Penultimate Week in High School

Just came across something I wrote at the end of school last year, and thought I'd post it in honor of the weather turning this weekend:

Going up the stairs in the morning we ascend into a damp cloud of still air, still stinking faintly of the hundreds of teenaged bodies that passed through the stairwell the day before.  Nothing on Junior Hallway has cooled off or aired out from yesterday.  The June heat wave left all of us wilted, the students whining and sweating in their polyester uniforms, the teachers cranky as we tried to force out the last lessons on the last Wednesday before finals.  I trudge up behind a great beast of a boy who sighs and moans as he feel the air press down, suffocating.  The hallway when we reach it is no better, and teenagers in flipflops and uniforms grumble as they change into their uniform shoes and stow bags and books in lockers, complaining about the heat. 

In class I lay the ground rules.  “No whining about the you-know-what,” I say, gesturing toward the blazing light outside the window.  “Also, no touching the fan.  They are scientifically positioned for maximum air circulation."  

This gets their attention, and a couple of boys and girls look around at the fans, checking to see if this might be true.   

"I don’t want to hear anyone talking about the heat."  A couple of kids look defiant, but they're too hot to pursue it.   I continue: "The only thing I want to hear you talk about is ice cream, ice cubes, ice skating, ice hockey, or ice pops.  Cold mountain streams.  Baby pools.  Got it?”   

They all groan. 

“Why baby pools?” asks the nearest boy, sweating over his notebook.   

“It just popped into my mind,” I answer.  I take attendence, and we try to finish up the Cold War and Korean War.  Nobody wants to, but we do it anyway.  It's June.  

[June 9, 2011]

 

First day of class with Polleverywhere: What is Art?

The first day of class is often a rut:  go-over-the-syllabus, fill-out-the-index-card, how-many-are-freshmen first day activities, blah, blah, blah.  This time, I decided to learn about my class demographic and share the results  live with the class using Polleverywhere, a free web tool that uses cellphones like classroom clickers.

Ahead of time, I went on the Polleverywhere site and created a few polls asking questions like, "What is your year in college," whether they'd ever taken an art history class or written a research paper before, what their majors are, and so on.  I had some of that info on my course list online, but I thought it would help build rapport if the students could learn about each other in a novel way.

Now here's the cool part.  I embedded a link to Polleverywhere in my pedestrian first-day-of-class powerpoint, and then in class, when we got to that slide, I clicked and went to the Polleverywhere site.  "How many people have cell phones?" I asked.  I think they thought I was going to ask them to turn off the ringers.  Nope. "Use your cell phones to text messages to this number up on the screen, answering the questions.  You 'vote' for your answer, just like American Idol. "
I totally had their attention.  Everyone whipped out their cell phone and got going with the first question, their year at college.  They texted or used smartphone web access to the numbers onscreen.   As their answers reached the screen, we could see the bars on the graph change right before our eyes.
Here are the results of the first question:

 The students were fascinated.  I asked if any of them had ever done this before, and none of them had.  I heard a few people remark that it was "cool."

We did a few more basic questions about who they are.  Here's one:

At the very bottom right of the screenshot above you can see "total results" in which Polleverywhere updates live the number of responses it has received.  There were about 33 people in the classroom, and 30 answered this question.  I use the old-fashioned classroom teacher pencil rule to decide when to continue - when 3/4 of the pencils stop moving, you start talking.  So for Polleverywhere, I wait until about 3/4 of the class has posted its answer.

After we got to know each other a bit, I started a poll question that dealt with the content of the course.  We'd been talking about art and art history all through the class, so  I asked:  "So, what is art, anyway?"  Poll everywhere lets texted or web-input answers float up onto the screen in real time, so everyone could see them. Here are some of the responses:

After we had a good number of answers,  I elicited patterns in them - e.g. many definitions had "expression" or "self-expression" in them; an important subset said art is difficult or impossible to define; and we questioned whether art bore any relationship to "life" or "reality" based on the responses, questions of intention and reception, and so on  I also pointed out that no one had mentioned "skill" in any of their definitions.  We then compared our definitions to some dictionary definitions of art that I had brought along.

