Authentic Lessons and Assessments (ISTE Standard 2)

My question for this module: How can I incorporate more technology into my assessments, particularly to help students access the skills in ISTE-S 1, using technology to get feedback?

When I wrote this question, I will admit that I was envisioning, perhaps incorrectly, mainly looking into summative assessments. I did find some resources to tackle this, but mostly addressing writing skills or projects, rather than the standard paper-and-pencil unit tests I use now at the end of units. A New York Times article called "Blogs vs. Term Papers" (Richtel, 2012)recommends that students write blog posts or other publicly shared pieces of writing to further student engagement. The NMC Horizon Report (Johnson et al., 2012) supports this idea, stating that "as [more and more] learners are exploring subject matter through the act of creation rather than the consumption of content," (p. 14) assessments and teachers need to make a corresponding shift. I continue to struggle with the idea that students must share their work on a global scale for the work to feel meaningful, but I can see that even giving students more access to peer review can create more buy-in with the assignments. This year I used Turnitin.com's digital peer review tools to create a guided peer revision assignment. The students had more opportunities to look at other classmate's essays, and they could spend time outside of class reflecting, rather than the rushed ten or twelve minutes in class. Having an audience helps students take more ownership of their work.

Most of the resources found by myself and my classmates to address ISTE 2 refer to formative assessments. I really enjoyed reading an article found by Michaela Clark called "Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment" (Beatty & Gerace, 2009). This article details the creation of a framework for the incorporation of technology in classes, similar to TPACK, but specifically for formative assessment. My understanding of the importance of formative assessment was reinforced, as "an assessment-centered learning environment weaves formative assessment deeply into the fabric of instruction, providing continual, detailed feedback to guide students' learning and instructors' teaching" (Beatty & Gerace, 2009, p.152 ). This is especially important to me as an IB teacher. The students are responsible for a lot of reading and content knowledge and I need to know what they understand and what needs re-teaching. I need to incorporate a lot more formative assessment into my classroom, and I could make better use of the resources available to me as a teacher at a one-to-one laptop school. Some interesting sites I found are: Socrative.com, SALG for teacher feedback (but which is mostly for the college level), and Virtual Training Suite tutorials for learning about website validity.

Overall, I came away from this investigation with a lot of questions. Formative assessment is great, but I think I really need to start shifting a lot of my units to more inquiry-based, even in the 9th grade, to be able to better build authentic learning experiences. My students struggle with understanding the relevance of history, and inquiry helps with this immensely. Also, it helps build student confidence and bolster the student-teacher relationship. "From Corn Chips to Garbology: The Dynamics of Historical Inquiry" emphasizes that "in order to facilitate powerful and authentic student inquiry, the teacher must be a learner too" (Kalmon et al. 2012, p. 14). The global, interactive nature of Web 2.0 removes the teacher-as-expert model. As stated in ISTE 2, technology should allow for increased creativity and personalized learning. If I am directing all activities and learning, this cannot happen. Students need more freedom, but that needs to start with a solid foundation of teacher-created activities supported by focused formative and summative assessments.

References:

Beatty, I., & Gerace, W.J. (2009). Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 18, 146-162. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10956-008-9140-4

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., & Freeman, A. (2015). NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition. https://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2015-k-12-edition/

 Kalmon, S., O'Neill-Jones, P., Stout, C., & Sargent Wood, L. (2012). From Corn Chips to Garbology: The Dynamics of Historical Inquiry. OAH Magazine of History, 26(3), 13-18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oahmag/oas024

Richtel, M. (2012). Blogs vs. Term Papers. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/muscling-in-on-the-term-paper-tradition.html

Inspiring and Innovating with Technology (ISTE Standard 1)

My question for this module, based on ISTE Standard 1, was: How can I design experiences that will allow my students to be innovative and inventive in their learning? Working in a one-to-one laptop school, technology is a part of my students' daily lives. We integrate effectively, but I wanted to research how to be more innovative and really transform my classroom. What I noticed in reading several articles was a consensus that having so much technology at our fingertips allows students and teachers to more readily move beyond drilling and into higher-level thinking. I agree with this sentiment, but it still comes down to how technology is used.

An important aspect of the internet (or Web 2.0 as a lot of academic articles call it), is that it is constantly changing. I noticed this while reading "Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship in a Digital Age" (Greenhow, Robelia, & Hughes, 2009) because many of the apps or sites mentioned in the article I had either never heard of, or I had and I knew they had been replaced by something more current. I have experienced this in my own classroom because I do a project where my students make a Facebook page for Alexander the Great, using an online tool by Classtools or on a poster board, and I have decided I need to find a new form of social media for Alex next year. Too many of my students think Facebook is for old people, or they just never use it themselves.

The most important part of technology, though, is how it is used. While it is fun to make social media pages for historical figures, "a well-designed lesson should meld content development with digital literacy" (Shand, Winstead, & Kottler, 2012). In reading about the concept of digital literacy standards, it sounded very much like goals I would have for my social studies classroom anyways- being able to do higher-order thinking. With this goal in mind, I did a little more research into the concept of flipped classrooms. In an article posted by a Alex Perry, according to Page (2015), a flipped classroom "arrangement allows greater personalization, freeing class time or teachers to help individual students or small groups while other students work on exercises." This provides ideas for answering my question, because a more personalized learning environment helps with student creativity and opportunities. In an article by Mazur, Brown, and Jacobsen (2015), flipped classrooms are held up as a strategy that fosters inquiry-based learning, which I feel can be difficult in a social studies classroom. It can be hard to stop students from simply googling questions, so designing deliberate, thoughtful strategies for engagement is a must. I tried to incorporate an inquiry-based unit on China last year in my junior history classroom. The format of inquiry-based learning does give students a lot of choice in what they want to research, and computers give them the tools to both find a lot of useful information and to share it in an innovative way. My students use the collaboration space of OneNote to work together on research and writing for this project. I hope to be able to be more deliberate in my planning this year to better integrate technology and further my students' learning.

One area where I still have questions is the emphasis I often see on sharing information on a global scale as a definition of innovative use of technology. Why does posting a video on the internet have more meaning than a video for classmates? Why does use of a wiki (which I usually encourage my students not to use as a source for research because it was put together by students like them) seem more innovative than a poster project? After this research, I feel like I have a better understanding of how I can help my students collaborate and can better direct inquiry in the classroom. But, I still want to learn more about how to better use the wonders of technology I have available.

References

Greenhow, C., Robelia, B., & Hughes, J. E. (2009). Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship in a Digital Age. Educational Researcher, 38, 246-258. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0013189X09336671

Mazur, A.D., Brown, B., & Jacobsen, Michele. (2015). Learning Designs Using Flipped Classroom Instruction. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 41(2). Retrieved from http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/26977

Page, S. F., ed. (2015). Innovative Schools in Michigan. Connect: Making Learning Personal, 2, 1-6. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED558046.pdf

Shand, K., Winstead, L., & Kottler, E. (2012). Journey to Medieval China: Using Technology-Enhanced Instruction to Develop Content Knowledge and Digital Literacy Skills. The Social Studies, 103, 20-30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00377996.2011.559434