This fall I wrote about some sound practices for developing rubrics that assess students’ 21st century capacities and highlighted a new kind of assessment rubric that allows teachers to assess student work both formatively and summatively–the single-point rubric. Check out this article by Jennifer Gonzalez on her Cult of Pedagogy blog, where she lays out the differences between holistic, analytic, and single-point rubrics and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each. Which one you use, or if you decide to go with a checklist instead, really depends on your students’ needs and what the assessment calls for, but I strongly encourage you to consider single-point rubrics. As you’ll see from the article above, it really lends itself to formative feedback and functions really well as a student reflection tool.
Not happy with a rubric you’re currently using? Let me know and I will gladly meet with you and look at ways to revise its 21st century capacities criteria and make it more useful for you and your students. Too busy to meet? Send me your rubric via Google Drive and we can collaborate on it that way.
Struggling with turning analytic rubric scores into grades? You have to check out Roobrix. It’s a great tool that uses a mathematical algorithm to guarantee your grade book scores are fair.
When people dismiss the notion of 21st century capacities as something new and specific to our current 15-year-old adolescent century (funny how these turbulent times reflect the turbulence of adolescence), they usually argue that there’s nothing new about them at all, saying that societies have always relied on people who show self-determination, know how to think critically and creatively, and can communicate effectively. While that much is true, to me, what’s different is our current context–the world as it is now vs. how it was in the past. We now live in a world where we have constant access to information that is always in flux–information that needs to be found, organized, analyzed, evaluated, synthesized and used ethically in order to solve problems–problems that have gotten bigger as the world has gotten smaller. As the context has changed, so have our needs. We need thinkers and problem-solvers who know how to ask important questions that lead to new understandings and solutions.
The cynic in me recognizes Google’s masterful use of the plain folk and emotional appeal persuasion techniques in the video below, and I get that not all of our students are destined to be world-shaping inventors. But I love how the video underscores the need for us to get kids to fall in love with asking questions and solving problems.
This all starts with teaching kids how to ask the right questions. They can be big, societal questions related to environmental or economic sustainability, or smaller ones like, How did that author go about crafting such a powerful ending? or Which practice exercises will improve my arpeggios on the guitar? Or, it can be something simple rooted in our emotional lives, like, How can I be more generous in spirit this holiday season? The key is getting our students to ask the kind of questions that will lead to interesting findings.
I enjoy modeling inquiry with students and rely on these resources from The Right Question Institute as my guide. I’d love to come to your classes to help build your students’ capacity to identify problems and develop significant question for investigation. Let me know if you’d like to plan something for the New Year. Until then, enjoy the holidays.
A couple weeks ago, while delivering a professional development workshop on Assessing the 21st Century Capacities, some questions were raised about the scoring of analytic rubrics. Developing criteria for rubrics that address content standards as well as capacity standards in kid-friendly language can be really tough, but assigning point values and translating these point values into actual grades can be even tougher.
For the first challenge, the district has developed rubrics for each of our 21st century capacities that are generic enough to address K-12 curricula across content areas. The trick is to tailor the language of these generic rubrics to our specific assessments and blend content standards with capacity standards. While most of you probably prefer to spend your non-instructional time planning engaging lessons and designing authentic assessments over writing rubrics for these assessments, I actually enjoy the challenge of writing analytic rubrics and developing checklists that help kids understand the criteria and help teachers measure growth. So let me know if you’d like me to take a stab at developing or revising one of your PBA rubrics in a way that addresses content and capacities. My door is always open.
As for the second challenge–assigning point values and translating them into actual grades–let’s turn to Jennifer Gonzalez and a post she wrote for her excellent Cult of Pedagogy blog. In it she describes the practice of using a single-point analytic rubric–formatively to give students feedback throughout the learning process, and summatively to assign grades. I love this approach for a number of reasons: the single-point rubric takes a fraction of the time to write, it is a great reflection tool for students, AND it’s ideal for assessing student growth in the capacities. Here’s an example of a single-point rubric Ms Gonzalez uses in her post for assessing a journalistic piece of writing with a narrative bent, which I’ve modified down below by more explicitly measuring student growth in the capacity of Synthesis. For the actual scoring process you’ll have to read the blog post.
