Keeping Parents Informed - Electronic Portfolios in Technology Classes.

For the third year I tried electronic Portfolios in my classroom, and as with anything you do a number of times, there is improvement.  I believed this to be so but I wanted to make sure the students thought so as well.  There were 2 students that have been doing electronic portfolios for two years with me.  The growth was extremely evident but both students were not happy with their first year of Information Technology so they deleted the old work, and tried to make a portfolio that is more professional.  Although I was sorry to hear this and I explained to them that showing growth was good, pride trumped it.  Take a look at this sample and this one. Both students are in Grade 10.  I only do electronic portfolios with the Grade 9 though 12.  Please remember, these are students that have done electronic portfolios for two years.

After the completion of the course I asked my student (29 in total) to fill out a survey, and the results. are below. Some of the results are a surprise.

I did student lead conferencing this year with parent conferences (see student's self-assessment for student lead conferencing) .  Many of the parents stated they already knew exactly where their child was so they did not have to come to the conference.  In a month's time I asked parents to email me comments in regards to their child's work.  All parents had to sign a note or email me saying they saw their child's work.  Between the portfolios and emails, parents were kept in the educational learning loop.  There were no surprises for them or for their child.  Both formal and informal feedback was constant.

This was a nice surprise.  The students reviewing their own learning (see photoshop final entries for self-evaluation and critical thinking) increased the need to do better.  As you can see below, students liked to learn on their own and self-reflection of your own work over a period of time helps the students to see (with evidence right in front of them) their own growth and their accomplishments.

The question below was in direct relationship to the photoshop unit I taught.  See the evidence of what Grade 9 and 10's can do and how creative they can be when they show me evidence in specific skills taught:

Example 1 

Example 2 

Example 3 

But of all the evidence gathered by this survey, what made me feel that electronic portfolios made a difference is the results below.  It's wonderful to see that this manner of assessing has had a positive effect on my students.

Portfolios online for  assessment that has become very popular with blogging of student learning and self reflection of learning.  How is this change in environment (learning though critical thinking) going in our school?  Do the student like this manner of assessment?  Take a look at what the students want.

Reflections of Grade 9 Students....

OK, I'll admit right now, he's one of my "great" students (Your a genius!!! - from Terry Small @terrysmall).  But that's not why I've chosen to share the Eportfolio blog reflection of these students.  You'll understand why after you read the blog.

When my students entered my classroom  I had a youtube video ready for them to watch.  We've been working on Social Networks in my Information Technology 9/10 classroom, hoping to teach some understanding of the negatives and positives of these tools.  We use a lot of social networking at Sullivan Heights, web classrooms, blogging portfolios, and tweeting out homework, successes and updates of our school.  The idea is to teach the students about your digital persona but also to make sure they understand that no one controls the Internet and when you put something out on the net, there's no going back.

So here's one of the videos I showed students, and below it is the blog entry I requested.  I asked students to write 100 words or more about what they learned from the video.  This entry makes me smile with pride that a student went further then just reciting was he heard or saw, he analyzed the information and came up with his own conclusions.  He extended his knowledge, and applied the learning of MySpace to Facebook.  Read below and hopefully it will make you smile as well.  He's in Grade 9.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11064451/ns/dateline_nbc/t/why-parents-must-mind-myspace/#.UHbptcU0WSo

 "   This video mainly introduced what Myspace is, and the dangers in the use of Myspace. Myspace as a social networking site is convenient and easy to use, and everyone wants an account in it (now its Facebook having the same thing happening). While friend can communicate about all sort of things on it, there are also many hidden dangers. But many teenage users are not aware of the dangers. The girl in the video, Shannon Sullivan, only thought it was her friends reading the information on her page. So she threw on everything needed to find her in person, and she "didn't thing twice about it". She put on a fake age, even though she was underaged to use Myspace. Like many other teenagers, she had no idea about the online predators stalking people like her.

