Learning & the Brain – Brain Dump

A quick post to say that the Learning & the Brain conference (Web-Connected Minds) last weekend in Arlington VA was terrific. A whole lot to think about. And in order for me to process all the information, I’m going to start working through my notes and get some stuff out here over the next week.

First, I was happy to meet some new colleagues in the field. Conversations and emails swapped during individual sessions, new connections made through the Twitter (search hashtag #LB32 for the stream of tweets from the conference), and a face-to-face “tweet up” on Saturday night made the experience all the richer. A tangible benefit of the workshops, keynotes, and conversations is that my stack of books-to-read has grown tremendously. I started an open Google Doc to get all the recommendations down in one place, and I got plenty of input from presenters and other teachers at the conference. Please take a look, add your own suggestions, or comment on the ones that are there (or write in the Comments section below). I haven’t read all of these books, but I’ll try to work through some of them this summer. I’m going to start with Play by Stuart Brown, and Brain Rules by John Medina. I’m also interested to read Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It after her fascinating talk on Sunday morning.

Thanks to @fitzwits, @plugusin, @reyjunco, @tobyfischer, @kjongtech, @henesss, @bradfountain, @mSchlemko, @raviniareading, @jennifercottle, @snbeach, @CathyNDavidson, @tkraz, @AVIDbrian, @lottascales, @rfmoll, and @learningandtheb for book recs, thought provoking tweets, talks, and great ideas.

Also, Maureen Devlin (@lookforsun) writes the blog Teach Children Well and she put out a tweet this morning, looking for teacher summer reading suggestions. Feel free to chime in there as well.

So, what’s on your reading list?

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Assessing the Assessment

Cross-posted at How to Use 65 blog.

Last Wednesday’s divisional discussion of PG&E goals was useful to me in a number of ways. I appreciated the chance to bounce ideas off of the small group of teachers that gathered to discuss assessment and classroom practice. It was encouraging to hear how other teachers deal with the same question, and also to hear some of their goals for improving their teaching practice over the course of the year. One of my professional goals this year is related to assessing my assessments. Are the elements that I think are important for students to know about a particular curricular unit that I teach (like photosynthesis) reflected in the assessment that I give them at the end of the unit? What do I want them to take away from a process like photosynthesis? It’s a broad question, sure, but an important one to ask. I have tests from previous years on file, and they vary a bit in their format from year to year. Some contain more short answers; some are more open-ended. In other years I’ve assessed mastery of content through projects, oral reports, and student-made videos. But which one is the best? Do I just grab last year’s, or do I revise and rewrite, considering this year’s particular group of students? And am I committed to doing that each year?

One of the tests that I’m most proud of this year was quite different than ones I’d given in previous years. For a unit on cellular respiration, I asked the students to take a few days to write a study guide that would be useful to any other student taking a biology class that would be preparing for a test on cell respiration. We talked about what they should know: general principles of synthesis and decomposition reactions, various forms of energy “currency” in the cell, overall goals and outcomes of the process, etc. etc. It was fairly open-ended, and open-book. Put this guide together. Make it detailed and clear. Go. That was the test. I actually think that preparing that document would have put them in good shape for a more conventional test. So going through the extra step in this case wouldn’t have been terribly useful. They didn’t all get As, in case you were wondering. With access to class notes, text, and the internet, it’s still a difficult topic to explain, and they did that with varying degrees of success (and detail). It’s not something I do for every unit and every test, but I think it’s a really useful way to test their understanding of a topic from time to time.

Some questions for the group:

What do you want your students to demonstrate?

What constitutes a good assessment?

What constitutes a bad assessment?

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correllation and causation – family income and SAT scores

This could make you mad, cause you to shrug, or perhaps induce some other emotion somewhere in between. You might say, “well, sure, of course it does.” Hopefully it makes you think.

Dan Pink wrote a post yesterday on the correlation of parental income level and child SAT scores. His post triggered a wave of comments on his blog, of course, from many different viewpoints (from parents, educators, philosophers, admissions folks, etc.).

