Writing on the wall

I’m not sure how to categorise the SMART Board. Is it an ICT tool? Or a platform for tools? Or both?

I attended an introductory session on SBs today and thought I might offer a few first impressions couched in a broader consideration of what is effective learning.

It seems to me that the uses for the whiteboard are as broad as you want them to be. You can view and annotate ready-prepared documents, link to web pages or video files, write up points from class discussion and capture and save a screen shot.

I can see enormous potential for primary school students and younger secondary students. However…

There is a worrying potential to get caught up in the ‘fun features’, believing your class is happy simply because there is technology at play, and failing to realise that behind you sits a wall of bored students. I am talking here about the physical construction of the classroom.

 The old classroom of teacher-at-front and students-facing-teacher was effective for the didactic model of learning. The new classroom should instead scream collaboration as soon as students enter it. And no teacher should not be positioned in the one spot, front and centre, for a lesson.

The key seems to be to ensure all the students are highly competent in using the SMART Board and that they do use it every time it is turned on. They need to feel it is their space up the front too, rather than a privileged ‘teacher space’. For example:

Capturing class discussion

If students' discussion, and capturing it, is so important, then students have to be given the chance to get up close and hands on. Students should be able to get out of their chairs and gather in front of the board. As they discuss, they each have the chance to add conceptual words to the board. This way, discussion is a process of mutual construction.

This could be done as a whole class if they are mature, or in groups while the rest of the class is on a rotation of other activities. The SMART Board enables each group to save the screen shot of their discussion points for wider class reflection.

Student presentations

Another way to destabilise the physical hierarchy of the classroom is to hand over presentations on the SMART Board to students as often as possible. Giving students the opportunity to take on a teaching role is known to be one of the most powerful forms of learning for them. The SMART Board offers students some interactive and enjoyable ways of presenting. They have the scope to make it as simple or as whizz-bang as they like. That flexibility is very appealing.

At worst, the SMART Board can stop a lesson in its tracks, with a teacher fiddling away in isolation with different shades of highlights and technical issues. At best, it can create a similar scene to those well considered and executed community art projects, where everyone is centre stage, working and the end goal is tangible and shared.

Prezi fresh!

Two weeks ago I looked at the benefit of PowerPoint slides for the classroom: quick and easy to create. However, PowerPoint has obvious disadvantages, not the least being that the medium of PowerPoint is on such constant rotation, the message itself is tainted. 

I argue that this alone is reason to scout around for other tools.

A colleague recently introduced me to Prezi when we had to put together a presentation. She is a tech wiz and had no idea there were people like me who had never seen a Prezi before, so there was no prior demo. I was decidedly unconvinced as we laboured over the creation of our presentation. The editing process was fiddly and it made no sequential sense to me.

Then she hit play.

See, PowerPoint is like a book, each slide loaded with text that gives way to the next visually identical slide. The trajectory is linear. But thinking just isn’t like that. Thinking is circular, it moves in and out of ideas and back again, it moves between the specific detail and the general or conceptual. And this is what Prezi does. It makes connections; it constructs knowledge.

As a tool for communication, Prezi has great possibilities. It is dynamic, intuitive and visually logical. It uses trajectory as a means of emphasizing the message. However, Prezi offers additional learning benefits for students when creating their own media presentations.

Unlike in PowerPoint where you can rapidly dump a mass of words and loosely group material in separate slides, Prezi forces you to make more complex editing decisions. The limited word capacity requires you to make decisions about what is important, what is the core, conceptual message. As well, the non-linear trajectory enables you to make interesting decisions about connections between concepts and what degree of emphasis you want to give various concepts.

A basic PowerPoint slide could be effective in getting younger students to describe concepts and to apply them to specific situations. A Prezi could enable older students to engage in genuine higher order thinking, to explore interrelated concepts in a more rigorous way.


An interesting lesson would be for students to create a presentation in PowerPoint and then transfer it into Prezi. This could be the basis for a class discussion around the different mediums and how many of the new media tools require different forms of reading, writing, viewing and even thinking.


