Non-continuous

SLATE 2011: Steve Dembo – Policies, Safety and Social Networking

Not sure what happened here…I’ll get this back up soon.

SLATE 2011: Renee Disch – Google Forms for Assessment

Disclaimers out of the way first. Wisconsin DPI has an agreement with Google that makes sure that what happens in Google complies with FERPA. Apparently that is a good thing.

Google forms have the advantage of being free, viewable with internet access, and can involve some collaboration. There are various types of forms. Just a text box the title of which can become the header of a column in a spread sheet. You can have a paragraph text, multiple choice, multiple choice but you are choosing from a drop down list, check boxes, a scale sort of rating kind of thing, and a grid which is a scale but for multiple questions at once.

Accessing a Google form is as simple as signing in to your Google account (create one here) and then selecting Docs in the tool menu. From there select Form and you are ready to go. From here on out you are playing around and making your forms.

The bigger question for me is: How can I use Google Forms to improve student learning?

SLATE 2011: Scott McLeod – Conversations for Classroom Educators

As a followup to this mornings keynote this session is a conversation with educators regarding the ideas from that session.

Scott started by mentioning a post-literate society: maybe there is a time ahead when many of us don’t need to read because electronic devices may be able listen to us and respond. Dependency on text is on the decline.

First topic: Worthwhile Apps.
Scott will post ideas for looking for good apps at his site for this conference.

Second topic: How do we get staff moving and motivated?
Initial urgency and maintenance urgency are the two main issues.
Scott mentioned Mind Dump which is a place where little snippets of information can be found to aid in chipping away at resistance.
Teachers are rational and have real reasons to be resistance. Those issues need to be addressed. They are legitimate.
We need to be aware of the “implementation” dip. How do we make it as shallow and as short as possible? Multiple support structures need to be in place. “There is no place you can turn and not get support.” See the book Influencer: The Power to Change Anything.

Third topic: What do we do about teaching to the top of Bloom’s (top 3 levels) and still maintaining AYP. Testing is asking us to live on the bottom.
What we remember is what we attach meaning to. Decontextualized stuff needs to live in contextualized place. We have to find ways to stay in context so we get the benefit of the top three levels and build meaning for the “remembering” of skills and facts.

Aside: Where do keyboarding skills stand? It should start as early as possible. Keyboarding may be replacing cursive handwriting in terms of time and necessity. In 10 years though keyboarding may not exist.

Fourth topic: What do we do about filtering?
Logging software may be useful.
We spend way too much time locking stuff down instead of teaching appropriate use.
We typically lock 95% of people down for the sake of the 5% that are the problem.

Fifth topic: How can we implement changes in the structure that we currently have?
Imagine that we start with 9th grade. There are no bells, class schedules. You give 15 teachers and every student a laptop and the current curriculum standards and that’s it. What can you build? What can you do?

Sixth topic: What would you implement for 1 to 1 initiatives?
Not an iPad. Not enough content creation – they are mostly content consumption devices.
Maybe a Netbook. Best option is a laptop.
A BYOD policy mirrors what happens in the real world, however there are equity concerns.
See Scott’s link (above) for a research brief on 1 to 1 initiatives.

Seventh topic: How do you know when you have to take a step back and avoid burnout.
Be aware that you need to either give stuff up or find more support structure. See this.

SLATE 2011: Eitan Benzaquen – Digital Learners Becoming Digital Educators

How do we take a school through the process of technology integration? How do we get teachers excited and how do we become good technicians of implementing change?

Prezi is the main tool being used here. Also Poll Everywhere.

Screenagers today are hyper-connected. How do we make learning a freeing experience, rather than a dictated one. RSS feeds, Wiki’s, blogs, etc. Any of these tools must be used with high expectations of quality.

SLATE 2011: Scott McLeod – The lines are blurring. Translating changes…into school practice

Everything is Scott’s presentation this morning is available here. We can also follow whats going on at TodaysMeet.com/mcleod This is a nice way to follow #slate2011 tweets.

Scott started by introducing #pencilchat as a hash tag where educators take pokes at excuses for not integrating technology into the classroom. Pithy stuff.

Scott’s first point is that We All Now Have A Voice and his second point is that We Can All Find Each Others Voice and then We Can Easily Work Together. This has to change the way we do things. Access is completely mobile now and we can get it anywhere. The lines are blurring now, say, between work and home or between local and global. Google’s Art Project is a great example of blurring the lines. So is Google maps in terms of being in one place but seeing another in “real time”.

We now live in an era where a 12 year old guitarist can get 90 million hits on youtube. That kind of thing used to be reserved for huge record contracts. Lines between producer/consumer and expert/amateur are clearly blurring. Another line that is blurring is the one between Us and Them. What kind of jobs are location dependent versus location independent. The internet is destroying geography. The jobs that we are going to grow and not see disappear because a robot can do them are
those that involve critical thinking, problem solving etc. This needs to be the focus of our classrooms. Not things we can look up on Google. Dan Meyer puts it best when he says “The robots are going to eat our lunch if we are not careful.” We need to spend classroom time doing the things that the robots can’t. Making connections, diagnosing and treating misconceptions, creating perplexing problems that create patient problem solvers, etc.

