Caveat Emptor: I am about to make lots of generalizations about textbooks. I know full well that there are exceptions to some things in some books. But in my 15 years teaching history, I have yet to encounter a textbook that works well for me. You may love your textbook, and it may be perfect for you. I don't even like my textbook, and it doesn't work well for me.
I believe that history is, at its heart, a series of stories. Stories can teach lessons, entertain, inform, generate a response, be boring, and even be lesson-less. However, history textbooks don't tell good stories; they damp down all the controversy, take out the blood, sweat, toil and tears, use one person to represent whole groups of people, and in general, present everything as a done deal that was a good outcome for the "winners." There's the African proverb "Until lions have their own historians, stories of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter," which I like better than "victors write history," but the basic intent of both is the same: textbooks are the history of the victors. And they remind us, as Dave Barry mocked in his book Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, that "women and minorities continued to make valuable contributions." Afterthoughts, stereotypes and condescension abound. And insomnia gets cured by all who read them.
Textbooks are expensive to make, expensive to buy, impossible to update, heavy to carry, limited to two dimensions, present one perspective and are governed by the political whims of whatever the largest states' Departments of Education think they should contain. They are boring, vanilla pieces of writing that contain mistakes and aren't even under the control of the ivory tower denizens who composed them originally. Some contain thorough research and are accompanied by supplemental materials that are somewhat useful, but most are spottily researched, and come with such intellectually stimulating items as fill in the blank/matching/lower order thinking worksheets that re-create the textbook page in even simpler form. Ultimately, if you are a teacher who uses those materials, you must know that your students simply copy off a friend just before class. If they are organized, they rotate the responsibilities among them...
So I don't like textbooks.
Sadly, the iPad doesn't yet help with this area of my classes. It allows me and my students to access the interwebs, and I do make use of the Wikipanion app to have students compare the contents of the textbook with the contents of Wikipedia and turn to a third party web source to adjudicate any discrepancies. I can have my students watch TED talks, PBS videos, and follow the news, blogs, and social media. Students can download items from iTunes U and podcasts that are free. So I can stitch together material, and I will eventually generate an ePub or my own iBook once it is populated enough, but for now it is a cumbersome process that relies on materials beyond my control.
Ah, but what about the new Apple textbook initiative and iBooks? Well, students would have to pay for anything out of iBooks. I currently can't buy books for them and then repossess them to pass along to other students in a subsequent year. (No rental licenses like there are for renting movies in iTunes...yet...) So even once Apple puts together its textbooks, I still will have to designate funds for the purchase of those items, and in terms of the mathematics of it all, iBook-based textbooks will end up being more expensive than the textbooks we currently use. (My current textbook cost is $90, and is on its 6th year of use...If I have to pay $15.99 per student per iBook per year, I won't really be saving anything over time, it just won't be a giant bill all at once.)
All I use a textbook for is to provide the students with a common platform of knowledge. I never use it in class; they read it at home, at night, on their own so they can come into the classroom with a body of information that will allow us to delve into the facets of the story that help: to explain our current world; to illustrate a problem that needed to be solved back then that resonates with a problem we have today; to provide an important comparison to another story from another place; or to help describe how something has changed as time has gone by. The iPad makes the in-class activities happen in new and effective ways, and it can help with the at-home portion of my process; it just doesn't do that smoothly and efficiently. Yet.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
"crowdsourcing" grading
I'm appropriating the name of this aspect of assessment from Cathy N. Davidson's chapter in her book Now You See It (Thanks Cathy!) Hastac.org, the blog of the work that is being done at Duke University is also a must read for those of us who are interested in how technology is showing up in classrooms at multiple levels of the education system.
This is mostly about involving students in the assessment process, which I've been doing for several years, but only through asking classes to collaborate to create the rubrics I use to assess their work or through asking students to reflect on the process and product of their work in the classroom. I have generally, however, shied away from having high school students provide grades for each other. This is usually due to my perception of them as not being willing to put much thought into their feedback (the phrase of death: "That was really good, I liked it!" comes up waaayy too much), grading on the basis of friendship or the lack thereof, or not being sure that all of them actually understood the criteria. So I've had them assess themselves after the fact, and used check-ins during projects to see how things are going.
But in light of reading Now You See It with the rest of the Instructional Leadership team at Burlington High School, I decided to try to crowdsource the grading of two projects in my senior elective, US-China Relations. Here's how it started this week:
I described the two projects to the class--one is a student presentation of a particular aspect of the relationship between the two nations the other is a summation of each of the four sections of the course, the first of them is the creation of a glogster poster in which they present the history of the relationship from 1972-present. (Details are posted on the class' blog uschinarelationsbhs.wordpress.com). Next year I think I'll ask them to design the projects, or at least give them the option to try that out...
I then asked them how they wanted the grading of these projects to go. I said I could grade them all, but it seemed to me that after 13 years of schooling, and given they were all adults, I wanted them to have the option to grade themselves. (Full disclosure: students with a grade of B+ or higher in senior electives in the second semester at BHS do not have to take the exam. So they have some motivation to do well. I also have the reputation of being "a hard grader"...) The prevailing sentiment in the class after some discussion was that they wanted a say in the grading. I asked them what their ideas were for how to do this, and they came up with several different permutations. I didn't have to do much to direct the conversation after that: 26 different voices participated without my prompting! As they talked, I recorded the ideas on the board for all to see, and they began to coalesce around a few options.
All agreed that they wanted a different system for each project, so we then broke up the projects and went one at a time. In the end, this was the students' choice (they voted through the electorally rigorous method of putting their heads down and raising their hands, counted by me):
Presentations will be graded by the students for the "style" of the presentation: how engaging it is, how effective it is, how well put together it is. Those grades will be collected and averaged, dropping the highest and lowest. I will be assessing the content of the presentation for accuracy. Students were perceptive enough to recognize that they were not going to be experts in the material enough to be able to say whether or not the presenters had accurate and thorough information. My grade will then be averaged against the students' average to determine the final mark.
The Summary projects will be graded by the students and me as one of the crowd. I will present the glogster projects to the class as anonymous submissions (to avoid assessment on the basis of friendship or enmity). The highest and lowest marks will be discarded, and the results averaged to attain a grade.
We then compiled the categories of a successful presentation in a google document, and the students are composing the language that will go into the rubric that we will use.
This is not a full out crowdsourcing of grades, which I was honestly ready to embrace, but the students themselves expressed deep ambivalence at completely handing over the power of the grade to each other. "Honestly, I don't trust kids in this class to grade fairly" said one student, to the general agreement of her peers.
