Kassblog

I recently organized a workshop for our middle school faculty on Web 2.0 technologies and their implications for teaching and learning at Catlin Gabel. Do you have a similar presentation? I would love your feedback on the best way to explain this to teachers.

Is it possible to teach generalized skills that may help teachers learn a variety of web 2.0 tools? What is the best way to organize different web 2.0 concepts for presentation to this audience?

I combined presentation and hands-on activities for this workshop. The following video captures the presentation component. The three activities are listed below and in the video. I would love your feedback as I refine this presentation.

Activity 1

Completed in a Moodle assignment object

In your practice, how do you find that kids learn best? What are the features of the learning environment that you attempt to create?

1. What interactions do you design (teacher-student, student-student, student-other, etc.)?

2. Who are the knowledge producers (“experts,” teachers, students)?

3. Who are the knowledge consumers (the audience for student work)?

4. List any technology tools that you think closely match your pedagogical theory of action.

Activity 2

Here are links to a number of Web 2.0 resources. Feel free to either browse these links on your own or follow the accompanying instructions.insideCatlinMoodle: view or create a courseDrupalEd: click Create General ContentGallery: view full-quality photos, upload your ownMiddle School podcast: do you have iTunes installed? Click this link: MS podcast feedAlumni community: search the directoryDokuWiki: edit a page. Yes, any page.ExternalCompare the following articles on Nicolas Sarkozy: NY Times | Wikipedia | Gale GroupDel.icio.us: search for a topic of interest to your classesYouTube: search for videos of use in your teachingBlogger: search for/start a blogWordPress: search for/start a blogEduspaces (Elgg): search for/start an education-related blogOpen Culture: Find a podcast on a topic relevant to your teachingFacebook: search for students or a schoolSecond Life: Can you figure out what this is?Wikipedia: Pull up a topic you know well. What do you think of the accuracy and completeness? Edit a page.

Activity 3

Completed in a Moodle discussion forum

By this point, you are hopefully optimistic about the use of some web 2.0 tool in your professional practice. Click Reply at the bottom of this message and write a short, informal summary of your thoughts from today’s faculty meeting. What tools have the greatest promise for your teaching or professional development? What match were you able to find between your teaching style and a particular technology? Did anything surprise you? Feel free to read and respond to the comments of others in this discussion forum.

It takes some effort to fully understand the technology curriculum of a school. Sure, it is easy to list the computer skills classes that we teach — the overt curriculum. However, these courses have become fewer in number over the years as we have moved to a more authentic model of technology instruction. We look for courses in which teachers have integrated technology into particular course units or activities. Computer technologies are being used as a tool to support course-specific objectives of various sorts. Some technology uses are easy to spot from a distance: digital photography class and computer science, for instance. Others take some investigation to find, for example computer use to support writing, research, or analysis. We also may find evidence of computer use in online communication systems that belong to the course, such as online assignments, forum discussions, or wiki projects.

The hardest uses to spot are informal or student-generated. Students learn from what happens during their school experience. Students sometime Google a discussion topic during class and then contribute new information to the group. During the evening, students IM and email each other regularly to collaborate on work. We should include such ad-hoc uses as we document our technology curriculum, as they are often the most authentic, useful examples of technology applications we have.

With the input of the Technology Advisory Group school committee, I am engaged in the process of collecting data on the technology curriculum at our school. I chose small-group interviews to collect this information. Given the above context in which technology use happens in school, it was essential to collect information as part of a discussion. I needed to be able to ask follow-up questions and let the conversation move toward the areas in which computer use was happening the most. In the lower school, this meant grade level teams (two teachers plus their teaching assistants). In the middle school, it was subject area teams. In the upper school, it is academic departments.

Interviews are extremely time-consuming, but they are leading to a higher quality of information collection than I have typically seen from surveys. I actually understand the data, because I collected it during a conversation in which I was able to ask for elaboration. Now, I have to transfer all of the data from note form to a structured database. The fields in this database reflect the kinds of questions I try to ask. Notably, as I moved into grades with more technology use, I was not able to get through all of the questions for each technology use. I sometimes had to sacrifice depth for breadth in those cases.

