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The Last Gasp of the Textbook

25 February 2012, 1:01 pm

So, I’ve got a new thing that keeps me up at night. Over the past year, my co-authors Kathy Cennamo and Peg Ertmer and I have been working on a second draft of the technology textbook. It’s only been out for three years, two if you go by the copyright, but evidently that’s long enough for the publisher to force us back to the grindstone. Despite what I thought were lackluster sales, with me being responsible for two of the largest adoptions, we’ve been spending the better part of a year going back over the book and revising it.

The good news is that we all believe it’s a much better book. Having gone through several changes of editors, a change of publisher (the old publisher was bought out), and a complete revision of the standards the book addresses, the first book had some duplication or at least repetition. In this new edition, we’ve worked really hard to hone it done, smooth it out, while incorporating some of the many new advances in educational technology that just weren’t worth writing about four years ago. For the past three years I’ve been tracking trends and issues and bookmarking ideas like crazy, so that was helpful when we did a thorough analysis of the text and got to work. A couple of the issues remain the same, but some of the chapters have been almost completely rewritten to better address the current state of educational technology practice.

The bad news is, no one is going to buy it. O.K., maybe someone will, but we found out the book is now going to be so expensive that I wouldn’t even ask my own students to buy it. We’ve always thought that writing a print-based book about digital technologies was a little ironic, but there are still many people who use them in their courses. However, I currently have students that tell me while they’d like to buy a print copy of the text for our class (the University provides them a PDF version of the main chapters), they can’t afford the $90. Now it’ll be twice that.

It’s not about the money

You might be thinking, “wow, your royalties will double!” Unfortunately, that’s not likely to be the case. You see, authors write books because they feel passionate about a topic, or at least my co-authors and I do. We didn’t know about the price change until just recently, after we’d done most of the work. But seriously, we just wanted a good product that represented us well. (I’m so proud of my revisions of chapters on differentiated instruction and assessment, I can’t even tell you!) We would have done the same amount of work if the book cost more or less or they even doubled our royalties. For most authors, royalties are so small that we have primary jobs and do this on the side. Compared to my consulting, I made about five days worth of income from my royalties last year, but I’ve spent days and weeks worth of time on this revision. Months would not be an exaggeration. I’ll never make up that time.

What is it all about then? I’m wondering if this is the last-ditch effort by publishers to try to make some cash before the walls come tumbling in. Evidently, they’re not reading the blogs, tweets, and eZines about the death of the textbook. I do. I’ve also been fortunate to evaluate some of the work of the Virginia Department of Education’s Beyond Textbooks initiative that is trying to push publishers to actually leverage the capacity of digital technologies to change the way we use textbooks rather than just selling a PDF file of the print version. (You can read a copy of my first report here, if you’d like to.) The most promising work is not coming from the major publishers, however.

I understand it still takes money to create a textbook, digital or not. I think the idea that we’re all going to get rid of textbooks and tremendously overburdened teachers will now create their own in their spare(?) time is a little off the mark, too. It’s promising to see some new publishing platforms becoming available (including Inkling and not just Apple’s new iBooks), but it takes more than paper to make a textbook. It takes someone hours and hours (and days and weeks…you get the idea) to research and craft content, to review and revise it, and to design and present that information so it’s engaging and relevant to the student. While removing print from the equation is one factor, the hard parts take time. And, ironically, the authors who spend the majority of that time, do it for no set fee and do it to the same degree whether they sell one or 1000 books. So, why $180?

I don’t know that answer. I am going to try to find out, but working with publishers is kind of like visiting the seraglio. Lots of veils and promises of delight shrouded by smoke and mystery. Is it the end of the textbook? Probably not. Will college undergraduates with loans up to their eyeballs buy our book? Also, probably not. It’s a shame, really. Like I said, it’s a good book. It’s too bad no one will buy it.

 

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Inaugural Digital Learning Day

1 February 2012, 6:11 pm
My Wild Self

My Wild Self

I celebrated the first-ever Digital Learning Day in about the best way possible…working with teachers on planning for digital learning! I’m working with a group of talented and skilled K-12 teachers from a single school district and we’re beginning to craft a new technology plan for the district. Whenever I visit districts, I am often seen as the “tech guy,” so I really tried to make sure that we focused on students and learning and making sure our tech plan supported the needs of the district and any initiatives they had underway. In order to do that, we started the day with a student-oriented activity.