So while I'm glad to be going forward with this, I think it is disturbing that the seniors in my classroom, after 13 years of schooling, don't have confidence in themselves to be impartial, focused, and analytical about the work that is going on all around them, nor do they trust each other to have those rather vital traits as they are about to depart the school...
This is mostly about involving students in the assessment process, which I've been doing for several years, but only through asking classes to collaborate to create the rubrics I use to assess their work or through asking students to reflect on the process and product of their work in the classroom. I have generally, however, shied away from having high school students provide grades for each other. This is usually due to my perception of them as not being willing to put much thought into their feedback (the phrase of death: "That was really good, I liked it!" comes up waaayy too much), grading on the basis of friendship or the lack thereof, or not being sure that all of them actually understood the criteria. So I've had them assess themselves after the fact, and used check-ins during projects to see how things are going.
But in light of reading Now You See It with the rest of the Instructional Leadership team at Burlington High School, I decided to try to crowdsource the grading of two projects in my senior elective, US-China Relations. Here's how it started this week:
I described the two projects to the class--one is a student presentation of a particular aspect of the relationship between the two nations the other is a summation of each of the four sections of the course, the first of them is the creation of a glogster poster in which they present the history of the relationship from 1972-present. (Details are posted on the class' blog uschinarelationsbhs.wordpress.com). Next year I think I'll ask them to design the projects, or at least give them the option to try that out...
I then asked them how they wanted the grading of these projects to go. I said I could grade them all, but it seemed to me that after 13 years of schooling, and given they were all adults, I wanted them to have the option to grade themselves. (Full disclosure: students with a grade of B+ or higher in senior electives in the second semester at BHS do not have to take the exam. So they have some motivation to do well. I also have the reputation of being "a hard grader"...) The prevailing sentiment in the class after some discussion was that they wanted a say in the grading. I asked them what their ideas were for how to do this, and they came up with several different permutations. I didn't have to do much to direct the conversation after that: 26 different voices participated without my prompting! As they talked, I recorded the ideas on the board for all to see, and they began to coalesce around a few options.
All agreed that they wanted a different system for each project, so we then broke up the projects and went one at a time. In the end, this was the students' choice (they voted through the electorally rigorous method of putting their heads down and raising their hands, counted by me):
Presentations will be graded by the students for the "style" of the presentation: how engaging it is, how effective it is, how well put together it is. Those grades will be collected and averaged, dropping the highest and lowest. I will be assessing the content of the presentation for accuracy. Students were perceptive enough to recognize that they were not going to be experts in the material enough to be able to say whether or not the presenters had accurate and thorough information. My grade will then be averaged against the students' average to determine the final mark.
The Summary projects will be graded by the students and me as one of the crowd. I will present the glogster projects to the class as anonymous submissions (to avoid assessment on the basis of friendship or enmity). The highest and lowest marks will be discarded, and the results averaged to attain a grade.
We then compiled the categories of a successful presentation in a google document, and the students are composing the language that will go into the rubric that we will use.
This is not a full out crowdsourcing of grades, which I was honestly ready to embrace, but the students themselves expressed deep ambivalence at completely handing over the power of the grade to each other. "Honestly, I don't trust kids in this class to grade fairly" said one student, to the general agreement of her peers.
So while I'm glad to be going forward with this, I think it is disturbing that the seniors in my classroom, after 13 years of schooling, don't have confidence in themselves to be impartial, focused, and analytical about the work that is going on all around them, nor do they trust each other to have those rather vital traits as they are about to depart the school...
Friday, February 17, 2012
iPad based social media in the classroom part 2
So this one will be a bit obtuse, because the social media site I'll refer to here (the name rhymes with "Macelook") doesn't like it when this project happens. It requires students to create fake accounts, which the social-media-site-which-can't-be-named, hereafter to be called "Voldebook," actively tries to discourage. In fact, I have a student who created a page for a school project in another class and was subsequently banned from using Voldebook...So I shall not attract their direct attention by using their name, thus incurring their wrath and risking my own account...
In any event, my students are tasked with creating Voldebook pages for the explorers/travelers Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, Zheng He and Rabban Sauma. They are to imagine that these men had access to Voldebook, and then replicate status updates they would have made on their travels. Students compile biographical information, pictures, maps, video clips that demonstrate what they would have seen/done/thought along the way. Students work in groups of up to 5 (depending on class size) to create and populate the pages. Each student must post at least 10 times, posts begin with the year and their initials (so I know who they are) and posts must happen in chronological order.
Students have 4 days of time in class (never a whole period, usually about 20 minutes) to coordinate the posting of the status updates (Voldebook won't allow simultaneous log-ins from more than two or three devices before it sends a message demanding a cell phone number to confirm the poster is a human being...if the cell number matches another one on file, they shut down both the new page and the old one...) assign years for research, and check in about progress. On the 5th day, students are required to have the pages done and ready to be assessed. Many groups establish a Google Doc, input their posts there and have a designated student make the actual posts on the Voldebook page.
Once the pages are populated with the status updates, the students then comment on each others' trips in the character of their explorers. For instance, Ibn Battuta, the Muslim legal expert, responds to Rabban Sauma, the Nestorian Christian Mongol envoy, and so on. Students are assessed based on the realism of their posts, the depth of their research (demonstrated in the wall posts), the clarity of their posts, usefulness of the images/videos/maps they used, and meeting the required numbers for posts.
The students seem to get pretty excited to be using Voldebook for school, and they display a great deal of versatility in making use of the capacities of this form of social media; they regularly exceed my expectations with the creation of these pages, and demonstrate their understanding of the material in very creative ways.
Benefits for students include:
#1 They come as close to walking in the explorers' footsteps as we can get and still stay home.
#2 They gain a very detailed knowledge of the explorers' journeys, and compare and contrast them.
#3 They have to articulate their understanding publicly, concisely, and in more than just printed words
#4 They then have to "inhabit" the explorer's minds in order to reply in character, developing empathy with a person very different from themselves.
#5 They work collaboratively to do research and develop a consistent voice as the explorer.
#6 They get to articulate their understanding in a medium in which they have a great deal of fluency and expertise.
#7 They have fun finding groups to join, music to like, friends to make, relationships to establish for imaginary, yet historically very well defined, characters.
Drawbacks for students:
#1 The aforementioned restrictions and sanctions of Voldebook make some students have some trepidation about risking their own personal access to it--it is a vital part of their communication, so the loss of it is quite scary.
#2 A small number of students are forbidden by parents from using Voldebook. They also are not permitted to have their own email addresses. The parents are attempting to remain in control of their child's access to social media and electronic communications, usually out of fear of predators and pornographic influences present in the inter-webs.
Benefits for the teacher include:
#1 A very creative project in terms of outcomes, with no material costs to me or my department. (No paper, glue, scissors, markers, etc. needed.)