Title:
Use the course’s term or make up a short, descriptive title for this event.

Grade level(s):

Teacher(s):

Time required:

Location:
Where this event takes place.

Initiator:
Who introduces this event to the class.

Objectives:
What pedagogical and curricular objectives exist for this event?

Goals:
How does this event tie into the broad goals for the course?

Skills:
What technical skills does this event require of students?

Outcomes:
What work do the actors produce by the end of this event?

Path:
Editor shortcut keysAbout the HTML editor Help with this

Successes:
To what extent does the event accomplish the desired objectives?

Challenges:
What obstacles exist to the success of this event?

Evidence:
What facts exist to support the understood successes of this event?

Attachment:
Optional file attachment

Already, interesting patterns are emerging, such as the difficulty of teacher collaboration when individuals have access to different peripherals. This seems to be a smaller version of the problem we used to find when some teachers had access to computers and others didn’t. I have also found varying teacher approaches to resources such as Wikipedia — some teachers encourage its use, and others forbid it.

I will continue organizing and analyzing data through the summer and put together a presentation for the school division in the fall. I hope to be able to pull together a timeline showing curricular events in different technology skill areas from grades three to twelve.

We are taking a closer look at electronic portfolio design. We have an interesting situation at Catlin Gabel. The educational programs in our four divisions are autonomous and coordinated. Portfolio assessment is a standard feature of the instructional program in the beginning, lower, and middle schools. Teachers organize the annual rite in the beginning school and early years, and students increasingly take on the organizational and productive tasks of putting together the portfolio as they get older. After eighth grade, portfolio quickly drops off. The concept appears in the upper school mostly in the arts, when a few students assemble summative portfolios of arts work for college applications.

Electronic portfolios offer a new opportunity for PK-8 teachers to deepen their use of portfolio assessment and upper school teachers to give it a try for the first time. E-portfolios: Making it E-asy provides a tidy summary of three different portfolio types: developmental, reflective, and representational. Student portfolios may feature a combination of all three, but it is useful to consider the primacy of each type in one’s portfolio design. Our middle school faculty recently considered ways to make the reflective experience more authentic in the design of middle school portfolios.

Electronic portfolios are a new concept at Catlin Gabel. We have an opportunity to make several aspects of portfolio assessment easier. Electronic portfolios lend themselves to multi-year assessment, encouraging students and teachers to consider student work over a number of years. Electronic portfolios solve the problem of students taking their best work home, leaving the school without examples of their best work. Electronic portfolios facilitate the capture of different kinds of media, especially recordings of performances, such as in the arts. Electronic portfolios amplify the feedback process by allowing potentially anyone to comment on student work. Interestingly, the middle school teachers overwhelmingly prefer to keep the portfolios private between the student, the family, and teachers.

All along, I have been leaning toward Elgg to provide our electronic portfolio services. I want to host our electronic portfolio service, though there are a number of promising hosted services available (e.g., Digication). We are in the interesting position of potentially embarking on a 13-year electronic portfolio someday, which is a long enough time period to eclipse three generations of web software technology! We must maintain control over all of the data so that we may migrate it from one system to another when we decide to make a transition.

Elgg markets itself as an e-portfolio, blog, and podcast tool, but it has much less structure than “e-portfolio-only” software. The “Making it E-asy” article emphasizes that the tool should be as simple as possible, and I find that Elgg’s navigation confuses users often, especially when they move between community and individual resources. D’Arcy Norman spotlights Exe, which offers more e-portfolio-specific tools without overly constraining project structure. Of course, Drupal, the swiss army knife of online publishing tools, could be configured to provide the necessary portfolio tools and access permissions.

With six teachers from different divisions interested in piloting electronic portfolios, we will need to select a tool over the summer and train teachers and students to use it. This will be a modest pilot, in which we attempt to learn as much as we can about the strengths and challenges of electronic portfolios with our teachers and students.

Do you work at or know of a school that has successfully implemented summative electronic portfolios with students? I would love to know.