What Else am I Learning?

Think on this a minute.  Can you come up with a scenario where the skills you acquired learning one thing, helped you do another?  For instance, did learning how to ride a bike help you learn how to ski?  Did learning how to tie your shoes help you to learn how to braid your hair?

This week I watched this happen with two people learning to work with social media and virtual worlds.  In one case, the person had previously worked with Blackboard Elluminate (running regular webinars).  I went into the virtual world of Second Life with her and she took to it like a duck to water.  All that pesky troubleshooting around sound issues in Second Life?  Not a problem.  She had the whole “triage” problem solving method down cold.  As in….first check your computer volume (on mute?), then your headset (plugged in the right way?), then your computer sound preferences (set to the right thing?), then SL preferences….and so on.  I didn’t have to explain a thing.  You wouldn’t think that a webinar platform like Elluminate and a 3D virtual world like Second Life would have all that much in common!

In another instance it was someone learning how to use Pixton. She had never used the comic creation tool before but because she was a photographer, she quickly grasped the notion of frames and layout.  In addition to that, Pixton has these somewhat confusing case-sensitive tool buttons where you only see the tool buttons that relate to what you are doing. In other words, you see a different set of buttons if you’ve clicked on a character than if you clicked on a speech bubble. Many people get muddled with these.  But not in this case.  As we worked further, it became clear that this person was transferring an understanding of case-sensitive tools that she earned using Photoshop.

Fascinating. In addition to the pleasure in seeing media skills transfer from one situation/tool to another, there’s another, harder to describe, benefit that seems to come along for the ride. I observed that my friend in the first scenario was just more patient, more resilient with the Second Life technical issues because she’s been there before.  She’d seen similar technical problems through to a positive conclusion, and that gave her the confidence to press on.  She possessed the certain knowledge that, eventually, she’d figure it out.

When I’m working with learners on new skills or concepts, all too often they just seem to give up – abandon ship – before they get to the fun part. Perhaps one way to diffuse this tendency is to reassure them – online tool use and technical problem solving are a cumulative things.  The more you do, the more you can do.

Getting Your Feet Wet

 

Peggy Brickman

Peggy Brickman (University of Georgia) lead a terrific workshop this week at the Biology Leadership Conference (#BLC10).  The workshop focused on conducting education research, even if you’re not an education researcher.  She gave a useful summary of the characteristics of good research questions:

• Yield results that move the field forward
• Firmly situated in the literature
• Actionable, feasible, sharply focused
• Reveal meaningful underlying mechanisms 

To companion those, Peggy outlined the most common mistakes people make in formulating their research questions.  Here are common problems that reduce a research question’s interest to others (and to publications):

• Questions that have answers with limited interest (limited scope)
• Questions that have been previously addressed
• Questions that aren’t expressed in a testable way
• Underdeveloped or insufficiently defined questions
• Questions for which there was inadequate or poor assessment.

Doing Biology with AP* Biology Teachers

Peggy Skinner’s APSI crew

The College Board (the non-profit administrator of the Advanced Placement program) regularly sponsors special Summer Institutes for high school AP teachers.  These week-long, discipline-specific professional development workshops – or APSIs, as they are called – are a tremendous opportunity for instructors to dig deeply into their AP course, run through resource material, learn new methods, reflect on their own course, and get their questions answered.  They are also a wonderful opportunity to network with other educators, teaching the same course, and learn from each other.

While always popular, this summer’s APSI offerings for biology educators are particularly well attended because of the brand-spankin’ new AP Biology Curriculum Framework published by the College Board in February 2011.  High school teachers around the country are being asked to rethink their course, in light of the new framework, and submit a syllabus to the College Board for audit.  Failure to comply with the requirements means that your high school could no longer call the course “Advanced Placement” and that students enrolled would not be eligible to take the AP exam or carry AP credit on their transcript.  Given the AP program’s popularity in United States high schools, the stakes are pretty high.

Peggy Skinner (left) and Allison Kittay (right) master facilitators.

