Daniel's Approach to Tech Integration

From 22-26 July, 2013, Daniel Martin trained on the Using Interactive Whiteboards course. 
Here is his first post on the Pilgrims technology bog where he shares his approach to using technology in the classroom. Thank you, Daniel. 

ON USING TECHNOLOGY 

DANIEL MARTIN 

"About a week before I was due to start teaching the course “Using Interactive Whiteboards” for Pilgrims, I joined a MOOC on Songwriting. (I am very passionate about music and singing, as some of you know.) In the introductory video for this course Professor Pat Pattison made reference to Aristotle, who claimed that –and now I’m quoting Professor Pattison- “every work of art displays the same quality and he (Aristotle) called the same quality unity, that everything fits together, that everything works together to communicate the main point, the main idea that you are going to express”. He goes on to add that “that’s the only possible rule in songwriting”.

I believe that the same principle applies to many other crafts, as the craft of teaching or the craft of teaching English or the craft of integrating technology in English language teaching for that matter. As language teachers we – and our students - have been using old, well trusted technologies like pen and paper, for instance, for many years. Should we be replacing them with digital platforms altogether? (emails, word processing programmes, online mind mapping tools, blog posts or digital textbooks to name a few...)

My answer is that, first and foremost, we need to have a clear idea of what our goal is and what might be the most efficient medium to achieve that goal. 

We might be asking our students to write something in a class blog or wiki and, therefore, use a digital medium to express themselves. However, it is perhaps a good habit to draft some ideas first with pen and paper. 

Let me give you another example. 

You have reviewed with your students useful expressions and then you want them to drill them in writing by generating a few sentences that are true of themselves. They write them on paper. Then – if you have a beamer and a computer in the classroom - you collect the samples of writing, open the camera tool of your computer and place them, one at a time, in front of the camera for the students to see and read projected up front. This is much more efficient than having to ask them to walk to the front and rewrite the sentences again. This integration of technology and tradition is a prime example of unity, of things fitting together.

Everything must fit together

Image derived from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4273913228/

Using technology for technology’s sake, because it’s there or because it – supposedly - provides fun or because that’s what our students want or even demand is not the answer. The novelty inevitably wears off. New technologies replace existing ones and human beings do not handle change well, scientists say. We do not want to be overwhelmed by this. We have to teach. And we have lives. Or we should.

My approach and advice is this: think about what you want to teach first, then how you are going to teach it and finally how it can possibly be enhanced with the technology at your disposal. You may have an interactive whiteboard or a computer, a beamer and an Internet connection. You may have enough tablets or laptops in your school to bring to class. Your students may be allowed to use their smartphones in the classroom. Or, if that is not the case, you can still plan activities for your students to use technology outside the confines of the classroom. Take a look at your situation in particular and devise activities that fit together and make sense together like the pieces of a puzzle. That includes continuing doing what works well for you in the class, trying out new technologies, integrating the four skills, making room for different learning styles and, last but not least, looking for a sense of purpose. Technology, after all, is just another piece of the puzzle."

We'd love to hear your views about this blog post and your approach to integrating technology in education. Looking forward to reading your comments... 

A Google search tip illustrated

Do you ever come across a really useful .pdf on the web that is clearly a chapter or section of a larger work?  

How can you find the rest of the material?  

Here is a real example. Today I was searching for materials on 'scaffolding learning' and I came across a terrific .pdf. When you look at the URL at the top of the screenshot, you can see it is chapter 3. Hmm, what about the other chapters? Maybe I would like to read them, too? How can I do that? 

How to search inside a website

First I truncate the URL.  This means isolating the main part, the home page, of the website. Here's how: 

Take the full URL at the top 

http://www.tllg.unisa.edu.au/lib_guide/gllt.pdf

and delete the bits at the end until you get to this:

http://www.tllg.unisa.edu.au/ 

Copy this part ....Then go to Google Advanced Search - if you are not sure where that is, well, Google it. 

Then search inside the website you have found by scrolling down and pasting the truncated URL into the 'site or domain' box.  

Also choose .pdf for the 'file type'.  

Click on the big blue button at the bottom of the page to see the results. What we are doing is searching inside this website for .pdf files rather than looking across the entire universe of the Internet. 

Here are the results. I got a lovely 100 page+ book :). 

How can you use this with students?

I like to use this with students. If you send the class to the Internet and ask them to search for something, you might get some very unsafe results!  But if I ask the students to search inside a safe website, like the British Museum, they will only get results that are safe.  

