Sara Thompson's List: Teaching

• Activity One: Digital Storytelling

    

   The purpose of this activity is to give workshop participants a chance to experiment with various grade- and subject-appropriate digital tools that will enable their students to tell a story or relay ideas through multimedia.
• • Digital tool: Storybird (6)
   
  • Technology required: one laptop computer, desktop computer, or tablet per participant; Internet connection; projector connected to an Internet-enabled computer

• Activity Two: Digital Citizenship

    

   The purpose of this activity is to have participants familiarize themselves with various grade-appropriate topics in digital citizenship. Participants will choose a lesson or unit to teach in their classrooms.
• • Digital tool: Common Sense Media website (8)
   
  • Technology required: one Internet-enabled laptop or desktop computer per one or two participants; projector connected to Internet-enabled computer
• • Have participants register at Common Sense Media (9). All participants, even if working in a group, should create an account.
   
  • Have participants navigate to Common Sense Media's digital citizenship curriculum page (10) to view the curriculum.

• Activity Three: Checking for Understanding

    

   The purpose of this activity is to give workshop participants a chance to experiment with using mobile devices to get a snapshot of student understanding or as a conversation starter.
• • Digital tool: Socrative (11)
   
  • Technology required: one laptop computer, desktop computer, tablet, or mobile phone per participant; Internet connection; projector connected to Internet-enabled computer
• • Using a premade survey, have workshop participants respond, using their devices (phone, tablet, or computer) to respond to the question.
   
  • Explain the various kinds of questions that can be created using Socrative.
   
  • Ask participants how they see this tool being used in their classrooms.
   
  • Have participants create an account on Socrative (12) so they can write their first survey question.
   
  • Encourage participants to experiment with a variety of questions and settings.

• Activity Four: Creating Screencasts

    

   The purpose of this activity is to give participants an opportunity to create a screencast that they could use to explain tricky concepts to their students. This activity can also serve to give participants a start in creating videos in preparation for "flipping" their classrooms (13).
• • Digital tools: Geogebra (14) and Screencast-O-Matic (15)
   
  • Technology required: one Internet-enabled desktop computer, laptop computer, or netbook for each participant; projector connected to Internet-enabled computer
   
  • Tip: Have the software already installed either locally on the machine or as a Google Chrome extension (16).

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• As one of the principal researchers for the Citation Project, I can state briefly the research findings that are described in detail on our website (and that will be described in further detail in our forthcoming book, Struggling with Sources). Our analysis of 174 students’ research papers produced in the required writing course(s) at 16 colleges and universities indicates the following:
• • Research data strongly suggests that students work hard to avoid plagiarism and to implement the instruction they are receiving in their Writing courses.
   
  • Nearly 50% of students’ citations come from page 1 of their research sources. This suggests that when students have found a passage that can be usefully quoted or paraphrased, they quit reading. Only 25% of students’ citations come from page 4 or deeper into the source.
   
  • Approximately 50% of students’ citations are to quoted passages from the source. Another 44% are to attempted paraphrase. Thus students are, 94% of the time, working at only the sentence level within their sources; they are not talking about the source as a whole nor trying to summarize significant passages of it.
   
  • When students attempt paraphrase of 1-3 sentences, they succeed approximately 66% of the time. The rest of the time, their attempt results in patchwriting, borrowing too heavily from the original phrasing of the source.
   
  • The sources referenced in more than 50% of students’ citations are no longer than 5 pages. Many of these are overview reference sources such as WebMD, Wikipedia, and Encyclopedia.com.
• I have spent the past three years (Fall 2010, 2011, and 2012) developing a Writing 105 at Syracuse that teaches first-year writers how to engage with complex sources in substantive ways. Each semester’s endeavors have taught me more about how much instruction today’s students need.
• The following sequence of learning objectives aims to help first-semester college writers read sources critically, write about them in depth, and make connections among them
• Evaluating whether a source offers alternative interpretations and multiple viewpoints, and whether it treats these multiple viewpoints as errors to be refuted, or as material for critical thinking. Students quickly become skeptical of one-dimensional arguments.
• • Summarizing the main claims in the source.
   
