Help to Give Our Students Some Examples

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If you're reading this, then you probably followed a tweet and your interest is greatly appreciated. Some brave teachers at NIST will be putting their likenesses online and open to our Year 10 students as a competition for the most interesting editing of the image. Of course, the results may be frightening but it's a fine example of our teachers being risk takers and 'walking the talk.'

If you have a few minutes to spare and care to crop out the background of this image and replace it with something far more interesting, this would be very helpful for getting the students' ideas flowing. Don't worry about how good it turns out. Effort is better than quality in this case. And something is better than nothing! Sorry for the crude green screen and if you don't have photo editing software installed on your computer, try out Pixlr online for free.

If anyone actually helps out with this, could you host your edited images online somewhere and tweet the results to @twowaystairs, please? Many thanks!

PS - Thanks to Alec and George Couros for the inspiration from their keynote at Learning 2.011 last year in Shanghai.

No More Throwing Your Sticks in the Middle to Pick Teams

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This year, with my Year 9s, I'm putting a focus on collaboration as students will work in groups to develop Scratch programs to help a NIST teacher improve teaching and learning in their classroom (overview here). In general, the students at our school are quite good students and, if allowed to choose their own groups, they would likely choose their friends but still manage to work fairly well. Most of them. However, as the development of an interactive Scratch program requires a range of different skills (some technical, some creative, some organizational, among others), I decided that I wanted to assign groups in which there is a reasonable balance of some of these different skills between team members. I'm hoping that this might encourage them to plan a little differently than usual. For example, if they know that one particular student has strong artistic or design skills, when planning, that student may be responsible for designing and creating custom sprites.

Structurally Sound Tower Bridge

My very first lesson of the year, I knew that my students would not yet have received their laptops for the year (1:1 program at NIST) which was an excellent excuse to get students into groups to remind them about how their peers interact in group activities. The activity was simple. I gave each team a box of supplies (paper; cue cards; coloured pencils; markers; rulers; paper clips; etc.) and asked each group to create something. They had about 50 minutes to create anything they wanted/could make with the given supplies. The results ranged from disappointing (the students' sentiments, not mine) to pretty impressive (including an Olympic-era replica of Tower Bridge in London and a Minnie Mouse puppet).

Minnie Mouse Puppet

With group dynamics and peers' skills fresh in their minds, I had the students fill out a survey on KwikSurveys (which, since the change of ownership, has gone downhill) in order to rate all of their classmates in six areas: Creativity; Problem Solving; Leadership; Knowledge/Expression; Teamwork; Digital Skills. I had done some searching for more scientific or proven skills/qualities to rate but couldn't find anything so, while I still feel that these maybe aren't the best range of skills, they served the purpose well for assigning diverse and balanced groups.

Using these results, I plotted them into a spreadsheet (shown below) and tried to assign balanced groups that should, hopefully, result in successful learning outcomes for each student. The nice thing for me is that even if students complain about their group placements, I can say that I used information that they gave me to make the decisions and it makes it seem less teacher-directed. However, as collaboration is the main thread/theme for this unit, undoubtedly, even students that get frustrated with fellow group members will still be coming away with appropriate learning experiences and will have plenty to reflect upon during the evaluating phase.

Values out of 500 because it was faster to not type a decimal

For me, it was interesting to see some of the results from the students to see how well the students know one another. Some results were fairly predictable but it was still nice to see that students do recognize the skills that their peers possess. There were a few surprising results too from students whose skills were put in more higher regards than I expected and some students whose skills were held in much lower regards than I'm sure they would care to know. Thank goodness for technology that allows for easy to use anonymity. Groups will be revealed early this week coming up so it will be interesting to see how the students react.

Gamification in Practice: Proceed to the Next Level

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A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to give gamification of my Year 8 Flash unit a go. The general idea is that the students would proceed through a set of nine levels that alternated through Flash skill building tasks and more curriculum based tasks like defining Design Specifications or creating a storyboard. I was interested to see how the students would react to this approach and so far the results have been amazing.

