Webcam Blogging - Ideas and Exploration

I have been conducting a number of training sessions involving blogging lately, and through that experience my ideas about blogging in schools have grown. As usual, working with teachers in different circumstances and with different interests led to different thinking and new learning. 

One of these ideas was utilizing webcams for posting images as parts of blog posts, which could include student authors, handmade creations, or other representations. Since most mobile devices have a camera feature, it is easy to snap a pic and embed it in a blog post without the hassle of transferring image files in some other way. 

For example, students could pose as a literary/historical character or display the results of an experiment. Then text can be formatted around the image in various ways for a unique and personal creation. See my example of Odysseus after his run-in with Charybdis.

Odysseus after Charybdis

To access the webcam in Blogger, you can click the image icon and then choose from your webcam. You may get a pop-up asking you to allow access to your webcam. Click the allow checkbox, and you should see a preview of the image. After that, you take the pic, and click to use it. Then you can choose a size, add a caption, and/or click and hold on the image to drag it to a different place on the post and continue writing. 

One potentially helpful tip for doing this with students is to require students to complete the text component of the post before they can explore the multimedia. Otherwise, some students may spend all the computer time taking funny pictures. Perhaps it's best to let them play for a while and then shift to  a focus on text. You're smart - you make the call. 

Look below for some links to resources I've used for training and coaching. Feel free to share ideas of your own in the comments. 

Craig

Blogging With or Without Students 

Making Connections with Blogging (book)

Feed the Feedback Loop with Google Docs

I presented today at Assistechknow, a very cool assistive technology conference put on by Kindy Segovia and others at Kent ISD. My topic was about enacting feedback in different ways within Google Docs, and it was tailored for the unique needs of special ed teachers but still applicable to others.

One of the things I struggled with is how make the process timely and engaging for students. I always struggle with how to make feedback available in time for action to be taken and for it to be communicated in a way that doesn't turn students off to the process. If they feel dumb or inept at any point, there's a good chance they will shut down. If you don't provide focused responses to their work, they won't grow in optimal ways. My best answer is that each teacher has to hone their tone and even personalize feedback for each student depending on how he or she is.

Whew, add that to the many mind-bending tasks for teachers. Hopefully the content below helps move people towards some measure of success in their feedback pursuits.

What Do Your Grades Represent?

This post originally appeared in the Kent ISD Ed Tech Blog

This is an image of a report card. Though it is obviously dated, many current report cards might look quite similar. There are grades and perhaps some comments but little to no information about what the student can or can’t do. At best, these are vague representations of student ability.

Here are three points from research-based sources that could improve this situation:

1. The most successful schools assess and report proficiency on each learning objective (Ken O’Conner)
2. Schools need to build strong curriculum and provide interventions when needed (Multi-tiered Systems of Support)
3. Schools need to provide access to learning in multiple formats (Universal Design for Learning)

Most would agree that they want to do these three things in their schools, so why isn’t it practiced more? The three big reasons are time, resources, and tradition. For time, it is challenging to set up a system of standards-aligned assessments and resources that provide actionable data. It is also expensive to pay people or buy systems that do it for you, and traditional structures like college admissions and grading practices can be challenging barriers to address.

Fortunately, technology now enables us to do these things without overwhelming our time and resources. We can set up sophisticated assessments, assign digital resources to individuals, and accommodate cooperative learning in flexible ways. At Kent ISD, we have developed a system called Edify that accommodates all of these practices. You can click on this link to learn more about how that works. However, this is not an advertisement for our tool; it is a call to consider your practices and move towards what is best for each student.

No matter what tools(s) we use, we should be striving to create learning structures that capture and organize student data efficiently, provide opportunities for teachers to connect with students in personalized as well as collective ways, and report out to stakeholders in a way that shows details about what a student can do – not just a vague letter with a dash or a plus.

Here are some links to how other tools can or could support a standards-based approach. All have pros and cons, but you can look at what might work for you.

DiscoveryEd, Schoology, PowerTeacher (gradebook endorsed by Ken O’Connor),PowerSchool, and Moodle

Helping Students to not do Dumb (and hurtful) Stuff Online

The image above is a screenshot of a message I found on a student's shared Google Document the other day. The student called me over a little freaked out and said that he didn't type it. I checked the revision history, saw who typed it, and sent that student to have a chat with the principal.

Sadly, this was a class of fourth graders, and somewhat ironically, it was during a lesson on staying safe and helpful with online interaction (link to lesson). Despite the unfortunate effects of the student's comments, it was, what some may call, a highly teachable moment about how our online actions can impact ourselves and others.

Recording Your World

Intro
Many people feel like they are being watched/ recorded all the time, and in many cases that is true - for better or for worse. They also feel like the details surrounding that are hazy (hence the smoke filter on my image for this post). Despite all the questions and uncertainties, I want to explore some possibilities for recording interactions in the classroom and other parts of education.

Recently I was working with the incredible staff at Crossroads Middle School in Northview, MI (outside Grand Rapids). A couple of the science teachers were describing how students often strayed from small-group discussion topics when the teacher moved away from them. That led us to think about how we could hold students accountable for their conversations, and we developed a plan for them to record their discussions and send them to the teacher. Here is the process we concocted:

Ideas for Supporting Common Core Literacy

Article used for this: Common Core and school media specialist

Crosswalk (blend of Common Core and 21st century skills- from AASL)

• Matches CC w/ AASL benchmarks
• Diff. language but similar set of skills
• With the implementation of Common Core, advanced literacy instruction will go beyond simply providing resources and being a search specialist or helping kids distinguish between informational and opinion texts, says Meghann Walk, the library director of New York City’s Bard High School Early College. Instead, educators will be required to focus on helping young readers actively engage with informational texts—the sort of stuff that students will encounter in college and in their future careers.
• Not enough to find a dusty copy of a Lincoln biography

Non-fiction shift

• Kids shouldn’t have to get all their information from a single snippet of text—they need “access to multiple perspectives”
• May have to do some ‘spring cleaning’
• Media specialists need to hunt for databases and other online resources to supplement their collections
• “Show the administration why those resources are needed,” says Aronson, “and finally, keep track of their usage to show just how well the money was spent.”
• Google Analytics to track traffic (how to add to Google Site)
• Blogger tracking tool
• Weebly Stats

Helpful points from article

• Take the lead and share your skills/ expertise.
• Toot your horn, make yourself known

What if funds are not available?

• Teachers could use help selecting content-area, leveled texts
• Provide content area, web-based texts that teachers and students can access
• School webpage or other online tool of your choice
• Use Twurdy (sorts searches by reading level) and Sweet Search to find up-to-date, relevant, and credible sources
• Teach teachers and students to do this

Anybody that has worked with teenagers knows that their set of commonly used words is often limited and thickly layered with slang or whatever is hip at that given time. This has been true for generations, but now we are in an era in which communication occurs more rapidly and anyone with a phone can speak volumes with pictures and video without uttering a syllable. This concerns me.

As a former English teacher and persistent proponent of rich language use, I fear that words are becoming less needed and therefore are in danger of dying or being reduced to some cheap, perfunctory code system only to be used when necessary. Though I have not done solid research, I would bet that the average person's working vocabulary is less than what it was ten or more years ago. This is true of me as well. I create screencasts in which words are unneeded or even distracting, and much of what I communicate requires the most simplistic language to avoid confusion in those I teach.

I realize the potential and power of multimedia, and I embrace that daily; however, I think there is value and beauty in promoting enhanced diction for all. Here are some ideas about how teachers and others can do that with digital tools: