Digital Footprint: Unintentional and Intentional

I am participating in an open access course about digital citizenship. It’s taught by Jason Ohler and is offered through the University of Alaska. Occasionally I’ll copy some of my own posts or reflections from that course.

This is a timely topic for me. Recently, I asked the students in my technology committee what they were learning about technology that they thought would be useful for their future, and what they haven’t learned about technology but wish they knew. I’m incorporating that feedback into a draft digital citizenship framework that I’ll then discuss with those students. One of the students said that she wished she were taught about creating an online presence that would benefit her as she goes on to university and then employment. I thought that was a great suggestion.

Question: What are the differences between an intentional and an unintentional digital footprint?

Response: Please see my Google Slide presentation here (http://goo.gl/dH1hGc), or you should be able to see it embedded in this post.

Question: How should we consider issues like age-appropriateness, privacy and safety in terms of students creating online presences?

Response: Age appropriateness, privacy, and safety need to be considered within the school’s philosophy, and the parents’ and student’s comfort levels. If any of these groups are not comfortable with developing a deliberate online footprint for the student, then it would not be right to force the student to create one. However, an alternative could be for that student to practise creating one within the confines of a school’s walled-garden, or one that is not published but stored only on his or her device. Of course, even these approaches do not guarantee privacy, and that should be communicated to the student, parent, and school as well.

At the same time, we need to communicate to everyone involved that a digital footprint can be a positive thing if done deliberately with a longer-term outlook in mind. That last part is important because many people do deliberately create a persona online, but the persona they create isn’t one that will necessarily help them, and may in fact harm them now or in the future.

Mixing Old Habits with New Possibilities

Yesterday one of my classes was working on a small part of a larger assignment, and I let them know that I wanted them to submit the small portion that night for feedback. They let me know they had a couple of major tests and assignments that were due today and asked if I could let them submit their work tonight. I had no problem with that, so I agreed.

It got me thinking, though. How often do I ask for assignments to be submitted on a day when I am with a certain class? If I ask for electronic submissions, why do those submissions usually have to coincide with days when I see those students? Shouldn’t the ability to submit assignments electronically allow for more flexibility than that? I guess some old habits are hard to break.

What Could the Next Iteration of ISTE’s Standards Look Like?

I am participating in an open access course about digital citizenship. It’s taught by Jason Ohler and is offered through the University of Alaska. Occasionally I’ll copy some of my own posts or reflections from that course.

This Week’s Question

ISTE has gone through two sets of standards. This is addressed in your course text and forms the basis of our discussion this week. Given that we know technology is evolving exponentially, what will version 3 look like?

My Post

I keep wavering on whether or not there should be a point that promotes the learning of hard skills, such as the “Technology Operations and Concepts” point from v.1. However, I think that it’s actually implicit in most of the v.2 points because they couldn’t happen without those skills.

I could see version three continuing to be more global while also have more personal aspects, too. I think that understanding our place in communities and the world requires us to understand ourselves.

I would add at least some points about these three things:

1. teaching students about contributing knowledge for the greater community

2. teaching students to be aware of how oneself is affected, both positively and negatively, by digital technology

3. teaching students to be more thoughtful about digital technology’s benefits and detriments to the self, and to society/the world, and that the benefits and that many of the benefits and detriments are impossible to predict and very difficult to recognize even when they are occurring

In fact, the teacher should also be modelling and practising each of these three things, too.

There’s also an idea that I can’t quite formulate, so I’ll do my best to communicate the gist of it. It’s that digital technology will eventually be thought of as we think of other non-digital technologies, such as a chair. I imagine It’ll blend into everyday life in a more inconspicuous way than it currently does, even new advancements may just become a normal occurrence. How often do we see a chair and really notice it’s a chair. To be fair, it is more difficult for digital technology to blend in than it is for a chair, at least for now.

As we get closer to that time, the standards may have to reflect that more natural blending somehow, that smoother interplay between digital technology and everything else. I’m not quite sure how this would look, but it’s something I’m mulling over still. Eventually, the ISTE Standards may no longer even need to exist.