In July, I had the good fortune to attend an AP Biology Summer Institute in Menlo Park, California.  There were two concurrent sessions, each with 30 high school biology teachers.  AP Biology veteran teachers, Peggy Skinner and Allison Kittay, facilitated the workshops.  The attending teachers were mostly from California, with a few from other western states and one from a high school in Shanghai, China.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when Peggy and Allison so graciously invited me to attend their workshops as an observer.  The opportunity to listen to teachers and hear about their courses and their students was certainly high on my list of reasons to attend.  I also hoped that I would gain some insights into the new curriculum myself.  Though I have spent time examining the document and learning the terminology (Big Ideas, Enduring Understandings, Essential Knowledge, Learning Objectives, and Science Practices), I still didn’t feel I’d yet wrapped my mind around it.

We started out the first (of five!) day with a trip around the lab room, as each teacher shared where they were from, how long they’ve been teaching AP Bio, and what they hoped to get out of the week ahead.  Their comments were revealing…

“I’m worried about the audit. How can I make sure my course is approved?”

“I’m concerned about the math that now seems to be required, whether or not my students can handle it.”

“Between my district being furloughed and the required exam prep, I just don’t think I will have enough to time to fit it all in.”

“I’m nervous about the new labs.”

“I don’t have time to completely re-make my course.”

“I’ve spent time gathering resources from other people, but now I feel overwhelmed with too much stuff to look at and evaluate.  Plus I want to make sure that the course I teach is my course.”

“ I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, if someone else has this figured out, I’m happy to use their materials.”

“I have IB and AP students in the same class, how can I make that work?”

“I’m worried about the exam.  The sample questions we’ve seen are very difficult and I’m not sure my students will be able to do well.”

“Where are the resources to help us with these data analysis questions?

“The textbooks I have are 8 years old and there is no money for new ones.”

“Where will I get the materials for the new labs – my school has no money to buy lab kits.”

“How can I convert my existing exam questions to reflect the sort of thing that my students will encounter on the exam?”

I found it particularly interesting that most of the participants were experienced AP teachers – many of whom were veteran APSI attendees.  The concerns about the new course were palpable, even among those veterans.

Allison and Peggy did an amazing job explaining, reassuring, and grappling with questions.  They patiently explained the philosophical underpinnings of the new course direction as they infused the week with a level of excitement over the possibilities.  As Peggy Skinner put it, “This is an exciting time to be teaching AP Bio, this new curriculum is all about how to do science.”

And “doing science” is precisely what they did.  Over the course of the week these hearty teachers got their fingers blue (FastBlast stain in the Gel Electrophoresis lab) and their minds on fire while they worked through the recommended labs for the course.  With each lab, the emphasis was to first get the techniques and methods down and then open the lab up for inquiry possibilities… What questions could students ask?  How might it go wrong and how to figure out why?  How could the lab be extended?  As each new wrinkle or question came up, Peggy and Allison kept everyone in the right mindset by asking the participants, “How would this inform your teaching?”.  Here are a few photos of the teacher participants, working hard to examine the labs and incorporate them into their own design:

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Over the course of the five days we did many labs, tried out sample exam questions,  reviewed all the College Board online resources, talked about the audit, and mapped out the connections between Big Ideas, Learning Objectives, and Science Practices. Here is an example of a Big Idea map:

Katie shares an idea for helping students understand cladograms.

One of the many wonderful elements of a week like this comes from shared ideas and activities between teachers. There were hundreds of years of teaching experience among these teachers and they were all eager to share what works for them.  You could feel the energy in the room spike as each good strategy was shared.  Like this video of Chris, explaining an activity he came up with using wine corks to help students understand natural selection.

Take home lessons stacked up over the course of the week, with the sure-footed sensibility that experienced and resilient teachers always seem to manage.  These were the important meta messages that stood out to me:

