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.

Interactive Notebook

I have the good fortune at the moment to be writing this post in Oxford, where I am chaperoning students for three weeks while they take a course here. A few times now different students have asked me what I do during the day while they are in class, and when I tell them that I am doing work, I inevitably receive a brief look of confusion and then the question, "What work do you have to do? Can't you just reuse what you did last year?" It never fails to amuse me when students reveal that they can't always conceptualize the amount of work teachers put into their classes (even when they complain about how much work it takes for them to prepare for a 15-minute presentation for a class, and thus forget that we subject ourselves to a much higher standard of engagement every day!).

So what exactly have I been working on? Well, three of the problems I face with my freshmen world history class is: 1. their inability to organize themselves; 2. their inability to succinctly and yet thoroughly take notes, particularly because English is a second language for most of them and so their processing time is a bit longer to be able to articulate concepts learned in class; and 3. the fact that they do not revisit their notes until they absolutely have to (i.e. an upcoming assessment).

In the three years I have taught at my school, I have gotten a lot better at anticipating the organization problem, and so it's become second-nature for me to do things like use visual and audio reminders so that students write down something important, or to remind them to use their planner etc. etc. As for the second problem, I have used a weekly assignment called a 'journal sheet' that allows students to reflect on what they learned for the week, and it also forces them to read the news. A sample journal sheet is below.

Journal Sheet (2011-12)

The problem with the journal sheet, however, is that every year it does not become as much of a routine as I would like. So one of my goals is to figure out how I will implement a more interactive way for my freshmen students to handle their notebook since this could attack all three problems at once. I first got this idea when my friend Bowman introduced me to this post: http://statteacher.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/algebra-2-interactive-notebook.html .  The idea is simple: students maintain a physical notebook throughout the year which is solely devoted to your class and is a space for them not only in which to take notes, but also to reflect and build on what they have learned. The latter idea is my favorite thing about the interactive notebook. I know that a lot of teachers have tried digital solutions to my three problems (particularly by using OneNote and sharing notes/assignments via the school network), but instead of inviting the demons that come alongside relying on computers (other software distractions; low battery supplies; internet outages), I want to keep it simple for my students and use actual notebook paper. Plus I think it gives students the advantage of being creative with their own hands, as you'll see below. I can debate the advantages of forbidding computer use in my classroom in a future post, but for now here is how I have decided to implement the interactive notebook in my class:

• I will create my own interactive notebook along with the students. This way they will have a model notebook which to refer to throughout the year, and I will theoretically be able to use it as an example to show students at the start of the next year. But I will also call it a 'portfolio' rather than an interactive notebook, just so they recognize that the object is meant to be a place for everything to be collected, not just notes.

• At the start of the year students will design a cover for their portfolio in order to personalize it and give them a sort of 'ritual' in which to embrace its importance. This website had good instructions and a rubric: http://www.cyberlearning-world.com/lessons/ushistory/isn.cover.directions.htm 

• At the start of each unit I will give students a template like the one below to paste into their portfolio so that they have a sense of what the essential questions are for each unit and what sources we will be looking at (which will hopefully also reinforce the importance of source material for historians).

Students will paste such a table on a page but leave space (perhaps a whole left-hand page) for revisiting it at the end of the unit, with the goal of drawing a picture (or pictures) of the main elements of the unit near the table. We will also use the table to revisit the essential questions and reflect on the sources in class or as homework.

• I will not use the right side of the notebook as an 'input' side and the left side as an 'output' side. While I understand that is a critical part of the interactive notebook, I hesitate  to use this format for two reasons:
• Since this is the first time I am doing an interactive notebook, I am having a hard time conceptualizing what I want my students' 'input' side to look like when they are simply taking notes from a class discussion. This website: http://kalamitykat.com/2012/01/08/interactive-notebooks/  has wonderful photos of what an interactive notebook can look like, and she has a great suggestion that students NOT turn the page in their notebook unless explicitly asked by their teacher, so if they need more paper for notes, they just glue loose-leaf pages to the page and fold them. Yet I don't think this would be practical for my class, seeing as how throughout the year my students struggle to learn what is the best way for them to take notes. This means that normally their notes end up having different lengths (some write what appear to be transcripts of class, while others are better at being succinct), so it is hard for me to imagine the chaos that would ensue if class was stopped so some students could grab loose leaf paper for their notebook. So I would rather have students discover how they want to take notes and not be limited by having to leave the left side of their notebooks blank. 
• I am 99% sure that my students will NOT do anything on the output side unless it is made a formal assignment, so I will have to frequently give reflection/application assignments for the students to do in their notebook (both in and outside of class). Thus I do not think leaving the left side blank is necessary - they could do the reflection/application assignments in the space after their notes.
• Some ideas for what kind of reflection/application assignments I could give are here: http://mrsgannon.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/assignment-table.pdf  and here:  http://www.cyberlearning-world.com/lessons/ushistory/lpwhatishistory.htm and here: http://www.mrgreer.net/notebookleftside.html . The last website also has a wonderful explanation of the rationale for interactive notebooks, including the fact that "students need to revisit a newly learned concept at least 7 times to be able to have embedded it into their long-term memories".
• Note that the basic idea of Cornell notes is embedded in the interactive notebook, so I will just have students periodically go over their notes as an assignment (a wonderful site for using the Cornell note system is here: http://statteacher.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/cornell-notes-in-math-class.html)

• http://kalamitykat.com/2012/01/08/interactive-notebooks/also has a great idea for creating a little pouch that students can use to insert vocab cards. I love this idea because I do not usually assign identifications on my quizzes and exams because my tests are weighed toward analytical short and long essay questions, but having students create their own vocabulary cards would be another great way for them to review the material. Here's another helpful site in that regard: http://www.cyberlearning-world.com/lessons/ushistory/ch1vocab.htm, so expect a future post once the year starts on what criteria I will use for students to create their own vocabulary cards.

• The downside to this whole system is that I will have to grade the portfolios fairly frequently in order to ensure that the students are serious about taking notes and reflecting on the material. Yet I do not think this has to take a lot of time, and will give me a better sense of just how students are taking notes in my class; I found a sample rubric here http://www.ljhs.sandi.net/faculty/MTeachworth/avid-summer-05-institute/oh12interactivenotebookrubr.htm which is good, and which I can use perhaps bi-weekly when I check their portfolios. But if I assign a reflection assignment as homework, then it would be easy to grade it simply for completion. Nonetheless here is where I will have to put in some further thought because I plan to use the Standards Based Grading system, so I need to consider how I will incorporate the interactive notebook.

Any feedback/suggestions about my thoughts here would be wonderful! And of course I plan to post about how this plan all works out in the fall…

P.S. Just so you don't think all I'm doing is work and chaperoning here in Oxford, I want to reassure you I have time for exploration and fun this summer as well! :)