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Redesigning Learning Tasks: Part 3

My role at school is all about trying to helping teachers leverage technology to come up with more interesting and engaging ways to help their students learn.  Some of our older students are in laptop programs which gives them fulltime 1:1 access to their own computer but many still do not, especially in the junior years. Which is a bit of a shame since there is, I think, so much scope in the younger grades to use technology in interesting ways that support the curriculum.  Unfortunately, with the way things are structured at the moment, our primary kids get scheduled into a single one hour lesson in the computer lab each week.  That’s not really my preferred option, as it’s hard to get technology integration working in an ongoing, embedded way when it involves trotting off to the computer room once a week.

Ironically, all our primary classrooms do actually have a small pod of four desktop machines in them, but unfortunately I don’t really see them getting used in any consistent, meaningful way.  Technology integration is still, by and large, reliant on that one hour a week of “computer time” in the lab.  However, whether I like it or not, it is what it is, and until the system changes it’s a limitation I have to work with.

Ludus - our school Blog ServerOur Year 4 students are doing a unit of work on Australia at the moment, so I started the term by having a planning session with the Year 4 teachers to look at how we might weave ICT into the unit.  A couple of years ago, the ICT component was – you guessed it – making a PowerPoint about Australia, but thankfully we’ve tried a some new approaches over the last few years. For the past two years we’ve been using blogs to get the kids writing about Australia, in fact I think we’ve come up with some good ideas for structuring the writing process when blogging.  We started off using Edublogs, but after having a particularly frustrating series of outages, the school decided to set up our own WordPress MU server and gave every student their own blog on that system. It took a bit of fiddling to get the feeds on the front page working the way we wanted, but that internal WPMU site worked quite well for us.  Because we run Moodle, we recently installed Mahara as well, which also provides blogs for students and so I guess we’re a bit spoiled for choice at the moment when in comes to school blogging.

Although the blogs had worked quite well for us in the past, for the unit of work on Australia the Year 4 teachers felt that they wanted to try something a bit different, so we brainstormed some ideas and came up with an idea that I think has worked very well.

For me, ICT integration becomes far more interesting when it involves lots of little skills used in a lot of different ways that student have to piece together into a finished product.  I like it that way because it give them a broader understanding of the way that technology tools fit together, and I think helps their understanding of how technology can assist them cross over into many areas.  I also like the idea of providing a structure, a scaffold, so that even our struggling students have a clear framework to work within.  However, surrounding that scaffold should be flexibility, options, choices, and a way for more able students to scale their work up and allow for that important differentiation.

What we came up with was a project called 25 Moods of Australia.  We brainstormed a collection of words (it started as 25 words, but grew to 50) that described various moods – haunting, hostile, creepy, effervescent, etc. Using a free wiki (where every student and teacher was given their own login) we published a list of all the words.  Working in pairs, the students then adopted a word from that list. There are 50 students in the two Year 4 classes, so working in pairs required 25 words.  The reason we came up with 50 was to give them a choice of what word they wanted to select, and to provide some extra words in case any students wanted to do a second one.

Armed with their chosen words, each student pair started by creating a new blank page on the wiki for that word. Then they had to find a clear, concise definition for the word (so that they understood it) and they then added that definition to the wiki page.  They used both regular paper dictionaries as well as online dictionaries. It was useful to compare the two.

The next job was to use Flickr to find a photograph taken somewhere in Australia that they felt captured the meaning of that word.  This was quite tricky… the Flickr search engine is not as sophisticated as Google’s and so to find a photo that both described their word and was taken in Australia required some thinking.  It involved looking carefully at the images, at the tags, at the captions, and using a bit of detective thinking to find photographs that met all the criteria.  To make it even trickier, we had a talk about copyright and the use of other people’s photographs without permission, which led to an interesting discussion about Creative Commons.  The students picked up on this idea very easily, and now know how to use the Advanced Search feature in Flickr to find photographs that are free of traditional copyright restrictions.  (I was feeling very encouraged to hear from their teachers that they are also now being much more mindful of copyright in other areas of their school work, and they’ve been observed looking for Creative Commons images for other projects as well! I consider that a major win!)

Once they found an image they like, they then used the All Sizes selector in Flickr to find the 500 pixel, medium-sized version of the photo and they copy it to their desktop. They also copy the URL of where they got the image so it can by pasted into the photo caption as an attribution, required by all CC licenses.  Once the photo is copied to their computer, they then upload it into the wiki (we used Wikispaces) and insert it into their page.