I decided to set up nine different blog posts and password protect them. To receive the password for the next level, the students would need to complete the previous level to an acceptable degree. Each blog post contains instructions for how to complete the level's challenge and how to show proof of completion. Here's an example of how one of the blog posts was set up:

The First Level

When reading this post, you might think that it sounds a bit prescribed and that it doesn't allow the students to the students to inquire and learn on their own but in practice, it has actually been quite the opposite. Each level becomes more challenging than the last by asking the student to solve more problems on their own. As students work their way through them, they begin to differentiate themselves based on their understanding of different tasks and, as you might expect, some students get through some of the tasks more quickly than others.

Increased Peer Support

Auto-Filtered Folders

When the students have completed a level, they are supposed to send me an email, which I automatically filter to the corresponding Outlook folder. I've told them that if they are waiting for a reply to an email, they can verbally let me know they are waiting and be patient. While they are waiting, they should be helping those around them, especially those that are at lower levels in the game. It's now at the point where students check the help resources and then if they can't complete the challenge, their next point of contact for help is their peers. If they're still stuck, I can then come over and help them to get past whatever obstacle is preventing them from progressing to the next level but for the most part, the students are solving things together.

Increased Engagement

Going into this, I had a hunch that students would enjoy the unique approach, as it's definitely different from their typical class structures, but I didn't expect the engagement that I've seen so far. I have explicitly said that students do not need to do any of this work outside of class time and yet I get students sending me emails looking for passwords to the next level at all times of the day, inside or outside of school. This isn't only for the "more fun" tasks like making things in Flash but even for tasks like making a storyboard or writing design specifications. They want to be able to set their red, incomplete levels to green, complete levels.

Students Fill in Their Successes on This Shared Google Doc

I have informally polled my two classes that are doing this unit and when I asked how many preferred this approach to work compared to the more "normal classroom" approach, it was pretty much unanimous that they preferred this. When asked if they thought it would 'get old' over the course of a trimester (2-3 months), most seemed to think that they would be happy to work through this learning method for extended periods of time.

Password Master

In the current incarnation, I am in charge of reviewing each piece of work and providing passwords for subsequent levels. At first, it felt like all I did was stand at my computer and review work and I was worried that I wouldn't be available to help students but, as students began to advance to higher levels, those levels would take longer to complete and the amount of email approvals has steadied out. Indirectly, it probably forced me to let the kids figure out more on their own or through their peers and get a chance to see that that method can be (and has been) successful. (NOTE: Having prepared video and text tutorials for many of the tasks was extremely helpful for supporting those early stages as it allowed me to say things like, "Check the 4 minute mark of the video and see if that helps"). Another advantage of being in charge of giving out the passwords for subsequent levels can be in giving students a slight delay between levels which encourages them to look beyond their own work to see who they can help before they more on to the next level.

Looking Ahead

The success I've seen with this has encouraged me to try the game method for a full trimester of work when school resumes after summer break. I have aspirations of being more explicit so that certain levels become official assessment levels (to keep the following example more globally understandable, I will use percentages with the explicit caveat that even mentioning the idea of percentages is completely anti-MYP). For example, perhaps by the time a student has successfully completed Level 3, this is enough to show 60% understanding for Criterion A and by the time they successfully complete Level 12, they can prove an 80% understanding of Criterion D. This would make assessment simpler but it will take a lot of planning to ensure that students are in fact given challenges that give them the opportunity to effectively prove their understanding of a particular criterion to at a particular level of understanding. I think it would help to make achievement more transparent for my students (typically between 10 and 14 years old) because I can clearly set minimum achievement levels, e.g. If you want 60% (again, for example purposes only), you will need to successfully complete 8 levels.

Photo from Flickr by Darwin Bell

My next step with this is going to be looking at my unit of work and each of the criteria to break them down into small, achievable tasks that show evidence towards a certain mark band within a particular criterion. In addition to these, I can supplement the criteria-based stages with relevant but perhaps not directly related tasks like having students find recent Technology news and blogging about it or presenting it to the class to help keep the tasks fresh and varied or getting students to read other students' work and leave them feedback about it. Since I have fairly successful units of work prepared already, it's basically a jigsaw puzzle at this point. I just need to break it apart so that I can reassemble all the pieces into a new, hopefully more interesting and effective picture.

