The Self Directed Learner

Last Saturday I presented a session on community collaborative writing at Littleton Public Schools’ Inspired Learning Conference.  Here is a link to the presentation, though the conversations led to most of the discovery during that hour.  Here are some of those discoveries and some of the things not in the slides.

1. Digital citizenship is paramount.

Students need to have the tools to not only be safe in regards to online collaboration, but to deliver professional and respectful communication.  We have students write letters to people all the time to practice these skills.  They aren’t new, just digital.  Hmmm…the postal service will soon only have to deliver bills, advertisements, and pen pal letters from elementary students.

2. Allow students to search for collaborators.

In a previous post, I described the writing professional biography project.  To scaffold this so that students aren’t trying to collaborate with auto reply bots, simply add a teacher approval step to the process.  Look for emails that may not be seen for a while or may be seen by multiple people (info@… or support@…) Look for personal addresses in the list of emails students supply (…@hotmail.com instead of …@csu.edu).  These don’t have to be thrown out, only verified first.  Maybe you could even create a Google form where the students enter email address, link to the site where it was found, and why the student would like to email this person.

The bottom line, however, is that a teacher cannot search for collaborators for each student – there is just not enough time.  Students with access to computers will communicate with strangers on their own.  It is our job to show them the safest and most respectful ways to do it.

3. Ask for what you want.

Pretend you are a busy rocket scientist and as you are deleting many emails, (most of which have the subject “Re: NASA Funding Denied”) you see an email from a sixth grader who wants to be a rocket scientist.  The body of the email reads, “Please help me with my science project.  Are you interested?”  As a busy scientist, your answer is probably, “I don’t know. I have no idea what I am getting myself into.”  You may reply asking for more detail because you have a love for education.

Meanwhile in the classroom three days have gone by and that same sixth grader is wondering if anyone will respond to the half dozen emails he sent out.  He gets your reply and has to supply more detail.  This collaboration is slow going.

Now pretend you are that scientist and you receive an email where the body includes, “I would like your help in learning about (insert learning outcome here).  Would you mind answering the three questions below?  I also must write a three page paper including my research and your responses.  Once I have this complete, would you mind if I shared it with you online for your feedback?”

4. Hold students accountable, not their online collaborators.

“Dr. Xyz hasn’t emailed me back” cannot be a valid excuse.  Make sure there are other options available for the student to get the needed information.  Brainstorm with students about what to do if their collaborator suddenly becomes a ghost in the machine.  Try to create opportunities for multiple collaborators per student and multiple students per trusted collaborator.

5. Search for blogs about the topic of interest.

In nearly every profession, there are those like myself that like to write about and share what they know through their blogs.  By searching for blogs on a topic, you are at least guaranteed to find someone who likes to talk about what they do.  These people are much more likely to start a conversation about something they have already shared on a blog than DrXyz@someuniversity.edu, who’s email address was found on the university web site.  If they are already talking about it, they will probably be amenable to continue talking about it.

The best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.  Once you have taught it to other people and want to learn more, build a game that models and teaches it for you.  To create a game that teaches, you must really take the topic apart and put it back together while creating a framework for the player.

First, decide on the learning objective for the player.  The more specific this objective is outlined, the easier the rest of this process will become.  Think about the feel of the game and what game play should be like.  Are you trying to model how to manage a classroom of 30 students? Or how to disarm a bomb? How to build a stable foundation for a high rise? These will all  be very different in how the game play should feel.  For example, disarming a bomb will probably have a time crunch feeling.

Secondly, take the components of each concept and assign game elements that model how they interact.  Choose which of these interactions  you want the player have control over and which are automatic.  In Angry Birds, the player controls velocity and initial trajectory, while gravity and object to object reactions are automatic. Check out Wired’s The Physics of Angry Birds for more on that example.

Now you have the objective and the components of each concept, but how does a player win?  Define victory conditions or scoring that aligns with the learning objectives.  At this point, you should have taken the topic apart into its components.  Once you decide on a victory condition, we can start putting it all into a framework of game play using the game elements.