The University of the People and MIT Open Courseware are blurring the lines between formal and informal learning. Can a student learn on-line all they need to know to pass a bunch of AP Exams and get college credit for that? Why or why not?

Next part of the session Scott challenges us to discuss how we operationalize changes in our schools that actually lead to student learning. What are we doing to combat low-level, wrote memorization, naked skill pedagogy? The first premise is that we need to invent our own solutions. The answer is not “out there”. We need to work it out and make it happen. Do it.

Next we took a look at this Mission Impossible: How do we get rid of textbooks? Each group put ideas into a Google Spreadsheet and then each group looked at someone else’s spreadsheet, identified 2 good ideas and put them on a summary page. We did this as a discussion around textbooks but also to see the value added by doing this is a digital way.

Scott also did a short segment on his iPad and looked at some really decent apps:
Algebra Touch is a great looking app for the iPad for Algebra.
So is Word Wit for English.
iMuscle for kinesthetics.
NYPL Biblion for History (The World Fair).
The Waste Land for Poetry/literature.

I have no opinion on this data.

I really don’t. I just found it interesting to learn what jobs are like mine.

How to Grade Without Grading Anything

Mike asked and so I’ll share.

The underlying ideas here are, first, that when students see grades they think something is finished. They look at the grade and either smile or frown. Then they file the paper away – too often in the circular file. Secondly, even if I have provided feedback on the paper, the grade rules and the feedback is generally ignored. So, in the footsteps of one of my heros, Shawn Cornally, I got rid of the problem – the grades.

My thinking has shifted on assessment lately also. I used to think that if I was studying domain and range with my honors precal kids, then my assessments should be a few domain and range problems. Usually they are pretty low level Bloom’s stuff and kids that could memorize and repeat had an advantage. I hate admitting this about my assessments, but in general I think teachers test what is easy to test. The thing that changed my mind though was realizing that these same types of problems that I was testing on were the problems we were already looking at in class. What data was testing on them going to get me that I didn’t have already?

So, I decided my “assessments” would be more open ended or application type, and try to get at the big picture of whatever we are studying. Like this one on on functions or this one on on domain and range.

The students complete those in around 15 minutes each and then I put feedback on them that night. I try to stagger them, so I only have one class to do per night. They are handed back the next day(ish) and the students respond to my feedback. This feedback loop continues until I feel like I’ve gotten the most I can out of the majority of the students. I think 3 revisions is the most I’ve done. Both the original shot at it and the revisions are all done in class under test like conditions.

For the first four weeks of school the two problems above were the ones that I decided would make up a students grade so far. I decided on this format for helping the students reflect on their work. Below the dotted line is where it’s my turn to make comments.

Here is a student sample of the work including all feedback. And here is the completed grade summary that goes home for a parent signature and comments.

My comments on the grade summary were directed at advice to help students get better, a goal for the student, and/or a statement of agreement or disagreement with the student’s evaluation. Parents would have an idea of what their student’s grade was before progress reports came out and more importantly, some concrete information on why their grade is what it is.

Next thing to think about is how to have students summarize a grade for themselves for an entire quarter worth of work (and eventually a semester). They have 2 assessments on domain/range, 2 on functions, and 1 on transformations of functions. Maybe a summary of each idea which is then somehow combined into a single letter grade, or maybe a holistic approach that looks at their overall progress. I’m open for suggestions.

I haven’t graded ANYTHING yet.

That’s right! I have not put a grade on one piece of work so far this year.

Here are the pro’s:

• Students don’t ask what their grade is.
• Students don’t ask why their grade is what it is.
• Parents don’t e-mail me and complain ask about their student’s grade.
• My students are enjoying learning for the sake of learning.
• My students are revising their work and are showing gains in understanding.
• I can see students getting better and I actually feel like I’m developing talent in them.
• Students are evaluating their own work and justifying their evaluations – based on the work.
• I am communicating with parents about student work and their understanding of it.

CagleCartoons.com

Here are the con’s:

• I have more work to do than “usual”.
• My friend and colleague Dave has a lot more and it may make him explode (or implode).
• I have to provide 2 progress grades per quarter and 1 final semester grade per administrative rules.  It is becoming difficult to provide a “final” letter grade when nothing is graded.
• Very concrete minded kids feel that if their work is not judged in a sort of right/wrong/ABCDF way they aren’t anchored to anything.