You can also teach this tip to parents. For example, you can help primary school children's parents search together with their children to find a suitable game on the CBeeBies website. Use Google Advanced Search and put the word 'games' into the top box on that page. Search inside the CBeeBies website so paste their website URL into the 'site or domain' box.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page to click on the big blue button. 

How many results do you get? 

I got more than 15,000 results. Plenty to keep kids busy over the summer holidays, right? 

Try it. See if you get the same results :). 

Blogging: what, why and 3 hows

We didn't have enough time on our course to look at blogging in any depth. There is the technical side of what a blog is and what the different parts of the page are called plus how you create them on platforms where you can have a blog, like Google's Blogger or Edublogs. Then there is the pedagogical side, which is more interesting. I'll try to focus more on issues I think teachers want to know about. If you have any questions, please post a comment! 

What is a blog? 

What is a blog and what is a post? This video from Edublogger gives some background information. 


 


So a blog is your space on the web to write and share whatever you want. 'Post' now generally means 'to add a piece of content to your blog'. 

You can see this from a search on Google Fight, where you can compare how frequent two bits of language are on the web. The phrase 'post to a blog' appears many times more frequently on Google than post a letter.  Try a few more 'fights' yourself to see how it works.

Why have a blog? 

People write long articles about the benefits of blogging but I'll keep my ideas short and to the point: 

• Using the Internet is a natural activity for young people. 46% of the UK's teenagers say they can't live without it. 
• When you have a blog, you have a real audience. Check out this article about influential teen bloggers to learn about some real examples.   
• They give students a chance to develop their digital media literacy skills. Most countries have added this to their national curriculums and have shared materials on the web. Check out this Canadian site for an example. 

By the way, there are many activities you can do with your class to help them improve these skills, most of which resemble the activities we do with printed text in our reading lessons. The image below contains some of the words I associate with digital media literacy and was created on Wordle, a popular tool.  

• Blogs allow students to use their creativity by combining media to express their ideas. This also includes adding media and linking to outside sources. Curious about what children can do? Check out the winners of the Digital Creativity Awards. There is even a degree course in Digital Creativity!   
• And blogging encourages reflective learning since a blogger often has to come back to a post and think about it again in the light of reader comments and other stuff they've learned since the post was written. The image was taken from Sue Water's blog. Check out the original post. 

So blogs can be a useful tool for teacher development if a teacher keeps a diary or a portfolio of work and reflections on one. Learners can also use them in a similar way. They can have individual blogs, which are usually a lot of work for the teacher to read, or the teacher can run a class blog where examples of students' work can be posted. 

How to write a blog post:

My top tips:  

• Keep it relevant. In other words try to make it interesting or suited to the needs of your readers 
• Use headings to break up text. 
• Avoid italics. Use fonts that are easy to read. There is research on this! 
• Include some visual and video and any other interesting media (but not just for the sake of showing off.)  
• Link to outside sources so people can follow up on ideas. 
• Do give more than one point of view - be as balanced as possible.  
• Invite more discussion ... (see below.)  

If you would like to explore some topics related to effective blogging, the about.com site has several pages with articles. 

How to get the most out of a blog 

One of the most important aspects of a blog is the dialogue that can develop through the comments section. Have a look at Scott Thornbury's blog post on 'Gestures', and see how much extra content is found in the discussion in the comments. It's many times longer than his original post. I enjoy reading the comments and come back to them later to see what else has been added even if I don't post any myself. 

How can we evaluate a blog post? 

If your students are going to contribute to a blog, you'll want to give them a rubric. Before that, read a few blog posts in class or for homework to decide what you are looking for and discuss how the students' work will be evaluated. One very useful list of resources for assessing blogs can be accessed from Richard Byrne's blog post on the topic. (I'd strongly recommend following this blog, by the way.)  

Another approach to evaluation is to develop a 'The best blog post is...' list with your students. Here's my list: 

1.) The best blog posts are thoughtful, original, relevant, and provide insight into your learning and your engagement with your learning. This includes learning from three sources: classmates, the activities, and course content. In your blog post you can/should also provide feedback/ suggestions. What would improve the course? What would improve your learning? 

2.) The best blog posts are reflections on your learning process during our course that explain, summarise, argue for and against, question, analyse, self-assess, synthesise, your engagement with course content. 

3.) The best blog posts make your thinking and learning visible, and use examples from discussions or class work as support.  

(Adapted from a comment posted to a teacher's blog. This is a real example of how I learned from the comments and discussions that follow the post. Scroll right down to follow the discussion.)

So please feel free to add your comments and question to our blog posts. We look forward to seeing some discussion develop! 

Who's reading the blog?