• To be curious and ask good questions, you need to be an expert….kids need to be an expert on some aspect of each lab in order to make them work.  So try starting with a skill that they master, to the unknown, to the formulation of a question.
• Talk with your pre-AP teachers (9^th grade biology) about how to prepare students for the AP Biology course ahead.
• We are facing a 3-5 year transition here – it won’t happen all at once.
• There are eight labs, each one requires 2-3 days,  and at least 25% of your course time should be spent doing labs.  There are fewer labs in the revised course, but each one requires more time and each one provides opportunity for inquiry.  Spread them out throughout the year.
• It’s very important to have your own identify when you teach this course. How will you excite the students?  What interests and drives you?
• There are College Board recommendations, but there are also school preferences and cultures – each teacher has to balance these.
• The exam will definitely be more data-driven.  AP Biology students will, for the first time, bring calculators to the exam.  There will a master sheet of formulas given.  Practice with interpreting data and calculations is a good plan.
• “E2/I2” is a good handle to keep in mind. Evolution.  Energy. Information.  Interactions.
• Examine where most of the LO’s fall and think about that in light of your curriculum plan.  For example, Big Idea 3 has 50 LO’s – twice as many as Big Idea 4.
• The exam will text essential knowledge with specific science practices.  Students will have to show what they know through what they do.
• Look for places in the year, specific activities, that will help students make a connection between Big Ideas – this will help students build a network.

It was an exciting and fascinating week — and I was so grateful to be there, learning along with everyone else.

*AP is a trademark of the College Board

Beginner’s Mind and Watercolors

Watercolor Tubes. All lined up and ready to go.

Yesterday I took an all-day watercolor workshop.  With just three of us learners and a very intense, French instructor, there wasn’t a lot of room to hide in that art studio – it was all learning, all the time.  Since I hadn’t held a paintbrush for many years, it was a humbling beginner’s experience for me.  A good reminder of what it feels like to be on the learner-end of the equation.

Tints from a mass stone.

We started with an introduction to color (hue, chroma and value), followed by some painting exercises to render mass tones (the pure color, right out of the tube) and tints (dilutions of that original color).  Fascinating. I couldn’t help but make note of the expert language our instructor used – how exclusionary it felt, how unwilling any of us were to ask for clarification or to possibly derail her by admitting that we didn’t understand a term she’d used a few minutes earlier. But my anxiety eased when I finally had the brush in my own hand and tried it myself.  Ah, yes…now I see what she meant (even if I didn’t remember all the terminology).

Following that, our instructor gave a few more painting demonstrations of various brush techniques. In addition to the expert terminology, there were many vague references to an understanding that would “come with time”, intuition that we’d develop with patient practice, and a “feeling” that we would eventually acquire if we worked hard. I was guessing that my peers, like me, were not planning a watercolor painting career and were most likely feeling a bit at sea.

“Your painting should float on the page!”  ”Let the paint do its work, don’t control it!”  Her advice sounded interesting, but I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant or how to translate her admonishments into my actions.

Following the demos, the instructor put out some pots, shells, and a bunch of grapes on a purple cloth – a still life tableau – for us to paint.  Not really knowing where to start (were we expected to draw the whole assembly? do you draw the items first with a pencil?), we all floundered around for awhile. So many decisions to make!  Wet on wet?  Wet on dry? Brush size? Perspective? Which objects?  Realizing that I was wasting valuable workshop time, I decided to narrow my focus.  Just one brush.  Wet paint on dry paper. This color palette. And hone in on the grapes. It was just a few hours, afterall.

Once I made those decisions, I fell into a rhythm with my painting.  Just me, the palette, the brush, the paper, and the grapes.

Nothing but potential.

I love the process of mixing the colors. At the start of the workshop we were each given an enormous white enameled pan.  She showed us a method where you apply a bit of paint from the tube to the pan’s side, and then bring it down to the bottom, with water, push that over to another color with your brush, and blend.  As I worked to render my grapes, I mixed at least twelve  different combinations of red and blue….blue and yellow…that green with the ruddy violet.  A gorgeous alchemy of color splayed across the clean white of my pan.

Before I knew it, two hours had swept by, and the workshop was done.  I was happy with my painting –  one grape in particular, was my favorite.  It had just the right shades, a bit of transparency, a suggestion of roundness, and the hint of green where the ruby plum grape joined the stem. All the terminology, expert nuance, and trepidation was swept aside as I took pleasure in the satisfaction of one grape well rendered.

The finished grapes.

Experimenting with Participatory Media: Mike Gaines at University of Miami

Mike Gaines teaches general biology to undergraduates at University of Miami. He’s one of those incredible educators who is always trying something new – regularly reinventing his course and his approach in order to keep it fresh, alive, and interesting (for his students and for him!).