A Lack of Educational Research: A Reminder to Myself

A couple of months ago, I asked a question on Google+ and on Twitter:

I’ve been searching in vain for research into the effects that prescriptive IT use has on students and teachers. What I’m trying to find out is the impact that prescribing specific technologies (e.g. everyone must use Moodle as his/her LMS) has on teaching and learning, student and teacher buy-in, perceptions of EdTech, and that sort of thing. Something that compares a prescriptive environment to one that is open or somewhere in between would be a great bonus.

I’m aware of the philosophical arguments for and against, but some actual research is difficult to find. If anyone could recommend anything, I’d be very thankful.

Quite a few people were interested in the same thing, but, ultimately, no one could help me find any research. In other conversations, though, I’ve learned that people are quite passionate about their opinions, one way or the other, on this topic. And I love hearing those opinions. They get me to think about things that I hadn’t before.

However, I’ve also noticed that it’s not uncommon for opinions in educational writing to be passed off as facts. Even when people cite others’ work, the information in the others’ work is still just opinion.

That got me thinking about the lack of research to inform educational practices. There are likely more topics to research than people who have the time, ability, and inclination to research them. Not only that, but education is a tough thing to research. There are so many cultural, socio-economic, gender, population size, background (and the list goes on) contexts to each study, that research results are sometimes accurate for only some schools, students, and teachers some of the time.

So what am I to do? I can have an educational philosophy that is built on as much research as possible, but I need to understand that that research may be shaky at times and will often be updated or changed. After I have a somewhat stable philosophy on which to ground myself, I can set up a filter that includes my own experiences and my contexts. I can get input from different stakeholders in my community and research that has been done to help strengthen my understanding of the contexts and build my experiences. Then I can feed new “facts”, ideas, and approaches through that filter and see if it agrees with my philosophy.

It’s by no means a new or unique approach. It’s imperfect. And it, it is just an opinion. But it’ll have to do.

An Analysis of 100 Google+ Educational Technology Posts

I’ve been curious about trends among educational technology posts to Google+, so I decided to do a little analysis just for fun. I went to two popular educational technology communities, and looked at and categorized the most recent 50 posts from each, for a total of 100 educational technology posts.

Keep in mind that I am not pretending that this is a completely valid analysis. My categorizations were probably biased even though I tried hard to keep them as unbiased as possible. There are also a few other obvious flaws with this methodology, but, like I said, I did this only for fun and interest’s sake. The other thing I’d like to mention is that I am not passing judgement on posts for falling into one category rather than another. I’m far from a prolific or high quality Google+ user myself.

I did make note of the topic of each post because that was useful for some of my analysis. However because I don’t want people to feel judged, since that’s not my intention, I won’t mention any of the titles or specific topics. I also didn’t make note any of the names of the posters.

The Three Categories

1. Did the post contain original material, was it a repost or a link to someone else’s material, was it a mix of both (such as a review of content in a link)?

I counted questions and requests for feedback as original material. I did not look at comments because it would have taken a lot longer for me to do so, and it would have made the results more difficult to sort through. However, it is doable, so I may add this if I were to do this again. I imagine that the number of original material would increase substantially if I had considered comments in my analysis.

2. Did the post promote student-centred teaching and learning, teacher-centred teaching and learning, or either one/unclear? I also added a “Not Applicable” option for posts that weren’t directly about teaching and learning.

3. Did the post promote a product or service that the poster or his/her company was selling? This one was a bit tricky to figure out and to categorize at times.

Future Additions

As I was collecting the information, I also thought of three other categories that I could add if I were to do this again. I didn’t feel like going back and adding those categories this time, though.

1. I was thinking of the SAMR model and thought it would be interesting to see how many posts promoted S and A use of technology, and how many of the posts promoted M and R use of technology.

2. I would like to see how many posts are directed towards elementary school teachers, senior school teachers, university teachers, or a mix of those.

3. I would like to see how many posters are posting on behalf of a company. 

I may do something similar with Twitter, but the comparison would be more difficult since a lot of Tweets are replies, and I didn’t include comments in this analysis. It can be done, though.

The Results

Original Content or Link/Repost to Other Content?

Posting or Linking to Lists

How many posts are lists? (e.g. 5 things you didn’t know about Google Drive)

Content of the Original Posts

 

Promotion of Product from Original Posts

 How many original content posts came from people who are directly or indirectly promoting a product or service they or their company sells? For this one, I removed the posts that were photo albums, one-liner inspirational quotes, gibberish, and questions or requests for feedback.

 

Overall Promotion of Product

How many posts came from people who are directly or indirectly promoting a product or service they or their company sells?

I didn’t get the data, but I realized that many of the original content posts that didn’t promote someone’s own or their company’s product were written by a very small number of people, perhaps two or three.

Student-Centred Learning, Teacher-Centred Learning, or Not Directly about Teaching?

An Edcamp Approach to Teaching Poetry

Background

One of my goals for the last couple of years has been to make my English classes more student-centred, and I’ve found that poetry lends itself nicely to this goal. Individual poems take less time to teach than a play or a novel, so if my attempts at student-centred learning go awry, they will affect only one or two lessons.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about an Edcamp-style session I will be organizing for other English teachers this winter, and I had a realization: if an Edcamp is an educator-centred form of professional development, why couldn’t the same approach work for a student-centred classroom? I decided to try it out with my grade 11 English class.

I had the following goals:

1. They needed to continue learning how to conduct rigorous, in-depth analysis of poetry.
2. They needed to continue learning how to synthesize texts.
3. They needed to take ownership of their learning.

The second and third goals were actually the easy ones. It was the first goal that gave me some challenges because it’s often easy to think about different ways of teaching and leave the rigour in the dust.

The Assignment

1. The assignment was not graded because it was the first time I’d done something like this, and the first time they had, the feedback was formative. The students made their own 5 point rubric for this assignment. As a class, they came up with the overall categories that would be needed to have a respectful, rigorous, engaging Edcamp. Then, in groups, they took one category and filled out the criteria for it. Finally, as a class, they reviewed and modified the criteria, and agreed upon the final rubric. When the Edcamp was over, the students marked themselves according to the rubric, and I gave them feedback as well.

The War Poetry Archives has some original copies of English war poetry, such as this one of “Exposure”.

2. The students took home copies of Wilfred Owen’s “Exposure” and Siegfried Sassoon’s “Wirers”. They had a few days to read the poems and were encouraged to do so more than once in a very carefully in a quiet place. Then, they had to come up with one insightful question or topic they would be interested in discussing.
3. One day before the Edcamp class, the students sent me their questions and topics, and I collated them into larger categories. In class the next day, I posted the categories, and the students signed up for the one(s) they were interested in. The class then was allowed to proceed like an Edcamp with one moderator per group. The students were allowed to change groups at any time, and the discussions were allowed to be flexible. I went back-and-forth among the groups and joined in the discussions but never felt the need to lead them.

The Outcome

My worries about the lack of rigour subsided fairly quickly after the discussions got going. The students all discussed everything I would have led them to discuss and more. The discussions were interesting, and even I came away with some insights that I hadn’t had about those poems before.

As well as filling out their self-reflections, I asked each student to add a couple of sentences about what whether or not she felt she achieved the intended outcomes, what worked well about the assignment, and how the assignment could be improved.

What I received was easily the most positive feedback I’ve ever gotten about an assignment. Every student indicated they really liked the Edcamp approach, that they learned a lot, and that they liked that the learning came from them. A couple of students mentioned that a small number of students didn’t participate in the discussion as much as others did, so they provided useful suggestions about how to engage those students too.

