
 March 2015
Setting Sail with Standards
Using Technology to Support Standards Based Learning
Sweet Tweets Walk into Jill Ouellette's second grade class and ask how many writers there are. Every hand enthusiastically shoots skyward. 16 self proclaimed adventurers and explorers who come up with ideas while reading, playing with legos, riding their bikes. They tell me they have millions of ideas-and my question to them was this: Who knows about all your ideas? Their answers were strikingly similar. Mostly it was their parents, sometimes a lucky grandparent or a friend. Never anyone out of their small social circles. I thought them ripe for expansion. I have to admit that what follows is NOT my original idea. I was inspired by Kristin Ziemke, a second grade teacher from Chicago who was a speaker at this year's Leveraging Learning Institute in Auburn, Maine. Kristin spoke about how she used Twitter to help fan her student's interest in writing and sharing their ideas. She gave examples of their skills when they started and their skills as they became more experienced. I was totally convinced that this was a great idea. What I didn't have was a classroom of my own to try it in so I had to hijack one. This is where Jill came in. Jill's new to our school but not new to teaching. She's had experience in technology rich classrooms. She doesn't cringe when she sees me coming - in fact, when I approached her with the idea, she jumped on it. It helps that she's in her twenties and familiar with Twitter. I started by having a chat with the students. I asked them to tell me the story of their classroom. I didn't frame it much. I wanted to hear their words. That's the first and probably the most important thing in using Twitter or any sort of microblogging. The students need to know that it is THEIR ideas that are important. This is not a formal assessment. I shared Kristin's feed (@OurKidsTeach) so students that are not familiar with Twitter can see what it's all about. I said we'd be reading, seeing, and listening to the story of her students' classroom. We picked apart the timeline so students had an understanding that they could share via photo, text, or video. We looked at all the different ways this classroom shared information. They had things they wondered about. They had impromptu book reviews. They had photos of artwork and classroom show and tell items. There was no "theme" other than ideas that went through the students heads. What's the benefit to having these early writers tweet? Here's just a few: ■
students show their engagement with content in a personal way
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students learn to share ideas more freely. Punctuation and spelling will follow
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students get an authentic audience for their writing
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ideas spark more ideas
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students learn the concept of digital citizenship and digital footprint early on. I touched briefly on what they would want to include in their classroom story and what they would want to leave out. They were spot on, even at 7! It also provided a great way to begin addressing online safety. We decided as a class that initials would be a great way to identify each student safely.
! The second graders were excited to start. As with anything, practice is important so I had come equipped with paper tweets. I asked them what part of their classroom story they'd like to share, and how they'd like to represent it. Could they draw a picture, they asked? Of course. Did spelling count? Not a bit, I said. Get your ideas down and post them for others to see. Talk about 100% participation. Some wrote quick notes and brought them over to me. No spell checking, no "take it back and fix this" in this exercise. I took each tweet and posted it on a "feed" on the wall as it was finished. Some students took great care in drawing a picture to represent their idea (multimodal learning works well!) The responses were varied, ranging from "How do you build a spaceship" to "I love Fun Friday." Students were very interested in reading the ideas of others. Conversation broke out all over the room. The next step was to hand out laminated Tweets. These are their "real" everyday Tweets and can be written on with dry erase markers. I made them to fit on 11X17 paper to make writing easier for little hands. (Blank Tweet templates are available here. Please feel free to share them). Jill
allowed them to put them anywhere in the room as long as they were easily visible. Students wrote and hung their first official tweets and it was time for me to leave. I checked back with Jill a week later. She said they were still excited about tweeting and were updating them regularly. She created a classroom account. You can follow it at @missoulette88 to see their progress. She's photographed a few of the tweets and will upload more as the process unfolds. Note: It's important to get parental buy-in for this process. Draft a letter explaining the purpose of this tool and the process students will use when posting. (Most teachers do the posting.) Be sure to have a signed media release on hand prior to posting any photos or videos of students.
