Learning from "No School"

This morning I woke to the news there is no school today. Initially, I wished that I had had this information before the students did, so I could have made changes on PantherNet before the students first viewed the subject sites. So, my initial goal was to get on PantherNet and make modification as soon as possible.

In my Environmental Systems and Societies class, I was giving a test on natural capital and demographic analysis. The test was already written, but how was I going to give the test to the students virtually? The objective of assessment is to determine what learning had occurred in the students. I wanted to assess individual student learning, but not allow them to use notes, books, or electronic resources and not allow them to get or give information from or to their classmates. This would be a good time to try out the running of a virtual school and use of an honor code at the same time. I provided the students with this message on the subject PantherNet site:

I hope your preparations and the help sessions have prepared you well for today's test. You will be taking the test away from school today, so you should plan your day accordingly, so the test can be completed and sent back before 2:00. (If you were not prepared for this test today--Expect to [and plan not to have anything conflict with] take it after school Monday [20 April] when we return from break. This is not the regular assessment; this will be a make-up. We will continue with the sustainability unit when we are back.)

When you are prepared with the following, email harveyh@isb.ac.th with the following information and he will send you the test.

When you are ready, send Mr. Hinsz an email with separate statements stating that:

a) you have access to a printer on which you can print a Word document which will be sent to you by email,

b) you will be in an environment in which you will not be disturbed (cell phone off, computer off, TV and other technologies off) by your friends, family, or other duties or expectations.

c) you have access to a camera or cell phone which you can use to email him pictures of your test when you have completed it.

d) you will not access your text, other people, or any resources during the time you are taking the test,

e) you will not discuss or communicate in any form anything about the test with anyone else until after 3:00 this afternoon,

f) you will not share your test or image of it with anyone, and

g) you are ready to receive the test by email, take the test in the hour, and photograph it and email the images to Mr. Hinsz in the 15 more minutes allowed, and abide by these rules.

Tell him you are ready to take the test and would like it to be sent to you. Mr. Hinsz is online and ready to receive your emails.

The statement for a) removed the possibility that students would have a time problem because of printing problems. I should have had the students ensure the printer could print the email I sent them before I sent them the test. One student took 30 minutes beyond the limit, because she could not print and had to copy all the questions by hand onto paper.

The statement for b) was clever, because students were focused and would not be tempted with calls, emails, or text-messages coming from others who might be colluding with them.

The statement for c) allowed me to document that no changes were made to the test after the students said they had finished it. This also allows me to have a digital copy if the student fails to bring me the original. The digital photo is also a time stamp of when the test was finished. If the test took particularly long, one might wonder if the student had used a lot of time searching for answers.

Having students individually write each statement made them cognizant and commit to an honor code. I was not so worried about their sticking to it; the test was not much different than the topics listed on my study guide.

Some things I learned:
School should inform the teachers before the students, so teachers can modify PantherNet before the students are on it. I can see a number of students accessed PantherNet well before I was even informed school was cancelled.

The electricity going out was not planned for. I let students know two scenarios: one with electricity out beyond 11:30 and one if electricity came back on by 11:30. Fortunately the electricity came back at 11:20, so they could take the test.

Some students used scanners, BlackBerrys, and cell phones to photograph their tests and send them in. None of these technologies were taught in my class; students had to get them on their own. Some students took some time to transfer cell phone images to an email account--they might more frequently be sending them to a social networking page.(My "Use of Cell Phones in Class" blog addresses other ways cell phones could effectively be used to promote student learning.)

The students who looked at their emails and looked at the PantherNet sites were often the best students. The worst students did not respond to the email and probably never saw them. They probably saw today as a day free from school expectations. With this experience, will those students learn it is wiser to look at PantherNet when school is closed? Should I have learned to not try to run a class when school is closed?

Some students needed more hand-holding and instruction and repeating of instructions that were already on PantherNet. I was reminded how some students have trouble with the clearest instructions. My having students write me with statements of what they understood was expected of them helped me know they crystalized the instructions before proceeding. It was important that I remained relatively consistently in email contact so students lost little time on task.