(See also this site offering tips on creating a great Prezi.)

I am student hear me roar

I hear a lot about the Student Voice.  But how many schools actually provide platforms for this, as opposed to pay lip service or provide a platform that is highly mediated by teachers or the school executive?

I have been reading Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed,  which calls for a radical response to what he calls the Banking Model of education, where teachers (and the school system generally) ‘deposit’ knowledge into passive students. 

Freire advocated a model of learning that was developed within the cultural contexts of students, which based curriculum resources on students’ everyday concrete environment and experiences, and which were utilised to develop students’ learning. The process was 1) highly dialogic, primarily consisting of egalitarian class discussion, and 2) emphasised action – new knowledge was implemented by the students in a meaningful way, and which had an impact on their communities.

This is a highly authentic model of the Student Voice: it recognises the need for students to ‘speak’ in order to learn and it also enables students to utilise their voice with genuine agency. Freire’s students were poor, largely illiterate ‘workers’ (he was, obviously, Marxist) in Brazil. How might this transfer to the first-world, secondary school environment? We need a platform that students themselves can use: 

MailChimp!

This is a free, online service that enables you to design and distribute email newsletters. Unlike a traditional email format, it essentially delivers a web page that is embedded in the email. This includes the features that a regular web page offers: images, static text, URL links or links to external social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Distribution is via subscription, controlled by the owner of the newsletter. The owner is also able to view subscriber activity such as the number of newsletters delivered, the number of unique and repeat access to newsletters, the number of users who accessed links within the newsletters, etc. These are displayed within clear graphs and maps and unique parameters can be set, to glean more specific information.

Back to Freire-ian plans...

There is real scope here for student-led newsletters for students. These could be developed out of a specific class as part of a unit of work OR tapping into interest groups across the school (the development of a new newsletter may even be the instigator for such a group).

Because students must opt to subscribe to the newsletter to receive it, they can be informed of it, and given the opportunity to help produce it or submit content, via the school-wide formal newsletter. 

Students could form an editorial committee and make decisions on content and learn how to take responsibility for creating the newsletter. This process would probably be supervised by a teacher, who would assist in developing students’ skills, capacity and knowledge and ensure access to resources. Also, the teacher would focus on creating a sustainable autonomy amongst the students, with the hope that they will eventually be able to train and mentor any new members of the group. It seems important that editorial decision making rests with the students.

This process would develop numerous skills in students. The need to produce a polished newsletter for a wider readership would require the development of technical, writing, editing, proofreading and design skills. In particular, the brief format of the newsletter would require them to make often difficult decisions about content and design. 

Also, a regular distribution would require students to develop skills in time management, delegation and teamwork. They would need to manage the administrative elements relating to subscriptions, usage and communication. They would need to be able to canvass and implement feedback.

The process would also develop certain capacities. Some or all of the students would need to have a capacity for leadership. The students would need to learn to communicate tactfully with students who submit content. They would need to work harmoniously and productively with each other.


The process would have to be effectively managed and supported at the school level and the spirit of the venture – giving a voice and agency to students – would have to remain at its core.

Students writing for other students on topics and issues that are important to them and in their own words: I think Freire would approve. 


And of course the question must be answered: why MailChimp over a hardcopy newsletter? Because students are ON THE WEB. And we all love the Unread mail notice in our inbox, hoping it will bring something interesting.

Finally, though, the impact must extend beyond the core editorial group. After all, Freire sought nothing less than a transformation of society! One idea for a newsletter that might have a broader impact:

A monthly book review 

The review format puts students at ease because anyone can write one – there is no sense of right or wrong, just what you think. A review also has utility. It gives fellow students information they can use.

To allow multiple contributors within a brief space, the newsletter might include single paragraph —or even single sentence or word! — reviews of books, or a group review of a book. It might also include multiple elements, such as illustrations of books, or the much loved book lists (My Top Ten Books or Five Best Books for When You Are [on a deserted island/etc] or Five Best Books About [Love/Friendship/War/] or Top Five [Sci-Fi/Romance/Goth/Fantasy/Non-Fiction] Books, etc.)