My Reflection

Initially, I was nervous about this assignment, but after seeing how well it went, I will definitely be doing something like this again. However, I will need to think about how to engage those who weren’t as active in the discussion. I would also like to make the topics a bit more diverse. I ended up with only two topics, which made the groupings rather large. The students didn’t tend to move from their own group, either. On the other hand, they did enjoy the conversations and learned quite a bit about the poems, so perhaps I shouldn’t be imposing my view of what an Edcamp should be on students who did quite well with what it looked like in our class.

Eventually I’d like to expand the student-centredness of the assignment. Last year, I gave my grade 10s an assignment that allowed them to choose poems from a long list, present them to each other online, and vote on which ones they’d like to include in their Socratic seminars. Somehow I want to figure out how to have the students choose their poems and choose what to discuss about the poems. Once I get that sorted out, then I can start thinking about how to apply the approach to novels and plays. For now, though, I think this is a good beginning.

Looking into Wired’s Article Titled “The Human Brain Now Reacts to Emoticons Like Real Faces”

I came across an article on Wired called “The Human Brain Now Reacts to Emoticons Like Real Faces“. It’s a good, short read that is nicely summed up in the title. For a while now I’ve been drawn to the idea that technology is not neutral, despite what many people claim. This seems to be more proof that it isn’t.

However, I’m always suspicious of popular media’s reporting of research studies, so I decided to track down the original research article. Thankfully, I saw that I could read the article, “Emoticons in mind: An event-related potential study” online through my university. I pulled out my alum library card, logged in, and got into an interesting read.

The Wired article is actually fairly accurate. The researchers did use only the happy face emoticon, and they did conclude that because the participants’ brains reacted to the :) as a face as opposed to (: that the recognition of an emoticon as a face is a learned behaviour. If it were a natural behaviour, the brain would have reacted similarly to both directions of the emoticon.

I was curious about the participants’ ages, though. Were they from a range of ages, or were they from younger generations. It turned out that there were 20 people aged 18-32, so the study contained a small number of participants from the generations that have grown up surrounded by computers and the internet.

I wonder how much exposure to emoticons it takes until the brain reacts to them as it would to a face. And I wonder how the brain reacts to the less recognizable emoticons, the ones that look like a face but don’t have an emotion that is understood by the participant.

All in all, I spent a lot more time on this article that I thought I would and wouldn’t mind knowing more if and when any follow-up studies are done.

Three Lesson Ideas Inspired by My PLN This Week

This week, members of my personal learning network (PLN) have inspired me with a couple of good English teaching ideas, which I’d like to share. I have not tried these out yet, and I still need to develop them further, but I really like their potential. By writing this blog post, I have been able to reflect on these ideas a bit more. As always, all feedback and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks to those of you in my PLN who share your knowledge with others and who pass along good ideas as you come across them.

Lesson 1: Writing Conclusions

The first lesson idea came to me from Meredith Boullion via Twitter and is about teaching students to write conclusions. Meredith received the idea from Caroline Trull’s blog post.

The lesson is very simple. In fact, it’s so simple that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that I’m the only English teacher not doing something like this already.

1. Teach the students the goals of a conclusion.

2. Provide the students with examples of different styles of conclusions.

3. The students read essays with the conclusions removed.

4. The students write their own conclusions for those essays.

5. The students see the original conclusions.

6. The students reflect on and discuss how their own conclusions are different than the authors’, and which ones are better and why.

That’s it. It’s a very simple use of the constructivist predict-observe-explain (POE) model of teaching (White & Gunstone, 1992) where the students encounter knowledge that is different than what they held previously and then learn by coming to terms with it.

I’m not sure if I’d provide the students with the examples of different styles of conclusions at the beginning, though, or if I’d let them discover those different styles in steps 5 and 6 before giving them some sort of reference for the different types of conclusions. That’s something I’ll have to think about some more. As well, I would use this lesson with my grade 11 students right before they had to write their own conclusions for their research papers. That way they’d be putting their learning to use immediately.

Lessons Two and Three: Narration within Narration

I like reading literature that has interesting narrators.