The next job is to go to Google Maps and find the location of where that photograph was taken on the map. This is also tricky, since not every photo makes this clear.  Some photos are geotagged with the exact location of where they were taken, but many are not.  We talked about geolocation.  We learnt to look at the tags, the keywords, the captions, the other photos in the Flickrstream, and to look for clues that might give us an idea about where the photo was taken.  And sometimes, when their were no clues, we had to make educated guesses about where the photo could have been taken.  Once we decided on a location – either a definite location based on real clues, or an imagined location based on common sense, the students found that place in Australia on the map.

Using the Link option, they then generated the embed code for the map, copied it, went back to the wiki and created a widget. They pasted the embed code into the widget and saved the page to reveal the embedded Google Map of their best estimate for the location of the photograph.

The last step is for the students to then write a couple of paragraphs talking about their photograph and why they think it represents their focus word. This can be quite a challenge, as they have to think very carefully about how exactly they will justify their selection, describing the photo and linking it back to the key ideas in the definition of their word. They also need to write about the map location and explain how they knew (or guessed) that the photo was taken in that place.

As you can see, it’s a task that contains a LOT of small pieces.  It contains lot of ICT skills and techniques and understandings in a number of areas. It is a task of small pieces loosely joined.  It’s also not a task that can be plagiarised.  It’s not a task where there is a “right answer”, as any answer could be right if it was justified well enough.

Remind yourself, these kids are 9 and 10 years old. And they have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of moving information around, remixing, repurposing and restructuring it in fairly sophisticated ways.  They quickly pick up the ideas of bringing all the pieces together to make something new. I think they are using some reasonably advanced information skills, as they learn to search, evaluate, synthesize and create with the information they find, and then add value to that information by interpreting and summarising and justifying it.  In short, I’ve been really impressed with what they can do. And even more impressed with what they can’t do, but can learn to do.

You can visit the wiki at http://ausmoods.wikispaces.com, although at the time of writing it is still a work in progress.  The final stage, when everything is complete, will be for them to use the discussion tabs on the individual pages to leave comments and feedback for each other.

I think it’s been a really good task, with plenty of really worthwhile ICT skills built in, as well as an integrated use of literacy, writing, geography, thinking and reasoning, collaboration, and so on.

If only we had more than an hour a week to do this stuff…

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Redesigning Learning Tasks: Part 2

Our Year 2 classes do a project each year called Great Inventions.  The students learn about various inventions and how they have changed over time, and over the past few years they have demonstrated that learning by producing a PowerPoint file that summarises the history of these inventions.

As you may have read in my previous post, two of my pet hate phrases are “do research” and “make a PowerPoint”.  Whenever I see these two phrases in the same sentence I can almost guarantee that we’re looking at a fairly low level task that focuses more on recall and summary of facts than it does on authentic learning.  I’m also wary of any time I see students “making a PowerPoint” that simply gets handed into the teacher for marking, rather than being used as a presentation platform since it is usually a sign that it’s being used as a glorified note taking tool; a place to write text complete with the distractions of bright colours and annoying graphics.  Don’t get me wrong… It’s not that I’m against the use of PowerPoint as such, but unless you use it for what it’s designed to do – namely to providing a set of effective visuals that support a speaker as they present persuasive ideas – then I think it’s use is probably leading us down the wrong path.

In previous years, the PowerPoints made by the students displayed some good computer skills, but I had the feeling that the technology was there as an add-on rather than an integral tool for completing the task.  The teachers also felt that the students had trouble collecting and synthesising information from the web as the level of most information found online was simply too difficult for the students to deal with.  I also pointed out that taking information from the web and simply rewording it onto a PowerPoint slide was not a big benefit to the students and I questioned the value of such a task.

After a bit of group brainstorming we made a few subtle but important changes to what we asked the students to do.  Firstly, recognising that the language on most webpages were too difficult for kids of this age, we started a wikispaces wiki and created our own pages of information in language pitched at the right level for Year 2.  It was a bit of extra work to create these summaries and took us an hour or so to do, but it meant we now had a permanent set of pages that were exactly what we needed.  The use of a wiki was relatively new to the teachers but they picked it up very quickly, adding text and images. I had my laptop open and I was creating pages and helping cleanup pages if necessary, as the teachers worked on the IWB to brainstorm together what content needed to go on them.  It was actually quite an energizing experience, and in that planning session of an hour or so I think we all enjoyed the buzz of coming up with a better idea and taking immediate action to make it happen.