Mike Gaines' wiki page

Recently he decided to introduce participatory media to his course (BIL 150).  For some time he’d been looking for a good way to turn a critical analysis of science in the movies into a workable course assignment and a wiki site seemed like a good way to organize it. He built a course wiki site, using Wikispaces, and gave his freshmen biology students the assignment to watch two movies, Contagion and 50/50, and then post their analysis of the biology in those movies (misconceptions?  inaccuracies?  controversies?)  as wiki entries. The student posts are very revealing. You can almost hear their wheels turning as they apply the course concepts (cell division, genetic mutations, viruses) to the science plot twists of the movie (cancer treatment, infection, and disease management).

Following success with that, he started a new page on the wiki site where students would record their observations and reactions to the Richard Dawkins lecture, The Magic of Reality.

Now he was up and running, he decided to experiment further.  Twitter, Wordle and Pixton quickly came next.  He used Twitter to keep in touch with his students, conducting virtual office hours to answer questions and take the “pulse” of the course. After each exam, he asked students to create Wordles (word maps) of their reactions to the exam so that the students could easily (at a glance) check in with each other on their sense of it (really hard?  how’d you do? what concepts were confusing?  how much and how did you study?) and how their own reactions compared to those of their peers. I thought this was a particularly ingenious use of a simple media tool. It was so interesting to read their potent relief as their calibrated themselves to their peers on terms other than test scores.

What I think Mike has done particularly well here is to design his teaching approach so that he’s engaged his students in an authentic experience, where the representation of his students’ knowledge is absolutely essential to the ongoing flow of the course.  There is no busy work here, no tack-ons – everything the students are doing feels important and part of the fabric of the course.

Cleverly, Mikes also used that course wiki site to get final feedback on the course from his students. He set up a new wiki page for student feedback and asked them all to post their comments, suggestions, gripes, and concerns on that page.  From the looks of it, almost all of his students posted something and many of them wrote a quite detailed and useful analysis of their experience.  There are some excellent insights there, but if you don’t have time to read them all, here are a few of my favorite student remarks:

“Because our audience was middle schoolers, critical thinking was required to help express technological and biological in an understandable manner to a general audience.”

“I enjoyed having the opportunity to provide my own input (through Twitter especially) because it gave me a chance to actually think about things more thoroughly. For example, by simply asking us to tweet you about what we found most hard about the test, you are asking us to rethink the test and try to figure out what went wrong. Tweeting is such an easy way to provide input but it really helps spark thinking.”

“Throughout this course twitter has been used as a useful tool to communicate with the professor. Although it may seem informal, it is an effective means of communication because a student can ask the professor a question as soon as they think of it. The comments from twitter were then converted to Wordles, this was exciting because as a student I got to see that other students had the similar concerns and comments on the course.”

“In particular, I thought the use of twitter was a fantastic way to connect with Dr. Gaines and make you stand out in a large class. The same goes for the Wordles, which allowed you to have some valuable input on the tests. It really showed that Dr. Gaines cared about us as students, and didn’t view us all as just one gigantic class that blended together.”

Pretty darned impressive.

And here’s what Mike, himself, had to say about the experience,

“My advice to teachers who want to try this is that once you become familiar with different aspects of Web 2.0 technology, it will be a useful addition to your pedagogical tool kit. It’s how todays students communicate. I had some fears at first because I felt my students were “digital natives” while I was a “digital immigrant” and I would know less than they do.  But this did not turn out to be the case. This teacher and his students became partners sharing their different expertise in the digital world to make my large lecture class more interactive and exciting.  So go for it!”

Not-Knowingness

Painting by Robin Remick

This week I came across a terrific piece in the Huffington Post by Brian Cohen (who is the President of Idyllwild Arts Academy) about teaching creativity.  In it, Cohen talks about the importance of giving students room to figure things out for themselves – allowing them to struggle a bit and discover on their own. He quotes the artist Paul Klee in the opener to his essay, “Genius is the error in the system.”