#2 Products which are impossible to contain in a folder are highly portable and easily assessable.
#3 Students are motivated, excited and enthusiastic to learn about long dead men.
#4 Students learn geography, history, political science, religion, and economics in a hands-on manner, and express that understanding in a manner that is comfortable and accessible to them.
#5 The interconnected-ness of the world is demonstrated in a way that helps students understand that the contemporary notion of globalization is not a new one.
The apps used for this were My Pad and the social media sites' own app, neither of which was satisfactory for the students. Many ended up logging in to the page through the iPad's various browser options, as that enabled the website's greater functionality.
There are alternatives to Voldebook, like Fakebookapp and Myfakewall, but those don't allow for interactivity, just the creation of a mock page. Twiducate and edmodo have some shared functionality with Voldebook, but again fall short and aren't great with the iPad. I'm hopeful to find a viable alternative, but as yet, one eludes me.
In any event, my students are tasked with creating Voldebook pages for the explorers/travelers Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, Zheng He and Rabban Sauma. They are to imagine that these men had access to Voldebook, and then replicate status updates they would have made on their travels. Students compile biographical information, pictures, maps, video clips that demonstrate what they would have seen/done/thought along the way. Students work in groups of up to 5 (depending on class size) to create and populate the pages. Each student must post at least 10 times, posts begin with the year and their initials (so I know who they are) and posts must happen in chronological order.
Students have 4 days of time in class (never a whole period, usually about 20 minutes) to coordinate the posting of the status updates (Voldebook won't allow simultaneous log-ins from more than two or three devices before it sends a message demanding a cell phone number to confirm the poster is a human being...if the cell number matches another one on file, they shut down both the new page and the old one...) assign years for research, and check in about progress. On the 5th day, students are required to have the pages done and ready to be assessed. Many groups establish a Google Doc, input their posts there and have a designated student make the actual posts on the Voldebook page.
Once the pages are populated with the status updates, the students then comment on each others' trips in the character of their explorers. For instance, Ibn Battuta, the Muslim legal expert, responds to Rabban Sauma, the Nestorian Christian Mongol envoy, and so on. Students are assessed based on the realism of their posts, the depth of their research (demonstrated in the wall posts), the clarity of their posts, usefulness of the images/videos/maps they used, and meeting the required numbers for posts.
The students seem to get pretty excited to be using Voldebook for school, and they display a great deal of versatility in making use of the capacities of this form of social media; they regularly exceed my expectations with the creation of these pages, and demonstrate their understanding of the material in very creative ways.
Benefits for students include:
#1 They come as close to walking in the explorers' footsteps as we can get and still stay home.
#2 They gain a very detailed knowledge of the explorers' journeys, and compare and contrast them.
#3 They have to articulate their understanding publicly, concisely, and in more than just printed words
#4 They then have to "inhabit" the explorer's minds in order to reply in character, developing empathy with a person very different from themselves.
#5 They work collaboratively to do research and develop a consistent voice as the explorer.
#6 They get to articulate their understanding in a medium in which they have a great deal of fluency and expertise.
#7 They have fun finding groups to join, music to like, friends to make, relationships to establish for imaginary, yet historically very well defined, characters.
Drawbacks for students:
#1 The aforementioned restrictions and sanctions of Voldebook make some students have some trepidation about risking their own personal access to it--it is a vital part of their communication, so the loss of it is quite scary.
#2 A small number of students are forbidden by parents from using Voldebook. They also are not permitted to have their own email addresses. The parents are attempting to remain in control of their child's access to social media and electronic communications, usually out of fear of predators and pornographic influences present in the inter-webs.
Benefits for the teacher include:
#1 A very creative project in terms of outcomes, with no material costs to me or my department. (No paper, glue, scissors, markers, etc. needed.)
#2 Products which are impossible to contain in a folder are highly portable and easily assessable.
#3 Students are motivated, excited and enthusiastic to learn about long dead men.
#4 Students learn geography, history, political science, religion, and economics in a hands-on manner, and express that understanding in a manner that is comfortable and accessible to them.
#5 The interconnected-ness of the world is demonstrated in a way that helps students understand that the contemporary notion of globalization is not a new one.
The apps used for this were My Pad and the social media sites' own app, neither of which was satisfactory for the students. Many ended up logging in to the page through the iPad's various browser options, as that enabled the website's greater functionality.
There are alternatives to Voldebook, like Fakebookapp and Myfakewall, but those don't allow for interactivity, just the creation of a mock page. Twiducate and edmodo have some shared functionality with Voldebook, but again fall short and aren't great with the iPad. I'm hopeful to find a viable alternative, but as yet, one eludes me.
iPad-based Social Media in the classroom, Part One
I've been using social media in the classroom for the last two years, so here's an example of how I make use of Twitter. For the iPad, the Twitter app is fine, but I wish it did more. I supplement that app with HootSuite and with TweetDeck.
Last week, we were discussing the Incan society, and I was surprised at how little my students knew about both Aztec and Incan empires. So we set out to learn more than what the textbook had to offer, which was neither very much, nor very deep. As an in-class assignment, I had the students use Twitter to develop a comparison between the roads built by the Incans, the Romans and the Persians. I established the hashtag #incaroads and wrote it on the board. (This is not any more complicated than saying to the students, "In every tweet, you must include this: #incaroads." Thus is a hashtag born...)
I should say at this point that my students had all created Twitter accounts earlier in the year, so I didn't have to spend time doing that. I do have a handful of students who maintain that they are "philosophically opposed to Twitter" for reasons they can't articulate. (All are inveterate Facebookers, so perhaps there is something there that interposes itself? brand loyalty?)
Students were then divided into groups covering one of three categories: Distance, Composition, and Purpose. Their task was to do some quick research to discover where the roads went and how far; how the roads were made and of what; and how the roads were used and by whom. They then were asked to tweet their answers, including web addresses for information (shortened using Bit.ly or tinyURL if needed) and images to help explain/show their topic. All included the #incaroads so they could be compiled.
They then made use of their Twitter apps (which got poor reviews) or either HootSuite or TweetDeck to view all the tweets in one place using #incaroads, and looked over each others' research. (I also projected the hashtag's feed for everyone to see--students were excited to see themselves "published.") Finally, they sent out a new tweet declaring which society made the better road using a new hashtag: #roadsmackdown. Though it wasn't required, some re-tweeted and responded to their peers in other sections, broadening the audience and providing feedback to each other about their arguments.
This was accomplished in a 45 minute period. (For the research, students made use of apps such as the Google search app, wikipanion, lightspeed browser and g-whizz to reach search engines.)
