Cross-Campus Peer Review

This spring semester I participated in a fun project with Tommy Buteau, who is doing fantastic work in educational technology. We conducted a cross-campus peer review in which my AP students read and reviewed the work of students in his creative writing class. My students used the track changes and insert comment features of word to give peer feedback on short stories and personal narratives that Mr. Buteau’s students had written. They then filled out a peer review feedback form to help his students produce their final drafts and to help my students think about writing, editing, and revision. You can check out his class web page by clicking here. The peer review papers are under each student's personal web page under "peer review paper." Yet another example of how technology can be leveraged to create unique opportunities for students to learn!

Romeo and Juliet!

Today I am hosting another synchronous web-based class discussion with my ninth graders. We're going to be discussing the major themes of Romeo and Juliet. We had the unit test yesterday and discussed the expectations for the discussion--a lot of the students were excited about being able to have another blog discussion. This is the last one this year that I am going to set up for them; for the book club unit the students will be writing the prompts and students in my other sections will be responding to their peers questions.

Education Malpractice

In addressing the reservations that many teachers still have about bringing technology into the classroom, Howland & Levin (2009) don't mince words. They argue that to continue to debate the issue of whether or not we should be embracing technology in education without "devoting substantive energy and attention to the development of appropriate digital practices for teaching and learning is to indulge a combination of nostalgia and intransigence tantamount to malpractice" (p. 88).

With a whole array of powerful technology available to our students and a growing pile of scientific evidence showing that it can facilitate higher-level thinking, motivate reluctant learners, support struggling learners, help create student-centered learning rather than teacher-centered teaching, and empower students to succeed in the digital age, the time for debate is over.

Lowther, Inan, Strahl, & Ross (2008) cite a report from the US Department of Commerce which revealed that education is the "least technology-intensive enterprise among 55 US industry sectors" (p. 196). How can we prepare students for a twenty-first century work world in a classroom that is mired in the early twentieth century? The answer is that we can't, we aren't, and industry continues to complain about an unprepared workforce being pumped out of our high schools and universities.

The time for debate is over. The kids are using technology whether we like it or not. The only question now is, will we teach them how to use it constructively or continue to let them use it only in inane and destructive ways?

To see my latest Web 2.0 adventure, check out my class blog in which we discussed themes from To Kill a Mockingbird here.

More Voices, More Insight, More Writing

“Sitting in a computer lab writing silently on a class blog is like standing right next to someone and sending them a text message.” People do it all the time, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. This point had honestly never occurred to me until it was pointed out to me recently by Dan Maas, the Chief Information Officer of Littleton Public Schools, but it has given an unexpected new direction to my ongoing teacher research project.

Toward the end of last year PSD finally unblocked some of the previously filtered blogging sites, including my personal favorite—blogger—which has opened the door for me to set up a new class blog project this year. My plan is to set up a class discussion centered on the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird. I will have three sections of 9th Grade Pre-AP students who are all currently reading the book and can’t wait to see what they come up with. I will post a link to the page as soon as I get it set up.

As always I plan to run the discussion synchronously (which means that all the students will be in class communicating through the blog at the same time) rather than asynchronously (which means that they would post as homework, over a period of a few weeks). The major difference is that I want to add a new wrinkle, one that honestly had never occurred to me before.

I have written on this blog before about the benefits of “silent discussions” an idea that I borrowed from an AP curriculum I taught at my former school (developed by Nate Hoffman) and adapted for use with a class blog rather than big sheets of butcher paper. But my EDUC 709 seminar recently had a visit from an amazing technology in education innovator, Dan Maas, and he gave me some food for thought.

He described a different type of synchronous blogging in which the blog supplements an active classroom discussion, so that the teacher is vocally engaging the students about the different subjects at the same time that they are furiously hammering out their typed responses. Essentially what this creates is a class discussion with so much more opportunity for student voices to enter the conversation. Rather than waiting impatiently, hand slowly going numb while the conversation plods on, a student can add his or her two cents without any wait, before he forgets, and before the conversation moves on and makes her comment seem irrelevant.

Interestingly I had a student come up to me after a recent, very active, face to face class discussion and he complained that several times he had ideas but that by the time I got around to calling on him the conversation had moved on and so his voice had never been heard. I keep track of which students I have called on so that I am sure to spread the input around, and bring in as many student voices as possible, but this is a difficult issue to overcome—unless you can set up a not-so-silent synchronous class blog with active in-class discussion at the same time. Sounds good to me, anyway, so that’s the plan. I’ll be sure to let you know how it works out.