How to predict a student’s SAT score: Look at the parents’ tax return Dan Pink 2/21/12

Pink is not saying that income causes higher SAT scores, by the way. He points this out in his post, below the graph. But it begs the question (from an educational and policy perspective): What should be done about the situation? Why does the graph look the way it does? If it makes you mad, then what can we do for students that come from low income families, to make up for the inequality of resources that leads to the disparity in test scores? What can we do about the test itself? Many factors related to economics and education obviously have an effect on the student that’s walking in to take the SAT, and therefore have an effect on the resulting scores. When you compound the effect that income has on all other aspects of a students life (schools attended, education of the parents, academic support from tutors, etc.), it’s not surprising that the graph looks the way it does.

Pink also points out:

My hypothesis — again, a guess rather than an assertion — is that the households in the top tier often have two parents with graduate degrees. That is, they’re rich and they’re well-educated and that’s a hard combo to beat. If that turns out to be true, it suggests that one most influential, but not much remarked upon, social forces in America is assortative mating by education level.

Our jobs as teachers, in the broadest sense, is to take students from where they are, and to develop their skills, work with them to reach towards their academic and creative potential, to move them towards independence as learners, and in the process teach them some content that will be useful after they leave our classrooms. Does Pink’s post change this? Probably not. Perhaps it gets you to think about the students that you teach, and how you reach them, regardless of background and parental income level.

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Final Project for WebTools

Overview: In the coming year our school is changing the structure of its master schedule; we are moving to a schedule that will include different length periods spread across a seven-day rotation. Every cycle will contain one 65 minute period (20 minutes longer than what we have now). For my final project, I’m planning to rework the way I use my seventh grade class blog and my ninth grade class blog. I have also started a paper.li electronic newspaper called The Landing that I’m going to use to coordinate current event activities in all of my classes.

1. I started my seventh grade class blog last fall with the idea that it could be a place to share information with my students, beyond the daily details of homework and due dates, etc. (that they get regularly through the school website). To say that I used the blog sporadically would be generous (5 posts over the whole year, which sounds a bit pathetic, I know, especially after taking this class!). It would be totally fair to say that I didn’t use it as an interactive blog at all, except for the last post regarding final exam review, which started to approach an actual conversation/discussion. I’m happy about the potential of using it in new ways this year.

2. My goal for blogging with my ninth graders this year is to find more ways to facilitate online discussion/dialogue. My students will create their own blogs in the first few weeks of class, and my plan is for them to experiment with different web tools over the course of the year in order to share information, teach each other, and connect with other biology students (not unlike this class). (As far as tools go, Google Docs, screencasts, Flipbook, VoiceThread, and Slideshare come to mind, but I’m sure there will be others.) I did not require my students to comment on each others’ blogs last year because I was wary of trying to evaluate those comments, but I’m going to jump into that pool this year. Please let me know if you have a biology class that will also be blogging this year, and we’ll find a way to get our students to share.

3. Inspired by several teachers that have started to rework the discussion/coverage of current events in their classes (Marsha Ratzel, Will McDonough, and others), I set out to incorporate a number of Twitter and RSS blog feeds into a classroom daily paper, using paper.li. (See @brunsell’s article on the topic from Edutopia here.) The online newspaper that I’ve created is called The Landing (which refers the common space outside of our science labs, and I think it also suggests a nice place for meeting/sharing ideas). I began by starting a Twitter list so that I can manage the feeds/stories that students will be most interested in and will pertain to what we’re covering throughout the year. It’s a work in progress, as it’s only a few days old. I’ll continue to update this list as I find new sources, which will then get pulled into the daily feed. I have a general idea of how I’d like to use the feed, but since it’s brand new to me, I’m going to see how it goes and I’ll probably blog about it in the fall (which suddenly doesn’t feel so far away). *I should note that I’ve intentionally included sources/topics that apply to biology (9) and environmental science (7) so that I could use the same electronic paper for both of my classes. Some of the biology content won’t be relevent to my seventh graders, and vice-versa, and that’s okay with me.