Benefits for the students:
#1 They got much more information than the textbook provided about a major aspect of Incan society.
#2 They realized that transportation was vital for an empire's growth and success.
#3 They learned that the Incas lived their lives both vertically and horizontally in the Andes.
#4 They compared three different societies use of technology and came to conclusions on their own about which was more advanced in the conception, formulation and application of transportation networks.
#5 They had fun being witty and pithy.
#6 They worked collaboratively to find the information, but independently to articulate it, and collaboratively to provide feedback on all aspects of their work.
#7 They practiced using a growing form of public expression responsibly.
Drawback for the students:
#1 Students who didn't use Twitter posted their findings to their blogs, but weren't a part of the "crowd" and felt left out. 3 of the 5 who initially didn't want to have a Twitter account signed up mid-way through the project to avoid this feeling.
#2 Some students felt confined and frustrated by the 140 character limitation of tweeting.
#3 There was some repetition of content in all three areas that made the hashtags cluttered.
#4 Some students forgot to use the hashtags and had to go back and re-Tweet, and a few students' Twitter feeds are private so they needed to take screenshots of their tweets and email them to me to post via my account.
Benefits for the teacher:
#1 I have a nearly instant ability to see who is getting it and who is not.
#2 Ditto for quality of research being done.
#3 All the student's responses were in one place, where they are easily viewed, discussed and assessed (Though this assignment was un-graded mostly because it was done in-class, which for me is rarely graded, and also because it is still a new way of doing things and I'd rather them get accustomed to it first.) But should I want to assess their work, it is very easy to do so.
#4 Pedagogically, there is the added bonus of a summarizer in place for all stages of the activity
#5 I now have a handy, student-created and vetted digital reference to use with future classes when discussing the Incas.
#6 No paper was used.
Last week, we were discussing the Incan society, and I was surprised at how little my students knew about both Aztec and Incan empires. So we set out to learn more than what the textbook had to offer, which was neither very much, nor very deep. As an in-class assignment, I had the students use Twitter to develop a comparison between the roads built by the Incans, the Romans and the Persians. I established the hashtag #incaroads and wrote it on the board. (This is not any more complicated than saying to the students, "In every tweet, you must include this: #incaroads." Thus is a hashtag born...)
I should say at this point that my students had all created Twitter accounts earlier in the year, so I didn't have to spend time doing that. I do have a handful of students who maintain that they are "philosophically opposed to Twitter" for reasons they can't articulate. (All are inveterate Facebookers, so perhaps there is something there that interposes itself? brand loyalty?)
Students were then divided into groups covering one of three categories: Distance, Composition, and Purpose. Their task was to do some quick research to discover where the roads went and how far; how the roads were made and of what; and how the roads were used and by whom. They then were asked to tweet their answers, including web addresses for information (shortened using Bit.ly or tinyURL if needed) and images to help explain/show their topic. All included the #incaroads so they could be compiled.
They then made use of their Twitter apps (which got poor reviews) or either HootSuite or TweetDeck to view all the tweets in one place using #incaroads, and looked over each others' research. (I also projected the hashtag's feed for everyone to see--students were excited to see themselves "published.") Finally, they sent out a new tweet declaring which society made the better road using a new hashtag: #roadsmackdown. Though it wasn't required, some re-tweeted and responded to their peers in other sections, broadening the audience and providing feedback to each other about their arguments.
This was accomplished in a 45 minute period. (For the research, students made use of apps such as the Google search app, wikipanion, lightspeed browser and g-whizz to reach search engines.)
Benefits for the students:
#1 They got much more information than the textbook provided about a major aspect of Incan society.
#2 They realized that transportation was vital for an empire's growth and success.
#3 They learned that the Incas lived their lives both vertically and horizontally in the Andes.
#4 They compared three different societies use of technology and came to conclusions on their own about which was more advanced in the conception, formulation and application of transportation networks.
#5 They had fun being witty and pithy.
#6 They worked collaboratively to find the information, but independently to articulate it, and collaboratively to provide feedback on all aspects of their work.
#7 They practiced using a growing form of public expression responsibly.
Drawback for the students:
#1 Students who didn't use Twitter posted their findings to their blogs, but weren't a part of the "crowd" and felt left out. 3 of the 5 who initially didn't want to have a Twitter account signed up mid-way through the project to avoid this feeling.
#2 Some students felt confined and frustrated by the 140 character limitation of tweeting.
#3 There was some repetition of content in all three areas that made the hashtags cluttered.
#4 Some students forgot to use the hashtags and had to go back and re-Tweet, and a few students' Twitter feeds are private so they needed to take screenshots of their tweets and email them to me to post via my account.
Benefits for the teacher:
#1 I have a nearly instant ability to see who is getting it and who is not.
#2 Ditto for quality of research being done.
#3 All the student's responses were in one place, where they are easily viewed, discussed and assessed (Though this assignment was un-graded mostly because it was done in-class, which for me is rarely graded, and also because it is still a new way of doing things and I'd rather them get accustomed to it first.) But should I want to assess their work, it is very easy to do so.
#4 Pedagogically, there is the added bonus of a summarizer in place for all stages of the activity
#5 I now have a handy, student-created and vetted digital reference to use with future classes when discussing the Incas.
#6 No paper was used.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
A practial iPad perspective
Looking over the blogosphere, peering into the depths of Twitter, and even watching the national media, there is a growing debate about the role of iPads in classrooms, with some siding with Apple's new push to digitize textbooks, and others decrying the presence of a corporate entity monopolizing the field of education and charging outrageous amounts of money for their product. On that debate, all I will say is that this isn't new! The corporate entities are named Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Macmillan/McGraw Hill. I know products of corporate boogeymen, I work with products of corporate boogeymen, and Apple is just another corporate boogeyman...
In any event, what's missing from what I've seen thus are samples of how iPads can be used in a classroom and tangible, educational evidence of their costs and benefits. What, if anything, is their value-added to the classroom? Here's a sample from yesterday's World History class:
We needed to cover African geography from 900-1500CE or so. Students needed to learn where the Kingdom of Ghana and the Empires of Mali and Songhay were; how trade routes, both maritime and Trans-Saharan worked; how the Swahili coast was organized; and how they interconnected and why each was significant. In the past, this involved a paper map, colored pencils, textbook maps/atlases and several paragraphs of their handwriting on sheets of paper that I then needed to collect, take home, read, assess and hand back. The total time for this process was at least one class period (two if they were doing a freehand sketch of the continent) for the students to complete the map, another class period to write out everything, and then two-three nights of steady reading and commenting on my part before the work would be handed back as a two or more sheets of paper packet. So a full 4-5 days would pass before closure of the assignment was attained. This year, I used the iPad.