Writing a set of rules  will help bring it all together.  Play it and make sure that all the concepts are modeled in the game play.  Revise it repeatedly  to increase the player’s interactions with the concepts. When people ask about your chosen expertise, supporters will no longer say, “You wrote the book on it.”  Supporters will say, “You made the game about it.”

Atlas wakes up as if Santa has come and left presents for her. Instead of running to the living room and looking under a tree, she runs instead to her desk and unplugs her tablet.  With the eagerness that only a fifth grader can have, she logs into her school account.  She says, “Hello Mittens.”, and her online avatar comes to life.  A little blue exclamation point pops up above the little cat’s head. Blue means science and Atlas doesn’t care for science as much as other quests.  Atlas strokes a finger across Mittens and a video pops up on the right side of the screen .

“Hello my favorite grand daughter.”, says Grandpa. “I hear you are learning about the planets and how they move.”  Atlas watches as Grandpa’s video quickly demonstrates two of her vocabulary words, rotation and revolution.  Atlas gets the two words confused with each other and replays the video another time.  When she is ready, she taps “Complete Quest” and Grandpa continues, “Now Atlas, pretend your chair is the sun you are the earth. Show me revolution.”  Atlas points her tablet at the chair and begins to walk around the chair.  As she finishes her first revolution around the chair, Mittens begins to purr. “Good Job!”, says Grandpa.  He asks her to demonstrate a few more things and the quest is completed.

“Atlas.  Are you awake in there?  Come get some breakfast”, says Mom from the kitchen.

“Just a minute.  Grandpa sent me a quest and I want to share it with Nori.  He loves Grandpa’s quests. It helps him with his English.  What time is it in Japan? Will Nori respond before school?” replies Atlas, quite excited with her accomplishment.

“Probably not honey, it’s late tonight for Nori’s family.  He already had his Monday.  Don’t take too long sharing, we need to get you to school.”

Atlas notices that Mittens has leveled up and wants to share something.  Atlas taps Mittens on the head to reveal a new game level, “Mittens in our Solar System.”  When Grandpa submitted the quest online, he picked some 5th grade learning objectives for science.  The school site guided him to areas were Atlas needed improvement and quickly trained him how to create a video for those objectives. It just so happens, Atlas has now unlocked enough science objectives to play the Solar System game with her avatar.  Tommy unlocked this yesterday and his monkey avatar got a cool space helmet when he finished it.

“Oh, I don’t have time right now, Mittens. Maybe when we get to school? Tommy can help us too.” says Atlas, as she closes the case of her tablet and is off to breakfast.  She shows Mom the video and tells her how excited she is for science class today.

A few hours later, it is time for science.  The teacher says, “Does anyone have any resources or quest to share?  Make sure they are relevant to the objectives on the board.” The teacher says this last part to draw attention to the objectives, though she knows that she has flagged it “science time” in the system and the student tablets won’t allow topics not tagged with the correct learning objectives.  For the next 20 minutes, students are sharing their quest with one another and completing one another’s quests as well as the teacher created quests.

Atlas has never had such fun in science.  Every time she sees another student walking around a chair to show Grandpa how revolution works, she feels so happy.  She also enjoyed  Tommy’s dad’s quest about orbiting.  She took her tablet to orbit the teacher twice – and Mittens loved it too!

The best part about this fantastic story of Atlas’s Monday in science is that every single part of what she did is possible today.  However, my grand daughter still has 10 years until fifth grade so we still have plenty of time to iron out the bugs.

Photo Credit to A1 Science, Masterfile.com and More-Cartoon-Cats

My wife and I will constantly catch ourselves quoting Pep Talk by Kid President.  I can’t tell you how many times we’ve said to one another,”I’m on your team, be on my team.”  There are so many great ideas in the heads of our students.  They want to share their ideas, we want them to share their ideas.  So why do we insist on being “boring”?  There are some great safe ways to get student ideas out there.  The benefits for students who have a wider audience is tremendous.