Which made me think of my good friend, Robin Remick, who is an abstract painter. I recently went to an Open Studio of hers and, much to my delight, she walked me through the work she had on display. There, in the studio where she created her stunning paintings, she talked to me about each piece.  Where she was when she painted in, what she was trying to accomplish, how the colors and materials she used worked together.  While listening to her, I was particularly struck by the role of error in her work. More than once she talked about “not knowing what would happen” and just rolling with it.  For instance, on one recent painting she had experimented with applying a coat of resin to the finished painting.  The resin bubbled up in an unexpected way which she, at first, saw as a problem. To correct it, she poured lavish amounts of resin on the bubbled up places and, in the process, created these thick dollops of resin that gave the painting an interesting textured look with unexpected visual dimension – which she ended up liking very much (me too).  She explained that it’s often that way with her work. That the so-called “mistakes” lead to unexpected discoveries, that working with new materials that she doesn’t yet fully understand leads to intriguing results. This, she told me, has become a familiar theme to her.

Of course, you must have confidence to let that happen. For Robin, who is a thoroughly trained painter, with an MFA and years of experience to guide her journeys and experiments, she has the confidence to roll with her “mistakes” and venture into new territory. But surely there is something to be captured from what she’s discovered – and what Brian Cohen recommends –  that could and should be applied to education? That we need to find room in our fervent curriculum planning to allow learners of all stripes to make mistakes, to take risks, to wander a bit and see where those foibles and flounderings lead? To spend time in that unsafe place of not-knowingness and get comfortable there?

As Cohen explains to the faculty in his academy, your first answer might not be your best and your last answer may well help you to get to the next, but it won’t be the next answer. Modeling that sort of not-knowingness and comfort with errors and unpredictable results feels incredibly right-headed to my ear.

“Creativity involves understanding and, paradoxically and simultaneously, not knowing; entering a process where ready answers are inadequate to the task, and where the resolution at first uncertain. You can know a lot about something and be thought to be good at it, yet not know for sure where things are going to come out.”

Connecting the Dots: Billy Beane, Nate Berkus, and Neil Selwyn

What do Billy Beane, Nate Berkus and Neil Selwyn have in common?  Other than the fact that they are roughly the same aged, succesful white men, I know that it seems like an unlikely trio.  But let me try to take them one by one and connect the dots, as I seen them…

Billy Beane

First, Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team.  Beane is well know in baseball circles for his data mining and in-depth analysis of baseball’s volumes of statistical information in order to gain a competitive advantage as he built his team.  He is more generally famous these days for being played by Brad Pitt in the newly released movie, Moneyball, based on the book of the same title written by Michael Lewis.

In the book, Lewis recounts spending the 2002 baseball season following Beane, the players, and the game as he gained a deep appreciation for this method.  Paying attention to statistics, of course, is not new to baseball – GMs, talent scouts, coaches, and fans have done this for time immemorial.  What was different about Beane’s approach was his willingness to rethink baseball, how the game is played, and who is best suited to which position.  He searched for inefficiencies in the game and for the story behind the statistics.  For example, rather than tracking hits, he looked at on-base percentages.  He also looked at mitigating factors involved with the various collected statistics (the weather, action leading up to errors, what else was happening on the field).  This more nuanced scrutiny put Beane in the position of being able to see raw potential in a player that others, looking at more conventional statistics, might have missed.  As a result, players who were seen as washed up or underperforming could be picked up for less money and, in the right circumstances, be allowed to shine.  For example a weak shortstop, with the right ingredients, and under the right set of circumstances, might wind up being a terrific pitcher.

I drew an instant line of sight between Beane’s unusual way of looking at data and education.  Isn’t that precisely what we should be doing with assessment?  And I think there are some valuable lessons in Beane’s approach for educators, for instance, his unflagging sense of the game as a whole.  While Beane burrows deep for facts and figures, he doesn’t fall into the trap of reductionist thinking but, rather, keeps the entire game and all of its interlocking parts in his mind’s eye. As Lewis puts it, for Beane, “the probability of any one thing happening in a baseball game is influenced by everything else that happens.”  Nice. Like a baseball game, what happens in a classroom is infinitely complicated and measuring the “outcome” of any one student (high stakes assessment) doesn’t tell you all that much (nor does it come close to what you need to know) about the potential for that student, or the teacher, or the classroom itself.  Beane attempted to make his approach to the game of baseball more scientific as he tried new and different measures to assess what was going on in the game.  Ultimately, he (and others who now use his methods) came to realize that there is a certain amount of “gut instinct” at work here as well; that it’s all extremely complicated, with many, many moving parts, and in order to really understand what is at work you must look at the detailed data AND the whole picture.  Yeah.  Sounds familiar.