Of course, like anything related to student grades, there are some potential downsides–with this approach subjectivity and time come to mind. But check out the article and let me know what you think in the comments.
When we assist students in planning a project or outlining a piece of writing, it becomes apparent pretty fast that what works for some doesn’t work for others. That’s partly why we sometimes hear groans from our students when we require a traditional outline for a project. As adults, we understand the importance of planning, or pre-writing. We know that strategic planning is an essential skill that falls under our Self-Direction capacity. But our students sometimes prefer to “wing it” and just dive right in.
Some of you may have explored alternatives to outlining that suit a variety of learning needs, like concept or mind mapping software Kidspiration or its adult counterpart, Inspiration. But this software can be expensive and too much to manage. I’ve recently been exploring a web-based mind mapping tool called Lucidchart that integrates really nicely with Google Drive and requires zero setup or management. A mind map is a type of graphic organizer that is a creative and logical way to map out one’s ideas, whether it’s for a writing project for school, to flesh out a business plan, or to plan a unit of study for your students. It’s essentially an outline that incorporates the way our brains think into its own structure. You can learn more about why mind mapping is such an effective strategy from its supposed inventor, Tony Buzan, here. Check out the video below to see how you and your students can get started with Lucidchart in Google Drive. For step-by-step instructions, go here.
Meet Generation Z. They are your current students (born in the mid-90s). While I don’t like to generalize, compared to previous generations, they are pretty impressive in terms of their willingness to challenge the status quo. If the author of this article‘s observations are accurate, many are driven by having a purpose and want to make their mark on the world. But we don’t need to take Ms. Levit’s word for it. Just look at what a group of our own 4th graders in Michael Ginsburg’s class hope to accomplish–to find a way to restore sight to the visually impaired through contact lenses that connect directly to the optic nerve with nanotechnology. And now, they are one of six teams in the country left vying for the NSTA/Toshiba Exploravision Awards national championship.
If the Gen Z profile in the article linked at the top of this post is accurate, Gen Zers are counting on us to deliver learning experiences that equip them with the skills they’ll need to contribute to society, engage in complex global issues, and make ethical, responsible decisions while they persevere when tackling tough problems. In other words, while fostering content skills, we may need to focus more on these.
As the name indicates, every post on this blog is about leveraging technology for learning. But I’ve been focusing this current series of posts on the SAMR model as a tool for determining how we leverage technology, and how we can use it to transform student learning. For this post, the last in this series, I’d like to focus on how mobile devices have the potential to change the way we learn.
When I think about the biggest impact my smartphone has had on my life, it’s not the ability to capture any of life’s moments with a good camera that’s always with me. That’s pretty high on the list, but it’s really the way my phone allows me to satisfy my curiosity and provide me with the information I need, on demand, at any given moment (provided I’m not in a “dead zone”). I’ve heard some refer to smartphones as “wonder-killers” and I appreciate that perspective…a lot of rich conversations revolve around trying to remember the details of our collective past, or wondering and guessing at interesting questions that arise. If overused to satisfy our daily wonderings, especially in social settings, don’t we run the risk of losing something special and unique to our humanity and move one step closer to The Singularity?
While I try to keep this question in the back of my mind while using technology, I prefer to view my smartphone as a curiosity-statisfier, rather than a wonder-killer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked something up on my phone to help me solve a problem, satisfy a curiosity, or simply learn something new. Smartphone technology and mobile apps have gotten so good, that they’ve become excellent research tools and have great potential to fuel inquiry-based learning. Thanks to bigger screens and faster Internet speeds (both WiFi and cellular), it’s becoming harder to brush smartphones and tablets off as research tools with the argument that you really need a much bigger screen and a keyboard to do any serious research.