This idea has the potential to create, no matter how small, a committed community around a love of books and reading. Every new subscriber to that newsletter, provided they read the material, is another student engaging with literacy and literature in a way that is meaningful and engaging for them. (Freire would definitely be happy.) If it gets one student scuttling off to the school library to hunt down a book, it’s a success.

And the Librarian, if he/she isn’t already leading the group, will be sending you love letters.

PowerPoint: Zzzzzzzzzzz

Do teachers really have time to

• find fabulous and ever-changing technology tools
• get across the tools’ technical specs and genuine pedagogical possibilities
• develop meaningful and student-centred lessons around them

without working until the wee hours every night? I don’t function well on less than a good eight hours sleep.

If we accept the theory that the use of verbal and visual communication, rather than just one mode or the other, leads to increased student engagement and higher levels of student cognition, then what is wrong with at least falling back on the pedestrian PowerPoint?

Oh yeah, that's right - there are better presentation tools. Prezi, for example, is beautiful, playful, and fresh. (I might review it next week…) But it takes longer to create, all that fiddling about with the ‘Edit’ function and fonts, and being forced to make time-consuming (=meaningful) decisions about the interconnectedness of your presentation, the hierarchy of your points, and so on.

If you’re out of time for labours of love, and you really need that sleep, but you want to boost your class discussion, then pulling together a few PowerPoint slides is still a good baseline.

How to do it well…

I have scanned the web for some top tips that might apply to the secondary classroom (most sites talk to corporate America). I came across a site belonging to Dave

who writes professionally on slideshow presentations (the new job market). He has polled thousands of people since 2003 using his ‘What annoys you about bad PowerPoint presentations?’ survey and says the overwhelming response indicates: Audiences are fed up with presenters who fill their slides with too much content and are then compelled to read it all to those seated in the room.

Brilliant for its sheer obviousness.

Taking Dave’s advice, I thought it might be interesting, calling upon some of the ideas in my earlier posting ‘The Word’, to create slideshows that

ONLY USE ONE WORD OR A SINGLE IMAGE SANS TEXT PER SLIDE

as a backup to class discussion. Students' attention would not be pulled in two directions: reading the text while also trying to listen to me. I would not be lecturing to them with a wall of text. 


A well-selected image would enhance their cognitive processing and a single word could foreground a key concept. And I could create my slideshow at the traffic lights, over breakfast, at recess, or in the wee hours if the urge arose - but just for five minutes. M

Edmodo: a little anarchy please

Edmodo... the 'Secure Social Learning Network'. 'The Facebook for the classroom’. I have spoken to two teachers in the last 10 days who use it — they were both animated.

But what can it do for my students’ learning?

Sure, it has the very obvious benefit of mimicking a social tool that has most students enthralled… OK class — we are going to ‘Facebook’ our English lessons… All hands on deck.

And, true, Edmodo does allow me to establish effective communication channels. Teacher–student, student–student and teacher–parent. It also enables an online point of exchange. I can provide students with resources, information and feedback; students can submit assessment tasks and other materials.

But this is just effective housekeeping. What about quality learning? And learning that is tangible, that I can measure and evaluate and provide feedback on?

I can ask the class to participate in online discussions. But I can see this falling into two categories: 1) the teacher leads discussion on a topic and the students obligingly bumble along, wishing they were in the real Facebook, where they have greater agency; or 2) the students respond but utilise the same quick-fire, three-word language forms they use in Facebook.

How can I utilise the social, collaborative, ‘community of learners’ quality of Edmodo while at the same time directly developing my students’ language and meta-cognitive skills?

Here is my idea* (and I think this could work for any student cohort; some would need a greater level of scaffolding than others, naturally): student-led and moderated class discussions.

*(Actually, this idea came to me from a University of NSW academic. See his excellent co-authored paper on student moderation for a more scholarly coverage.)