  • Integrating summary into larger discussion of a source.
• Learning basic techniques of intrinsic source analysis: recognizing what sorts of evidence are being offered; what type of argument is being made; and what this suggests about the author’s sense of his or her audience.
• Learning basic techniques of extrinsic source analysis: identifying the author, publisher, and date of publication in search results from the open Web and library databases; discovering the author’s and publisher’s credentials and agenda; and appreciating the importance of date of publication for appreciating the context in which a source was published, thus avoiding the presentism that would have students read the source as if they, in their present moment, were the source’s only target audience.
• Seeing research not as a compilation of basic factual information but as the pursuit of tenable answers to complex questions; and seeing the presentation of research as an opportunity to engage and explain complexity, rather than to “clean it up” and present oversimplifications.
• At the beginning of Fall 2012, the students expressed real apprehension about what they were going to be taught. They were candid about the fact that the course would not present them with opportunities to use the writing and reading techniques familiar from high school instruction, and they worried that they would not succeed. Their end-of-semester evaluations, however, express appreciation for the course:

• Linked sources:

   

  Elder, Cristyn, Ehren Pflugfelder, and Elizabeth Angeli. “Handout: Comparing Policies.” Purdue Online Writing Lab 11 Nov. 2010. Web. 21 Feb. 2013. <http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/929/15/&gt;.

   

  “Phase I Data.” The Citation Project. n.d. Web. 22 Feb. 2013. <http://site.citationproject.net/?page_id=224&gt;.

   

  “Researchers.” The Citation Project. n.d. Web. 22 Feb. 2013. <http://site.citationproject.net/?page_id=11&gt;.

   

  Strauss, Valerie. “A Warning to College Profs from a High School Teacher.” Washington Post 9 Feb. 2013. Web. 21 Feb. 2013. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/09/a-warning-to-college-profs-from-a-high-school-teacher/&gt;.

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• He expects students to familiarize themselves with the information beforehand so that class time can be spent helping them understand what the information means.

   

  

  Emily Hanford

  Eric Mazur teaching his class at Harvard.

   

  To make sure his students are prepared, Mazur has set up a web-based monitoring system where everyone has to submit answers to questions about the reading prior to coming to class. The last question asks students to tell Mazur what confused them. He uses their answers to prepare a set of multiple-choice questions he uses during class.

• Next, he asks the students to turn to the person sitting next to them and talk about the question. The class typically erupts in a cacophony of voices, as it did that first time he told students to talk to each other because he couldn’t figure out what else to do.

   

  Once the students have discussed the question for a few minutes, Mazur instructs them to answer the question again.

   

  You can see a video of Mazur’s peer instruction approach in action here:

   

  http://youtu.be/lBYrKPoVFwg

   
• What Mazur has found over nearly 20 years of using peer instruction is that many more students choose the right answer after they have talked with their peers. And it’s not because they’re blindly following their neighbor’s lead. By the end of the semester, students have a deeper understanding of the fundamental concepts of physics than they did when Mazur was just lecturing. Students end up understanding nearly three times as much now, measured by a widely-used conceptual test.

• In addition to having a deeper grasp of concepts, students in Mazur’s classes are better at solving conventional physics problems, despite the fact that Mazur no longer spends class time at the board doing problems. He says this shows something that may seem obvious.

   

  “If you understand the material better, you do better on problem-solving,” Mazur says. “Even if there’s less of it done in class.”

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• The SmartBook (not to be confused with the ill-fated mobile devices with the same name that were promoted a few years ago at CES) works like this: All readers essentially see the same textbook as they read for the first five minutes. But as a reader answers review questions placed throughout the chapter, different passages become highlighted to point the reader to where he or she should focus attention.
• McGraw-Hill’s Mr. Kibby predicted that in 36 months, “what we will see is that we won’t be offering print textbooks” but “dynamic, adaptive, personalized learning environments” instead. The company plans to make the SmartBook product available for about 90 different course areas in the late spring.
• McGraw-Hill  Education has yet to set a price for the SmartBook, though the company says it will be in line with standard e-books. The company’s education software called LearnSmart currently costs $20 to 25 per semester.

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• Once again, I’ll turn to Wiggins and McTighe’s book Understanding by Design, from which I’ve borrowed the notion of enduring understanding. Wiggins and McTighe devote an entire chapter to “uncoverage,” which they contrast with the more familiar concept of coverage
• To highlight the pitfall of coverage as the default model of course design, Wiggins and McTighe recall a more “ominous” definition of the verb cover: “to protect or conceal, to hide from view” (106). They suggest that in the race to cover more ground—more history, more literature, more formulas, more physics—we can end up actually covering or hiding the underlying principles that make those subjects important in the first place.
• Uncoverage, in contrast, emphasizes revealing assumptions, facts, principles, and experiences that would otherwise remain obscured. Uncoverage is uncovering in order to learn something new. Uncoverage is digging down.
• Bring to the surface and bring to light the misunderstood, the subtle, the nonobvious, the problematic, the controversial, the obscure, the missing, and the lost. (102)
• Given the spatial metaphor of uncoverage as digging (unearthing) and coverage as moving across, it’s tempting to characterize uncoverage as “depth” and coverage as “breadth.” But Wiggins and McTighe caution that depth and breadth should not be pitted against each other.
• My colleague Mills Kelly passed along to me a great example of uncoverage "in the wild": Lendol Calder has illustrated how he uses uncoverage in a U.S. history survey course: Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey.