With the iPad, students snapped a photo of a blank map of Africa I posted on the whiteboard. (I could also scan it and share it as a .pdf if the camera images weren't good enough quality to use. But they were.) They then imported the photo into ShowMe, Educreations or VoiceThread apps, which allowed them to draw (using fingers or styli) the items onto the map that they were to locate. (Most used the map in the textbook as their source, but it was mis-labled, and they ultimately had to look up the information to make corrections.) In all three apps, students are able to draw over time; that is, they can put in the items in a sequence and then animate the final product so that items appear one at a time, overlaying as necessary. All three apps also allow students to record their voices and overlay that onto the map. So as they drew, or after they drew, students recorded their own voices explaining the items, what they were, how they interconnected and why they were important to this period of time.
Students then saved their maps, generated links, uploaded them to their blogs or emailed themselves and me a link. This process, in all three classes with 20 students at a time using the wireless network simultaneously, was completed in 30 minutes, leaving 15 minutes of class time.
So:
Benefit to the teacher #1: I have reclaimed a full class day plus for other content.
Benefit to the teacher #2: I do not have a stack of papers to transport to and from my home.
Benefit to the teacher #3: I can assess their projects digitally on their blogs or via email--I don't have to worry about them reading my handwriting (or not); I can correct any mistakes I make cleanly without cross-outs; I don't have to read, I can just listen; and I don't have to puzzle through their handwriting.
Benefit to the teacher #4: I don't have to spend time out of my day at the photocopier, copying stacks of maps to distribute, but can use the time more productively. (No paper jams, running out of toner, etc. and no loss of my prep period on such a mundane task.)
Cost to the teacher: None I can think of.
Benefit to students #1: their projects can not be lost, misplaced, ripped or damaged.
Benefit to students #2: rather than get frustrated by markers running out, inadvertent marks being made, or mistakes occurring that would require a total re-start of the activity, they can erase as they go along, replace colors, and edit their work without pulling the old, "I need a new map." which sends me back to the copy machine and wastes their time.
Benefit to students #3: They are forced to put their information into the spoken word and record it, which required them to pre-think the significance and connections and rehearse what they would say, which led to their doing the work at a higher level. Most students jotted notes first to be sure they covered what they wanted to cover.
Benefit to students #4: They all receive high quality, rapid feedback from me (and from their peers as well, all of whom have access to each others' blogs.)
Benefit to students #5: When they go to study for tests/quizzes, the maps are easily retrieved, the information is in their own voices and handwriting, and is better imprinted on their memories.
Cost to the students: Some of the above benefits are also possible through composing a map by hand, and indeed, several students during our de-brief maintained that they preferred doing map work and composing responses in their own handwriting. Valid, but,
To my way of thinking, this is true of every type of assessment and activity; there is no one-size-fits-all for learning. So pedagogically an argument can be made that sometimes I should do map work with the iPad, sometimes I shouldn't. Or, I should allow students to choose their medium of expression, and let them gravitate toward what works best. Fine.
But the benefits to me the teacher are unequivocal. I gain time, which is precious in the school year. I gain clarity in my feedback to them, which is precious to their development. I gain organization, both my own and the students, which is critical to my classroom functioning well. Lastly, I cut down on resources used, which is precious to the school budget, and thus frees up scarce dollars from the money pit of photocopying.
The iPad is only a tool for learning. It doesn't replace me or my expertise. It just allows me to do more, better, in less time, at less cost.
In any event, what's missing from what I've seen thus are samples of how iPads can be used in a classroom and tangible, educational evidence of their costs and benefits. What, if anything, is their value-added to the classroom? Here's a sample from yesterday's World History class:
We needed to cover African geography from 900-1500CE or so. Students needed to learn where the Kingdom of Ghana and the Empires of Mali and Songhay were; how trade routes, both maritime and Trans-Saharan worked; how the Swahili coast was organized; and how they interconnected and why each was significant. In the past, this involved a paper map, colored pencils, textbook maps/atlases and several paragraphs of their handwriting on sheets of paper that I then needed to collect, take home, read, assess and hand back. The total time for this process was at least one class period (two if they were doing a freehand sketch of the continent) for the students to complete the map, another class period to write out everything, and then two-three nights of steady reading and commenting on my part before the work would be handed back as a two or more sheets of paper packet. So a full 4-5 days would pass before closure of the assignment was attained. This year, I used the iPad.
With the iPad, students snapped a photo of a blank map of Africa I posted on the whiteboard. (I could also scan it and share it as a .pdf if the camera images weren't good enough quality to use. But they were.) They then imported the photo into ShowMe, Educreations or VoiceThread apps, which allowed them to draw (using fingers or styli) the items onto the map that they were to locate. (Most used the map in the textbook as their source, but it was mis-labled, and they ultimately had to look up the information to make corrections.) In all three apps, students are able to draw over time; that is, they can put in the items in a sequence and then animate the final product so that items appear one at a time, overlaying as necessary. All three apps also allow students to record their voices and overlay that onto the map. So as they drew, or after they drew, students recorded their own voices explaining the items, what they were, how they interconnected and why they were important to this period of time.
Students then saved their maps, generated links, uploaded them to their blogs or emailed themselves and me a link. This process, in all three classes with 20 students at a time using the wireless network simultaneously, was completed in 30 minutes, leaving 15 minutes of class time.
So:
Benefit to the teacher #1: I have reclaimed a full class day plus for other content.
Benefit to the teacher #2: I do not have a stack of papers to transport to and from my home.
Benefit to the teacher #3: I can assess their projects digitally on their blogs or via email--I don't have to worry about them reading my handwriting (or not); I can correct any mistakes I make cleanly without cross-outs; I don't have to read, I can just listen; and I don't have to puzzle through their handwriting.
Benefit to the teacher #4: I don't have to spend time out of my day at the photocopier, copying stacks of maps to distribute, but can use the time more productively. (No paper jams, running out of toner, etc. and no loss of my prep period on such a mundane task.)
Cost to the teacher: None I can think of.
Benefit to students #1: their projects can not be lost, misplaced, ripped or damaged.
Benefit to students #2: rather than get frustrated by markers running out, inadvertent marks being made, or mistakes occurring that would require a total re-start of the activity, they can erase as they go along, replace colors, and edit their work without pulling the old, "I need a new map." which sends me back to the copy machine and wastes their time.
Benefit to students #3: They are forced to put their information into the spoken word and record it, which required them to pre-think the significance and connections and rehearse what they would say, which led to their doing the work at a higher level. Most students jotted notes first to be sure they covered what they wanted to cover.