The logistics:

Throughout the year, students are assigned a week in which they will moderate the class discussion on Edmodo. The moderator is expected to post a discussion paper a few days before their week begins. This could be a mere few hundred words or, for older or higher ability student cohorts, a several page exploration. The discussion paper would require some degree of research.

The moderator would post up the paper with a set of discussion points and/or questions. The class would then read the paper and respond to the points or questions. The moderator’s role is to develop the discussion.

The teacher’s role is simply to inject extra information or direction if necessary. If the exercise is well scaffolded, the teacher’s role would be largely invisible.

At the end of the week, the student moderator rewrites the initial paper, this time incorporating the new ideas generated from the class discussion. They would also write a briefer secondary report that reflected on the moderation process.

Students would be assessed for the quality of their initial paper, their ability to lead and develop the discussion, their ability to incorporate the fresh ideas from the discussion into their paper and the extent to which their reflective piece demonstrates a meta-cognitive understanding as opposed to a simple retelling.

Students would also be assessed on the quality of their non-moderator contributions to the class discussions across the year. They would be expected to contribute something each week.

The challenge for the teacher is high quality scaffolding. In particular, guiding students in developing that crucial initial discussion paper and in being able to foster engagement during the discussion.

The benefits for the teacher are potentially great: it is possible that within a few months students’ ability and willingness to engage in the class discussions will be self-regulating.

The benefits for students: ownership, empowerment; student-centred and directed learning; deeper, meta-cognitive learning and skill development; more relevant and engaged discussion and thus learning.

This would be a highly inclusive learning environment. There are students who never participate in face to face classroom discussions, because they are shy, or they prefer to reflect before they comment, or they are not proficient in English, or they have poor hearing. These students would find they have a voice.  

And the quality of the learning? The asynchronous nature of the discussion provides students with the opportunity to reflect on their thoughts before posting, resulting in a much more complex and valuable response than would occur in a face to face classroom.

A word of warning. This is not a way to reduce your workload. All those posts would still have to be read each week!

Cheers, M 

The Word

Words are obviously the staple of the English language classroom. Yet words tend to be studied in terms of their utility: their ability, across whole sentences, passages, or texts, to evoke, instruct or persuade.

Students who self-identify as writers or readers will often tell you that they ‘love words’. They love finding new words and finding new ways to showcase their existing words. Is this a key? Can we encourage more ‘writers’ and ‘readers’ if we find engaging ways to study The Word? Also, by focusing on individual words, and particularly those in high use, we can move straight to the heart of a text.

I want to explore here the possibilities for showcasing The Word offered by an incredibly simple tool: www.wordle.net

Wordle.net is an online tool for creating ‘word clouds’ – a cloud or bouquet of words. The user simply types or copies a piece of text into a text field and hits ‘Go’. Wordle.net then generates a cloud. The words are removed from their previous sequence and placed randomly within the cloud, at different angles and in different colours.

If the text provided is brief, the word cloud will include all the words; if the text is long, Wordle.net will select the most common words.

The clouds emphasise words that appear more frequently, by increasing their size in relation to the other words. This provides a visual indicator of significant words

The website describes the tool as a ‘toy’ and it does have a playful quality. Text can be altered in terms of the font type, text colour or word layout. The results are striking, with different cloud options evoking different moods or symbolic messages.

Immediacy

It is quick and simple to create a cloud. This enables the creation of clouds during a lesson, providing students with immediate results to view and discuss. This can be particularly powerful if the lesson is aiming to compare ideas across a specific class discussion – to show similarities and differences in students’ ideas and responses. The tool also offers an engaging ‘reveal’ when the cloud is created, with its explosion of randomised colours, fonts and layout. The immediate ‘text’ is a striking visual object; a second later, it is registered by viewers as a set of words to explore.

‘Here’s one I made earlier’

The teacher can create clouds prior to a lesson and utilise them as a discussion point. If talking on a particular topic, they may collect words from a text being studied, or from secondary sources that might illuminate thinking around a topic. Or they might record classroom discussion in words and use this to illustrate some of the ideas the class has covered.

