratic discussions) on the reading. This book is simply a great resource and I would highly recommend it if you are weak in Latin American history (like I was, which is why I took the course). While it is very dense with facts, it is also readable, effectively analytical, and up-to-date, so it was a great way to provide background information for class discussion, and it will be a great resource for me should I want to provide case studies on Latin American countries.

• In the workshop the professor asked short-essay questions for which we spent time writing answers in class and then shared our ideas. Here are the 8 questions we ended up discussing in full:
• What are the hurdles in teaching about Latin America?
• What were the differences between the Latin American and North American experience of conquest?
• What commonalities did indigenous peoples have before the arrival of the Europeans?
• What were the values of Latin American civilization? (i.e. What's 'Latin' about Latin America?)
• What were the global consequences of settling Latin America?
• How does the Freyle story reflect and modify the casta system as we illustrated on the board?
• Is there a parallel between the North American and Latin American revolutions?
• What were the challenges facing Latin America in the 19th century?

I ended up having over 7 pages of typed answers after fully digesting our discussions, and they will provide a good framework for putting Latin America in a world historical context as well as studying it on its own terms.

• My favorite part of the workshop were the assigned readings from The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories. It has been a while since I've taken a literature class, so after reading the first few short stories assigned before the workshop started, I was baffled as to how we were supposed to use them. Yet the professor proved to be very adept at unfolding the stories for us and revealing not only the allegories and metaphors involved in the writing, but also at helping us put the stories in historical context and using them to consider cultural studies. It was a phenomenal experience for me to be confused with a text at the start and then be so aware of the intricacies and nuances of the same text just thirty minutes later. It reminded me of how good analysis and close reading of short texts are critical in any humanities course, and how I must give my students that same intimate experience with texts as often as possible. This means I must work on my goal this summer of gathering meaningful but cropped primary sources for my classes to examine & dissect in-class. I want to give them a spread of sources to look at, like selections from literature (e.g. Epic of Gilgamesh) and artwork (our professor had us compare Baroque Latin American compositions with the more abstract music of late-18th century Latin America), or newspaper clippings (e.g. feminist activities in early 20th century) and political texts (e.g. The Communist Manifesto). Yet it is difficult to find the right selections as well as translations that are appropriate for my students, particularly for my freshmen, for whom English is a second language. (Any suggestions for resources online or otherwise to help in this endeavor would be appreciated!)

• Our group also got the chance to talk to our professor about the challenges that he faces with university students, and it was interesting (if also somewhat disheartening) to realize that many of them are the same ones we face with high school students. Plagiarism, for example, remains a big problem, and we talked about what seems to be a trend in which students are not held accountable for their work as much as educational institutions are the first to be blamed….an interesting discussion that I will ponder more about in a future blog post.

 When I left TEC it so happened that coincidentally I got a chance to sit with Louise again and she, like myself, had had quite an enlightening workshop. So if you should have any questions about TEC or my specific workshop or want to discuss other PD opportunities, please feel free to comment!