Everything's a Game: Gamifying My Classroom

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Over the course of this school year, I've learned about a lot of different teaching methods and ideas about which I wasn't previously aware. I've been trying some of them in my own classes (21st century skills, crowdsourced grading, increased prominence of blogging, etc.) but there has been one that has intrigued me quite a bit that I have yet to implement and that's game based learning. Gartner, Inc. has predicted that "by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes." Since the same principles seem to make sense in an educational setting, I've been toying with ideas in my mind about how to make it work within the context of my classes. I've had some ideas but what usually gets in the way is trying make a game that fits the MYP Technology curriculum and adequately addresses each criterion. With this in mind, I eagerly attended John Rinker's session on game based learning.



photo credit: Toni Blay via photopin cc

John had taken a game based approach to learning about the history of the Neolithic revolution. To investigate the essential question ‘How does WHERE we live affect HOW we live?’, Rinker's class undertook a range of challenges, split into levels of achievement, that blended investigation of the content with investigation and skill development in Google Earth. An advantage to game-based learning is that it can help to keep an appropriate focus on the concept of the unit of work rather than on the tools used to present it. As Rinker points out in his blog, "This project isn’t about using the tool, it’s about creating an authentic experience to demonstrate an understanding of our essential question." This is what can really help me effectively apply game based learning to the MYP Technology Design Cycle.

As is the nature of the Design Cycle, despite the "creating" criterion  being a relatively small component of the curriculum (maybe about a fifth of the criteria), it tends to take up a lot of time with learning specific tools (in the case of most of my classes, that refers to digital tools) and applying those skills. Getting students to complete levels is an interesting way to get them to do more "dry" work like research in order to add some motivation to unlock the next level which may include learning or applying skills in a particular program. As the school year is nearing its end, I have managed to assess my Year 8s on all the required criteria at least once already so this leaves me a little more free to experiment with new ideas with my students. Typically, at this point of the trimester, my Year 8s would be starting a relatively brief 'design and make' project, using Flash animation software to create an eCard. As I was riding a bus recently, I jotted down an outline of how to take what is typically a pretty straightforward little unit and gamified it. I tried to alternate between Flash skills and other design cycle criteria. Here's an outline of what I have come up with so far:

Level 1 - Animate a Bouncing Ball. Students will follow along to a video tutorial I created last year to help animate a bouncing ball.

Level 2 - Type out possible ideas for their eCard and post it to their blog.

Level 3 - Get a star to follow a particular path while continuously changing colour.



photo credit: Cross-stitch ninja via photopin cc

Level 4 - Write Design Specifications for a successful eCard and post it to their blog.

Level 5 - Make your name transform into a shape

Level 6 - Pick one idea for your eCard and draw a simple storyboard to explain the action

Level 7 - Make the eCard

Level 8 - Make your animation file available through your blog

Level 9 - Support others with their eCards

So far, these are just skeletal instructions for each level and more specific instructions and requirements will be added. I am still toying with the idea of how to distribute each level to students who have successfully completed the work. An email containing the next level's instructions is one, simple way but I'm also considering having a password protected blog post for each level as well. Another thing to consider is a tracking sheet so that students can easily (and preferably visually) track their progress.

There are a few challenges to using this approach for student projects. One problem I've already alluded to earlier is that it can be difficult to present adequate/interesting challenges that still address the different bands of achievement on the curriculum rubrics. For this particular unit, I am making sure that students do address the different parts of the rubric but I think it will still be up to my professional judgment as to what level of achievement they've demonstrated for a given criterion. In the planning of future units of work though, I could foresee this as a great way to differentiate a unit of work. The earlier levels represent lower bands on the rubric and as the students succeed to high levels, they will begin to demonstrate evidence of criteria from the upper mark bands. Some students may not actually complete all the levels but for the more keen or capable students, this gives them the opportunity to take their work to a higher level without being held back by other students that do not progress as quickly.



Probably the biggest challenge involved in setting up a unit like this is the planning required for it to work successfully. Thankfully, for this first attempt at a game based learning unit, I already have a number of resources to build upon which makes it a more manageable task at this time of the year. Also, on the plus side, initiating such careful planning early on also means that once the unit is underway, I should, in theory, have a fair bit of time to manage the game and support students in their attempt to complete each level.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this works out and am certain that I will run into challenges along the way but I'm sure that things will work out on the whole and any problems that arise will simply help me to make improvements to units of work for next school year.