Group feedback

The teacher may produce a cloud based on the collective written tasks of students to demonstrate key or diverging ideas or whether students are addressing an assessment task adequately. The teacher may also collate the feedback provided to all students, to give guidance to the class as a whole on some of the most common issues students may be having and/or the best aspects of their work.

The Word as jewel

Finally, it is possible to utilise Wordle.net as a jewellery box for gorgeous words. Students may create clouds out of their favourite poem, or poem stanza, or favourite block of text. The word cloud illuminates individual words and encourages the student to reflect on them. This can be done to foster student thinking around the meaning of significant words, such as their cultural or personal power, or their ambiguous, conflicting or varying meanings. 
Alternatively, the activity could be purely aesthetic. Students could be asked to reflect on the appeal of a particular word or series of words. They might discuss what thoughts, emotions or memories the word evokes, or they may simply comment on the pleasure of uttering the word!

Word clouds as artefacts

The word clouds can be saved online or printed for display or distribution. The online gallery allows anonymity but provides students with the pleasure of seeing their clouds ‘published’ alongside other Wordle.net users around the world.

Finally, here IS one I created earlier, based on the text of this blog entry…

VoiceThread: Making poetry relevant

What do I want technology to do? I want it to elicit a sense of thrill and creativity, to foster an immediate desire for exploration. I giggled when I discovered VoiceThread.

This is a tool that enables the creation of individual or collaborative multimedia slideshows featuring text, audio, image and video files. The slides can be commented on, by the owner or others, in a text, audio and/or video format.

The tool’s highly user-friendly and well sign-posted interface makes it suitable for students of all stages, backgrounds and most levels of English proficiency. The tool is hosted on an online platform and does not require a program to be downloaded.

Why is VoiceThread special? It offers an engaging opportunity for students to read, write, speak, view and represent any form of text, to do so in a manner that is both personalised and within a community of learners. It also gives students the opportunity to develop skills in self and peer review. My favourite example is the illustrated poetry text created by a third-grade class in the US.

The empty-shell nature of the tool means it could be utilised across all disciplines and student groups and to address most learning outcomes. In particular, I think VoiceThread would be an excellent way to introduce poetry writing and analysis to reluctant Stage 4 (ages 12 to 14) English students ('Poetry is dumb', 'Poetry is boring', 'Why do we need to do poetry?').

I outline here a possible approach, which would take place over a number of highly scaffolded lessons:

Students are introduced to the VoiceThread text, to establish the sense of a communal project and text and to encourage them to start thinking about the multi-modal nature of poetry. The possibilities are instantly multi-sensory and offer the chance to create an online identity and community.

The students produce a short poem around a coherent theme, or in response to a poem or poet they are studying.

The students then produce or find an image that best illustrates their poem. This could be a drawing or a photo, etc, and either figurative or abstract.

Students are asked to produce an audio commentary in which they read the poem, then provide a brief comment on their poem and image.

When the class or group slideshow is complete, the students are randomly allocated the slides of five of their peers to review (they can review more if they wish). They can do this in written, audio or video format. This last stage completes the cycle by encouraging students to reflect on the processes of their own work and the different manner in which their peers approached the text. This step develops their collaborative, critical and self and peer evaluation skills.

Some of the benefits of VoiceThread for the learning activity detailed here include: the development of a sense of class community; the opportunity for highly personalised interactions, between peers and between students and teachers; the increased engagement with and personalisation of the poem for students by the act of ‘speaking’ the poem; and an increased sense among the students that poetry can be valid and enjoyable and, in this instance, result in a published text.

A final key reflection on VoiceThread is that it enables amendments to be made according to the special needs of students. If a student cohort includes a sight-impaired student, the class could be required to provide an audio component. If the cohort includes a hearing impaired student, the class could be asked to include a text transcript of any audio or video material they add. The same could be required if the class included students of low-level English language proficiency. Also, it enables students whose English speaking proficiency is still developing, or students who are shy or anxious, to participate in and enjoy speaking tasks without the need to stand in front of the class.

Enjoy! M