Nate Berkus

Second, Nate Berkus.  I know, it’s a leap, but bear with me.  For those of you who don’t watch daytime television, Nate Berkus is a design professional.  He entered the television scene as a consultant, sometimes brought on air by Oprah Winfrey.  He worked his magic with re-imagining small spaces, bringing order to clutter, and sharing his design insights and eventually earned his own show, which airs weekday mornings at 10:00 a.m.  I first became aware of Berkus through a gut-wrenching tragedy in his life.  He happened to be vacationing in Sri Lanka, with his partner, when the 2004 tsunami hit.  Somehow, Nate survived, but his partner did not.  That heart-wrenching story was enough to compel me to watch his show, which I’ve now seen a few times.  While my motivation for finding the show in the first place was to gain some insight into how someone survives a tragedy of that proportion, my motivation for returning to it more than once was a fascination over what he was able to accomplish, design-wise, with very little money and a little elbow grease.  And here’s the thing – all of the home or apartment “make-overs” featured on his show involve him.  Nate is always there – with his sleeves rolled up, ripping off plaster, hanging shelves, stapling fabric, and hanging pictures.  Sure, he has a team of worker bees and he directs their efforts, but you always see him doing the work.  My guess is that it’s the doing the work that’s given him this gift of seeing possibilities.

Neil Selwyn

And that leads me to Neil Selwyn. I know, it’s been a long path, and you’ve been very patient.  Neil Selwyn is a British sociologist who writes beautifully and intriguingly about the integration of digital media with everyday life. I’ve just come across Selwyn’s essay (first published in the Europa World of Learning, 2012) entitled Social Media in Higher Education.

In this essay, Selwyn takes a look at the challenge that social media tools and applications present to higher education.  He examines social media and new types of learners, as well as new types of learning, and takes a deep look at the way higher education is responding (or not) to these influences.  I appreciated his even-handed and thoughtful description of the challenges – Selwyn’s training as a sociologist really shines – he carefully considers all the facts and issues in an objective manner. For example, Selwyn points out that internet access is not as ubiquitous as we’d like to think and that digital inequities persist along race, class, and gender, age, and geographical lines, making clear that social media use is not the equitable and democratic activity that it is often portrayed to be.  What’s more, students’ preferences for particular tools vary within economic and social classes, as well as ethnic boundaries.  Selwyn is also bald about the fact that social media use by many falls far short of the participatory and interactive potential and all too frequently falls down on the side of passive posting – or worse, carping from the sidelines. But even with the disparity between educational rhetoric and educational reality in mind, Selwyn still winds up on the optimistic side.

Particularly compelling to me was his call for a new “pedagogy 2.0″ as in this passage here:

“Nevertheless, many higher educators believe that universities are capable of accommodating (and benefiting from) these shifts in emphases. Some commentators have therefore begun to talk of the need to develop a ‘pedagogy 2.0’—i.e. innovative pedagogies that leverage these affordances to support learner choice and autonomy.”

He states that there is “room for higher education community itself to assume a greater role in shaping the development of social media on the ground in higher education settings. After all, social media technology is something that is supposed to be created by its users—higher education institutions and educators included.”