1. Use Google drive to create collaborative learning documents.

It was once a lot more difficult to get parents and community members to be involved with student projects.  People had to take off work and come to the school to volunteer.  Now student’s can just share an online document about their writing, science fair, or social studies project.  Here is a great example of one such project.

2. Use twitter hashtags to get feedback from a community.

Set up a classroom twitter account and use it to post student work.  Be sure to not use names when posting.  You can post pictures of physical creations or handwritten work.  You can post links to students’ digital work.  But, most importantly you can post it to a #hashtag that you share with your class community so that the can also post responses with the same #hashtag.  A hashtag is just a string of characters preceded by a # to make tweets easier to search for.  When choosing a classroom hashtag, make sure to search it first to make sure that others aren’t already using it.  Students will love seeing what people say about their work.

3. Student websites and digital portfolios

By having students create digital portfolios, students can have a body of evidence that stays with them much longer than last year’s notebook.  Students can always revise work instead of loosing it or waiting to have it returned by overworked teachers.  They can also built their own personal toolbox for what they are learning.  Best of all though, they are learning to put their work up for a large audience to view and provide feedback.

The challenge

How do I get people involved to comment and give productive feedback on student projects?

There is no easy answer to this, though the solution is simple.  You have to build an online community of supporters.  I have been actively supporting these ideas for a while now and have quite a few loyal supporters.  If you have an upcoming project, email me and I will try to help find people to support it.  You can also sign up for our Scribelife monthly newsletter which has a section devoted to education and 21st century projects.

The students of today live in a much larger social world. They are connected to many communities through the use of their cell phones and websites such as Facebook or Twitter.  Being digital natives, they are quite accustomed to finding information quickly through the use of the Internet. If they want to learn how to beat a level in their favorite video game they will search YouTube for online tutorials. Most students of today feel that school takes away the tools that they are most comfortable with.  Utilizing the flipped classroom meets the learners where they are comfortable and allows them to use tools they use every day.

Here are the types of the comments received from students after their first trimester in a flipped classroom:

Pros

“I can pause, rewind, or fast forward my teacher.”

“My parents couldn’t always help me with homework, but now they learn along with me.”

“I get frustrated when other students would ask teachers to repeat stuff over and over, it was just boring.”

“I can finally do something in class.”

Cons

“I can’t ask questions right away while watching a video.”

“I have basketball, FBLA, and a part time job; I don’t have time to watch videos all night.”

There are some possible reasons for these students’ frustration. Perhaps the videos tackle too many concepts and the students feel as if they are getting lost.  Some guidelines in video creation will be covered later in the handbook.

“I use to get my homework done in class anyway.  This is just more work.”

There are many students who are very practiced in attaining the information they need to pass a test.  Under a flipped classroom model those students may be reluctant to take their learning deeper.  Just stick with it. They will come around.

Training Students for Flipped Classroom Expectations

There a lot of students who are highly practiced at playing school. They understand the game of picking out keywords, understanding key vocabulary, and recalling this information for a test. Switching to a self-directed classroom model can be a shock to some students. So we have to train the students to be able to be successful in this model.

• Teach students how to use your content library to help prepare for the challenges you’ll present to them during class.  Although it may sound intuitive, most students may not realize that they can pause content write-down the question and continue on or go back through the resource as needed.
• Expect responses from all students, every day.  If the teacher says the homework is to watch a 5 minute video, watching the video is the only expectation for which the teacher can hold learners accountable.
• Train your students how to ask higher-level questions. If you ask the typical 6 to 12 grade student to explain Costas levels of questioning, be prepared for a blank stare.
• Students need to know how to find information quickly using online searches. They should be able to find the answers to lower-level questions with the use of an internet search.
• Explain to students that by having a resource library for content delivery you have freed up more time to listen to their questions by giving up time lecturing.  The benefit to them is that you now have more time per student.  The downfall for them is that you now have more time per student, and no longer can they fade into the crowd while you lecture.