Improve Blended Learning with the SAMR Model I've worked as a technology integrator and teacher for 14 years. We've adopted a proficiency based philosophy for 5 of those years. It's been a monumental shift but one that is so important for students. No longer is it ok for them to know just 65% of the material as evidenced by an averaged grade. As a teacher I've had to learn to differentiate instruction and scaffold learning for each individual student. Most importantly I've had to learn to let go of what works best for me and focus on what works best for each student. The switch to a proficiency based model means that teachers have to be much more intentional in their teaching. It's no longer a matter of turning to the plan book and seeing what you are teaching that day. You may be teaching pieces of 3, 4, or 5 days (or weeks) of your planbook at once. Proficiency based teaching and learning hinges on the premise that the student determines the pace at which they will work and the means by which they will learn. They expect to have access to learning materials, resources, and interventions as close to 24/7 as possible. We all recognized early on that technology could be a crucial tool in supporting students in this new model. How well it is used remains a factor. In technology integration, we have a tool called SAMR. It's a model that we use to determine the value added to learning by the use of technology. It was developed by Dr. Reuben Puentadura in 2010 and has been used worldwide to move the use of technology in the classroom from simply replacing what we are already doing to transforming the kinds of tasks that students can do. When we add technology to proficiency based learning we move into the realm of blended learning. Blended learning is the use of technology to provide learning opportunities that move outside of the classroom. It is not a delivery method. It is a teaching and learning model. It does not replace classroom practice students most often still come to class during regularly scheduled blocks but it does provide students the ability to move through content at their own pace, choosing resources that fit their learning needs. It provides an opportunity to give students quick, quality feedback to guide their work and offer choices. It also provides them the opportunity to monitor their progress as they move through their content. How well blended learning works depends greatly on the way it is structured. SAMR is a model that can help design blended learning opportunities that work. SAMR is most often used to look at individual learning tasks or tools that you'd use as part of your classroom activities. In this article, we'll look at how you can use the SAMR model to evaluate your blended learning offerings.
In a nutshell, SAMR is a four part continuum that seeks to move technology use to a level where the educational results are maximized, improving rigor and depth. There's a great video that explains the four SAMR levels in 120 seconds. It might be easier to think of SAMR as a learning taxonomy. As you improve the quality of your blended learning opportunities, you'll see a natural increase in the rigor and depth of learning for your students. Well designed blended learning opportunities lend themselves to learning that involves content creation, data analysis and the opportunity to apply new knowledge in real world situations. What follows are some very basic examples of what blended learning might look like at each of the SAMR levels. You'll notice that there are no suggestions of tools to use. The tools are only as good as the design of the task they are used in. Design will remain the focus of this article. Substitution A typical classroom website falls into this category. It may be a part of your grading software package or be a standalone site that is you created. In any case, it serves mainly as a bulletin board. It holds, in digital form, the racks of folders you have in your classroom containing student assignments, worksheets, and assessments. Students can go to the site, find the document they need, download it and begin their work. They may be able to email it back to you or upload it to the site for review when they are finished. There's not a lot of value added over what you did "pretechnology" perhaps a bit of convenience because the materials are always available, and students can access them whether they are in school or not, but the educational gain is limited. The actual learning would be the same with or without the use of the technology. Augmentation Augmentation offers some extra value to the learning. There are a broad range of ways to enter the augmentation phase. This is the place to begin adding some differentiation for students. It's easy to provide resources in a variety of media formats to suit your learner needs, allowing them to choose what works best for them. It can be as simple as providing links within your project handouts to sites that bring clarity to different concepts or videos that show a process. Simple collaborative tools also fit here. Remember having to wait until the next class to get your papers back with suggestions and corrections? Collaborative tools that allow document sharing allow you and the student to ask questions and provide quick feedback (in either audio or written form) in real time. These frequent formative assessments can help reduce the time it takes students to get to the mastery level in their content standards. They can help you see where students as groups may be missing some key concepts. This will allow you to group them and target further instruction to keep them moving forward.