One of the hidden attractions of keeping a blog is being able to see who is reading it. Well, not the actual people's names but you can see what countries your readers are in and where they came to the blog from. With the blog only two weeks old we have readers from ten countries! 

You can also see which posts have been drawing the most readers/views. It seems the most recent posts are the ones which have drawn the most views, quite naturally. 

If you have never set up a blog you may not know what is visible at the back end :). 

In my next post, tips for evaluating blog posts your learners write. 

Rubrics and assessing students work

Thursday, the second-to-last day of the course, we talked a bit about feedback, evaluation and assessment. We started with rubrics. 

Rubrics really help a teacher to be more objective while marking the work students produce. Marking a multiple choice test is quite easy but how to you ensure consistency when marking students' written work, oral presentations or project work?  Using Web 2.0 tools for creating more 'single right answer' type tests is a real mistake (in my opinion) unless of course these tests are created by the students! The web tools we are looking at on our Pilgrims courses focus on creative work, assignments that require collaborative work in pairs of groups and integrated language skills. Assessing such work requires a high degree of professionalism from the teacher. If you are new to the idea of rubrics or want to find out more about the advantages of using them, check out this list. 

After talking a bit about rubrics, we examined a few examples from the web to see what features to pay attention to while making our own. 

In the first example below, people thought that starting with the 'best' column on the left was more motivating but that having a column with a 'zero' score (Unsatisfactory) would be demotivating. Also, the wording has to be very well-chosen. 'Fails to explain...' was thought to be very negative. A more humanistic wording would be 'In this assignment there is no evidence of..' or something like that. It was also too detailed for our needs.  























In the second example, I like the term 'Apprentice' as it has the connotations of a beginner who is learning from another person, which promotes the importance of group work. There is no mention of 'failure'. Some group members 

Writing a rubric is hard work but an important part of carrying out fair assessment. Rubrics make it clear to the students what aspects of their work should be worked on during the next assignment. The use of rubrics encourages a cyclical progression where students receive feedback from the teacher and possibly their peers and use that feedback to set their next goals.   


Writing a rubric

Working in groups the course participants prepared draft rubrics for marking the 'Fire and Ice' task. They formulated the categories to be assessed down the left of the grid and the levels/points across the top. Then they assessed their friends' work using their rubric. They wrote a piece of feedback on the back. A variety of different styles of feedback emerged. Some wrote points for each category. Others wrote sentences saying what they thought was done effectively and suggesting an area to work on next time. I hope that everyone benefitted from seeing what different styles there were!  

We discussed whether there should be points given or just feedback - and not everyone agreed. Some wanted to know how many points they got and others wanted to give/recieve points on the second or even third task since the aim is to focus on learning. However, we are aware that pressure from parents and testing systems makes us give points even when we might not want to. 
  

Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

To practise some of the shortcuts and tricks we revised/learned about using Word, the group members created visual representations of the poem 'Fire and Ice' by Robert Frost. I have used this poem before for this kind of task and each time I try to create a different way of handling it with the class or group. Here is what we did this year.

We were already warmed up on Wednesday so it was easy to move to this task without any special lead-in, although with a group of students I would ask a few general questions about poetry (Do they like  reading poetry? Any favorite poet? Does anyone write poetry, etc.) or about artistic self-expression (painting, drama, dance etc.) before starting.

First I gave each group member a blank piece of A4 paper. I asked them to copy what I was writing on the board on the paper in their best handwriting. Writing the poem yourself makes you think more deeply about the words than merely reading it or listening to it. It also gives some silent time to start to interact with the text. I wish this was an original idea of mine but it isn't! I picked this suggestion up from a lesson plan on the Internet. The steps given in this lesson plan have been copied and reporduced on many websites - usually without attribution which isn't very nice. I hope the site I have given is the original source.    

Here is an example of the poem as one of our participants copied it:

Next the teacher reads the poem out loud twice or the group can listen to a version from the web a couple of times. Librivox has several recordings for you to choose from.


Then, just as in the lesson plan on the website, we brainstormed around the words 'fire', 'ice' and 'world'. They did this with their partners first and we collected all the answers on the board.

This helps people think about the possible range of meaning of some key words in the poem.

In pairs or small groups the students/participants can share their ideas about the following questions:


a.) Where did your mind go while you wrote and listened to the poem?
b.) What pictures did this poem give you? And what feelings do you get from these pictures?

c.) What does Frost think will happen at the end of the world? Do you agree or disagree? Why?

d.) What message do you think Frost trying to convey?

I adapted these questions from another lesson plan on the web.