Benefit to students #4: They all receive high quality, rapid feedback from me (and from their peers as well, all of whom have access to each others' blogs.)
Benefit to students #5: When they go to study for tests/quizzes, the maps are easily retrieved, the information is in their own voices and handwriting, and is better imprinted on their memories.
Cost to the students: Some of the above benefits are also possible through composing a map by hand, and indeed, several students during our de-brief maintained that they preferred doing map work and composing responses in their own handwriting. Valid, but,
To my way of thinking, this is true of every type of assessment and activity; there is no one-size-fits-all for learning. So pedagogically an argument can be made that sometimes I should do map work with the iPad, sometimes I shouldn't. Or, I should allow students to choose their medium of expression, and let them gravitate toward what works best. Fine.
But the benefits to me the teacher are unequivocal. I gain time, which is precious in the school year. I gain clarity in my feedback to them, which is precious to their development. I gain organization, both my own and the students, which is critical to my classroom functioning well. Lastly, I cut down on resources used, which is precious to the school budget, and thus frees up scarce dollars from the money pit of photocopying.
The iPad is only a tool for learning. It doesn't replace me or my expertise. It just allows me to do more, better, in less time, at less cost.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Mid-term Exams: time to leave them behind
It's that time of year again already. The school year is just about half way over and the semester is drawing to a close. That means mid-term examinations are on the way. Some recent comments from my colleagues have me thinking about them a bit more than usual, and, as a result, I have some questions about the whole mid-term concept.
Why do we have mid-term exams? Because that's what we do half-way through the year. Not a satisfying answer, is it? The idea of inertia is the worst possible reason for doing anything, in school and in life. This isn't overtly true in my department, but, if I'm being honest, it is an underlying reason, because doing something new means doing work, and change is hard for many teachers to embrace...So that aside, what are some of the other reasons given for having mid-term exams?
Because we need to see what the students have learned so far. Ah, ok, that I can work with. We are giving these tests to check up on the learning that has gone on in the classroom thus far. Exams are there to see what the students know. And when they don't know the material, do we go back and re-teach it? Cycle around to ensure that the content is embedded in the memory banks and skills are fully mastered? I'll go out on a limb and say no. I'd also go further out on a limb and say that most teachers don't take any data from the exam at all, because I need the exams to be easy to grade, says a colleague. (Do you hear sawing? This limb is vibrating...) Hence, multiple choice has ruled the day in my, and most, departments. And even though this style of test lends itself to statistical analysis, we don't take the time to go back over the results to see what, if any, patterns exist in the student's knowledge. Thus rendering the exams useless as a re-teaching tool. And such exams only check content knowledge, not skill mastery, so they only take care of half of the teaching puzzle.
To be fair, there is no time built into the exam time-frame for teachers to make a thoughtful analysis of whatever data they've accumulated, reflect upon it, and then make necessary adjustments. We have two exams a day for four days, with a make up period for students who missed it. Exams then have to be graded and overall marks calculated and commented on simultaneously with returning to the classroom and continuing on with instruction. We are changing this daily schedule somewhat this year, which should facilitate faster grading in some ways, but the nearly instant return to instruction combined with a seemingly endless list of standards to cover means that re-teaching is at best a momentary activity, and at worst, not even thought about. So, the exams don't serve the purpose of uncovering what students have missed thus far very well.
Because we need to give them the experience of taking a cumulative exam so they get prepared for college. You mean we need to do this in every class, for every student, two times a year for four years? In my school, that means a graduating senior would have taken over 50 summative examinations during his or her high school career, all to make ready for that first final exam in college? Seems like overkill. Though to hear it from my former students who are now home from college: "Those exams were the hardest I've ever taken," says one. "Nothing in high school prepared me for that," says another. So something isn't connecting. I'm going to say it is format, for no returning student has ever said their collegiate exams in the social sciences included multiple choice. My undergraduate experience didn't include those either. Exams were essay and short answer based, and hit on higher order thinking skills, not regurgitation of material. (The root of my beef with the College Board's curriculum--spend the whole year prepping for an exam the likes of which doesn't exist at the level the course purports to recreate.) As a result, I don't think we are actually preparing students to articulate their understanding of material in ways that resonate with the collegiate level. In 50+ tries. Over 4 years. So mid-term exams don't serve that purpose well either.
Because assessment of student performance will be part of teacher evaluation, says the deal cut by my state in order to get Race to the Top money. So the exams are for the teachers, and the determination of the quality of their performance. Which means that we need to design exams (mid-term and finals) that contain common standards of teaching excellence, that can be measured, quantified, and compiled, so they can be useful in conversations with teachers about their practice, and that can promote conversations between teachers and supervisors about how they need to improve. And they must be based around the content and skills of the course curriculum that is taught. Uh huh.
Leaving aside questions of who will design such assessments (ah, ah, ah, bureaucrats! Sorry, had to sneeze...) the need for quantifiable data points will not relieve the pressures of assessing students through multiple choice-style exams. So we run the risk of being stuck with a practice and a format that doesn't lend itself either to re-teaching or to collegiate preparation, while turning teacher evaluation into a statistical exercise.
If we must give mid-term examinations, it is time to abandon the old way of doing them. I believe we need to articulate the standards of course content, grade-level skill, and teaching practice, then have students submit work in a portfolio comprised of both work done earlier in the term and in a timed writing (or other activity that doesn't involve scantron) at the end of the term. We can use the technology we have not only to have students store their material digitally, but also to design a systematized way of reviewing the material. Instead of a multiple choice exam, let's have the students discuss their work thus far with the all the teachers of the subject in the department, who then ask questions designed to delve into the students' knowledge of the content and to reveal their mastery of skills. (This doesn't have to be face-to-face (though it could be through a dissertation style defense format); again, technology can make this easier, either through video recordings, emailed responses, or google form completion to name a few methods) Regardless, the content mastery needs to become secondary to the mastery of the skills.
Then, based on the student's responses, the timed writing and the portfolio, the teachers can know what skills to cycle back to in the second half of the course, and what content to reiterate. The portfolios and the rest can then serve as the primary discussion points for the discussions of teacher performance, and actual student work, not percentages and statistical analysis can stand as testimony to the teacher's success or struggles in the classroom. Yes, time will be needed for this to happen, but it would be worthwhile time spent if it actually helped to prepare students for the collegiate environment (if that is in fact the goal of high school...), and reveal what is working and what is not working within each teacher's classrooms. And mid-terms would stop being meaningless examinations and become meaningful assessments...
Why do we have mid-term exams? Because that's what we do half-way through the year. Not a satisfying answer, is it? The idea of inertia is the worst possible reason for doing anything, in school and in life. This isn't overtly true in my department, but, if I'm being honest, it is an underlying reason, because doing something new means doing work, and change is hard for many teachers to embrace...So that aside, what are some of the other reasons given for having mid-term exams?