Design A 21st Century Student

To open the day, teams of teachers divided themselves into groups and worked together to determine what a 21st Century student needed to be successful. They then had to design a visual representation of that student in some way. We had posterboards and markers handy, but I’m very proud to announce that all of our submissions were digital. Some used their iPad to draw, others combined images they found online, but most opted to use a site I mentioned that was the origin of the idea called Build Your Wild Self. This site from the New York Zoos and Aquarium was recommended to me by one of my graduate students (Thanks, Shenette!) who teaches second grade. She used it for a best practice lesson on habitats, because the “wild self” you create comes with a wide range of options on body parts and accoutrements, but you have to justify why you used them. We did the same with the 21st Century student.

The future selves the teachers created, whether with the site or not, came with some great justifications. Truthfully, I had only budgeted 30 minutes for the activity as an ice breaker and to get creative juices flowing, but we took a whole hour. I believe it was worth it. In the end, the teachers noted that our 21st Century student needed some of the following:

  • Antennae because they’re always networking, but a need to understand how to connect networking to education
  • Wings because they are often connected and may rely on mobile devices, especially wireless devices
  • To come out out their shells and develop social skills in a variety of settings, including face-to-face settings
  • A device to support knowledge: they need to know how to access, assess, and apply knowledge
  • Wide eyes because they are often visually stimulated and enjoy a wide range of stimulation
  • Devices they relate to so that their different learning preferences can be addressed
  • Wings because the teachers want them to soar over adversity and to rise to their potential
  • Big ears because they’re probably always listening, although teachers need to help them develop the skills to be critical listeners
  • Powerful hindquarters or fins because teachers want to push or propel them to success

This was a great start to a long day full of lots of hard decisions and analyzing different forms of data. Please feel free to use it yourself, and if you do, let me know how it worked. If I get permission, I’ll post some of the examples from the teams, but in the mean time, my own wild self is presented below.

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Teaching Teachers: Considerations for Design

11 December 2011, 4:47 pm

When I was in college, I couldn’t wait to get into my own classroom. The learning and camaraderie was fun, but I just wanted to be in charge and put all those things I was learning into action. Theory is one thing, but I wanted to see it in practice. I wanted to be in charge. For that reason, I know I developed some of the same behaviors antithetical to learning in my own classroom that I now struggle with when I work with teachers. One of my goals is to design instruction that helps my own students, most of whom are teachers, to overcome some of my own poor behaviors.

Teaching can be a lot of fun. One of my favorite parts of teaching is seeing kids learn something new. There’s no audible “click,” but often it seems like you can actually see that change when a kid processes something new and develops a new understanding or adds something new to their repertoire. It happened a lot with my middle school students, but I could still experience it with my high schoolers. That’s not always the case with adults, though, who tend to be more resistant. Typical of adults, it shouldn’t be surprising that with so much learning going on in my own classroom, that the one that was most resistant to learning was…me.

It’s not like I shut out the possibility altogether, but there’s a strange switch that occurs with many people when they move from student to teacher. I know I went through it, and I run into it time and again with the teachers with whom I work. I’m not sure how it happens. It may be an artifact of our school culture, but happen it does, at least in many cases.

In most schools, teachers work alone. The bell rings, they close the doors, and it’s time to get to work. They’re in charge and what they say goes. There’s a saying in education, “don’t smile until Christmas,” and I’m not the only one guilty of perhaps embodying this philosophy a bit too strictly.

Now that I work with teachers and even teach teachers, some of these strange cultural behaviors are more readily apparent, and they really make me struggle as I try to learn from and help my teachers learn new things. Following are some behaviors I know I’ve exhibited that are now challenges I face when designing learning for teachers.

I don’t know it all. There was a time when teachers may have known it all—or at least all the content they needed to impart for a test or entry into a career. But there’s more to teaching than just the facts and figures. Many of the teachers I run into truly do know all of the facts, figures, and processes covered in their curriculum. But it astounds me that I run into many who can’t tell me why they’re important. Why study math? Science? Social studies? Some of the answers I receive are astounding, and not all that convincing.

In my first classrooms, I tried to know it all, and many of my students expected me to, but now it’s different. I’ve seen that not only that I don’t know it all but that I never really will. There’s just too much to know! And more to know day after day. So now I tackle my online instruction as an opportunity to learn rather than a requirement to teach.