    

Because her mother had settings that allowed her to see the internet use on the computer, she found out about Shannon using Myspace. She grounded Shannon for two weeks, then had her place private setting on her page. This is very fortunate compared with other parents who has not the slightest idea about things like this. Teens put on all sorts of revealing pictures and personal information about themselves, and the online predators takes advantage of this. That's why parents have to monitor the use of social networking of their teens, to protect them from harm. I believe this is very important, and applies to all social networking sites, not just Myspace or Facebook. Teens should be careful about what they put on the internet, and what they do put on should be protected by private settings."

Just to show that not all students are as proficient in writing in my classroom, the intent to show learning is still there in other examples and show just as much learning.

"      In infotech today I watched a vodeo on how myspace can be "the" site for predators. in the video, it explained how a girl signed up for myspace when she was underage she signed up, and I was thinking, who's to say that people that are under the age of 10 are signing up. and if that happens it clearly means that they know a lot less about pravicy settings. So what I am trying to say is people signing up under age makes it so much easyer for predators to find people. 

         In my opinion i think that there should be a perant part of the sign up form so if there underage, so that way kids wont sneek on websites like myspace to sign up without permission"

Remember, it's only been a month for these students, and we're still in the process of setting up the eportfolios,and understanding critical thinking and analysis but they do understand that when they blog, it is an opinion and they explain their opinion to show their learning (critical thinking skills).

Both entries make me proud.  We're on our way to expanding our learning and developing learning skills.  ;)

The Change of Education needs to consider the Teacher

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosz/2040577615/ 

I've been reading all these different manners of changing your educational practises, from Backward Planning, to Activating Students' Creative Thinking, and the list goes on.  With the changes in our school of "No Marks", "technology implementation", "Using Web 2.0 Tools", "Eportfolios", and many more that we are exploring, we all need to remember one thing.  Even though one of these methods looks great and alive (The exploration in our Physical Education Department is absolutely fabulous - tweet Ryan Neufeld - @teacherneuf and Jeff Vaughan - @CptKudos  for more information), this doesn't mean it will work for everyone.  Not all teachers are the same, we may have similar training, and have gone to the same classes, but the personality of the teacher does come through somewhat, in some way, or manner.  This means that not all methods of teaching will work the same for every teacher due to this personality.

The great news is that if every teacher is different from the next, students won't get use to one style of learning, and this is a reality of life - no two things are the same (look at the picture - really look - and tell me if you see the exact Flamingo twice - look at their coloring). 

So as teaches this is what we normally do  (Sorry for speaking for a group of teachers but after 25 years of teaching in a number of schools and acting as a computer facilitator of learning technology - I've seen a lot of styles) - we take what we like the most out of every learning experience and we use that.  Sound familiar?  So do students.  We do not criticize the different manners in which a student learns, we try to instigate a number of ways of learning in our lesson plans, try to touch all (or as many as well can) of the different ways students learn.  Why can't we accept the same of teachers?  We learn different, we use what we've learned, to the best of our ability.  Some of us learn quickly, some of us take more time to contemplate things, but in the end, almost all teachers have the same goal, to be the best that we can.

Think about it.  How much do you use what you've learned compared to a colleague?

New Procedures and Ideas for Professional Development.

Sullivan Heights continues to think and learn with new ideas procedures for professional development. We'll continue to make Individual Learning Goals our goals.  Most of the school's goals last year were in regards to learning new technology or new methods of assessment using apps, Web 2.0 tools online and growing with learning networks online using Twitter.  Below is a slide show from Jane Hart (excellent blog to follow) on the impact of social media on the workplace (and relevant to the educational field of learning).

The impact of social media on workplace learning

(View more PowerPoints from Jane Hart)

It's true, our school has been crazy with learning last year.  Everyone wanted to try something new, learn something new, do something new.  We've explored numerous areas of learning with technology, but we've also examined new ways of teaching and/or assessing with our students in regards to this technology.  With all the learning last year, this coming school year our school needs to look more closer at the impact of this learning on both our teaching styles, our new manners of assessment, the learning done by the students and ask ourselves if these changes that have developed are actually helping our students.  