Of course, the next step is having the students get and submit the test from and to PantherNet. It's motivating that digital learning always has more ways to improve the way we communicate.

The school will be closed the next day, also. I am having my biology students review the flower diagrams on images.google.com to learn the names of the parts, then find an unlabeled diagram and determine the names of its parts. This will lead into a discussion about their functions when school resumes.

Thanks to Yochin for the Flickr image of the digital contents of a digital learner.

Managing the Digital Classroom

We tried a new program that allowed voice threads and images to record individual ideas about Managing the Digital Classroom better ways to manage technologies in a classroom. I submitted a couple comments and recently tried to make a voice thread, but it didn't work.

The only submission I can find is: "Sometimes there is more than one computer cart in the classroom at one time. To help students remember which cart to return their computer to, place a label of cartoon characters on the cover of the computer that matches the character on the front of the cart."

"Students tend to leave the powercord from their computer hanging out of the cart, onto the floor. Have the students follow a convention of placing the cord over the top of the cart when then take the computer out. This ensures they wil not step on or damage the cord by closing the door on it. It also makes it easy to find the cord for that computer when returning the computer to the cart."

The comment I tried to enter into a voice thread was something like to make the sound clear when you are making a story board or video use a headset that has a microphone attached to it. When I tried to play it back, I could see the progress of my recording, but there was no sound. Dennis suggested it might be the microphone settings on my computer.

Reflections on expanding on use of technologies in the classroom and move toward "flowware"

Some of my blogs lately have followed a pattern of: the plan, the implementation, what I learned. For this blog, I would like to highlight the digital risks I took this semester and list some digital accomplishments.

I got a real scare when the unit plan I had submitted to the Coetail wiki was blank. It helped me sympathize with students who even now are having frustration when we require them to use technologies they don't fully understand.

Being away from all this for a few weeks when I had to return to the US, I was surprised how much skill I lost for doing some basic technological things. I was making and storing voice threads when I left and I lack confidence in that area now.

I focused parts of lab lessons on properly referencing sources of digital information. I was surprised how weak some of my students still were in this area--even this week after I had specifically assigned products related to this.

During the beginning of this semester we discussed the validity of web resources. Students found some food web Internet resources with errors. I wrote the webmaster of one of these (US government) web sites and the site has been corrected and I received a letter from the webmaster of the site. I had asked for volunteers from the clas to do this, but none did). I shared this action and result with the class.

Unfortunately, they did not remove the site from the Internet before it had spread further into the cloud. A quick search just now found another site that uses that same image, is referencing the original source, and has a "topic editor" "reviewing and approving" it.

The students did collaboratively produce a common written product in the values of a resource unit, but I did not get them yet to publish to the world.

With numeracy being a goal for our department and with students having weaknesses in using and analyzing graphic information the units of population dynamics simulations and gathering Internet demographic information and developing a demographic transition model for two countries was ideal for addressing numeracy, student weaknesses, the IB Environmental Systems and Societies syllabus, and global citizenship. (Addressing globalization and numeracy standards were additional goals I mentioned in my Coetail Course 4 project preparation plans.) I am still grading the products, but initial results are encouraging.

Some of my students still lack skills in properly labeling their graphs with titles and axes labels. I offered regular Monday help sessions to address this, but weak students fail to come if they are not required.

Students really responded well to the computer 3-D animation of the parts of a DNA structure. I believe this really assisted the learning of some spatially oriented learners.

Editting on wikipedia was a bold and rewarding move for me. I guess this is the 'next step' in my preparing my students to become global publishers. I was pleased to find wikipedia specifically referencing research I did before I came to ISB and directly linking introductory content to an article I co-authored. I still have not met my goal of writing a new entry for wikipedia.

The unexpected benefit of having students use cell phones, as well as data logging equipment, was a leap in my understanding.

And, of course, the confort with trying out new things on PantherNet to expand student understanding is the most obvious way technologies have impacted student learning in my classes. My SmartBoard presentations are regularly part of my PowerPoint and are assisting students who are frequently absent this semester. Embedding videos and their links are becoming more and more frequent in my PantherNet pages with time.