I learn new things from my students and the teachers I work with every week. They share their experiences, new resources they’ve found, and we sometimes work through problems together. The process really helps me, and I believe that those who are willing to work with me in this way also benefit. I tell my students that activities are a conversation, and if I misinterpret or misunderstand something, they should let me know. We should talk about them so we both better understand each other. That said, I rarely have a student speak up or contradict what I say or comments on their work. Why? Well, they’re almost all teachers and many are still playing the know-it-all game.

One of the most powerful things I’ve learned to say, albeit reluctantly at first, is “I don’t know.” But I can’t leave it at that. I may not know, but we can figure it out together, or you can help me to learn it. That has been a great benefit. There’s been one more benefit to realizing I don’t know it all. A tremendous burden has been lifted from my shoulders because one thing I do know now is, I don’t have to know it all. Whew! Now if I could just convince a few others…

I’m not always right. This is a tough one. The stereotypical image of a teacher is of the all-knowing font of knowledge that has the final say. Being the final authority is an approach I probably did take more often than not when I first started teaching, but it’s really a trap. I know why I did it. It made me appear to be the authority that my students could trust. But if you want to wear those shoes, the first time you aren’t right, you then spend most of your time doing damage control and you never really gain that trust back.

This issue comes to the forefront when commenting on the work others have done. Outside of the classroom, this is pro forma. I remember the first paper I wrote for my new “corporate” job (I use quotations because I worked in a non-profit with a lot of other former teachers, so it was more corporate than a school, but not entirely so). I had just published my dissertation and thought I had this writing thing down. The paper I got back was covered in red pencil from an editor. I was livid! How could this be? I had a Ph.D.! I was the expert!

In the end, what happened was I learned that while I knew a few things about educational technology, our editors knew a lot more than I did about writing, especially writing for different audiences. Their comments weren’t intended to be punitive, but informative. Sometimes they were intended to make me think deeper about my topic and maybe to consider different perspectives. They were actually trying to make me sound better, perhaps smarter, and to make my writing better so people might think I was always right (well…maybe right most of the time). I began to trust them and rely on their feedback.

Giving feedback to teachers is a challenge. If a teacher works under the mindset that they are always right, even a simple question can shut down communication. At least once in every class I teach I have students tell me they are struggling with my class and feel like they’re failing. Generally, they have the highest grades in the class and are exemplary students, but I may have posed questions or even taken a point or two off an assignment. To those students, less than perfect is failure. I gave up on perfect long ago and am much happier for it.

In terms of design, I try to be very confirming with my feedback. I try to pose questions rather than make statements, pull in references or data, but even those can cause some people to raise their shackles. Very often, however, I do have students that make erroneous statements or flawed or conclusions. At this point, I’ve taken the stand that it’s better to let them know than to let it slide by. It can take its toll on communication, but communication has to take a back seat to learning.

I can’t do it alone. A former colleague of mine once said, “Collaboration is an unnatural act conducted by two nonconsenting adults.” It may seem that way, but collaboration has become one of the most necessary skills for success in the world of work—in just about any occupation. It should also be true in education, but many of the educators I work with don’t see it that way.

I have to admit that working in cooperative groups was one of the most difficult things I had to learn once I left the classroom and worked in “the corporate world.” But the truth is that since I don’t know it all and I’m not always right, having other people who knew things and could do things I couldn’t do actually made me more effective. Our skills and knowledge often complemented each other. In this case, I really believe that the sum of the parts was greater than the whole, especially since collaboration can lead to creative solutions or opportunities that I just couldn’t come up with on my own. I just didn’t have the experiences or knowledge to do so.

The 21st Century Skills movement has encouraged educators to provide students the opportunities to collaborate and build collaborative skills, but I find few teachers willing to work collaboratively themselves. At this point, I encourage but don’t require collaboration in my online courses. When collaboration is an option, I try to provide structures for collaborating, perhaps job aids or templates, and I encourage collaborators to reflect on the activity. What did each person do? What did they bring to the table? What was the benefit? Collaborating with someone new, however, seems to still be a challenge, and until the participants feel comfortable and realize they don’t know it all and aren’t always right, it can be a slippery slope to traverse.