This article about how BYOD programs can fuel inquiry-based learning offers some good insights in terms of how to make smartphones and tablets work as learning and research tools. As Tim Clark, coordinator of instructional technology for Forsyth County Schools in Georgia, notes: “Kids already know how to use their devices, but they don’t know how to learn with their devices,” suggesting that the teacher’s role is to help them discover how a device that was previously used only for texting, gaming, and social networking can actually be a powerful learning tool. Of course, this means that their teachers need to get comfortable using their mobile devices as research tools along with information gathering apps like Diigo (which I explained in Part 3 of this series) and Google Drive. Like anything else, using mobile devices and new apps takes practice, and that, of course, takes time. None of us have enough of it, but when you find it, let me know and I’ll be happy to help you get more comfortable using mobile devices in your classroom in transformative ways, whether it be during a planning period, PLC meeting, or after school.
Aside from time, what are some other hurdles keeping you from embracing regular use of mobile devices in your classroom? Are your students too young to handle the responsibility of bringing their own devices to school? Until high-quality tablets cost under $100, that hurdle may be too high to overcome for elementary teachers. Is it an equity issue…worried about the haves and the have-nots? That’s a valid concern to which we should all be sensitive. But with our growing supply of Chromebooks and laptops, shouldn’t we start considering putting those devices into a lending pool at the middle and high schools, rather than dedicate them all to carts that teachers check out for the whole class? This way students can use a Chromebook for the day if they can’t or don’t want to bring their tablet, smartphone, or personal laptop to school. Whatever the obstacle, leave a comment below so we can figure out how to overcome them. Or, if you have a mobile learning success story, please share that as well. Thanks for reading!
POST-SCRIPT…
While I highly recommend the article I linked at the top of the fourth paragraph, it comes up short in terms of explaining how to get started with the inquiry process, with or without mobile devices. No one has mastered this process better than the fine folks over at The Right Question Institute. Their website offers some great resources that will help you get your students asking their own meaningful questions for deep exploration, but if you’re looking to master inquiry-based learning, you should really check out the book Make Just One Change, by RQI directors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. While I’m no master yet, I’ve used their strategies with MPS teachers, and they work!
While the first post in this series presented foundational information about the SAMR model, which can be used to assess how we use technology in our classrooms, the second gave specific examples of how teachers can leverage technology to enhance and begin transforming learning. Part 3 will now focus solely on practices and tasks that were previously inconceivable without the technology — those practices that sit solidly in the R of SAMR: Redefinition (see graphic below).
In order to redefine learning tasks and transform learning, technology has to allow for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable. Sound like a pretty tall order? Well, it’s actually not, if you consider the way one piece of technology has changed the way we gather information in our every day lives — the Internet. Prior to the ubiquity of the World Wide Web, we got most of our news and current events information from mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television and radio programs that were pretty limited in their scope. Since most of these news sources depend on advertiser funding, the information they present typically represent the views of the majority, lest they offend their audiences and advertisers pull their funding. Now we live in a much more information rich society. The advent of 24-hour cable news in the 1980s marked the beginning of the Information Age, but things really exploded when broadband Internet access made it so that anyone with an Internet connection and computer could start their own news media outlet and share their views with the world, covering the news s/he viewed as the most important. This has had a profound impact on the way news is delivered, as Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen points out here:
“The practice of gathering all sides of an issue, and keeping an editorial voice out of it is still relevant for some, but the broad journalism opportunity includes many variations of subjectivity. … the objective approach is only one way to tell stories and get at truth. Many stories don’t have ‘two sides.’ Indeed, presenting an event or an issue with a point of view can have even more impact, and reach an audience otherwise left out of the conversation.”