Change is good but it can also be stressful, the handling of the impact and  logistics of change.  Change can sometimes be uncomfortable because it forces us out of comfort zone; even when the change is good. Not everyone embraced the learning, but some recognized that they needed to change with their fellow colleagues.  The difficulty has to do with the rippling effects of change in the school. It forces teachers to create new routines, new ways of thinking or believing and new perceptions of the world around them. With any sort of change one needs to sit back and reflect on these changes:  Has it made a difference to me, to my students, and/or even to parents?  Has it improved my/student's situation in the school or even outside of school? Has it been beneficial?  

The changes in our school with Twitter was like a tiny pebble thrown lightly in a pond, the ripple effects went farther then anyone really thought it would, in our school and outside to PLNs most of my colleagues at school have made.The only way to recognize this effect was to stop for a moment, take account of events and the situation around you, reflect and document what you have learned, to actually take the time to assess the change in the students and in your environment, and note what has come about with the change.  


This is where we need to go for this next year.  We need to reflect on the effects and affects of our learning.  We need to assess our learning and the learning of our students:  is it worth the change?  We also need to realize that this change may be affecting our students as well, in ways we should look at.


With all this change happening in our school, we need to ask the questions:

• Why are we doing this?
• Why are we making this effort to change?

Because the world is changing, the students are thinking differently (their experiences in today's world have taught them to think differently), and working in today's world is a lot different as well.  Thus we need to understand what changes we as a school need to make as well, and you as a teacher need to consider.

There is a  deeper issue at work here that Sir Kenneth Robinson so eloquently underscores in his book "Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative?" At the heart of most schools Sir Robinson believes is our obsessive preoccupation with academic ability and the confusion of academic ability with intelligence. To Robinson there is "much more to intelligence than academic ability and much more to education than developing it." John Bareell agrees with him in "Developing More Curious Minds".  Both point out the truth, that it is not so much the academic ability to memorize and recite what is learned as much as the importance of teaching students to be creative and to be curious about learning, to develop further the love of learning, and instilling in students a curiosity to continuously learn or want to learn.  That's what this change is about, to change and help students become more creative in exploring new information on the information highway, to collaborate and learn form each other, and to question what they learn, be it questioning the sources, question the books, the Internet, even the teacher.  This means different ways of teaching (backward planning, project based, differentiating, collaborate group work, etc), assessing differently (no marks, skill sets, rubrics, etc) and grabbing students curiosity (through the internet, web tools, blogging, critical thinkings, etc).

That's a lot to ask for.

As my mother once said to me and I have repeated numerous times to my students "There is no such thing as a stupid question, it's just stupid not to question". 

so that's what I hope our school continues to do, not just change but to question our change and see if it not only develops a curious and creative mind in our students but to show the students that the teacher as well is curious and creative.

Let the questions continue.... with the learning ;) and the assessing of our learning.

Running a Network at School.

Our Physical Education Department at Sullivan Heights have been a very active group in the area of our grant and learning. Truth be known, they were the leaders in getting our staff participating in twitter and networking to the far reaches of north america and oversees.  Ryan Neufeld, our expert on twitter spent a lot of energy and time training our staff, encouraing them to tweet, and then encouraging students to follow the different tweets of the athletic wiki, and the different teachers that use Twitter to post work, keep in contact with students, and inform teachers and studetns of what was going on at our school.

It was he who enspired the Twitter account for the School News section with it's own twitter feed.  With his encouragement of tweeting "cool things of Sullivan Heights" and more by a number of big tweeters at our school:

@Phillipskerri @MrBrownPE @teacherneuf @kpederson15 @klaw6 @SusiQ25 @garr_s @SullivanHeights @SullivansBarry @CareerEdSHS @Phillipskerri @msfree1 @Ms_Sommerfeld @painchaud_n.  Follow any of them online - you'll learn a lot, I know I did.  

Here is the summary of the Phy Ed Departments research:

http://sullivanathletics.wikispaces.com/Ryan+Neufeld 

From a Science Teacher Department Head.