So here’s what I take from considering the work of these three seemingly disparate people, as I think about the application of new media to education:

• We need to keep trying new things and consider alternative (unusual) ways of examining what goes on in a learning experience.
• It’s important to regularly assess the very measurements in use, to make sure they are still working and telling us what we need to know.
• Data is good, particularly when it’s analyzed in relationship to the whole
• We must engage with these new tools and applications ourselves (you can’t figure out how they will work best for learners unless we understand them from the point of view of a user)
• We need to keep our heads – to look at the problems and challenges with clear and unflinching eyes, and listen carefully to the short-comings as we embrace the possibilities

Learning in Action: Interview #3 with Ruth Gleicher

Ruth Gleicher's AP Biology Students at the Indiana Dunes

I’ve been shadowing Ruth Gleicher, AP Biology teacher at Niles West High School (in Skokie, IL), for the last few weeks as she re-imagines an ecological succession project with her students.  This week, Ruth and her students went on their field trip to the Indiana Dunes (that’s them in the photo above).  Ruth has altered the project from the paper brochure she required her students to create in years past to a menu of possible digital projects (a video, an online comic book, a VoiceThread, or a digital storybook). She has also included a formative assessment stage, where the students storyboard their project before building it. Ruth hopes that the assignment’s redesign will help spark their imaginations, encourage their creativity, and facilitate peer review and networked sharing. Ultimately, Ruth believes that this new approach will help the students more fully grasp and understand the concept of ecological succession while helping her better assess and diagnose their misconceptions and gaps.

I’ve been recording short conversations between us as Ruth recounts her insights and observations on the development and implementation of this new project.  Here is conversation #3, recorded jus after their trip to the Dunes:

Ruth Gleicher Interview #3

Learning in Action: Interview #2 with Ruth Gleicher

For the last week, I’ve been blogging about my ride, alongside Illinois high school teacher Ruth Gleicher, as she works to revise an ecological succession project for her AP Biology students. Last night, Ruth and I spoke, via Skype, and I recorded the conversation.  In this recording, Ruth reveals her thinking process about the assignment, the materials she’s created in the last few days (since our last interview), the project format options her students will have, the timeline for the project, and her expectations for the outcomes.  Here’s the recording:

Ruth Gleicher Interview #2

Here are the materials that Ruth refers to in the recording:

The storyboarding guide:  storyboardfordunesproject.

The project’s RAFT rubric:  DunesRAFTrubric.

The reading guide:  readingguideindianadunes.

The student image collection:  ImagecollecitonforDunesTrip.

To sum up the project’s timeline….

9.20.11  Students will go on field trip to the Indiana Dunes

9.27.11  Storyboards due

10.6.11  Student projects posted

10.21.11  Ruth evaluates projects

One of the many things I admire about Ruth’s plan is that she’s made room in the schedule for input and refinement.  There are two weeks between when the students post their projects and when she evaluates them.  Projects will appear on the class blog site, comments are encouraged, and the link will be shared with other AP Biology teachers and content experts.  Based on the feedback they receive, students have the opportunity to refine and improve their projects.  With this interesting addition, Ruth is modeling the network effect at its best. Wonderful.

Learning in Action: Planning the Project with Ruth Gleicher

Ruth Gleicher and I are working together to reinvigorate her AP Biology “Dunes” project by turning her students into producers, authors, and film makers.  Ruth’s plan is to assign her class the task of creating a digital story to explain ecological succession, after a field trip to the Indiana Dunes.  Here is a PDF of her original assignment: 0821_001

In this previous post, I’ve explained the challenge before us.  Now, onto my recommendations for Ruth on the digital tools. Here is an email that I sent to Ruth this week:

Hi Ruth,

So, what  we want to do is to reinvigorate the “brochure project” that you used to assign by using new media tools so that your students will be able to create and share digital stories. But, as we discussed, you want to think through the instructional plan before we jump to discussion of tools.

You mentioned that you were interested in formative assessment for your students, so regardless of what method you (or they) choose to create their succession project, I would suggest requiring them to storyboard their story first.  Storyboards are paper plans for the eventual project – a roadmap of the story they plan to tell.  The great thing about storyboards is that it forces the producer (your student) to grapple deeply with the concepts before they get caught up in the fun and zeal of the technology.  They make sure (and you can see) that they understand the biology behind the story and they have a firm grip on their plan, before they invest in the creation.

Here’s a great site that explains what a storyboard is and why it’s important to do. Here’s a site that will send you a free pack of storyboard templates. And here’s a web-based set of printable storyboards.  And here’s another.

