The Transparent Teacher

If you read my last post, you know that I taught e.e. cummings’ “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” We’ve been done with this unit for a couple weeks now, but I am just now finding time to post some of the student examples. The finished product involved the use of Google Docs (where they had a copy of the poem and their own notes about it), Quicktime Player (with its built-in screencasting capabilities), and USB microphones. I would have loved to use Jing so that students could select only a portion of their screen for the screencasts, but the software was out of date on the students machines. Instead of updating a whole cart of Macs, I went with Quicktime Player and its full-screen screencasting option. When finished, students uploaded their screencasts to Google Docs, made the file accessible for “anyone with the link,” and then pasted their group names and the link to their screencast into a Google Form. This gathered all the links into a simple spreadsheet for me, and grading was a cinch. I couldn’t be more pleased with the results!

The results testify to the power of screencasting as an assessment tool. How often have I delivered instruction and watched heads nod, thinking this meant that the students were understanding, then graded exams in dismay as I discovered that they didn’t really “get” it at all? Screencasting allows every student to share understanding. It allows me to verify that they understood. When I graded the cumulative exam for this unit, I noticed that students had mastery of this poem. I firmly believe this was the result of having wrestled with the material individually and in groups, working toward the production of an extemporaneous screencast about the poet’s method and the poem’s meaning. Magical!

I sought approval from my students before sharing their work here. They were proud of what they accomplished, and rightly so. Their work is commendable!

If you took interest in the lesson and would like to hear a few of the finished screencasts, please check out the three samples posted below.

Example #1

Example #2

Example #3

Well done, students!

I will be presenting in Crystal A at 10:45 today on the topic of using digital technologies to create real audience and authentic, descriptive, meaningful feedback for student work. I do not have a slide deck for this presentation; instead, I will be demonstrating the technologies and sharing examples from my own classroom. If you are unable to attend but would still like to see my session materials, please feel free!

I just presented my first session at PETE&C, and it was provided to a face-to-face group as well as a virtual audience (via Elluminate). My session materials are available in the PETE&C Ning, but my moderator also pointed the virtual attendees to this blog, which is great.

My session materials are available here for anyone who is interested. Thanks for attending!

Image Credit: KTVee on Flickr, Creative Commons Licensing

First, the great news. It’s small, but it makes me really, really happy. I set out this year to digitize as much of my class activity as possible. I wanted students to become fluid with the management of their digital resources. I also wanted them to realize the collaborative power of technology. During the first month  of school, this meant taking a couple extra minutes here and there to guide them. I showed them how to make a copy of a view-only Google Doc, rename it using a specific file naming protocol, and share it with me. I pointed out the power of bookmarks within a Doc, as well as hyperlinking in general. They learned a host of digital skills. This wasn’t always easy, because contrary to what many people believe, our students don’t already know how to do this. They needed guidance and assistance, and in a class with 24 kids, this can take time and patience. The effort was totally worth it. Check out these recent incidents:

• After taking a hiatus from a “Notes” doc where students are keeping all their notes and information about American literary history, we returned and continued taking notes this past week. When I shared view-only notes on Neoclassicism, I merely said, “Don’t make a copy of the file. Instead, command-A, copy, and paste into your existing Notes doc. Place this information between Puritan and Romantic.” No one asked for clarification. They just did it. One student raised her hand and asked, “You titled this ‘Neoclassicism.’ I am assuming I should add that word to my table of contents and bookmark it?” YES! Exactly!
• In a similar way, I wanted students to do some more extensive/lengthy work, and I didn’t want this “Notes” doc to be cluttered with longer analysis. Instead of adding all this info to the “Notes” doc, I asked them to create a new doc, then I asked them how they could organize things so they would have everything in one spot when they were studying this material months from now. They immediately saw where I was headed. They opened their main “Notes” doc, typed a descriptive line, then highlighted it and hyperlinked to the longer analysis that they were keeping otherwise separate. YES! Exactly!
• I will be out of class this Monday through Wednesday for PETE&C. I placed all my resources and lesson plans in Google Docs, and took three minutes of class yesterday to go over everything with the kids. As I wrapped up, I reminded them that they can reach me while I am gone if they need assistance. One student said, “Tech is so cool that way. It’s pretty much like you’re not gone.” YES! Exactly!

This may not seem all that impressive. It’s not a huge tech project. We weren’t doing anything terribly cutting edge. This isn’t material for the next issue of T.H.E. Magazine. But I think it is great news in its own small way. These are the mundane but crucial tech skills that make it possible for us to run a digitally-organized life. Too many schools and teachers are assuming that students just know this stuff. But they don’t. We have to teach it. The thrill for me this past week was observing that hey, they get it! I said to them, “Remember how long this took back in September? You have come so far. You’re all rock stars with this stuff now.” They agreed.

This is as good a time as any to mention that I have used an incredibly small amount of paper this year. In the past, I wasted an incredible amount of time in the copy room, wasting an incredible amount of paper — reams and reams. This year, I’m hardly ever there. That’s really great news, too.

PETE&C starts today. I will be traveling to Hershey soon. I am presenting three sessions this year, and attending countless others. I can’t wait! I’ll be blogging about my experience for those who are interested.

What’s your favorite song? Why do you love it? Is it the tune? Is it the lyrics? Is it both?

I asked my students to select a song and analyze the lyrics as poetry. They could work alone or in pairs. First, I posted detailed questions in a Google Doc, and they had to make a copy of that doc and share their copy with me. I monitored them as they answered questions about rhyme, meter, figurative language, similes, metaphors, images, etc….the standard stock of poetry analysis. Next, I asked them to write about their discoveries. I wanted the to explain why they picked it, why they love it, and why they think it’s poetry. I wrote an example and posted it on a Google Site, then I created a page for each kid. They had to go into the Site and hyperlink to their subpage. Next, they posted a YouTube video of their song, a copy of the song lyrics with line numbering for reference, and finally, their explanation of why the song lyrics constituted poetry to them. I gave them a rubric and explained how I would evaluate their work.

Some of them took this very seriously from the start. Some of them didn’t. When I mentioned that we were going to promote our website and solicit feedback, one student asked, “We’re going to make this visible on the real web? Is it live right now? Because if it is, I need to go in there and fix something.” That’s the power of real audience: If he had been writing just for me, he didn’t mind tolerating a few mistake in his prose. If this thing was going to be out there for the world to see, he wanted to get it right.

One student out of 65 elected not to post work on the site. I respected this student’s right to decide where her work would appear. I believe that all of my students should be offered opportunities to build positive digital identities, but I’m not in the business of forced exposure.

Toward the end of the process, I showed the students how to create a Google Form and post it on their page. I explained that this technology was great for all sorts of tasks, and that we were going to leverage it to allow our visitors to provide feedback on our work. I went on to say that this was optional. After all, some feedback might be negative, and even though we phrased the feedback questions in a positive way, anyone who has ever read YouTube comments knows that there are some folks out there who are more interested in tearing you down than building you up. I was pleased to note that most students felt comfortable posting a feedback form. Some of them even added additional questions.

This morning, I changed the privacy settings on the site to make it visible to anyone with the link. We printed QR codes and shortened URLs, and students are going to share these with friends and within their social networks. I posted a link on Twitter with the hashtag #comments4kids, and I hope this generates a little more traffic to the site. As I posted this, one student said, “It seems so official.”

Yes. Exactly.