So what does this have to do with how we leverage technology in the classroom? Keeping Mr Andreessen’s words in mind, isn’t it more important than ever for us to teach our students how to make sense of the world around them? How to navigate the streams of information coming at them through social media? How to question the “variations of subjectivity” they see in a digital and cable news environment? And isn’t the ability to do so what we mean when we talk about the 21st Century Capacities of Synthesizing and Analyzing? I believe the answer to all the questions above is a resounding YES, and here’s what a learning experience that leverages technology and the Web might look like for our students…
For all learners, controversy = engagement, so I suggest finding articles on the Web that speak to one of the most pressing and controversial issues of our time, like climate change, income inequality, money in politics, digital surveillance by government agencies as a way of combating terrorism, or matters of race in America. Given recent events in which unarmed black men were killed by white police officers, let’s use this as an example. A social studies teacher might have students analyze the way white folks and black folks experience and view law enforcement by reading and viewing a series of articles and news clips. After establishing a common understanding of the events surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the subsequent protests by reading/viewing more objective mainstream news clips, students could then start to process the many variations of subjectivity we’ve been seeing on the Web. This could include a popular post in defense of police officers that’s been making the rounds on social media…
Then they could get a different perspective from an article from Alternet.org titled “Most White People in America Are Completely Oblivious” before moving on to this one from FoxNews. Or how about viewing related news segments that express very different perspectives on the issue from Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart? Perhaps a final performance task for this kind of learning unit could be a class debate on white privilege in America à la Stewart/O’Reilly.
The point is, we need to get our students in the habit of mind of questioning all the subjective viewpoints they will encounter on the Web. And we need to design learning experiences that will make them more adept at synthesizing all these viewpoints and pieces of information, and that call on them to ask their own questions to research, so that they can get to some semblance of the truth.
At this point you may be thinking, Ok, but does this really redefine learning tasks through technology? I mean, teachers have been asking their students to think critically about various perspectives since before the Internet existed. While this is true, I think it’s important to note that the technology in this case, the Internet, has redefined how we receive our information. Moreover, there are online tools we can leverage to gather digital information and help us process it better than before. One such tool for which I’m in the process of setting up accounts for Madison teachers and students is Diigo. It’s essentially an online bookmarking tool that allows students to save, highlight, and annotate any article on the Web, and it has some great collaborative features, too. In short, it allows for the creation of the kinds of tasks that were previously inconceivable without it.
For my elementary and lower middle school readers who often struggle to find appropriate online content for their developing young readers and thinkers, and are right now questioning how relevant this post is to them, I’d like to share an excellent tool that Brown Middle School principal Julie Phelps recently turned me on to called Newsela — a website that contains news and current events articles that can all be customized to five different lexile reading levels. So, yes, even elementary students can process current events like the Brown/Garner decisions by reading articles like this one.
This is just one example of how Web-based technologies have the potential to transform and redefine learning, and I’m sure many of you have designed similar experiences for your students. Please help inspire your colleagues by sharing them in the comments section below!
Last week I began a series of posts focusing on leveraging technology for learning using the SAMR model. While that initial post provided a general overview of the different levels at which one can incorporate digital tools to enhance, or better yet, transform learning, I thought it would be helpful for the rest of this series to provide specific examples of technology use in the classroom and where these uses fall on the SAMR spectrum between substitution to redefinition. I’ve chosen the SAMR model to evaluate technology use, but it’s worth noting that it’s not the only one out there. Another model worth checking out is the Lo-Ti framework for technology use. I especially like this organization’s resource materials for digital age best practices. But because I prefer the simplicity of the SAMR model, I’ll be referring to the model below while describing some of the technology uses I’ve seen our schools, as well as some suggested uses I’d like to offer.
Let’s start by looking at a digital tool that has gained popularity in recent years and that I know many of your are familiar with — Prezi. Now, with typical use, this tool sits solidly in Augmentation on the SAMR spectrum. Essentially, it’s a digital canvas on which you can organize and display text, images, videos, and hyperlinks, and it’s got a really slick interface that allows the viewer to zoom in on different parts of the canvas. Basically it’s an online poster or presentation tool, but what moves it from Substitution to Augmentation are the functional improvements over regular posterboard of being able to host your Prezi online and share it with a wide audience, being able to embed videos and hyperlinks, and its dynamic and interactive viewing experience.