This semester pushed me to move more toward the flowware that I discussed in a previous blog--seamlessly moving between optimally effective and appropriate technologies to provide students a richer learning environment.

Thank you to Dennis and Jeff for their expertise and patient support throughout this process.

Learn and share on a wiki

I planned a lesson in which I had students learn about renewable, non-renewable, replenishable, and recycleable resources from any resource they wanted, then read examples of each kind of resource on a wikispace, then add two examples of their own that were not close to those already listed on the wikispace. Then each student was to comment on why they suggested that kind of resource belonged to that group.

Some students chose the book we use for the class to find information about the terms, but more chose sites on the Internet, frequently wikipedia. They placed their examples on a wikispaces site, and we will discuss them during the next class.

What I particularly liked about this assignment was that I could watch each entry as they submitted it, and I could determine the validity of each suggestion and get back to the student in class (as I did for two of them). Those students reviewed their submission and changed them.

Next class we will review the characteristics of the four kinds of resouces, then make verbal descriptions of the characteristics of each. They will then review the list they, as a class, put together last class and in their cluster, evaluate the examples and reasons for each category and report changes they would make to the class.

After students completed the assignment:
Only one student did not get the assignment done in the five days since the last class. She didn't attempt the assignment until after 10 pm the night before class and said the Internet would not give her access to the wikispace. When she tried it in class, it opened immediately. After a discussion of the terms, all students were given an assignment of reviewing, correcting, and elaborating on what they had placed on the wikispace.

Playing with production of a group product

I'm toying with an idea of trying to get my Environmental Systems and Societies students to produce something online as a joint project. At first, I thought of setting up a structure of a spreadsheet on Google.doc in which each student has an assigned set of line numbers (like I did on the Resources types project) and each student writes their comments by the number I have placed on a spreadsheet line for them. But this becomes forced when students are trying to do word processing on a spreadsheet document.

Next I thought I'd start a Google.doc Word document with the student numbers, then have the students write their responses next to their number. After completing this, students could read what each other wrote and reflect on it in a space provided at the bottom of the document. This also was forced in the way it wouldn't flow.

My last thought was to divide the students into two groups, give each group a task, (like describing the various kinds of value people place on a given natural capital) a separate Google.doc Word document address, and have each produce a document in which each student writes their part of the final document and all of them are addressing the task to produce a cohesive product.

My most recent thinking is, why set up the Google.doc word processor sheet for them? Show them how to do it and let them produce it all. I abandon this idea because the energies directed toward learning to set up a Google.doc account (yes, they could use their ISB gmail account) would distract from their learning about the various kinds of values given to a resource.

I decided I would follow the path of having students select a resource, divide up the four kinds of values as suggested in our text and each volunteer to write one part of this document. Then I would have them read and append each other's documents. We would wrap up the learning about resources by suggesting which of the resources are more valuable to lesser developed countries (LDCs) or more developed countries (MDCs).

Dennis suggested, rather than having the students compose a Word document together, I have them fill in a table. I liked this idea, because I could put two columns, LDC and MDC, to the left of the table at the end, and students could place an 'X' by the resource that was more important in those kinds of developmental environments.

Thanks to Ronaldo F Cabuhat for the Flickr image of the forest and lake, the two resources the class chose to study further.

The class performed this activity on a day when class was shortened to 55 minutes. There were a few areas which were unexpected learning areas and some that were good for learning.

Some unexpected issues:
a) a student copy-and-pasted material from the Internet and did not give proper references to the source, nor did the student put quotation marks around the information. The student was not learning from the information they had found.
b) I did not find a way to add columns to a word-processer document on Google.doc. I copied the entire table, imported it into Word, added the two initial columns, and exported it back to the original Google.doc document.
c) The content was weak in some areas and the students in the cluster were not good about appending other student's work. There wasn't sufficient time to review all the resources before the end of class, so I had to amend the document so students did not learn the incorrect information presented in this document.
d) students became involved in Internet research that took longer than I had planned for. This delay was, in some instances, due to students not being specific enough in their selection of search terms.