Overall, I’m looking to provide some continuity throughout each 7 day cycle, tap into students’ creativity, and to take advantage of the extra time that we’ll have periodically (rather than doing the same thing we’ve been doing for an additional 20 minutes — as much as I like to talk, nobody wants to hear me talk for another 20…). By incorporating new web tools; giving students options in how they present material; and having them interact, collaborate, and share information online (using new tech in new ways); I think we will be able to teach more effectively and reach more students. I think what we’re really doing when we teach this way is just diversifying how we communicate with students, and how they communicate back to us (and to their peers). I’m confident that good things will happen.

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Reflection on Online Discussion

I’m pretty happy with the variety of discussion formats that we’ve used for this class: (“conversations” through the comment sections of our blogs; the teachingscience2.0 wiki, and D2L), and I’m happy that we finished out the course with the threaded conversations on D2L. They were a nice change of pace/format, and actually seemed like they were more of a conversation, if that makes any sense. Maybe because there was more back-and-forth than on blog comments, where I felt like I was chiming in every once in a while, but not actually writing to the author (even though I was).

I see three themes that came through loud and clear (and many of my classmates have commented on these already):

1. The increased confidence that comes from getting to know a few tools/skills, having had the chance to test drive them for a while. And even though this course was carried out “in public” (out there in the blogosphere for everyone to read my assignments!) it still felt pretty safe. We were collectively willing to admit that some tools were frustrating, or that we had problems loading, embedding, getting audio levels and image resolutions right. But I’m sure that each of us found websites, software, and new tech tools that we will definitely use (to good effect) in the coming year. We’ll also try some things that won’t work out as planned, and that’s okay too.

2. Students will have similar range of reactions to the new technology, and they’ll need some time to practice and get comfortable with new tools as well. I’m not entirely convinced that all kids take to technology as quickly as we (as teachers/adults) think they do. I’m skeptical of lumping all students in any category (especially one as broad as general as “digital natives“) just because they’ve been around computers since they were born. They’ve been around food since they’ve been born, and some are still picky eaters.

3. The chance to connect with new teachers and expand our personal learning networks has been invaluable, and will continue to be a useful resource. We come from all kinds of schools, we teach different age levels, and we teach various subjects (within the broad heading of science). But we are all interested in making science education better, and we have found new colleagues with whom to share information. I’m happy to have made some new connections, and I look forward to hearing about your classes through the coming year.

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More on Blogs in the Classroom

I tweeted this a few days ago, but thought I’d repost here since it relates to so many of our final WebTools projects and could be pretty useful. This a great article with a wealth of information on blogging (in and out of the classroom). “Wealth of information” doesn’t even do it justice (I think I counted 38 links to different sites with information for teachers, students, and anyone else that blogs).

The Best Sources Of Advice For Teachers (And Others!) On How To Be Better Bloggers by Larry Ferlazzo. Read it, consider following Larry on Twitter.

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update 7/18/11 Broken link fixed.

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Blogs and Wikis – a reflection

In reading Week 5′s assignments and looking ahead to our final projects (while considering this post on using blogs and wikis in the classroom), I was struck by the following line (which I put in bold below):

“Looking Forward  Week 6 will focus on adding detail to your final project idea and exploring additional tools.  You may also want to start thinking about your final reflection.  The final reflection (due week 7) is open ended.  Please be creative and think about how you can use web tools to share your “story” of this class!”

There are lots of ways that we’ll all share the story of the class — we might bring the story back to our department, division, or district at home come September, and we might even choose to present it in some new way that we learned during the class, which would be fitting. But one thing that we all have in common, that we’ve been building since Day 1, is this digital document that already tells the story of the class. There’s a reason that Eric asked us to create a blog in the first week. I can’t help but think that the positive aspects of blogging this course could be useful for any student in any course. At the end of a term, do you ever ask your students to tell the story of the term (in some way)? If they had a digital portfolio (searchable by tags, dated and time-stamped, with examples of useful video and hyperlinks) of their work; what they had learned, presented, and discussed, telling that story (or at least reviewing for it) would be much easier. I think this is the biggest selling point of using blogs in class.