Guest blogger:  Mr. Edwards - Science Department Head.

Positives:

• The kids seemed to really excited about working with the gizmos.  This helped increase the enjoyment of discovery learning, and/or the re-enforcement of what was already taught.  (ie the students were truly engaged).
• The level of difficulty of the different gizmos was in some cases challenging, but students were still able to work through the activities with some guidence.  Thus this tool is as effective as long as the teacher is prepared and has done the work in advance as well.
• The instant feedback of the five follow up questions both for the teacher and the students was nice to have, provided the students did it themselves and not copy what their partner had as their responses.
• The student worksheets provided had insightful questions, and followed a logical order in investigating the activity.
• The gizmos are versatile for either review, or discovery learning.

Drawbacks:

• Some students could not complete the online assessment at home if they did not finish in the time provided.
• Some students simply saw what the other students answered in correctly, and thus had an advantage, making the formal and informal assessment questionable to whether they understand it.
• We could not get the gizmos to work on our iPads, due to unavailable software, thus we were limited to the laptops, which were not always available.
• There are no gizmos written specifically for the Earth Science 11 curriculum here in BC. 
• Some gizmos are more useful than others, and are too simple.  They would ber better as a demo, than as an activity.

Suggestions to the district coordinator:

• Different versions of the questions to help minimize copying.
• Try and get the software for iPads, or make them compatible with the existing software.
• Try and get gizmos for both Science and Tech 11 and Earth Science 11, as these courses could really use an engaging means of learning. 

There will be contunued use of the gizmos for next year, provided we get accounts by the district. 

Edistorm on the IPads

I have always ranted and raved about Edistorm, a Web 2.0 tool that is perfect for brainstorming, for pre-assessment of student knowledge as well as organizational for students doing a project.  The different printouts help teachers to mark student work, and get a great assessment tool of critical thinking on the part of the student.  But like so many other Web 2.0 tools that don’t work on the IPads due to lack of Flash, I was concerned about the same problem with Edistorm.  To my surprise, they were building (as we speak) an IPad friendly beta site, using one finger and two-finger control.  So lets take a look.

Students can start brainstorming online by creating a new “Storm”—a project page. Or the teacher can set one up, type in a name for the project, add a goal or description, and start inviting collaborators (her students). You can make it public or visible to anyone. Once you’re on your Storm page, you’ll see a wall and a virtual stack of sticky notes on the left. You can change the wall to a SWOT or Venn diagram or many others, depending on your needs.  Anyone you’ve invited to participate can type an idea on a sticky note and place it on the wall wherever they want. You can change the color of the sickies as well.  Notes can be moved and organized in an endless number of ways, or grouped by color to better illustrate whatever point it is you’re trying to make.  There are drop down menus to help you with this feature or the users can use one finger to move the stickies or two fingers to  enlarge the screen or make it smaller.  Because Edistorm operates in real time, you will SOMETIMES immediately see whenever another users adds a sticky or makes adjustments to the wall.  On the pads you need to refresh the browser every one in a while to update what has been added to the wall..  The best part of this app is the ability to think on the fly and to share ideas instantaneously.

As stated before two fingers will shrink or make larger your screen.  One finger moves the stickies around.  There is a voting system, you just click the sticky by the number and that creates the vote.  You can assign how many votes each student gets when you set up the storm. 

I still love this program for the pre-assessment value, the post-assessment value and just the idea of being able to jot down all your ideas at once, then organize them, and get others to help you consider everything by commenting on your ideas and stating which ones are the best.  The possibilities are endless. 

Thanks to Jennifer Spain @jennifer_spain for trying out this program with her French class.  Both the teacher and the students loved it (they used the browser to work with the program).

Get your storm going!