The product that was produced was good for student learning. By coming up with a lot of values of a lake and forest, students created knowledge that helped them produce lists of values for a resource on their exam.

Reflections on mitosis images

For years the Bio 10 team has used a University of Arizona interactive website to review the phases of mitosis. In addition to specific information about each of the phases, this site is excellent, because it gives the students some small images and has them select the phase each image represents. If the students select incorrectly, a short description helps them understand their mistake.

It is good to review these tested and true sites. The last thing on the worksheet was a video of a cell actually undergoing mitosis. The animation site was dead, so used YouTube search to find a mitosis animation that worked equally well, and give it to the students with the worksheet.

The next thing was to put what they learned together with previous microscope skills they learned last semester. The team decided to have the students do size calculations of the images they saw on prepared slides. Once students had demonstrated this skill at two different powers of magnification, I felt the same task for the other four phases would not improve student learning much, so I modified the lesson to have the students evaluate images from the Internet and label these larger images, which offered more opportunities for detail.

First I had them work with the microscope and find onion root tip slides in anaphase. I chose this phase because students would find many of the other phases and would identify them before they found a much rarer anaphase image. Then:
"Using images from your computer, find plant cells in each of the following phases: INTERPHASE, PROPHASE, METAPHASE, and TELOPHASE. For each phase, look at three different images and choose one that you feel best represents that phase and make a detailed, labeled diagram of it in the appropriate boxes. Include the URL of the site at the bottom of each box."
Flickr image courtesy of The JCB.

Many of the prepared slides were old and their colorizing stains had faded, so the use of Internet slide images was timely. I briefly reviewed with the students how to use Google images and reminded them of the importance of giving references in their presentations.

I had reviewed the images of mitosis on Creative Commons and found only two that were relevant, not enough to create a lesson around. One was the image above. The other was an attractive painting to the left that actually looked like a phase of mitosis.

Flickr image courtesy of rakka.

I verbally told students to check if there were any errors in the images they chose. Looking back on that now, there is little chance they would have seen errors, because the images would more than likely not include labels. A better statement would have been to either check if the phase was correctly labeled or check labeled diagrams (not slide images) of the various phases to see if structures were mis-labeled. An obvious mistake online would have been labeling a centriole on a plant cell. (With the exception of mosses and ferns, plant cells do not have centrioles.)

The use of online images was a good idea. The clarity of detail of the images online allowed students to label their work more thoroughly. The major learning that I didn't expect in this lesson came from how students documented their references. There were four areas I reviewed with students after grading their work:

1) With URLs that are long, students didn't know how to break them up, so they tried to squeeze them into one line. I explained they can move to the next line after any hash mark.
2) Google uses dots, "...." in URLs that are long. Some students copied these: "www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/.../jronionroot.html" and needed to be shown that the URL is in the address line for the browser .
3)Students sometimes gave only the address of the server location, only up to the first hash. We discussed how this is a parent address for all the files in the folders on the server. I explained all valid URLs should end with something like .html, .gif, or .jpg.
4)Students continue to use "http://images.google.co.th/...." as the URL for sites. I explained how Google is a search engine and showed them where the URL is embedded in this address and suggested the image they studied would be better if they actually clicked on the "See full sized image" button.

This lesson brought together a few of the standards we discussed in the course: EL1b, EL1c, EL1d (making diagrams from images and labeling them is considered data processing in Biology and IB Sciences, and EC2b.

I could have expanded this lesson more by having students scan their labeled diagram and display it on a school site for others to view, but I do not believe this would have assisted their learning or the learning of other students. This is a standard I would like to have students do in future activities.

Computer used to translate for student focus and attention

I haven't tried it yet, but changing the word order in a sentence or presentation can cause a student to return attention to the lesson. Alternatively, it can draw attention to a part of the topic that the presenter wants emphasized.

Do you have some fun want to, hmm? This Yoda language translation site while doing some research on such use of languages I found.

Thanks to niallkennedy for the Flickr image of Yoda.