Was blogging useful to you in sorting your thoughts, thinking through a topic out loud, and trying to come up with an intelligent way of saying it? Did you learn anything from any of your classmates by reading their blogs and by following comments? Did any comments on your own blog cause you to look at something in a different way? I wish I had more time to read your blogs, because I got a little buried there in the information stream. The nice thing, though, is that they’re still there. I can check the archives, and I will. So that’s how I feel about the whole blogging thing. I’m going to try to get my seventh graders involved at some level. It might be a class blog, or they might start individual blogs. I haven’t decided yet. I’m going to continue having my 9th graders blog in biology, and I need to work at requiring them to interact/comment on each other’s work. I think they can learn a lot from each other.

I’m realizing midway through writing his post that wikis also happen to be pretty useful (for this class and others), especially when it comes to posting information/assignments/readings/schedules. The WebTools wiki was interactive in some ways (questions in the comment section asked and answered), but I think it was more of a static resource (not in a bad way). In class, I see students using (building) a wiki as a collaborative tool or project. They might have different responsibilities or roles in the project, and each would contribute to the whole. I see their writing blogs as more reflective and individual (and more journal-like). Both can be effective as part of a successful class, but they result in different end products. A few folks have mentioned setting up wikis before school starts, and there are good reasons to do that. Class resources or rules, reliable sources for research, guidelines regarding submission of assignments, outline of curricula; it would be nice to have those set up for students and parents to see before they arrive in the fall. But the rest of the wiki, that’s for the kids to fill in, to work on and to build. It’s a lot like the bulletin boards inside your classroom (and perhaps the one in the hall). Do you fill it up before the kids are there, or do you wait until they’ve done something to show?

   

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Expanding your PLN

Cross-posted at HowToUse65.

So, with the interest of collaborating and sharing ideas with other educators, many teachers have begun to “build” their own Personal Learning Network (PLN). “Grow” a PLN might be a better way to put it, since a PLN expands organically (in some ways), and it requires tending, occasional pruning, and general upkeep not unlike a plant or garden. It’s also made of living people. Making connections with other professionals in one’s field is not a new idea. Professors and scholars of all kinds have been traveling to other cities, monasteries, and universities for centuries with the intent of sharing information and learning from others. This happens today, although The Professional Conference now plays a significant role in many fields, as do the organizations that sponsor those conferences (NSTA, NABT, NCTM, NAIS, etc).

Everybody has a PLN, by the way. Your PLN includes the people in your department, colleagues present and past; they could be down the hall or a phone call or email away; it might include classmates from your college or university, folks you’ve met at conferences, on trips, through old fashioned social networking (family connections and cocktails), or sometimes they are simply friends of friends. Who do you turn to when you have a question about content, about teaching, assessment, learning styles, use of time, lab procedure? Who do you bounce ideas off of? Those people are part of your PLN (whether you’ve called it that or not). I can’t help but think of the old Sesame Street song — and I apologize in advance, a little, for getting this stuck in your head — “Who are the people in your neighborhood?“

What’s different now is how people are making connections outside of those conferences, using the Web to share best practices, pedagogy, breakthroughs, field work, etc. (a web-based PLN). Blogs can also be a terrific forum for conversations, ones that allow for reflection, thoughtful comment, and discussion.

There are many ways that the Web can help to connect people:

Teaching networks like Classroom 2.0 are designed with connecting teachers of all disciplines. The Synapse is a similar network specifically for teachers of biology, and I’m looking forward to making new connections and participating there.

Twitter is a remarkable resource that’s used by many different people in many different ways. Thousands of educators have latched onto this tool as a way of sharing information and making connections. I joined Twitter during a workshop at November Learning‘s Building Learning Communities conference back in 2008, and it’s been key in growing my PLN. The website Twitter4Teachers is one of many that make it easy to find colleagues by discipline in other schools, districts, states, and countries. It can also be used in the classroom.

I use Delicious primarily as a way to keep track of web links from interesting articles I find online. If I don’t have time to read it all, or if I know I’ll want to have access to it later, I’ll add it to my bookmarks. I’m curious to find out how other people use Delicious.

This is just a start. Which tools you’ve found most helpful in connecting with other educators?

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