 

I’m still working on these factors in my learning design and consulting work. Sometimes I think I should go in and pretend to be the all-knowing font of knowledge who can’t be wrong—I think teachers expect it of me. But it’s a loosing game in the end. I’ll keep plugging away and hope you share some ideas you have for designing better learning for teachers.

 

 

 

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All means all…doesn’t it?

30 November 2011, 3:39 pm

When I was a student in public school many moons ago, it was the time of obvious and blatant tracking. Students, parents, and teachers knew full well whether their kids were in the advanced, regular, or basic track of classes. In that situation, all didn’t mean all. There were different expectations for different groups of students. At the time, I didn’t give it much thought, until junior high.

While I was a bona fide participant in my district’s elementary school gifted-and-talented program—a status only achieved after taking a paper-and-pencil forced-choice test—my sixth grade teacher was quick to discern that I had other talents that might not have been measured in that test, procrastination being chief among them. But what he recognized as lack of ability was merely my misaligned priorities, with socializing seeming much more important at the time. As a result, I was put into the “regular” English class in the seventh grade. It was like traveling to a different world.

All my friends would go to English one period before me—the advanced class—and tell me what they had learned. Funny. I was in the same class, at the same desk, and yet my class couldn’t have been more different. We didn’t read the same materials. We didn’t have the same assignments. And I never got to use the fake telephones to hone my phone etiquette—a slight I live with to this day, although I think I do an exceptional job in that arena, despite any past perceived failings.

In my opinion, perhaps one of the most important philosophical beliefs educators can hold is that “all children can learn.” My seventh grade English teacher didn’t espouse that belief, or at least she didn’t act on it. I was deemed lesser simply by my class assignment. I don’t think it was her fault, so much. That was just the way schools were run.

If it wasn’t for the observations of my eighth-grade English teacher who set things right and got me, well, “back on track” in the ninth grade, I might’ve never had much success beyond high school. Well, my parents wouldn’t have accepted that, and the threat of the military had I not made it to college was pretty big motivation for me. But even in those two short years, I developed gaps that continue to plague me, mostly around grammar. I remember the “i before e” song from the movie “A Boy Named Charlie Brown,” but I still struggle with its versus it’s. Other gaps in grammar surface now and then. I can quantify the impact of all not meaning all, or at least not including me, even for just two years.

No more tracking?

As a teacher, the schools I worked in had abolished the idea of tracking, at least in terms of overt terminology. We weren’t even allowed to suggest that students were tracked into different types of classes. As far as I can tell, this practice continues today in the schools I visit. No tracking. Really?

Now that I visit schools across the country, I’m not sure we’ve truly bought into “All means all.” “Well, yes,” some will say, “except for…” and then there is a litany of those in whom some don’t really believe can learn. Very often, they’re described as “those kids” or “that class,” they may come from different parts of the district, be in certain classes, or otherwise embody some difference in some other way that suggests maybe our “all” is not as inclusive as it’s intended to be.

So, what’s this got to do with technology? I’m a firm believer that technology is a great equalizer. I’ve witnessed story after story of kids who use technology to perform above expectations. There are some especially powerful stories about special needs kids, especially, which are most often narrowed out in terms of “those kids,” in terms of being able to perform up to and beyond expectations. “Just like the other kids…” (another moniker of all not meaning all—that there would be “other” kids.) My students, who are teachers, just finished work on differentiation and Universal Design for Learning, and some of their stories resonated with me, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Technology is often immediately engaging and, for many, challenging. And that challenge can help promote learning. And in many of the classes I visit, kids are starving to be challenged! They’re bored! I’m bored, too, sitting in some of those classes. Outside of school our kids chatting and playing games and using social media and still learning, whether we like to think of that as learning or not. And they’re all learning.

I appreciate that change is hard. And, really, when we talk about “those kids” or “that class,” we haven’t really changed our expectations. But maybe we can. I believe it’s an exciting time to be a teacher. Tough for some reasons, yes, but with so many more possibilities to engage and reach all students through technologies that are becoming ever-more prevalent and the high quality learning resources they give us access to. I believe we do have the potential to truly reach all students.

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Yea, there’s an app for that, but…

15 August 2011, 11:26 am

It seems like many of the groups I’ve been working with recently—from schools on up to states—are going gaga over touch-screen mobile devices (especially the iPad and sometimes the lesser known Android Honeycomb and Dell Streak, among others). I have to admit they look pretty sexy, from a technology standpoint, but the fervor with which some educators are throwing limited technology budgets at them has me a little concerned.