Crowdsourcing Makes the Grade

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This was the first EARCOS conference that I have attended and, going in, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Having been to the Learning2 conferences that tend to be exploding with technology like a bottle of Pepsi at 30,000 feet, I wondered if this conference would feel a little dull and sterile in comparison. As I checked through the list of presenters, I noticed familiar names like Kim Cofino and Jeff Utecht so I knew there would at least be some useful or edutaining presentations. As I delved a little deeper, I noticed that there were a number of other presenters that had a technology focus to their topics too so, superficially, it seemed promising enough. When the first morning kicked off with Cathy Davidson and her thoughts on the evolution of technology and my mental sparks started to fly.

Cathy's keynote presentation began with an outline of the different information ages. Moving from speech to writing to printing and onward to the recent evolution into things like mass sharing of information (internet). As she points out, we've reached a point where students cannot remember a time when there was no internet. They don't remember the joy (!?) of listening to their dial up modem connect to the internet so that you could open a webpage before going to make your breakfast, wash some dishes, feed the cat, take the dog for a walk, iron your shirt for work, and finish a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle before returning to see if it had loaded yet.

The idea of sharing thoughts with anyone, anywhere, anytime, seems like an intrinsic right that these students have never lived without. If they want to know how something works in another part of the world, there are millions of webpages full of text and video and other content to help explain it but, better yet, there are also millions of people that are just as free to express their knowledge and opinions. These people, once days', if not weeks' journeys away, are now available for interaction instantly. That is an amazing power that most of our students probably take for granted. All of these insights, and many others that I haven't mentioned here, were enough for me to convince me to check out some of her other presentations/workshops.

I actually took away a number of ideas from Cathy's presentations but the one that excited me most had to do with crowdsourcing grading. I love teaching. I love challenging my students to push themselves and to continually improve what they are capable of accomplishing. I love thinking ahead and planning lessons and assignments that will give students that opportunity. I love seeing the end results of their learning. What I don't love is marking students' work. I don't imagine many teachers do. The thought of sitting down and reading through 20 students' assignments and assigning each a numeric level of performance is, for me, by far the least inspiring part of teaching. I do it because it's prescribed by curriculum but I can't just give a number and leave it at that. To actually add some kind of meaning to the numeric value, I always make sure to include feedback with the level awarded. Marking a whole class, to be blunt, sucks. My displeasure with marking seven classes' worth of assignments cannot be politely described so I will leave you to fill in the colourful language here at your own discretion. This is why crowdsourcing of grading piqued my interest.

photo credit: krischall via photopin cc

Essentially, in Cathy's course, "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," she had students sign a contract with targeted marks and she prescribed corresponding expectations for students based on their expectations. For example, if a student wanted an 'A,' they would need to complete all of the assignments to a satisfactory standard. If they wanted a 'B,' they would need to do, say, five of seven assignments to a satisfactory standard. The definition of satisfactory standard needed to be clearly explained to each student because, in the end, they were the people assessing the work. And, as it turned out, this was a successful strategy for Cathy's course.

This course was a university course with mature thinkers that should be able to handle the requirements of peer assessment from both an assessing and a being assessed point of view but I wondered if it could translate to a middle years classroom; so this week, since returning from the conference, I've jumped head first into this idea. I have explicitly gone through the rubrics for assignments for six different classes in years 7, 8, and 9. As a practice exercise, I gave the students work from previous classes to assess against the rubrics to see how well they would do and I had some very interesting results.

The first thing that stands out is that the students are probably more harsh as markers than I am. The marks that they gave were generally either the same or slightly less than marks I had awarded to the students previously. I think one thing that may help to explain this has to do with the fact that students were assessing Evaluating assignments (from MYP Technology) without having read or seen the preceding assignments upon which the students were reflecting. I, on the other hand, had seen and assessed the project all the way through so sometimes I could infer more from having an understanding from the preceding assignments.