The nature of the PowerPoint that the students were being asked to create got an overhaul too.  Rather than just submit the PowerPoint file, I convinced the teachers to reallocate their class time to allow the students to get up in front of their peers and actually present their finished work.  I also suggested that we needed to somehow introduce an opportunity for the kids to create and invent, and to use their imagination rather than just retell facts that others have already provided.  To this end we decided to scaffold the PowerPoint into three slides only (I suppose four if you count the title slide).  Each child’s presentation was about a particular invention, and slide one would be about the past history of that invention, slide two about its present and slide three about its future.  We also agreed that the students would only be allowed to use pictures on the slides, no words.

So, slides one and two would tell the story of the invention’s past and present, and this information would come initially from the students looking at the summaries created by the teachers. Naturally, because the teachers had vetted those summaries for both content and language, it was reasonable to expect that the students would be able to identify and deal with the information appropriately. The visuals for these slides would come from images the students found online that captured the past and present of the various inventions.  All the other information about the inventions would have to be delivered verbally by the student when they stood up to give their presentation, since there were to be no words (and therefore no slabs of text and no bullet points!) on the slides themselves.

But slide three was about the future, which clearly hasn’t happened yet. For this, we would ask the students to create a drawing of what they thought their invention might look like in the future. They were free to be as imaginative and creative as they liked (and it was amazing what they came up with!)  Their drawings were scanned or photographed and added as the picture on slide three.

Remember, we are talking about 7 year olds here.  I think what we did to improve this task was to effectively scaffold it, stripping it down into the really important components and providing a guide for the students to work with, while giving them opportunities for creative, imaginative thought as well as researching existing knowledge.  We simplified the technology requirements and realigned the task around the content we wanted them to learn.  The technology became the environment for what they produced, and not the focus for it.  I was quite please with what we did.

I then suggested that, if the students were going to get up in front of the class and present their work, it would be a shame to not share their presentations with a wider audience. To this end, I suggested that we use UStream to create a live broadcast to the web so that parents and relatives could watch the children present live over the Internet.  The Year 2 teachers were really receptive and excited about this idea.  I told them I’d do a bit of testing for them to make sure UStream would work smoothly through our network, and I’d investigate how we could control the broadcast and perhaps just limit it to parents and invited viewers.

That’s often the other big part of my job, to not only come up with ideas that push the teachers’ use of technology, but to do the leg work to make sure the technical aspects of those ideas are actually feasible. After a few days of trying various configurations and running a few live tests, it was clear that it was very feasible and would in fact work really well.  I then worked with the Year 2 teachers to draft up a letter to parents explaining what we were doing, when we would be streaming and the passwords required to watch it. (Let me know if you’d like me to email you a copy of that letter)

The finished results were really very pleasing.  The work that the students did to create their presentations was very good (and importantly, we were now referring to what they were doing as “presentations”, and not “PowerPoints”… I thought this was a great sign to indicate that the focus was off the technology, and instead was on what the technology was enabling)

The final live broadcasts, which ran over several days, were a lot of fun!  I rigged up my Macbook Pro so the webcam was broadcasting the video, and we hooked up a very nice Rode Podcaster mic on a stand in front of the students so the audio was actually pretty good too. Although the actual media stream was quite good, we unfortunately had trouble getting UStream’s backchannel chat to work through our proxy.  But UStream does at least tell you how many people are watching at any given moment, and after each presentation the kids would all turn around and ask “How many people are watching now?!”  There’s nothing quite like an audience to spur kids’ enthusiasm and willingness to do their very best!  We did the presentations in a number of sessions over the course of the week, and I eventually started tweeting out to my PLN before we started broadcasting… this added to the parent watchers and raised the audience numbers considerably, and it also provided a sort of backchannel as well. At one point, we had more almost 50 people watching the stream… that was more than double the number of people in the actual classroom! The kids were really excited by it all, and as we got encouraging tweets back from schools in other parts of the world, the raised level of commitment to doing a good job with their presentations was a joy to watch (some even insisted on doing theirs a second time because they felt they could do better!)

The Year 2 teachers were really quite amazed at how it all came together, and especially to think that there were more people watching from outside their classroom than there were inside the classroom!  We also had an unexpected visit from the principal, who had heard about the project and dropped in to watch a few of the presentations, It was really cool to have him there, sitting on the floor being king of the kids.  Overall, I have to say it was a much better experience than simply submitting a Powerpoint file to the teacher for marking!