Because we need to see what the students have learned so far. Ah, ok, that I can work with. We are giving these tests to check up on the learning that has gone on in the classroom thus far. Exams are there to see what the students know. And when they don't know the material, do we go back and re-teach it? Cycle around to ensure that the content is embedded in the memory banks and skills are fully mastered? I'll go out on a limb and say no. I'd also go further out on a limb and say that most teachers don't take any data from the exam at all, because I need the exams to be easy to grade, says a colleague. (Do you hear sawing? This limb is vibrating...) Hence, multiple choice has ruled the day in my, and most, departments. And even though this style of test lends itself to statistical analysis, we don't take the time to go back over the results to see what, if any, patterns exist in the student's knowledge. Thus rendering the exams useless as a re-teaching tool. And such exams only check content knowledge, not skill mastery, so they only take care of half of the teaching puzzle.
To be fair, there is no time built into the exam time-frame for teachers to make a thoughtful analysis of whatever data they've accumulated, reflect upon it, and then make necessary adjustments. We have two exams a day for four days, with a make up period for students who missed it. Exams then have to be graded and overall marks calculated and commented on simultaneously with returning to the classroom and continuing on with instruction. We are changing this daily schedule somewhat this year, which should facilitate faster grading in some ways, but the nearly instant return to instruction combined with a seemingly endless list of standards to cover means that re-teaching is at best a momentary activity, and at worst, not even thought about. So, the exams don't serve the purpose of uncovering what students have missed thus far very well.
Because we need to give them the experience of taking a cumulative exam so they get prepared for college. You mean we need to do this in every class, for every student, two times a year for four years? In my school, that means a graduating senior would have taken over 50 summative examinations during his or her high school career, all to make ready for that first final exam in college? Seems like overkill. Though to hear it from my former students who are now home from college: "Those exams were the hardest I've ever taken," says one. "Nothing in high school prepared me for that," says another. So something isn't connecting. I'm going to say it is format, for no returning student has ever said their collegiate exams in the social sciences included multiple choice. My undergraduate experience didn't include those either. Exams were essay and short answer based, and hit on higher order thinking skills, not regurgitation of material. (The root of my beef with the College Board's curriculum--spend the whole year prepping for an exam the likes of which doesn't exist at the level the course purports to recreate.) As a result, I don't think we are actually preparing students to articulate their understanding of material in ways that resonate with the collegiate level. In 50+ tries. Over 4 years. So mid-term exams don't serve that purpose well either.
Because assessment of student performance will be part of teacher evaluation, says the deal cut by my state in order to get Race to the Top money. So the exams are for the teachers, and the determination of the quality of their performance. Which means that we need to design exams (mid-term and finals) that contain common standards of teaching excellence, that can be measured, quantified, and compiled, so they can be useful in conversations with teachers about their practice, and that can promote conversations between teachers and supervisors about how they need to improve. And they must be based around the content and skills of the course curriculum that is taught. Uh huh.
Leaving aside questions of who will design such assessments (ah, ah, ah, bureaucrats! Sorry, had to sneeze...) the need for quantifiable data points will not relieve the pressures of assessing students through multiple choice-style exams. So we run the risk of being stuck with a practice and a format that doesn't lend itself either to re-teaching or to collegiate preparation, while turning teacher evaluation into a statistical exercise.
If we must give mid-term examinations, it is time to abandon the old way of doing them. I believe we need to articulate the standards of course content, grade-level skill, and teaching practice, then have students submit work in a portfolio comprised of both work done earlier in the term and in a timed writing (or other activity that doesn't involve scantron) at the end of the term. We can use the technology we have not only to have students store their material digitally, but also to design a systematized way of reviewing the material. Instead of a multiple choice exam, let's have the students discuss their work thus far with the all the teachers of the subject in the department, who then ask questions designed to delve into the students' knowledge of the content and to reveal their mastery of skills. (This doesn't have to be face-to-face (though it could be through a dissertation style defense format); again, technology can make this easier, either through video recordings, emailed responses, or google form completion to name a few methods) Regardless, the content mastery needs to become secondary to the mastery of the skills.
Then, based on the student's responses, the timed writing and the portfolio, the teachers can know what skills to cycle back to in the second half of the course, and what content to reiterate. The portfolios and the rest can then serve as the primary discussion points for the discussions of teacher performance, and actual student work, not percentages and statistical analysis can stand as testimony to the teacher's success or struggles in the classroom. Yes, time will be needed for this to happen, but it would be worthwhile time spent if it actually helped to prepare students for the collegiate environment (if that is in fact the goal of high school...), and reveal what is working and what is not working within each teacher's classrooms. And mid-terms would stop being meaningless examinations and become meaningful assessments...
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Thoughts about how students learn in the 21st century
This is probably not news, and likely others have articulated it, but I think there is a key difference in the way that digital natives (thank you Marc Prensky for the lable!) learn in a classroom from the way that I was expected to learn in the classroom, and with the addition of technology, this difference becomes more distinct.
When I was a student, teachers presented material in a sequence. First A, then B, then C. I was then asked to analyze why A came first, B second, and C third. That was the depth of thought I was expected to master; rarely was I asked to synthesize a D that might happen next, but that would be the logical next step in the maturation of a thinker: to get to a hypothetical outcome and rationalize its existential prospects. Learning was a sequential pattern of cause and effect paired with analytic and synthetic thought processes. But school was about the teacher controlling the sequence and the time. The teacher determined what was taught and when and in what order based on his or her logical understanding of the material. Textbooks are organized the same way. Regardless of the authors' intent to highlight thematic recurrance of historical events, or causality, textbooks fall back onto chronological progression. Within the theme of, say, social justice in America, textbooks will always talk about Nat Turner before John Brown before carpetbaggers and sharecroppers before Jim Crow, before Plessey before Brown before MLK. I've not seen one mix this order up, which is too bad...
The difficulty faced by teachers confronted with digital natives is that little in their life is sequential. The traditional classroom expectation is that students will be able to sit still and focus on one series of sequences delivered by the teacher in a class period. But they are wired to be what we older folks would call "distracted," but I'll call "tangential." They have the ability to follow a tangential thought, then cycle around to their original topic. So for instance, in my classroom of iPad equipped juniors, we can be discussing the role of the manor system in the early middle ages of European development. I actually do this through playing a game that simulates life on the manor and how it grows into a kingdom... In the course of that game, which allows for a sequential growth, students have free time while other teams take their turns. In those gaps, I've seen students go to Words With Friends, because the word "manor" might work. or "serf," or any of the other vocabulary words that come up in this game. They check Twitter, they look at facebook, and on either post their progress in the game, maybe talk a little trash, maybe ask some questions. Then they look at their English class blog to see how the readings from Beowolf might connect to life at that time. They then return to the conversation, make their moves, discuss their outcomes, explain their reasoning, then the game moves along. Playing the game and discussing the manor system causes them to make other connections to other parts of their life, "leaving" the classroom as they follow their tangents, and ideally bringing a deeper understanding of the material.
