Happy Halloween!
Can’t believe Halloween is already here. Seems like just yesterday we were together in C4T Boot Camp thinking about how to better use technology and 21st century skills to improve our classroom instruction. I have chose two focus areas for the first quarter being Moodle and Diigo. Here’s what we did.
Every since the Internet and web pages have emerged as a prominent feature, I’ve tried to utilize online communication as a way to enhance education for my students. This evolution has taken me through several stages of different applications and servers as the years passed, but all had the same goal of extending the classroom beyond the minutes of face time in the regular course. I’ve done everything from free to paid sites with this goal, but now it seems Moodle has provided the dependable online presence I’ve been waiting for. Here’s how…
I began by focusing on the calendar as a feature that documents what we do in class each day. Every day I record two categories titled “in class” and “hw.” This allows kids to stay on top of what’s happening in class, even if they were absent. As a teacher I find this format to be an excellent compliment to my regular lesson plans. I find lesson plans to be focused from the teacher’s perspective, while the calendar is from the student’s point of view. Kind of helps create a nice Ying and Yang effect for all the Yo-Yos involved, especially me!
The other focus I’ve concentrating upon is designing Moodle blocks around class units and lessons. This re-enforces classroom instruction, while also battling the “black hole” of student backpacks/lockers. Anything we do in class has a Moodle connection to it. For example, my first unit in American Studies (10th grade American history and English integration) was on contemporary America under the essential question of “What is America?” The unit theme centered upon our country’s diversity including how historically it has been formed and how America deals with it today. I created a block within the Moodle that explains broad unit goals and objectives, then added additional blocks to organize the different sub-unit lessons.
What I like best about the new Moodle from last year is the ability to easily move blocks up and down so that what ever is the current focus can be on the top of the page. This may sound a bit simple, but it has been a huge time saver. In previous version of Moodle, the teacher had to move blocks up and down one step at a time. No big deal if you have three or four blocks, but what it you have 50 or more? Thanks to Moodle for this improvement!
Instead of answering questions I write, students make individual engagement with the media that connects to what they already know, questions what they don’t fully understand, and comments show insights of their understanding. This Moodle activity works best in classes I teach where students each have their own laptop, but I also adapt it for use in my regular classes that kids don’t have one. In the second case students record CQCs old school style with pen and paper, then add their best CQCs onto the forum as homework. In either design, students extend their knowledge by adding to class work by comments on other student’s thoughts or adding to the forum by answers to other's questions or putting links to research online that informs the topic. CQCs have become a favorite class activity for my students because it personalizes the lesson! The other area I chose to focus on also has similar ability to individualize learning for students was Diigo.
Diigo
Diigo has become an excellent research tool for students in my class. I must admit that I had apprehension about using Diigo that I expressed during summer c4t training. I prefer the old “cut and paste” method into MS Word document and then having students interact with the text via highlighting and margin notes using the “reviewing” toolbar. Diigo has the same benefits of this type of active reading lesson, but cuts out the reformatting that is often required when students cut and paste Internet sources into a Word document. The main reason I gained appreciation was that many student liked Diigo better, which increased the amount of quality research they were doing.
As we learned about Diigo this summer, we found the toolbar add on to the Internet browser allows highlighting and annotated notes for any online source of research. When deploying this approach, I found Firefox to be the browser that interacted best with Diigo, although students did use other browsers for research with differing amounts of glitches. The setup for creating a group inside Diigo does take a little extra time investment from the teacher, but is a one time investment that is needed only once at the beginning of the project. Once you have the student’s email for the first project, you can re-use them for future groups you plan on using.
I find anytime you want student to do quality research that you need to review aspects that make complex thinking possible. First, explain highlighting doesn’t mean, “painting” a page. The purpose is to identify key ideas of terms you may return to later when creating the end product for which you are doing research. Highlighting doesn’t work like the movie The Matrix were when you’re jacked-in you know everything about the topic. Painting working alone doesn’t create understanding.
Think of highlighting being a form of a Post-it note. It is a label that can more easily be referred to later when you return to the research. I understand students often try to shortcut a process to speed up the time required, but quality doesn’t usually equal brevity. I try to help facilitate this understanding by telling kids to limited highlighting. Highlight one word minimum to a one sentence maximum. This way they really have to evaluate what they highlight.
The comment feature of Diigo really allows students to show what they are thinking and teachers to see student understanding of any text. This process also takes time to be done right, but is necessary. Here too is a chance for teachers to do some pre-teaching on what quality annotation really is all about. I showed models of good and bad comments to class BEFORE they did it on their own. This took a little more time, but greatly improved student work.
The best thing about Diigo for teachers is how research visually presents itself to the instructor. When you review student research it is all it one place, no heavy folders of papers you have to haul back and forth from school since it’s all in cloud memory space. When you look at your student’s research you can see it either in chronological form within the group, or by student. I preferred the later for my grading purposes, but both have advantages. The best advantage is how research presents itself on the page. When you first see what students have done, it only shows what they interacted with on the page. In other words, it is only their thoughts, minus the original text. The quality of research really pops out at the teacher. This aspect is what converted me to Diigo! You can sit down and conference with students by looking at this view and asking them to explain their thought process. I found this type of conferencing important to improving my weaker students by exposing poor effort and encouraging better work.
Quarter one has been a good start of the C4T class for me. I hope the rest of the year will continue to be as good!
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