I recently complete a review of literature for a state department of education that was investigating the possibility of an iPad pilot. I found out some interesting things about the app market that I thought worth sharing.

And the winner is…

Foreign language, actually. In a review of apps available in the education section of the iTunes Store in 2009, Carly Shuler from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop found that the most popular content areas for apps were foreign language and literacy. That piqued my interest. A total of 92% of the apps available at that time targeted either adults (57%) or toddlers/preschoolers (35%)—very little for elementary, middle, and high school students. I did a quick review of the education section of the iTunes store a couple of weeks ago, and it looks like the foreign language apps are probably geared towards the adult (and older student) side and the literacy apps for the toddler/preschoolers. Makes sense to me.

Another nice finding was that most of the apps for children are very inexpensive. Most are only 99 cents and none were more than $2.99 (from Shuler’s 2009 report). Some of the apps for adults could be quite pricey—with one for $149.99(!)—but even with that outlier the average price was around $5.

The Sesame Workshop folks commissioned outside research on two apps, Super Why and Martha Speaks: Dog Party (see the Executive Summary at http://pbskids.org/read/research/mobile.html), that showed significant gains in learning for young children between the ages of 3 to 7. Both of these apps targeted literacy, not foreign language, and were based on popular children’s television shows on PBS. The researchers also found that most of the children had little problem operating the devices, and those that did required very little guidance to overcome them. The kids were persistent, too, and kept working with the device to overcome problems on their own. I was encouraged, however, to find at least one experimental study that focused on these new learning resources, as experimental research is quite difficult to find when it comes to educational technology in schools.

And the catch?

While the future of these lightweight, portable devices seem promising, there are also a few issues anyone considering implementing them should be concerned about. My belief is that these will be less of an issue over time, but there are some things to think about.

One of the most talked about issues is that the iPad does not currently support Flash, which is software that’s used to show much of the animated or video-based content on the web. There’s a lot of it out there, and if your textbook series or other curriculum contains online multimedia elements in Flash, it’s may be a deal breaker—for now. This is currently a marketing point for other makers of touchscreen devices. None of us know where this will end up, whether next generation iPads will support Flash or some third-party workarounds will evolve, but just be sure to test your favorite content on any device to determine whether it works for you or not.

Perhaps the most important issue is that anyone can create and post an app. Honest, there’s a group called Moms with Apps (http://momswithapps.com/) that consists of moms and dads who have created apps, whether they’re educators, instructional designers, or even software developers. Sound familiar? If you were teaching in the 1980s, you might remember the early software available for the then-new personal computers that were coming into our classrooms. Most of it could be summed up in one word: horrible. Primarily drill-and-practice programs that focused on low-level recall with rudimentary branching, limited learner control, and a bevy of multiple-choice questions, the early software had little to do with learning theory and sacrificed learning for novelty.

And how do you find the good  apps? There’s no universally accepted standard or quality metric for apps, and the app stores will list their top sellers, but you don’t have any information as to how good they are. A few school districts and individuals are now posting list of apps they use and some reviews, but little of the information relates to how effective the apps are and the reviews can be hard to search. My favorite review site for apps—so far—is Common Sense Media, that uses developmentally appropriate criteria at each age to review apps and other media, like television shows, books, and movies. You can check out their reviews and filter them by some helpful criteria at their review site (http://www.commonsensemedia.org/reviews?media_type=30061).

Do Your Homework

If you’re interested in incorporating apps into your language teaching, just be sure to do your homework, just as you would with any curricular resource. It’s easy to find what’s selling well through the iTunes Store or Android Market, but even just a simple search for “foreign language” can be frustrating as it brings up many erroneous matches. The app descriptions are also often short and—again—most are focused on features rather than how well it supports learning.

Researchers for the Sesame Workshop also found that, at least with young children, that student usage either stopped or changed relatively quickly, even after a week. The problem was that most apps have a limited amount of content, and once the students master the content, the apps can be of little interest, so they start “gaming” the app and trying to earn high scores or try other strategies that don’t necessarily match learning. From this lesson, it’s important that you find apps that have a good deal of content or that release updates to the content over time.

On the plus side, as mentioned earlier, the low cost of many of these apps means that you may be willing to download one or two and try them out. If you do, let us know how it worked! I’d be glad to hear how you are using these new devices and software, your successes, and the challenges. Until the market matures and we have a better way of finding the best apps, we’re going to have to depend upon each other to share what we’ve learned.