Recognizing art and art worlds as historically situated is one of the course goals, so I plan to raise this question "What is art?" every so often as we progress from the Renaissance to the present, so students can revise and develop their definitions, and we can think about how the definition of art has changed over time.

We also got to practice using the web tool, so now the students are familiar with it for whenever I want to use it in a lesson.

Issues:  Poll everywhere didn't display on the screen the same way it had at home on my computer, so bits of some of my questions were not visible.  To be fair, they do warn you in the instructions to practice the poll on the computer and display system you will be using.  I didn't.  Live and learn.  It still worked out great!

Other issue - I had too many intro questions. It does take a little while to text in all those numbers.  If I upgrade, I think I can make it a little more seamless, but at the moment it's a bit expensive for an adjunct.

Back to school, in a green way

Great storage idea for teachers from a really cool blog about, of all things, storage: Storage Glee

To post notes or not to post notes, that is the question.

Recently, on a listserv I subscribe to, a new Advanced Placement course teacher wondered whether he should post his outline of the textbook for his students, or let them take their own notes.  He wrote:

Hi everyone,
> First time AP Euro teacher here, and was hoping for some advice on the topic of class notes. I have several colleagues who favor providing their students with the notes for the course, and several who do not (it has grown into a long-running debate at department meetings). Traditionally I have agreed with the point of view that the work of actually taking the notes is in itself quite important to the learning process. Now, I recently finished outlining the text book we will be using(McKay, 10th ed), and am on the fence whether I should post the notes to my website or not. As I said, my gut instinct is telling me not to, but I have noticed there are several AP teachers who do provide their students with notes. Being that this is my first attempt at an AP curriculum I was hoping to get some more experienced opinions on the matter. Do you provide your students with a set of notes? Has it worked for you in the past? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

> Mike

Here's what one teacher replied:

Do not most university professors have all notes, assignments, etc. al. on their websites?
I do understand your desire to teach your students note taking skills....but are not many summaries, etc. on line for their use anyway?
Almost all of the AP World, AP European, AP US textbooks with their ancillaries and supplementals  provide chapter notes for students on their websites.
I might humbly suggest that students should be taught to "use" the historical information (notes), data, and narrative analytically, ie., seeing change over time, continuity over time, comparative (also contrast) and analyzing POV [point of view] in primary sources to finding truth in the past.  In other words using historical notes from diverse sources to understand historical processes. 

And here's what I added to the discussion:

While I thought the way Mike did going into my first year teaching AP, I found that when I didn't provide notes, many students searched out and printed notes from various online sources, which many of them annotated in class.  Also, in practice I found out the hard way that the pace I had to move at was too fast for such idealism.  I found that if I provided the students with powerpoint notes or even with old-fashioned lecture outlines on the blackboard, that they did take notes during class anyway.  It simply allowed me to go much faster,  and it helped them understand and retain better.  

Ditto for our textbook.  It depends on how well-organized your textbook is and what kinds of signposting and online resources it provides, but students did find it helpful to have some way of knowing what *I* thought was important in the torrent of information the book provided.  I did this by having them fill out a reading "quiz" for homework before we started each chapter (I didn't make these quizzes up myself but modified them from quizzes I found on one of the many wonderful, generous AP teachers' websites.).  They got a modest number of homework points for completing these quizzes, and we went over them quickly in class but I did not grade them.

 About three quarters of the way through the year, I also started a blog (I used Blogspot, and there are others you can use like Wordpress etc. If your school provides you with space on its website, that can work too) where I posted homework, project requirements, links to resources and cool websites we didn't have time for in class, and other information.  Even with my stumbling first efforts at this, I have to say it made life easier for everyone. 