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• The collaborative magic of Google Docs did not really appeal to me until I was forced to use the app to collaboratively edit an article that I had submitted to Hybrid Pedagogy.
• As I worked to revise the document, Pete (virtually) worked alongside me, serving as both sounding-board and devil’s advocate and providing me with synchronous feedback on my revisions. It was an eye-opening experience, not just because I was unaware of many of the tools available in Google Docs (such as the revision history feature and the chat tool), but because of how powerfully the act of collaboratively revising a piece of writing affected me.
• So I began to consider how I could use this powerful tool that I had been poo-pooing for years as a weapon against the isolation, anxiety, and despair that I so often see plaguing my First-Year Composition students.
• ProfHacker has written quite a bit about the app and their post “GoogleDocs and Collaboration in the Classroom” is chock-full of links to various tips and useful ideas.
• I’ve always used journals in my literature and writing classes, whether they were reading journals, learning journals, or writers’ journals, because I believe that the most powerful thing we can teach our students is how to be more “meta.”
• These are the reasons why I became an early adopter of student blogging. By having students blog instead of keeping analog journals, I could monitor their entries (and when they were doing them) without inconvenience to the students or myself.
• So, this term I have asked my Basic English Skills students to keep a daily journal (which can be on anything they wish to write about and functions to help them build their writing muscles) in Google Docs, which they’ve only shared with me.
• But it gets really interesting when the teams come together in the week’s first class meeting. The lead editor creates a Google Doc, which they share with their team and me, and type in their focus question and a brief summary of how they plan to answer it. What follows is a 30-40 minute session in which the team discusses the question, the lead editor’s sources, and their plan for answering the question completely in writing in the Google Doc, observing a strict rule of silence (I adapted this activity from Lawrence Weinstein’s “Silent Dialogue” activity in Writing Doesn’t Have to Be Lonely).
• This is beneficial for the lead editor because it provides them with sounding-boards and devil’s advocates and by the time they leave class
• And it allows me to monitor the team’s work and provide my own feedback early in the writing process before the lead editor begins writing a draft that might be too ambitious in scope.

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• I’ve also found a good use for the Google Docs’ spreadsheet app in my First-Year Composition classes. Right now we’re reading and discussing Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.
• Since the book is rather dense, especially for freshman who have little to no experience reading informative texts other than grade-level textbooks, I decided to ask students to practice the skill (and art) of crowdsourcing by having them collaboratively annotate the book as they read it.
• In the second semester iteration of the FYC course, which focuses on literary analysis, I’ve had students work in groups to collaboratively annotate poems using the social bookmarking tool Diigo.
• Since my FYC classes are hybrid and students complete their annotations as part of their online work, I did not want to make the mistake of disassociating the annotations from our face-to-face time together and risk having students see the annotations as “busy work” or an add-on assignment
• • Wow. According to the screenshot, these students have already tried meditation?? Amazing! And what an interesting way to settle a class down / get focused.  Double wow. 
• After a debate regarding the effectiveness of meditation (triggered by one of the annotations above), students agreed that they would like to try starting our next class meeting off with a few moments of quiet in order to give everyone the opportunity to deal with physical and psychological noise that might prevent them from focusing on class;

• talk to them about what research was like when I was in college and how it really hasn’t changed that much because it’s still like an archaeological dig through multiple layers and sometimes in multiple locations (they just have more topsoil through which to dig); and diagram the source reliability pyramid to help them visualize the continuum of sources they have to choose from and where the internet and various types of domains fit in along that continuum.

   

  
• But I think that what the process of annotating the text together accomplishes is twofold. For one thing, it begins the process of teaching my freshman how to actively read for learning and retention.
• It turns out that many of my freshman never really had to read their textbooks in high school and, even if they did, were not encouraged or, in some instances, allowed to highlight or take notes on what they were reading. So, by requiring students to publicly annotate our text, I can encourage more active reading and teach students how to engage with it critically.
• Secondly, by using the annotations as a springboard for the class discussions of the text, it encourages students to share their thoughts and responses and it helps me to focus on the ideas within the text that students find most relevant or problematic. This is an especially important result since the text is so dense and covers more issues and ideas than we could possibly address in our limited time together.
• Since I teach my FYC students Graff and Birkenstein’s “They say/I say/So what?” approach to academic writing, I could easily have students engage in a formal or informal written conversation with their peers based on their annotations.