Now I'm not naive enough to actually think that this is going on for all my students all the time. Some are not fully engaged with the game, or the concept of the manor system, and drop in and out. Some are tweeting in ways that have no relevance at all to the material. Some are doing homework for another class. But I am naive enough to think that this all evens out in the end. Rather than think of this day in isolation, I think of the course as a whole. I tell them at the beginning of the year that there is something for everyone in this class (AP World History) but that doesn't happen everyday. So there will be days when I lose some students for a time, and days when I keep some students for a time, and I'm ok with that, because I know no successful adults who are perfectly engaged with every aspect of their lives every day.
But to return to my point, I'm having to shift my expectations for what is a "good" student. In my experience as a student, teachers yelled at students who were doodling, who were "disengaged", having side conversations (even if they were about the material); silence and attentiveness were golden, even if the minds behind the attentive eyes were blank. I have to acknowledge that students are capable of following a tangential thought and returning to the "main focus" of the class, and hopefully are gaining a more complete application of the material in the rest of their lives. So I adjust to understand that what they are doing isn't necessarily "off topic" behavior. It isn't that they are being rude, or disrespectful. They aren't necessarily bored or "distracted" in the traditional sense. They are seeking to make meaning of the material, connect it to the rest of their lives, and thus embed it.
So, I can adjust my teaching to incentivize this behavior. Offer extra points for using relevant vocabulary words in their online games, set up my tweet deck to register #manorgame tweets and credit students for doing this. I can follow their English teacher's blog or Twitter feed so I can pull in references to the novels they read and create an Edmodo or Facebook group to allow for a cross-discipline discussion that can't happen in the "real" world because of the limitations of our brick and mortar, 19th century schedule.
School for teachers is becoming Darwinian. Teachers have to adapt or die off. Adaptation is hard for me and requires a new way of thinking about the use of my 45 minutes when we are together as a group. But the choice is to do this and acknowledge the differences between the way I was trained to view school, or try to bend 25 individuals to my way, my older way, my linear way, my incompatible with the 21st century living way.
Seems like a no-brainer to me...
When I was a student, teachers presented material in a sequence. First A, then B, then C. I was then asked to analyze why A came first, B second, and C third. That was the depth of thought I was expected to master; rarely was I asked to synthesize a D that might happen next, but that would be the logical next step in the maturation of a thinker: to get to a hypothetical outcome and rationalize its existential prospects. Learning was a sequential pattern of cause and effect paired with analytic and synthetic thought processes. But school was about the teacher controlling the sequence and the time. The teacher determined what was taught and when and in what order based on his or her logical understanding of the material. Textbooks are organized the same way. Regardless of the authors' intent to highlight thematic recurrance of historical events, or causality, textbooks fall back onto chronological progression. Within the theme of, say, social justice in America, textbooks will always talk about Nat Turner before John Brown before carpetbaggers and sharecroppers before Jim Crow, before Plessey before Brown before MLK. I've not seen one mix this order up, which is too bad...
The difficulty faced by teachers confronted with digital natives is that little in their life is sequential. The traditional classroom expectation is that students will be able to sit still and focus on one series of sequences delivered by the teacher in a class period. But they are wired to be what we older folks would call "distracted," but I'll call "tangential." They have the ability to follow a tangential thought, then cycle around to their original topic. So for instance, in my classroom of iPad equipped juniors, we can be discussing the role of the manor system in the early middle ages of European development. I actually do this through playing a game that simulates life on the manor and how it grows into a kingdom... In the course of that game, which allows for a sequential growth, students have free time while other teams take their turns. In those gaps, I've seen students go to Words With Friends, because the word "manor" might work. or "serf," or any of the other vocabulary words that come up in this game. They check Twitter, they look at facebook, and on either post their progress in the game, maybe talk a little trash, maybe ask some questions. Then they look at their English class blog to see how the readings from Beowolf might connect to life at that time. They then return to the conversation, make their moves, discuss their outcomes, explain their reasoning, then the game moves along. Playing the game and discussing the manor system causes them to make other connections to other parts of their life, "leaving" the classroom as they follow their tangents, and ideally bringing a deeper understanding of the material.
Now I'm not naive enough to actually think that this is going on for all my students all the time. Some are not fully engaged with the game, or the concept of the manor system, and drop in and out. Some are tweeting in ways that have no relevance at all to the material. Some are doing homework for another class. But I am naive enough to think that this all evens out in the end. Rather than think of this day in isolation, I think of the course as a whole. I tell them at the beginning of the year that there is something for everyone in this class (AP World History) but that doesn't happen everyday. So there will be days when I lose some students for a time, and days when I keep some students for a time, and I'm ok with that, because I know no successful adults who are perfectly engaged with every aspect of their lives every day.
But to return to my point, I'm having to shift my expectations for what is a "good" student. In my experience as a student, teachers yelled at students who were doodling, who were "disengaged", having side conversations (even if they were about the material); silence and attentiveness were golden, even if the minds behind the attentive eyes were blank. I have to acknowledge that students are capable of following a tangential thought and returning to the "main focus" of the class, and hopefully are gaining a more complete application of the material in the rest of their lives. So I adjust to understand that what they are doing isn't necessarily "off topic" behavior. It isn't that they are being rude, or disrespectful. They aren't necessarily bored or "distracted" in the traditional sense. They are seeking to make meaning of the material, connect it to the rest of their lives, and thus embed it.
So, I can adjust my teaching to incentivize this behavior. Offer extra points for using relevant vocabulary words in their online games, set up my tweet deck to register #manorgame tweets and credit students for doing this. I can follow their English teacher's blog or Twitter feed so I can pull in references to the novels they read and create an Edmodo or Facebook group to allow for a cross-discipline discussion that can't happen in the "real" world because of the limitations of our brick and mortar, 19th century schedule.
School for teachers is becoming Darwinian. Teachers have to adapt or die off. Adaptation is hard for me and requires a new way of thinking about the use of my 45 minutes when we are together as a group. But the choice is to do this and acknowledge the differences between the way I was trained to view school, or try to bend 25 individuals to my way, my older way, my linear way, my incompatible with the 21st century living way.
Seems like a no-brainer to me...
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