As an improvement for this year and to save the burden of photocopying, I would put the Powerpoints or notes up on a free service like Wikispaces (sign up for a free educational account, which allows you to sign up multiple users at once and restrict access if you like) and Slideshare and let students download and print them themselves.   I would post the links to these sites on the blog so the students could find them again whenever they needed to.  I don't think it is doing their work for them.  The students who want to learn will appreciate it and will continue to work hard, as is their custom, and those who want to cut corners will do that anyway, whether you put up the notes or not.  Everything is moving in that direction anyway (see "The Flipped Classroom"). 

What Mike is really asking is, "How do I make sure my students are learning actively?"  Note-taking (done correctly) is one way of learning actively, but it's not the only way.  Don't agonize over it.  Put the notes up and provide opportunities for active learning and synthesis other ways, with classroom activities, discussion, well-designed projects, web quests, graphic organizers (I used to call them "tables," "charts," and "diagrams" ;-)) and so many other things we've seen on the boards (including note-taking!). You can always stop putting up notes it if it's not working for your class.

Wow! Wikispaces history project is a hit!

Just wanted to share with you a comment e-mailed to me by one of my students' parents about my first Wikispaces project for my U.S. History II high school class.*

 Hi this is XXX's father XXX and it's nice to actually see a teacher that lets the parents get involved with the children's work. This is the first time I have ever seen anything like this and it is a true teaching accomplishment. XXX's video was very interesting as it pointed out many harsh realities of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Also, the paragraphs written after were very coinciding with the video, especially the one referring to the Japanese concentration camps due to fear of another attack of some sort. The discussion board is also very insightful and will be a huge help to those students who need help understanding one of the topics posted.

My 11th-grade students researched good-quality videos on World War II, then posted them to their own Wikispaces page on our class site, and wrote introductory texts as well as a paragraph explaining how their video augmented, illustrated, or even in some cases contradicted their textbook.  We spent time in class discussing the criteria that would make a video "good-quality" for a history class - things like accuracy, availability of metadata (who created it, where,when, and why; intended audience, and so on); the source of the video post, the production values, and whether the video showed evidence of any bias or interventions after its original creation.  We talked about primary and secondary sources and what would make a video qualify as one or the other.  (Basically, a primary source is created during the period you are studying; a secondary source is later or at some remove.) Students weren't required to add photos or illustrations to their pages or change the fonts, but I taught them how to do it as well as how to alter their layout and colors.  Many of them chose to embellish their pages in this way, even though it wasn't required.  Many took great pride in their work.

Next, after all the videos and pages were assembled, students were required to view and comment on at least three of their classmates' videos and posts, and I commented on all of it as well.  Here I modeled comments as well as prompted students to improve their pages; and students were able to see their peers' work, and see skilled and not-so-skilled examples.  They also joked around and encouraged one another.  They seemed to like having control over many aspects of the process.

In a related exercise, I posted four discussion questions about topics we had discussed, read about, or viewed in a film on World War II we saw together in class, and students were asked to post to at least two of them.  The questions were designed to prompt students to synthesize the material from these print, aural, and video sources in order to join the discussion.



For the project, we discussed the criteria in class and I posted instructions and a jing about using Wikispaces on my school blog.  When I saw the project was turning out to be pretty exciting, I wanted students to share their work with the adults in their lives, so I offered very modest extra credit if they showed their work to a parent and the parent e-mailed me a note saying he or she had seen it.  I didn't ask for anything more than that, but many parents wanted to write and say what they thought about the project.

Needless to say, I'm thrilled.   I didn't even know Wikispaces existed four weeks ago.  [note: this entry was originally written in late May 2011 and updated in June]
So what did they learn?

• Synthesized information from a variety of media, including print, digital, and face-to-face interaction.
• Developed their writing skills: description, summary, analysis, critique
• Evaluated the content and reliability of web sources as well as concerns inherent to the medium like production values or production interventions (editing, photoshopping and the like)
• Presented their work to an audience of peers and parents
• Commented on peer's work
• Created, organized and designed simple web pages
• dipped into HTML and WYSIWYG editing
• Produced knowledge base on World War II

*Because it's a school Wikispaces project, to protect students' privacy I can't publish it to the whole web.  If you'd like to know more about the particulars of setting up this kind of project, e-mail me or contact me via the comments.