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• I use the open web badging system that developers on Stack Overflow and other systems use, where you award badges if and only when they are deserved--but you don't give negative feedback.
• But this feedback is more about what members are contributing to the success of their team.   So no negative feedback---except if you get back three sheets from your colleagues and find you have not been awarded a single badge in any category.  That is sobering---but also an opportunity to contribute.   
• This is a draft of the feedback badging system I'm going to try this semester.    It's hard to see the grid I'm using (unless you have a very large screen) so let me describe it.   On the left column are the individual names of the Project Team members.  Across the top, I've posted about a dozen categories (all editable by the students, see instructions below).   These are for both skills and collaborative contributions:  Web design, artistic desing, learning design, creativity, firestarter (ideas), Implementer (gets stuff done), Organizer, Finisher, Good spirit, Problem solver, Leader, OTHER, Overall Great Collaborative Partner.
• and then working all term to turn that 45-minute segment into the most creative, interactive public open online learning course imaginable. 
• Peer badging:   First collaboration exercise:   10 minutes:  Project team decides what goes in the twelve (or more or less) boxes.  Accept or edit these.  Add others deemed important to the success of the team.   20 minutes:  Reassemble as a class and each team presents their grid.   10 minutes: Reconvene in project teams and decide to edit or keep original grid.   [New criteria can be added throughout the term].   Post all the grids to the EVALUATION page of the website. 

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• new book by Paul Hanstedt on general education. He recommends that assignments for general education courses should achieve at least three things: 1) contain evidence that students are learning what we want them to be learning, 2) engage students in deep, long lasting learning, and 3) generate student work that doesn’t make us cry when we grade them. (p. 78)
• After making some changes, students are still writing three papers, but the assignments are very different. Now in the first paper, students analyze a piece of art that they like using the formal elements to explain their emotional response to it. They write this paper to a classmate as a way of introducing themselves. In the second paper, they use a quotation from the readings to justify the necessity of abstract art in contemporary society. They write this paper to a skeptical parent. For the third paper, students construct an argument justifying the use of university funds for the purchase of art, explaining the role they think art should play in academia. This final paper is addressed to the university president.

• It turns out many of us here at ProfHacker use blogs in the classroom. That explains why we’ve got posts on creating a printable syllabus from your blog (rather than vice versa), evaluating student blogs, re-using course blogs, moving your blog, and better blogging assignments. Blogs are great, and they help you get your work done, in an online space that approximates the community of a classroom.
• What if you’d like to run a blog, a discussion forum, and a wiki for your students to use? Or what if that community that you want to reach out to is much, much larger than a classroom? In that case, I’d recommend you check out Commons in a Box (CBOX).
• In short, it’s a plugin for WordPress (we’re fans of that around here) that helps you, a group you work with, or an institution build a space for working with one another.
• Setting up a CBOX website is five-steps simple and clearly explained with the site’s installation guide. I was able to go through the whole process in under ten minutes’ time, where most of that was waiting for my web host (don’t miss our Website Hosting 101 guide) to set up a new database.
• I also envision using a site not for a single class, but as a community for all of my classes. There’s something about the community of an institution, where you overlap your learning and experiences with that of others, and I’m wondering how I can create that online.
• I’m also planning to take some cues from other institutions that are using CBOX. You can see some of them at the CBOX Showcase. One of them, you might notice is the MLA Commons, which will be launched at next month’s MLA Convention.

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• This post is part two of a fourteen part series, Teaching Strategies, that is based on a series of education workshops.
• In my library’s workshops, participants indicated a high priority for learning more about active learning and group work, so instead of a lecture (or even a facilitated discussion), I used group work to get to the content.
• Divide up into groups and pick models to investigate
   With this background, each participant then selected the topic most interesting to them and moved to that topic’s designated corner to investigate it. I used different ones in different iterations of this workshop, and some aren’t strictly ID models, but are related. Here is a representative sample: ADDIE, Fink’s Significant Learning Experiences, Design, and System Thinking.
• I just wanted the group to see how much we had internalized them and to see the areas that are perhaps overlooked in each of our individualized teaching personalities.
• But there are other places that make sense, too. If your library has a media lab and any media services, perhaps development is a good place to target involvement. I know of a few libraries with experimental classroom space. Those can easily target implementation. If you know when and how evaluation is taking place, you can have conversations with faculty about what information/media/digital/etc literacy issues are showing up in assignments and create a plan to target them the next time around.

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