Gender Differences

This summer I conducted a review of literature focused on quantitative research regarding the relationship between online discussions and student performance. Obviously, student performance is a subjective term and it is operationally defined quite differently from study to study, but overall there is overwhelming evidence of a clear correlation between online discussions and increased student achievement.

I have written up my findings and I plan to go over some of the more interesting aspects of the research here in this blog over the next few months. But in the mean time I wanted to share one particularly interesting finding.

Building on the overwhelming evidence that women are underrepresented in traditional classroom discussions, which tend to be dominated by male voices, Caspi, Chajut, and Saporta (2006) conducted a study in which they examined the relationship between gender and participation in both face to face and online discussions. Relating overall participation to the baseline attendance ratio they were able to determine whether women were underrepresented or overrepresented in terms of their contribution to discussion in each environment.

Not surprisingly to those of us who have run class blogs ourselves, women were significantly underrepresented in face to face discussions and yet were actually overrepresented in terms of their contributions to online discussions. Why females prefer the online forum is not yet entirely clear, but the implications for anyone wishing to run an equal-opportunity classroom are obvious. Though neither is a perfect forum for discussion, providing opportunities for both types of discussion to take place in a classroom is the best way to ensure the greatest number of voices will have a chance to be heard. Relying only on old-fashioned face to face discussions in a classroom is simply not a recipe for equal participation.

Instant Gratification

In talking to teachers about class blogs I've found that a number of people have experimented with them, but that a lot of us have not had much success keeping them going. I've also found, in trying to come up with new names for my class blogs, that there are a lot of class blogs out there with one or two posts and a few scattered comments that have died an ignoble death and lie floating in cyberspace unloved and known only by those who wish we could take their domain names. I think that unfortunately this lack of success is causing many teachers to turn away from the technology before they realize that there is a better way.

One mistake that many teachers make is that they make the blog an out-of-class assignment and then they stretch the discussions out over a period of weeks, or even an entire semester. While I think that this can be valuable, and in the right circumstances it could work, I think that one of the keys to a successful class blog is instant gratification.

The thing that makes chat rooms, instant messaging, and text messaging so appealing to this generation is the instant feedback that you get when you're communicating live with another person or, better yet, a whole group of people. When you post a comment to a class blog as homework nothing happens other than your post going up on the page; it may be days or weeks before another student responds to you (if they ever do), and by then you've long forgotten about your comment anyway. And if the blog does eventually pick up some steam, when it's your turn to post there's usually a lot of reading to do just to get caught up with the discussion and it starts to feel like a chore to read all of the previous threads. Students end up just making up a random comment to fulfill the assignment that doesn't do much to further the conversation. That is a major reason that so many class blogs die in their infancy--they're pretty boring for both teacher and students and eventually everyone loses interest and gives up on them.

By setting up a silent discussion you can have thirty students in a computer lab all communicating in a way that allows for instantaneous feedback and no-waiting participation. You don't have to wait for the teacher to call on you, and you don't have to wait days for someone to respond to your message. You can have five or six conversations going on in the same class, all at the same time. It's all instant, it's all online, and perhaps best of all, it's all silent.

Despite the lack of activity on this page my class blogging project rolls on. I've set up another silent discussion this week for my Pre-AP Sophomore English class. We'll be discussing Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities on the 21st and 26th of March.

Writing Project Conference

I'm definitely excited about the CSU Writing Project conference in January; I think it will be a lot of fun. I'm planning to set up in a computer lab and help teachers create their own class blogs. I'll be offering two sessions, one designed to help beginners to get online and create a blog, the other for teachers who are ready to explore the infinite possibilities of class blogs.

Here is a quick description of each session. Hope to see you January 26th at CSU.

Beginning Blogging

Learn fast and easy ways to bring your classroom into the twenty-first century through class web log discussions. Participate in a real-time web log discussion and learn how to protect yourself and your students while taking advantage of the opportunities for critical thinking discussion that the World Wide Web offers. Walk out of the session with a published web log ready for class on Monday.

Advanced Blogging

Take your class web log to the next level. Learn advanced techniques for facilitating critical thinking discussions online. Discover ways to expand your classroom beyond the four walls of your room; connect your class discussions from class to class, grade to grade, and even connect to classrooms on the other side of the world.