• “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver – The narrator is the main character, but the narrator’s opinion of the story’s events is different than the main character’s is at the end of the story; therefore, the narrator’s realization must have come between the end of the story’s events and his telling of those events.

• True Grit by Charles Portis – There are many reasons I couldn’t put this book down, but one of them was the strength of the narrator’s voice.

• The Princess Bride by William Goldman – Aside from being a fun read, this novel has some interesting interruptions by the narrators.

• Middlemarch by George Eliot – At work two years ago, two colleagues were talking about the intrusive narrator in Middlemarch, so I knew I’d have to read it. Then I read Daniel Deronda, which has a similar type of narrator.

• Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King – The narrator is often interrupted by the characters of his own story talking directly to him. Often, they inform him him that he is  telling the story incorrectly, so he has to retell portions of it.

• The Reivers by William Faulkner – I have not read this, but it was recommended in the comments of Laura Gibb’s Google+ post that I mention below. Apparently, the story is framed by only two words at the beginning of the novel: “Grandfather said”. That novel is now on my “To Read” list.

Because of my interest in narrators, I latched onto a Google+ post by Laura Gibbs (She also has a blog post about the same topic). In part of it, she discusses her interest in framed narratives (narrator within a narrator), and how she’d like to use that as a focus for her students’ reading and writing.

She was thinking of having her students write a narrative and then frame it in another narrative. I think this is a worthwhile exercise, but I will need to sort out best method of teaching students to do this and to have them work on it. It looks like it would be a good exercise not only in structure but also in voice and transition. It would probably be best for me to assign this after the class has read Frankenstein and discussed that novel’s narrative structure.

Of course Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, is another good story for the study of narration with its narrator within a narrator within a narrator. Since it pairs well with Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” anyway, and since the poem has a narrator within a narrator, it may be a good time to compare aspects and effects of the narrators, or perhaps the story-telling honesty of Victor Frankenstein and the mariner.

So there you go. In one week, I have three lesson ideas that are inspired by members of my PLN. Thanks again to Caroline Trull, Meredith Boullion, Laura Gibbs, and the commenters in those posts for sharing your knowledge and ideas with the rest of us.

References

Bouillion, M. https://twitter.com/realtechfored/status/420376306380193792

Gibbs, L. (2014, Jan. 7). Third person storyteller style [Google+ post]. Retrieved from https://plus.google.com/u/0/111474406259561102151/posts/Kq465FU6bRu

Gibbs, L. (2014, Jan. 7). Third person storyteller style [Web log]. Retrieved from http://writingwithaesop.blogspot.ca/2012/01/paired-storytellers-stories-in-dialogue.html

Trull, C. (2013, Dec. 16). Writing superhero conclusions with the phantom endings exercise

[Web log]. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/writing-conclusions-phantom-endings-exercise-caroline-trull

White, R. & Gunstone, R. F. (1992). Probing Understanding. London: The Falmer Press, chapter 2 & 3.

Shared Note-Making with My English Classes

My first blog post is going to be a reflection on my implementation of shared note-making, which I began in September this year. Even though there are many ways to implement shared note-making in a classroom, the core idea is that there is one set of notes that are made by students and shared among the entire class. I first heard about shared note-making from Alan November at a conference a few years ago and have been thinking about the idea ever since. Last year a fellow English teacher at my school tried it out during a Shakespeare unit, and reported back how well it went, so I was encouraged to try out shared note-making this year. My colleague also put a nice twist on the idea. In a class with few computers, she had one student type the notes on a computer that was connected to a projector so that the rest of the students could view them. This is a good idea for a class that does not have technology in the hands of every student.

My Approach

I haven’t done anything too adventurous with shared note-making yet. I figured that I want to get a hold of some of the basics first. I have a shared a Google Drive folder with each of my classes. In the folder, I have one document for each day of class, and I try to get the documents up one week ahead of time. At the top of the document, I type the planned agenda for the day. The agenda includes hyperlinks to any resources that the students need for the lesson. The students are free to print anything out ahead of time, and I make hard copies of any poems or texts that the students need to annotate. The agenda, of course, is flexible and will occasionally change in the middle of a lesson as our exploration of the topics can take us in new, but still valuable, directions. We will sometimes add new resources as we come across them in class.