Prezi and the Economy

One of the most exciting tools for educators I learned about this year is Prezi, a presentation tool that zooms all around a matrix that you create.  Basically you design something like a poster or layout, then you create frames and links that allow you to jump all around in any direction.  It's a lot less linear and one-up than PowerPoint.  Or at least it can be, because you can see several elements of the presentation at once, and then zoom around to whichever one you want.  Of course, if your purpose warrants it, you can always run your Prezi linear fashion, so viewers see things in the order you want them to see them.  But the big difference with Prezi is the feel.  Elements swoop, zoom, and spin - it's a lot less static than Powerpoint, and makes even Powerpoint's animations seem kind of stodgy and lame.

But why read about it, when you can see?  Check out this award-winning Prezi by Jonathan Chan:

Raise the Rate on Prezi

Chan is a recent graduate of an Economics program who won $50,000 for his idea, which he submitted to an online contest* using Prezi.  I like this example for two reasons:  It's a skillful use of Prezi - visually elegant - and its streamlined content is also elegantly conceived.  So together, it's a seamless mesh of form and content.    And it has me convinced that raising interest rates and counting savings toward consumer credit scores is the way to go.  

*FYI - Pension giant TIAA-CREF's "Raise the Rate" contest solicited ideas to help raise the rate of consumer savings.

Wikipedia Redux

Those of you who read my post on the Great Wikipedia Question  ("Edupunks, Latin American Literature, and a Wikipedia Confession" ) will be interested to see how it's handled in a rubric developed by Linda Goldsworthy, a high school teacher in Wisconsin.  Rather than forbid the use of Wikipedia and its ilk, Goldsworthy evaluates student research papers by applying criteria of "overview sources," "directly credited sources," "authoritative quality of sources" and finally, formatting:

> My research paper/project  Works Cited Rubric includes "Overview
> Sources" which can include things like wikipedia, World Book, etc.
> so that students gather key names, places, events, etc.  It is
> meant to give them an idea about their topic. It consists of 10% of
> the rubric.   I let them know that in many college courses,
> wikipedia is an unacceptable source and my goal is to wean them
> from it.  I do spend some time pointing out the references at the
> bottom as potential places to get better material.
>
> Next, I use "Directly Credited Sources" which can include primary
> sources, secondary sources, etc.  My high school subscribes to many
> databases including things like ABC-CLIO, Opposing Viewpoints and
> Jstor. This may be worth as much as 30% on the works cited rubric.
>
> The third, and most important part of my rubric uses "Authoritative
> Quality of Sources"  This is usually 40% of the Works Cited rubric.
> Kids know that I spend a lot of time looking at their sites and
> the QUALITY of the sources they use.  The use of the subcription
> databases always let me know that authoritative quality is much
> higher than other sites students frequently want to use.
>
> The remainder of my rubrics deal with MLA/APA/ASA or whatever
> format I am using as well as spelling, etc. for the last 20%.
>
> I worked very closely with the librarian at out school to develop
> this rubric.  She's actually assists me during the early stages of
> teaching the students as she knows what works best.
>
> My goal is to wean use of overview sources and encourage thinking
> skills that help them fine tune their researching abilities.

Wikipedia isn't going away anytime soon, and do we really want it to?  I like this approach because instead of flat and futile prohibitions on using the source we secretly use ourselves, it guides the students towards learning to evaluate and make judgments about web sources on their own.  The sooner the better, I say.

*About the illustration:  I created this by downloading an image of a confessional from the web, then uploading it to  Be Funky, and using this free photo-editing web tool to paste in a speech bubble. Then I cut and pasted the Wikipedia graphic (badly, I admit) using Sumo Paint, a free web editing and painting tool.  It took me all afternoon, and I loved it.