The other thing to keep in mind with these participatory media tools is the “participation” part.  By posting their stories online, it’s a tremendous opportunity to share, do peer review, and get others to comment on the students’ work.  That is what you sometimes here referred to as “the network effect”. Get people talking – get them to share, reference each other, build on each other’s stories.  If they feel that they have an audience, that there are other people listening/watching, the quality of the work, the amount of time they invest (and, of course, what they get out of it!), will increase.

So, onto the tools…

Video:  Home-made videos can be very powerful.  And with video cameras being so cheap these days, it’s relatively easy for students to produce their own videos.  You can buy a Flip video camera for ~ $90. Armed with their camera, your students could go out and shoot some footage at the Dunes then, using some simple editing software, create a movie to tell the succession story.

VoiceThread:  This is a free web tool that allows students to create a narrated “slideshow”.  So, it’s their voice, talking through the images (which are jpgs they upload).  In addition to creating a nice, visually-based story, others can go into the created VoiceThread, after its posted, and add their own comments, so that the story continues…

Podcasting:  I’m a big fan of podcasting (reminiscent of radio…). What I like about it is that it’s relatively simple and low tech.  You just use an ipod or any of a number of cheap digital audio recorders. Record an interview with an expert or a student talking through story, timeline, or a series of images.  You can leave it there, with just the recording (up on a web site or on iTunes, for anyone to listen or download), or you can play with the audio recording to enhance it. To do that, you import the podcast into an editing tool (Garageband on the mac, Audacity on the PC) and then add images or video clips to the audio.

Present.me:  Another free web tool.  With this one you can create fully recorded sessions, with slides (PPTs).  One stop shopping here – you get the video of the presenter, their voice, and the images.

Blogging: Blogs are great tools for reflection and growing community.   You could set up a class blog or individual student blogs. Or you could do a combination of both, where the individual student blogs all roll up (and feed into) a class or “mother blog”. Students write about their experiences, the photos the data – they tell the succession story in installments. The key is to get them to read and comment on each other’s posts. You could also line up some outside content experts (or other teachers, NABT friends) to comment on the students’ posts.  That’ll really fire them up!

Comic Books:  A fun way to tell a story that seems to appeal to kids. There are a number of programs to do this that are very easy to use and allow for a tremendous amount of creativity.  For instance, Comic Life (a Mac program) is one I use frequently. It’s all drag and drop – dead easy – and your output can be jpgs or PDFs, so easy to share what you’ve created. Here’s a web-based comic creation site, Pixton, that I’ve used before with good results.

Issuu: This one allows you to create and publish a “storybook” online.  This would be great for anyone who had in mind creating a digital children’s book, to tell their story. You can upload images, documents, whatever and then build it into a magazine-like narrative.  In the final product, the reader flips the pages online as they work their way through.  Very nice output and its easy to use this one, they could structure it so that their drawing was on the left-facing page and the photo of the same thing was on the right and then explain how the two are related.

Animoto:  allows you to create a sort of “music video”. Photos (that you upload) that dissolve and spin, using special effects, played to music that you choose.  You can insert a sort of narrative into it by adding images with short lines of text.  I’ve seen some really high impactanimotos, like this one on the light reactions.

Include Drawings:  You mentioned that you’d like to their hand-rendered drawings in the final product.  If you have access to a scanner, they could scan them in and include those drawings as jpg.  Easy.  So, basically, with any of these programs, the idea is to make sure that all of their assets are jpgs (whether they are photos or scans) and just upload those into the application of choice.  You can use Skitch (for Mac) or SnagIt (for PC, but that one’s not free) to add illustrations, doodles, and annotations to your uploaded images or screen captures.

Google Maps and Google Earth:  Images and/or footage from these tools could be nicely incorporated into the student projects. Done simply, they could use Google maps or Google Earth images (screen shots, uploaded as jpgs). At a more complex level, they could create a Google Earth movie (a screencast) that zooms in on the dunes location, giving relational information or they could create a kmz file (an overlay) that zooms the viewer from place to place in a predetermined way.  There are a number of tools that allow you to do screen casts of the action on your screen – my favorite is Screencast-o-matic.  And speaking of screencasts, students could use a tool like Eyejot to record a short, talking head video using the web cam on your computer.

What do you think of these?