From my perspective, I was really pleased with what we’d done.  We took a task that I thought was a little mundane, a little dull, and quite frankly lacking in higher order thinking, and with a few simple tweaks we redesigned it into something that everyone felt was a much better, richer, authentic and more meaningful experience. I felt we shifted the use of technology away from being an end in itself, to being an enabler of richer learning.  I thought the quality of the presentations was really good. Again, was it all perfect?  No, there are things that we can improve next time, but that’s what it’s all about… learning and getting better.

Here’s a video of one of the presentations…

People sometimes ask me whether all this effort to integrate technology into our classrooms is worth it, and whether it really makes any difference.  To answer that, let me share part of an email I received from one of the Year 2 parents the next day…

“It was such an enjoyable experience for my husband and I to be able to watch our daughter in action from the comfort of our office and home respectively. Extended family members logged on later that evening to view  the recorded event, which sent a ripple of excitement through the family.  Our daughter was thrilled.

Upon reflection, it’s been made apparent to me that our daughter is not just being taught basic skills, but that talking and listening, reading and writing can have a purpose and an audience far greater than their teachers and peers. What an amazing learning experience.  How wonderful it was for mothers and fathers to at last be the fly-on-the-wall in our daughter’s classroom and to see the girls use technology so innately and with such confidence.”

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Redesigning Learning Tasks: Part 1

In these next few posts, I’m going to try and describe some of the projects we’ve been doing at school lately.  My role at PLC Sydney is ICT Integrator, and I very much see it as a role where I support, advise and consult with our classroom teachers about ways to enrich their lessons with technology. It’s a hard line to walk sometimes, since it often forces me to cross that line between giving advice on how to use the technology and giving advice on how to teach. The nature of digital technology makes it a really good fit with the general principles of quality teaching practice… and sometimes that fit is so good that I find it difficult to suggest ways to use technology without also suggesting that the underlying pedagogy should shift to match it.  Fortunately, I work in a school where most of our teaching staff are willing to take such suggestions on board, be it simply just regarding the use of technology, or to actually shift they way they approach the job of teaching.

Our Year 9 Geography class work on a project each year about natural hazards (bushfires, floods, earthquakes, etc). Over the last few years the students have been given a task that requires them to do “research” on one of these phenomena and “create a PowerPoint” about it.  I tend to put those terms into quote marks because I find that “research tasks” presented “in Powerpoint” are usually just a formal excuse to get kids to plagiarise (especially when they just hand the PowerPoint file in… they don’t actually present it to the class). When I looked at the task as it stood I was struck by the fact that most of the questions being asked could easily be answered by simply going to Wikipedia and doing a cut and paste.

I tend to use Blooms Taxonomy as a means of getting a quick overview of the quality of the tasks we ask our students to do.  It’s not a perfect tool, but it’s nice and easy to apply and it gives a pretty good insight into the degree of higher level thinking that might be involved in a given task.  When I looked at the existing task I got the impression that it was made up of fairly low level recall skills.

As an ICT Integrator, one of the questions I always try to start with is “What can we get the students to actually MAKE?” If  the word “create” is at the top of the Blooms pyramid, then I reckon that starting with that question is a good way to begin pushing upwards into higher levels of thinking, since making things, by definition, is creating.  The term “doing research”, unless it is followed up with actually making something based on that research, rarely takes students much beyond simple cut and paste thinking.  To be fair, the other part of the task did involve creating in the sense that the students were “making a PowerPoint”, but it was really just a PowerPoint summary the “research”.  Is it any wonder our students tend to plagiarise when we give them tasks like this?

So when I got a request, as the ICT Integrator, to simply visit these classes to remind the kids “how to make a PowerPoint” I felt a little underwhelmed, and I tactfully tried to suggest that perhaps we needed to rethink what we were asking the kids to do, and to come up with something a little more challenging. That’s what I mean when I say I often have to cross the line between just offering ICT support to teachers versus helping them rethink their actual pedagogy.

Anyway, we did end up redesigning the task, and I think that in the end everyone agreed it was a better, more interesting task that made good use of ICT while also covering all the necessary learning outcomes.  The students were put into groups of three and their task was to produce a 3-5 minute audio news report about a natural hazard of their choice. (It wasn’t technically a podcast, since we didn’t wrap it in an RSS subscription enclosure, but the recording part was the same general idea as a podcast.)