Basic flipped classroom techniques (providing the direct instruction in video form) allows students to watch the main content on their own and bring questions to class for clarification. These flipped videos can also provide review opportunities for those students who need to hear or see something more than once. These may be brief lectures, demonstrations, or presentations created by you or your students. You may also include outside resources. Augmentation often improves student choice of both format and time by providing simple interventions that keep learning moving forward. Modification Here's where the rubber really meets the road. Modification requires significant redesign of how we ask students to address their learning. There is no student passivity in the modification phase! Students have flexibility in choice of who to work with, where and when the learning takes place, and how they will show mastery of their learning. Teams of students can work collaboratively on text documents, graphics, presentations, and/or video projects without having to come together into one physical space. These works can be shared with the teacher so he or she can monitor progress and make sure that the work is addressing the standards and not getting off track. Students begin to explore communities of learners outside of their classrooms. The audience widens from just the teacher to a group of peers/coaches in and outside of the classroom. At this level, students are encouraged to share their work outside of their peer group. Frequent formative assessment is found during the modification phase and may be available from an authentic audience within your school or from outside viewers. This could take the form of photo essays, public service announcements, blogs, or threaded discussions. Other assessments could include using selfgrading quizzes for both readings and videos. These tools provide instant feedback to students and allow them to see where their learning is concrete and where they need to go back and review. Because they are exposed to the work of others, students begin to see more possibilities in not only how they can learn content but also how they can show mastery of that learning. This encourages more ownership of learning by the student. Redefinition Redefinition moves your students into areas that could not be replicated without technology. Your redifined blended learning tool may end up looking a lot like social media. The flow between inclass and out of class work becomes more seamless because the role of teacher and student has become more like that of fascilitator and participant. The tools you and your students choose offer opportunities for more global learning. At this level students are encouraged to develop personal learning networks and will need to have the skills to work
You don't have to be part of a proficiency based learning (PBL) environment for very long to see the benefit of using technology. PBL shifts learning from the "sage on the stage" method to one where students are direct stakeholders. They are asked to be in charge of their learning, making decisions about how, where, and often when they will work through content. Many schools in Maine are making this transformational leap. My district is one of them. We recognized right away the importance of providing an "anytime, anywhere" learning platform that gives students access to standards and content around the clock. What we haven't given enough time to is the difference between posting information in the schools learning management system and structuring the blended learning environment to maximize learning rather than access. Blended learning is more than just making a website, posting assignments, and waiting for the magic to happen. It's a model of teaching and learning that helps move the walls of the classroom and provides learning opportunties (as opposed to homework opportunities) both in and out of the classroom. It is designed intentionally to require students to engage with the content in a variety of ways that suit their learning style. Collaboration is essential. Good blended learning uses strategies that provide opportunities for students to revisit their learning, reflecting on what they've learned and allows time to think about how all this becomes personal. It helps students apply what they learn rather than memorize facts. The tools and resources available in a blended learning environment maximize learning, plain and simple. In a perfect world, developing a blended learning environment would look like this: Teams of teachers, technology integrators, curriculum coordinators, administrators and students sit down to determine student learning needs. They identify global learning goals for all students. They identify specific learning needs at different levels, using data to drive decisions. They agree on a format and a platform to use across curriculum and in all learning areas for continuity, with customization at different levels to accomodate maturity and access to technology. Tools are chosen intentionally to allow for cross content learning and collaboration between teams of students and teachers. The structure of the learning allows for movement beyond the traditional grade level structure as students show mastery of the standards. More often, here's what really happens: Tech savvy teachers develop tools to meet the needs of their students in isolation. This leads to different tools used in each classroom, multiple logins for students, and varying navigation systems and expectations for use. The success of the tool is dependent on the teacher's grasp of taxonomy and design, both visual and from an information organization standpoint. Students adapt with varying degrees of success. Those that don't adapt use the excuse that they can't find anything on the teacher's site.