The Wonders of Weebly

My students have been learning a number of Web 2.0 tools, photo modification, sideshows, the need for Avatars, etc.  Because of all of these different programs on different sites, we needed an area where all can be put, and that way, seeing the growth of their learning would help build confidence in students, would help them self-assess, and would help students in comparison, and analysis of different tools with the same purpose.  It is the hope that the students will be able to synthesis all these tools and come up with an analysis of which Web 2.0 tool is the best for what situation.  The  evaluation in this area is to make judgements of each tool with their own defined criteria of needs, for a specific project that is called for in any course or subject, not just my  course.

Weebly is a simple, free Web design and hosting system that takes nearly all the pain out of creating a site.  You use drag and drop features to create the pages.  As a teacher you can set up a class of 40 students, setting the user names and passwords of the students one by one, or by uploading a text file of students names, etc.  The program lets you print out all passwords and as the teacher you can lock up the web sites so no one can see the student sites unless they have a password that you set up.  This is for the security and safety of the students.  


Another excellent feature of this tool is their blog area, which you can use for critical thinking activities and also for peer assessment as there is a comment section for his area.  

Weebly has big gaps in its feature set (when dragging and dropping, sometimes the machine lags in this area and sometimes the embedding feature jams up the visual look of the site but by closing off the site and then opening it, all rights itself.  As a quick-and-dirty site host, it's not bad. I really like its simplicity. You can start by selecting a page layout from Weebly's templates (all of which look good - see above picture), or just start typing on the default template. Adding elements like pictures (via uploads or Flickr), YouTube videos, and Google maps to a page is very simple, just drag and drop the feature.  Adding pages to your site is also easy, a click of a button.   But there are some limitations in this service. You can't put a picture into a block of text after the fact--there are separate module types for text and for text-plus-image. You can't put a headline or a caption on an embedded object (like a Google map or YouTube video);  And I'm not sure about space (how many pages you are allowed).  

At present it suites our needs for our eportfolio.  We'll continue to explore this aspect, and I'll continue to assess Weebly in this blog.

Below is a YouTube video on Weebly.

Here are more Web 2.0 tools that my students will be exploring this year in Grade 9/10.  As you can see below, Google covers many of the aspects of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy with their aspects.

http://blog.kathyschrock.net/2011/03/google-tools-and-blooms-revised.html

Finally, just to see how you too can integrate some Web 2.0 tools into daily practise see the Prezi below.

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and Web 2 Tools on Prezi

Working on the Critical thinking - assessment in the E-Portofolios.

Students are beginning to collect their information and submit it on their portfolio.  With this understanding I have been giving open ended - or a variety of choices for their assignments.  One such assignment in Information Technology class was for the student to pick either a poster creating program they knew (Glogster) or a program to create a timeline (below is a list of several that I like and so do the students) to sequence the history and growth of the internet.  Students were to name at least 40 different events that changed the internet (from the start with Spotnix to the 250 million users today).  They were to add pictures and graphics to their timeline but the most important aspect of this assignment was not to memorize dates, but to see what changes the Internet.  So this is where the reflective question comes into the process.

With the correct prompting, I can assess where they in comprehension for of the goals.

Goal 1 - Learning a timeline program

• What was the learning intention or goal for this work? Did you achieve it? How do you know? Give evidence from the work.
• What can you do now in your work that you couldn’t do before? What contributed to your growth in understanding, knowledge, or skill?
• What strategies did you use to complete this work? If those strategies had not been available, is there another way you could have done the work?

Goal 2 - What was the importance of looking at the history of the internet?

• How does this work connect to your interests or life experiences?

Goal 3 - What did you learn?  Do all three.

• Which aspects of the assignment were easy for you? Which ones were difficult?
• What surprised you about this assignment?
• What are you still wondering about now that you have completed the assignment?

With the shortage of time, and the need to learn, I believe I can do the three goals simutaniously, Students worked on learning the new program they chose for the first day.  They had 3 web sites as references to start with.  The 2nd day they had a PowerPoint presentation where specific points of interest were to be added to their time line.  On the 3rd day they continued to work on the timeline but comments thrown out there diagrams like the ones below:

http://www.satmagazine.com/cgi-bin/display_article.cgi?number=1609810110

http://webhostinggeeks.com/infographics/the-internet-growth/

or