I suggested that the three students should take on three different roles, each focusing on a different aspect of the natural disaster.  The first role was the newsreader, and her job was to announce and describe the key facts about the disaster – what it was, where it happened, and some information about the causes for it… the newsreader essentially set the scene and gave the background about this particular disaster.  The second role was that of on-the-scene reporter, and this person was responsible for giving the detailed information about the disaster – who was involved, describing what the scene looked like, how it was being handled by emergency crews and so on.  The reporter then conducted an interview with the student playing the third role, that of a victim.  The victim’s job was to talk about the human impact of the disaster, and how people were affected. They were to give an insight into the human cost of natural disasters.  Together, these three roles would cover all the important aspects of natural disasters.  I think it’s important to recognise that all of these aspects are outlined in the syllabus for this unit, and so doing it this way was not just a novelty but a way for students actually engage in the prescribed content in a more interesting, more engaging way.

Of course, in order to play these roles the students needed to write a script.  For this, we used GoogleDocs and I taught the students how to write collaboratively using the shared writing tools in GoogleDocs.  I should point out that our Year 9 and 10 students are now 1:1 and every student has their own laptop.  This is a fairly new thing for our school as the 1:1 program just started this year, so I wanted to ensure we build authentic technology skills into these tasks.  Most of the students had never used GoogleDocs before and had never seen the collaborative, shared writing function. I spent a lesson with each class teaching them how to share a document and work on it together, something that they picked up very quickly. That’s the thing about our alleged “Digital Natives”… they actually don’t know a lot of this stuff, but once shown, they tend to pick it up pretty quickly.  Once they got the hang of how it worked, they used GoogleDocs as a shared writing space to work on a script together.  It worked really well and the students worked in groups of three, all collaborating on the same document, adding, editing and creating together.  I think they found it a very valuable tool.

I also spent some time teaching the students the basics of recording sound using Audacity. Once they were shown the core skills of recording a track, then overlaying it with other tracks, music and sound effects, they were ready to get on with producing their radio news reports.  Again, it was a skill that most of them had never seen or used before, but after a half hour of training they were all quite proficient at it.

Of course, behind all of this the students DID have to do considerable research.  They needed to find out how bushfires spread, what causes cyclones, where droughts are most likely and so on.  It’s not that they don’t need to do research – they certainly do. It’s just that once they did the research the task required them to actually use that information to produce something else.  The focus was not on the research, but what could be done with the research. Importantly, they were given some room to be creative, admittedly within a reasonably scaffolded framework, but there was still room to be creative… it wasn’t all about just regurgitating the facts they had researched.  They needed to take those facts and understand, manipulate and create with them. They were given an opportunity to engage with a range of new technology tools they’d never used before, and ones that will hopefully be of use to them in the future. They were being asked to use the media production capabilities of their shiny new laptops to collaborate and make something original, and not just use it as a glorified typewriter.

As we designed the task, I also made sure it offered the teachers a chance to learn new skills as well. We are really pushing the use of Moodle at the moment, and although most of our teachers are very good at posting resources like Word and PDF documents, the activities part of Moodle is still quite underused. I insisted that the final products of the students – namely a text document with the script and an MP3 file with the finished recording – be submitted as an Assignment in Moodle.  There was initially some resistance to this idea, but it forced the teachers to engage with the assignment submission workflow that Moodle offers and exposed them to a number of Moodle features they were not aware of, like the gradebook and the ability to manage student results electronically.

Overall, I have to say the task was a great success.  The students seemed to really enjoy the opportunity to work in groups, to make good use of their laptops, to be able to inject a bit of their own personality into the final product.  They told me that they liked the opportunity to be a bit more creative and not just hand in yet another boring PowerPoint file or essay.  The teachers told me they were impressed with just how engaged the kids were during the task, and that the quality of the finished products was generally quite high.

I’ll put some more posts up in the next few days about some other projects we are working on at school, but at the heart of them I hope there is a common theme.  That is, I hope we are getting better at rethinking what we ask our students to produce so they can show us not only what they know, but what they can do with what they know.  I’d like to think that we’re working harder to build creativity, choice, authenticity, collaboration and engagement into what we ask of them.  I’m pleased to see their laptops being used in ways that leverage the things that digital technology can do, and not to just treat them as a fancy way to take class notes.

Can this task be improved in the future?  Sure, but it was a nice step up from the previous task. I’d like to think that the ICT in this case was there as the appropriate tool for supporting a richer learning task, and not just there for the sake of using computers.

Below is a playable sample from one of the groups.  I don’t know if it was the best one, since I haven’t actually had a chance to listen to them all, but I picked it more or less and random and thought it was pretty good.  I liked the way they used sound effects and mashups recorded from the TV – it shows that they made a special effort.  And I like the creative (and slightly humorous) way they introduce the story at the start of their bulletin.