However, as Island Ave. 4th grade teacher Laura Tanner demonstrated to me with her students this week, when combined with other digital tools and a more collaborative approach, a Prezi project can move “above the line” from Augmentation to Modification. When her students researched and studied Algonquin Native American tribes, they incorporated Google Docs to collectively record what they believed were the most important pieces of information about Algonquin culture on a shared Google doc prior to creating their Prezis individually. Adding this layer to the Prezi project allowed for a pretty significant task redesign (Modification). The shared Google doc allowed them to build a collective understanding that would have been extremely difficult to develop without this technology. In this same vein, her students could leverage certain features of the technology to stay above the line that separates Modification from Augmentation by sharing links to their Prezis on a class blog or website (Google Sites or Kidblog) and giving each other feedback on their work. Or students could become experts on different aspects of Algonquin culture, then team up with a partner and use their collective intelligence to create a shared Prezi that shows more depth of knowledge than those created by students individually.
I think it’s worth noting here that one of the key characteristics of technology use that sits “above the line” is that it calls on students to develop specific 21st Century Capacities. In the example above, it’s clear that Laura is providing students with opportunities to develop their Collective Intelligence and Product Creation skills.
I hope the example above has given you some inspiration to leverage technology in new and meaningful ways, but I’d love to hear how other teachers are incorporating technology and where you think those uses sit on the SAMR continuum. (All four levels of the continuum are good, by the way, depending on the task at hand.) Please leave a comment below.
Now that we live in a world where much of the educationalcontent we and our students access, consume, and create is digital, we are increasingly accessing this content on the same devices we use for entertainment and to make social connections. These devices can be used to enlighten us intellectually, enrich our lives socially, or to simply entertain us with games and other forms of media. While these mobile learning devices allow us to do school and homework whenever, wherever, what happens when the more social aspects of these devices present distractions and get in the way of learning? As this article on Edutopia points out, all too often our students multitask, jumping from their school work to the hard-to-resist temptation of social media–a practice that has been scientifically proven to negatively impact learning. Is it up to us, as educators, to teach kids to delay gratification on their mobile devices? Would this fall under the 21st Century Capacity of Self-Direction? After reading the article, I would argue, yes, on both counts. Check out the Edutopia link above to see what we can do to help our students manage their digital lives.
Google Apps for Education is really taking off across the district, especially at the middle and high schools, where all students and teachers have accounts. (At the elementary level, all classroom teachers have accounts, but we’ve only begun piloting student accounts.) In just the past week, 1,240 Madison users have logged, and 1,427 documents have been created in Google Drive. In addition, students at Brown, Polson, and DHHS have been creating their own websites with Google Sites. Meanwhile, teachers are coming up with creative ways of sharing class resources from their Google Drives through their Finalsite web pages. Late last week, I got this in an email from Polson’s tech para, Chris Barden:
“Just wanted to share a conversation I had with a student regarding google apps. I was in the study room at Polson and noticed a student using Google Apps, and I asked him what he was working on. He said he and his friend are working on writing a book and that they absolutely loved Google Apps and the fact they could share the documents they are working on. He also said it’s the greatest thing he has used and loves the fact Google added an html feature to the Sites app. Just thought you would like to hear how much it’s liked by the student population.”
Music to my ears.
As this tool grows in popularity and more staff members begin trying it out for the first time and/or experimenting with its advanced features, I thought it would benefit everyone to share some great resources for Google Apps:
This website is the best Google Sites resource I’ve found. Anytime I’m not sure about how to do something to a Google Site, it’s where I go.
Google has created its own resources for Google Drive/Docs that are quite good. The video below is featured in its Basic training for Drive/Docs.
And of course, I have created some of my own tutorials tailored specifically for Madison users, which can be found on the Teacher Resources tab in the Finalsite Community Login portal (grades 5-12), or on the Technology Resources page for elementary teachers.
Recently, we turned on the Gmail feature of Google Apps for teachers and students. Providing a protected email environment for students will improve communication and further facilitate collaboration. As with all Google Apps, Gmail will only function within our domain of MPS users.
If you’re new to Google Apps for Education, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for help. If you’re a more experienced user, please leave a comment below, sharing a success story or what you like most about Google Apps.