Hopefully your district falls into the first category; however, if it doesn't, and you recognize the power of blended learning, you can still step in. Take a deep breath and read on. Getting Started First and foremost, start where you are. Designing blended learning takes practice. It takes an understanding of taxonomy of learning as it pertains to your district's standards based teaching and learning practices. It takes a healthy dose of humbleness and a willingness to say "Well, that didn't work" then analyze why. Evaluate Your Content You've already got a good grip on how your standards relate to each other. How is your content scaffolded (or is it?). Are there standards that students will use throughout several units, or is it "one and done?" Are they written in language that students will readily understand or is it written in teacherspeak? You may find that classtime is well spent unpacking standards for understanding. Ensuring that students are crystal clear on what they need to know and be able to do will go a long way towards getting students to the mastery level. Don't feel like you need to have an entire semester's worth of work ready to go before you get started. It's perfectly alright to start with just one unit or group of competencies. This will have two bonuses: Students will not feel overwhelmed with the amount of work they have to do, and neither will you. You can test the waters in both how students react to being blended learners and what you need to do to be a blended learning teacher. Use a model Choose a model for your design. Backwards Design fits nicely in the competency based environment because it starts with the goal of the learning then asks you to work backwards identifying skills and levels of learning along the way. It provides an easy way to scaffold your content and aids in your organization. I also like Cathy Moore's Action Mapping model. It includes a step that identifies WHY students have struggled to reach proficiency in the past. This allows you to build in the necessary skill practice/content connections so students can be more successful. This is crucial when asking learners to behave independently. Look at your scaffolded content with a critical eye to taxonomy. Many competency based schools use Webb's Depth of Knowledge to determine the difficulty of a task based on the level of critical thinking involved. Those lower level skills and concepts are pieces that lend themselves to work outside of the classroom. Make this the work that students do outside of class. This might be vocabulary, basic content knowledge, or any other memorizeable information. Provide the resources (in multiple formats if possible), ask them to document their questions, create the necessary formative assessments and let them go. Some tools that may be helpful for you will be those that provide drill and practice opportunties, readings with online graphic organizers, labelling activities and written responses to content.
Once your students have the skill and content knowledge they need, you can use your blended learning environment to provide ways for them to apply that knowledge. Introduce new tasks that require higher level thinking but be careful not to toss your students to the wind. The leap from skills and content acquisition to strategic thinking and reasoning can be a big one and requires a level of independence that may be a bit of a stretch for some students. Support in the form of collaborative tools, face to face conversations, frequent formative assessments and access to multiple resources for content will be important as you ask students to make this move. Be sure students understand how to access the help they need. Activities that fall into these categories could be analysis of student collected data, research projects, creation of infograms, collaborative writing projects, social media campaigns addressing student solutions to real world problems, and original student created multimedia projects. Use your inclass time to fascilitate questions and discussions about content application tasks. You'll still do some direct instruction but will find that your classroom time becomes more like a learning lab where your instruction will get small groups of students "over a hump" and moving forward again on their own. You'll need to develop a workflow that uses the information from your formative assessments to flexibly group students when you meet face to face. This will keep you from answering the same questions over and over again throughout the room and will provide smaller learning communities within your classroom that students can access as they need help. Ideally you and your students will develop a cyclical workflow that moves online and offline as they identify where and when they need help to complete tasks required to show mastery of content. Evaluate Student Readiness for Blended Learning Many of our students have been in a digital freefall for years, moving around the web and interacting as they see fit. Don't assume they know how to interact in a collaborative online environment just because they are on Facebook or play multiplayer games. The rules are very different. You will need to work with them to set expectations and discuss acceptable ways to participate in discussions, and give positive and negative feedback. They will all be able to tell you how to be a good digital citizen; for some, following through is more difficult. The best way to do this is to ask your students to asses their skills. I use a three point learning continuum designed to let students identify strengths and weaknesses when it comes to working independently. It looks at goal setting, managing distractions, creating a workflow and finding quality resources. It will give you an idea of where your students are as a class and as individuals so you can provide opportunities for large and small group instruction. It also gives them an idea of the skills they will need to work on to be successful in a blended learning environment. If you use the continuum as a starting point for individual discussions you may be surprised at the barriers students identify.
The 16 Habits of Mind are skills that are important for students to have if they are going to independently direct their learning; they are also difficult to assess and are sometimes overlooked in the push to implement standards. Don't ignore them! As you move to increase the use of blended learning you'll want to consider your students' strength level in each of these categories. For many students, this requires active instruction in how to manage distractions, work through problems, and applying prior knowledge intentionally. Improving students' thinking and working skills will open doors to rigor, application, and authenticity of learning.