“Let’s Make a Lesson” video podcast will start on 4-2-2013. Our first episode will be “Cells, Tissue, Organs and Body Systems – Elementary Science” Each week we will invite teachers to share the screen in putting together engaging lessons. There will be two videos created each week. Of course we will post the final lesson video, but we will also post the brainstorming and story boarding that went on and the process behind creating the lesson. One concept – One hour – Two Videos.

Please feel free to use the submission form to suggest upcoming topics or to sign up to participate in the podcast. The submission site is available at: http://scribelife.com/edu/index.html

Inquiry Based Learning

Inquiry based learning is the theory that the educational experience should stem from students questioning the world they live in. The difficult part about inquiry based learning is the structure. The public education world has set guidelines on when student should learn certain concepts. The student needs to learn A before they tackle B, and in most cases they will be tested and categorized by how they answer C. So when the student asked a question about X, they are redirected to focus on A, B, and C.

By no means am I saying that inquiry-based learning has no structure. The structure just looks different. We still have to guide students to ask the right questions. It won’t do to have the student ask questions about fairies and unicorns unless we can somehow tie that inquiry into a learning objective relevant to the concepts we are required to teach.

Susie is a sixth grader. She loves Twilight! If it has anything to do with vampires or werewolves, she is on board. Mr. Jones is a science teacher. He is having the hardest time getting Susie to be interested in science. While talking to the librarian, Mr. Jones finds out that Susie has read every Twilight book and anything similar.

The next day, Mr. Jones asks Susie the following question, ”How do werewolves change from people into huge furry beast?” He asked her to explain this scientifically. He offers some vocabulary from unit on changes in matter to help her along the way (chemical reactions, physical changes, and malleable). This becomes her assignment over the next few days. She must provide a theory about how werewolves can change form. Mr. Jones has just turned Susie into a scientist.

I want to clarify the first sentence in this section. Inquiry based learning is the theory the educational experience should stem from students questioning the world they live in. Often teachers try to get students to develop questions for the world in which the teacher lives. Inquiry starts with the learner. Try to take time to live in the learners world long enough to identify the possible questions that could lead the learner to a path of discovery.

Teacher Planning for IBL

• Brainstorm possible questions, ideas and issues
• List possible to connections to popular student interests
• Use concept mapping software, mind maps or topic webs to record ideas
• Create a three column, What I Know, What I Want to Know, What I Learned (KWL) chart to develop questions about the topic of inquiry

Possible Student Inquiry Activities
• Refine and develop a list of search terms, keywords and subject headings prior to searching
• Use online library catalogues to locate materials in school and public libraries to locate information
• Use online databases (e.g., SIRS, eLibrary, www.countryreports.org)
• Learn how to efficiently use Internet searches to locate information
• Develop and practice interview questions and techniques.
• Use KWL chart

Possible Student Processing Activities
• Complete organizers (e.g., compare/contrast, cause/effect, commonalities/discrepancies, problems/issues)
• Write about or discuss graphic organizer(s) was/were most appropriate for their inquiry
• Evaluate Internet sites for accuracy, objectivity, currency, authority and content, using a rubric, or an evaluation checklist
• Write about or discuss which resources are most useful for a deeper understanding of their topic and why
• Write about or discuss graphs, charts and illustrations and how effectively these present information in an easily understood format
• Write about or discuss how their understanding of the topic has changed/developed since the start of the inquiry
• Write about or discuss what new questions, problems, issues and ideas have emerged

Possible Student Creation/Reflection Activities
• Craft a hypothesis and present evidence on its behalf
• Write an essay
• Create a presentation
• Create a video
• Create webpage
• Propose actions /outline steps to solve a problem
• Reflect on KWL and create questions for further inquiry

There is a lot of information about the flipped classroom concept available on the Internet.  As I’m asked what exactly is the flipped classroom, I wanted to give a more in-depth explanation.  Of course the main point you can read in almost every blog or publication is that there is no “the flipped classroom”.  In my opinion the flipped classroom is more than turning your lectures into videos and putting them online and then doing homework in class.

This is my interpretation of the key components of the flipped classroom. Of course six months from now, I will probably feel like this video is totally outdated and my interpretation will most likely have grown.