Now it's time for individual interpretation. Everyone goes to the Internet to find copyright friendly images that they can use to illustrate the poem and what it means to them. You can access a copy of the task if you want to see it in full.

Here are a few of the results! I'm sure you agree they look wnderful. In the next post, I'll share how we prepared a rubric for peer assessment purposes.

Our wiki page reflections

We are in Canterbury at the Pilgrims Summer School doing an ICT course with our trainer Kristina and a group of fellow students, who come from Slovakia (3), Hungary (1), Poland (3), Slovenia (1) North Cyprus (2) and the Netherlands (1) so we are a rather mixed group, but we get along very well, helping each other whenever we can.

 

Our names are Gitka Kottmanova and Margaretha Siebelt (short Marga). At the back of the picture you can see our friends on the course Nihat and Alan.

 

Our task was to create a page on our class Wiki and introduce the job of a farmer in Ancient Egypt. This page should provide information to young students with also some sort of tasks. It should persuade a young person to become the apprentice of a farmer, rather than another job. Have a look at the task on the wiki and you will understand the following steps we try to describe.  

 
We are going to outline are the steps we took when creating a Wiki and the different kind of media tools we used. Moreover we tried to indicate the difficulties we encountered while making it and the questions still to be answered.

  

Planning and finding materials:

●    We started by creating a Google drive document because we wanted to work on it simultaneously. We used pictures from various sources using insert image.

●    During the course Kristina taught us the advantages of working in a Google doc, which you can find under the heading of Google drive, do have a look!!!!!

Here are three sites with some ideas for using a Google Doc with students: https://sites.google.com/site/colettecassinelli/docs,

http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej55/ej55m1/

http://www.edudemic.com/2012/04/50-little-known-ways-google-docs-can-help-in-education/)

●    The great thing about working together in a Google doc is that you can see whatever the other person is adding even when you are miles away, even when you are continents apart. It is also possible to revert back to an earlier version if someone makes a mistake or accidentally deletes something.

●    We started a search on the internet and used the following websites:

○     a webquest based on this task

○     Google search to get pictures by using advanced search

We searched inside one website ‘ancientegypt.co.uk’ (which you can do from Google Advanced Search) using the tags ‘farmer’ and ‘agriculture’.

The results were reliable because the ‘ancientegypt.co.uk’ is a British Museum website. They were useful, because they give us the basic information we needed. The criteria for selecting them, was our audience (young students) so the language should not be too difficult.

Preparing the wiki page:

●    We had realised there were 4 different aspects of being a farmer so we created a table of 2 x 2 on our PBworks wiki page because you can easily organise the layout of the text, images, video or whatever else you are going to add within a table. In every one of the squares we introduced a different category of information using a picture that linked to a video, a PowerPoint presentation, our Google document or a website with a story game.  In short, 4 sections and for consistency each one links to different media.

●    Linking from the picture on the wiki page to the Google document is a bit tricky. We had to pay great attention to the way the link is organised, the document has to be embedded into the table by using the following steps: http://tinyurl.com/npd6gp4   By the way, the use of this tinyurl.com site is great, because so many times you try to give a person a link and by mistyping things go completely wrong, but by shortening it, life becomes much easier.

Inserting the pictures into the table

The inserting of pictures into the table is not so difficult.

●    We collected the pictures and put them in a folder on the desktop

●    We inserted the pictures into the table. Look at the following pdf document for all the steps neatly explained.

●    We introduced a short video on the YouTube and introduced it into the table by insert video also explained in the above site. We used a YouTube video, because our students are very visually inclined and will be willing to learn from the video.

●    The last picture links to a site with an educational character. It’s an interactive story about a boy in search of his brother on the Nile. You can make the boy go up and downstream while the story tells something about what he encounters. Finally he will find his brother if..... you go into the right direction. 

Overall:

We choose the 4 images from the same website with each part something to click on to go further into the description of the life of the farmer or his environment, in order to maintain a consistent image. We are happy with the way the page looks.

  

The presentation:

We presented the result to our group and they were so kind as to give us the following feedback.

The positive points were the following

 

1. The setup was logical, nice and strong



2. Children will like the story and they can easily remember it



3. The content, searching, design and use of media was considered to be well done



4. Kristina was pleased that we worked with our goal group in mind the young adolescents. (primary and upper primary students)

 

There were some negative critical notes meant to be instructive, much appreciated.

1. less text would be nice, it is not clear what is important and less important



2. a PowerPoint with special effects was missing

 

In future we will certainly implement both the positive and the negative remarks.

We greatly enjoyed making the blog and for class purposes we are going to introduce it too.

17-6-2013

Gitka and Marga