I rewrote the notes for this example because I did not want to publish my students’ work. However, this is a close approximation of the quality, style, and language my students used.

Below the agenda is where the students make the notes for that class. During each class, there is one student in charge of the note-making and one student supporting her. The students rotate these roles. However, it isn’t uncommon for other students to support as they see fit. In fact, I try to encourage that. After each natural break in the topic, I ask the students to evaluate the notes that have been made and decide what should be added, removed, or edited. I look at them to check for the class’s understanding of the topic. Students can also make their own notes in their own books or on their own devices.

Benefits

There are five benefits that my students and I have noticed:

1. My students negotiate knowledge.

• When the students come to an agreement about the quality and accuracy of the notes, they are negotiating their knowledge, and accommodating the knowledge into their prior understandings (Barab & Duffy, 2000; Xin & Feenberg, 2007).

2. I can see what my students do or do not understand.

3. The students use the notes to help catch up on missed classes.

• My classes have a lot of discussion in them, which is very tough for students to catch up on if they are away. However, the notes at least give them an idea of the main points they missed.

4. The students can use the notes for review.

• Because we use Google Drive, my students can search for a topic and have a search results list of each class when that topic was discussed.

5. The students learn how to make notes.

• I begin the year by giving my students some pointers on how to make notes. I could, though, do a better job with this. My students also see how their peers make notes and learn from them. Because the notes are for everyone, the note-makers tend to make high-quality notes that are nicely laid-out.

What I would like to improve on

I would like to do the following:

1. Remember to have students evaluate the notes more frequently.

• Sometimes I will forget this step until the end of the class, and there are times when I forget to do it at all. This step is crucial for many of the benefits but especially for the first one.

2. Have the students do more of what Vatonen, et al. (2011) call, “Developing Lecture Content”.

• “Developing Lecture Content” means that the students don’t make notes only on what I or other students say in a discussion, but they also include their own interpretations of the content, which reveals understandings and misunderstandings. They can also include new ideas and questions for further discussion.

• This may involve having the students add more to the notes after the class is over.

3. Make room for more flexibility of note-making styles.

• Valtonen, et al. (2011) suggested that students may want to draw lines and other markings. Students may also want to enhance the notes by adding images and other multi-media.

4. Revise the model I use so that it better fits a student-centred class.

• Right now, my approach to shared note-making seems too mechanical and tailored for lecture-based teaching, which isn’t how I teach most of the time. In fact, I’m working  very hard this year at developing improving the amount of student-centred and personalized learning that happens in my classes, so the shared note-making needs to reflect this. In points 2 and 3, I have mentioned two ways that I would like to notes to be more student-centred. However, I’d like to continue evolving the shared note-making to make it even more flexible, more student-centred, more meaningful, and more personalized. This will likely mean completely redoing my approach.

Conclusion

I’m glad that I’ve begun implementing shared note-making in my classes this year. Even though I have much to think about (Doesn’t that apply to all aspects of teaching, though?), I’m seeing some solid benefits to continuing this in future years. Some of my students have been wanting to make shared notes in other classes, and, in an anonymous survey, the majority of them said they found the shared note-making useful for their learning. To me, it seems like something worth continuing.

References

Barab, S., & Duffy, T. (2000). From practice fields to communities of practice. In D. Jonassen and S. Land (Eds.), Theoretical foundations of learning environments. Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Valtonen, T. T., Havu-Nuutinen, S. S., Dillon, P. P., & Vesisenaho, M. M. (2011). Facilitating collaboration in lecture-based learning through shared notes using wireless technologies. Journal Of Computer Assisted Learning, 27(6), 575-586. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00420.x

Xin, C., & Feenberg, A. (2006). Pedagogy in Cyberspace: The Dynamics of Online Discourse. Journal Of Distance Education, 21(2), 1-25.