All in all I am really very happy with the results.  Especially my Juniors – I have never enjoyed my Juniors in Honors Precalculus more than I do this year.  I thought about if it was just the kids or how I am rolling now with grades.  I distinctly remember liking previous classes until the grades started rolling out on assessments.  Then it quickly became nit-picky, negative, and sometimes confrontational.  In short – we were having conversations about grades rather than having conversations about math.  That sucked and I hated every minute of it.  By the end of last year a lot of my kids would roll their eyes and go “Oh boy, here it comes” anytime someone brought up their “grade”.  Grades do not equal learning and in many ways I think they prevent it.  If kids don’t need them to learn and we don’t need them to teach, then why do it?

I’ve left a lot out of this story and if anyone is interested, I’ll share more of what I am doing in place of grades.  My challenge now is to figure out how I’m going to have the kids justify their quarter grades…

Algorithm-o-rama

So, my son is in second grade but has math with the third graders. Right now their area of focus is “Regroup Ones and Tens.” This is a picture of what he is doing:

His complaint is that he doesn’t like the way they are doing it. In his mind #2 looks like this: 200 + 300 = 500, 80 + 60 = 140, and 4 + 7 = 11. So the answer is 651. He is disturbed by the idea that he has to work right to left. To him it is counter-intuitive (for obvious reasons, I think).

“Not liking something is not a reason for not doing it” would be my normal reply but in this case I’m not so sure. What is gnawing at me is something he said about #13. He sees the 6 + 5 as 11 (and has obviously been instructed to write that down in an attempt to explain why we leave the 1 in the “ones place” and move the ten to the “tens place”). I’m a little puzzled why they stop there and don’t write down 130 somewhere to be consistent, but anyway when he got to the end he added the 9 and the 1 and said it was 10. That bothers me. He doesn’t see it as 1000. I’m not sure if he sees it as 900 + 100 and hasn’t made the connection that 10 100′s is one thousand, or if he doesn’t even see it as that.

I’m pretty sure if he were doing it the way he wanted to do it (left to right), he would have no problem getting 900 + 120 + 11 = 1031. And he would understand the magnitude of the number. I’m afraid he is starting to just do stuff because the teacher says to. This is where kids start to dislike math. “I can do this stuff in a way that makes sense to me (and is mathematically sound) so why do I have to jump through hoops? That’s stupid.” I would agree.

So now I’m running through how I might broach this issue with his teacher. I want to do it in a way that doesn’t smack of “I know better than you.” Then, anticipating her response to “he needs to use the standard algorithm in order to do subtraction with ‘regrouping’” I’m again wondering why? He can come up with a method of working left to right with subtraction as well. One that reinforces place-value like what he does with addition.

Before I take this on, I need to know where I’m wrong. I’m thinking that I personally do not use any standard algorithms for addition or subtraction. Or multiplication or division for that matter. (In fact I’m convinced that partial products when multiplying both makes more sense and makes things easier in high school when we need to start multiplying polynomials.) I mean, does anyone other than third graders use standard addition and subtraction algorithms? Can we do without them?

I’m pretty sure technology exists…

Over a late night dinner at B-Dubs last night, my friend Dave, and I were talking a little about Algebra 2 and how much it just made us want to kill ourselves this year. We really tried. There were 4 of us that met a lot and discussed targets, essential questions, the ACT, and tried to create a fluid coherent Algebra 2 curriculum.

My biggest problem with the whole endeavor was that in the end the whole thing just turned out to be a list of skills much like this one. We expected C students to be able to do the straight skill work. We expected B students to be able to things like resolve an argument. Something like “Dave claims that bla bla bla and Aaron claims bla bla bla: who do you agree with and why? Then we expected A students to be able to use the skills to solve some sort of problem that we had not considered at any time during class. It might be a unique application or maybe we flipped a problem around so they were looking at the back end and had to figure out the front end.

I liked the way we assessed but getting from assessment to assessment was a huge chore. It just seemed like there were too many topics to make decent connections with. But my biggest issue was that it was hard for me to justify a lot of the content. Who needs to know all of that crap and why? Really? Who cares about complex solutions to quadratic equations? The ACT? Then who? I just don’t have the acting skills to pull some of those topics off. BTW, see Shawn Cornally’s latest post for more.

What Dave and I have spent some time talking about is why we don’t let the technology we have do the grunt work for us. If there is a need for complex solutions to a polynomial function maybe my average 11th graders don’t need to know how to find them by hand if they can do it with the technology. Maybe they don’t need to factor anymore because the technology can do it. Solve a quadratic by hand? What the hell for?

The interesting thing to me is thinking about what we do with our time if we aren’t learning how to solve systems of equations by elimination. What if we were solving complex and interesting problems? Problems that you would never get to in the 11th grade curriculum because you are hamstrung with skills and procedures. We should be using technology where it exists to do the grunt work for us so we can get on to the more interesting and important things.

Two final thoughts:

1. I’m not sure yet what the complex and interesting problems look like because we have never had to think this way.
2. I’m convinced that teaching the students to use the technology has a whole lot more benefit (mathematically speaking) than we think.