Another thing that I noticed which should be more surprising than it is, was that the Year 7s were probably better assessors than the year 8s and 9s. There does truly seem to be a bit of a trend that as students leave the PYP program, where they're constantly inquiring and thinking critically, and proceed through the MYP program, despite intuition to the contrary, the students seem to lose their critical thinking and inquiry skills. Perhaps lose them is an overstatement but they seem to ignore them, preferring instead to be told how/what to do their work. (This, of course, is based purely on personal observations and has absolutely no scientific merit).

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="photo credit: marfis75 via photopin cc"][/caption]

On that note though, I could see that a lot of students were initially challenged to accurately interpret a rubric so the crowdsourcing of marking, while it certainly has the advantage of lessening my marking load, also has the added advantage of helping the students to better understand what exactly they are being assessed on by carefully considering the criteria before jumping into the assignment. As another added bonus, when I informally polled the classes about how many of them would take more care in with their work (including the presentation of it on their blogs) because their peers would be looking at it and over two thirds said they would be more concerned about the quality of their work.

One (almost) clever Year 8 student was quick to mention, "If you just got the other Year 8 class to mark our work and we marked theirs, you wouldn't have to do any marking at all." We'll see how this round of crowdsourced marking goes (due a few weeks from now, after Thailand's New year holiday break) but, fingers crossed, that Year 8s student's quip actually becomes a more regular reality - for the benefit of all involved.

Validation

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With my Year 7s this year, I've been working on a unit about presentation. I admit that the initial inspiration for the unit came from Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen and, in it's first iteration, I actually named the unit Presentation Zen. Because my classes rotate on a trimester basis, I get the chance to tweak my units a couple of times a year and from looking at not just what my Year 7s could/couldn't do but also what students in upper years needed to do to be successful, I tried to help the Year 7s build some foundation skills for their secondary years. As such, the unit has evolved from focusing primarily on traditional presentation  (slideshow, speaking in front of the class, etc.) to maintaining that aspect but also adding the idea of presentation of written work, especially in a digital realm such as a blog. With this broadened focus came a renaming of the unit to Presentation Matters which, while it may not have that cool "Z" sound in it, seems to capture the heart of the unit a little better.

The students have done a range of things leading up to their presentations like learning better digital search techniques; taking research and putting that information into their own words in the form of a script; building visual support based on the information they want to communicate (i.e. their script) rather than fitting a script to images; and, all the while, gradually improving the presentation of their blog posts as well. Sometimes, as a teacher, you think up the ideas for the units and, on paper (well, digital paper), you think that things look pretty good and you hope that the learning and understanding that you expect will actually transpire. When I had the students start the trimester with a quickly thrown together presentation in their first lesson, I was impressed by the quality of the work and was beginning to doubt whether the kids would actually have much new learning.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="A Student's Presentation on My Dim Whiteboard"][/caption]

This week, the students have finally gotten to the point where they are presenting in front of their classes. Personally, I thought that the presentations were, in general, quite good but I wondered how much of that came from learning this year versus things they had learned prior to Year 7. Then, after one student had finished her presentation, I heard what I would like to consider a bit of validation that the unit of work has actually been useful. After the presentation finished, a girl in the audience said, "Mr. Jesse, these presentations are so good. I've watched seven presentations in a row and I'm not bored at all. In Year 6, I would have been asleep by now." And with that, we carried on with more presentations. Looking forward to seeing some of the students' reflections that come out of this to see what parts made a difference and what parts need less emphasis next time.

 

Relaunch Creation Has Begun

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After following the MYP Design Cycle through Investigation of their topic; Design of their ideas for solving their problem; and Plan of action for how they'll go about making their solution, my year 10 class have finally started creating their final Relaunch solutions. I'm actually pretty excited to see some of the things that my students have designed as they've come up with a range of ideas from stop motion to phone apps to a typography video.

[caption id="attachment_84" align="alignleft" width="224" caption="Stop Motion in Process"][/caption]

It was great to watch a student using Adobe Encore for the first time (I too have never used it) and he was having trouble getting Photoshop to open the menu file to edit it. We worked together to walk through some forums online and established that Photoshop wasn't the default program for opening that type of file so he changed the association and that solved his problem.

One of my favourite quotes I overheard from today was, "Earlier this lesson, I was behind plan but now I'm all caught up." I love when the students really start to "get it" and understand the big picture of the whole project. The students have almost six more weeks until the final creations are due so it'll be interesting to watch them evolve.