For more information:

Chiong, C. & Shuler, C. (2010). Learning: Is there an App for that? Investigations of Young Children’s Usage and Learning with Mobile Devices and Apps. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Available from http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/Features-82.html

Rockman et al., (2010). PBS Kids iPod app study: Executive Summary. Available from http://pbskids.org/read/research/mobile.html

Shuler, C. (2009). Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning, New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Available from http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/Cooney-Center-Blog-69.html

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Bringing the World to Your Language Classroom: The ePals Global Community

16 June 2011, 4:25 pm

ePals logoLanguage teachers have long had a variety of technology-based resources available to support their instruction. Language labs with audio and video recordings, texts and workbooks, and other supporting materials go well back in to the era of analog media, and the digital revolution has only increased the number and type of interesting and helpful resources available to support language acquisition in today’s classroom. When I ask language teachers what needs still remain, many respond that it’s difficult for them to find native or fluent language speakers that their students can interact with. Most have access to a wide range of print materials and recordings they can use with their students, but finding a way for students to really engage with fluent language speakers remains a challenge.

In researching options over the past year to determine how language teachers might use technology to address this need, my paths kept crossing with Dr. Rita Oates, vice president of education markets for ePals. I’ve known about ePals for years, but there was some sort of synchronicity with our crossings, from her presentations in this world at the national ISTE technology conference in Denver last summer to my attending a session she presented in Second Life last fall. When we both appeared on the roster of an online learning Ning this Spring, I thought it was a sign I couldn’t resist and asked her to share some information about ePals and how educators from across the world are using ePals’ services to connect schools, classes, and students, especially in support of language acquisition.

More than a Pen Pal

In the textbook I co-authored and in workshops I present, I use ePals as one example that I encourage teachers of all disciplines to investigate, because the global connections it provides support multiple content areas and learning goals. In fact, ePals may best be known for successfully connecting classrooms from across the world so students (and teachers) can learn from each other and gain a better understanding the nuances of culture, society, politics, and exploring everything from what kids in other countries do for fun, have for lunch, and learn about in school. In fact, to date, ePals has connected more than 600,000 classrooms (that’s just classrooms, not people) in more than 200 countries or territories—for free! They have more than 2500 new schools sign up for their services every month.

Students from Sarah LaComb's French class in New York meeting their ePals form Arras, FranceStudents from Sarah LaComb’s French class in New York meeting their ePals from Arras, France

That all sounds good for some kind of classroom sharing, but in communicating with Rita, I wanted to know if ePals offered specific services that could help meet that one big need—providing access to native or fluent language speakers. She responded that this is one of the two main reasons teachers sign their classrooms up for ePals, the other being English as a second language teachers in countries where English is not the primary language looking for English practice for their students. If you think about it, it’s the same reason, really, with interaction with native language speakers being the ultimate goal. Need…meet solution.

Example of a French class in Spain seeking ePalsExample of a French class in Spain seeking ePals

The Menu: Taste or Feast

ePals offers a variety of services for educators, many for free, with new services developed and offered based on input from the educators that participate in its programs. One of the most common starting points for new members is the ePals Global Community, which is the traditional classroom connection that many people associate with a pen pal connection. But, of course, it has a 21st Century twist.

The ePals Global Community was built by educators for educators, so the sharing has learning outcomes in mind. The primary resource for sharing is e-mail, which might be common in American schools but not so in all participating countries. ePals provides a secure, filtered e-mail environment to support communication that includes several levels of protection for students. They hold TRUSTe certification, an especially rigorous data security certification, that makes them well suited to work with children of all ages, including those younger than 13. (According to the Children’s Internet Protection Act, parents must provide consent for children under 13 to enter data to an online service, which is why sites like Facebook do not allow these younger people to participate.)

Teachers can choose to moderate all, some, or no messages before they are sent, and can request to receive notification of all or just questionable communications. ePals also offers the option of an online translation solution that supports 58 languages, and that number keeps growing. Many classes go beyond exchanging short e-mail messages and share everything from poems, stories, multimedia presentations, to video. Others have incorporated videoconferencing for real-time interaction, which obviously requires some coordination depending on time zones and school calendars. You can view a short video presentation by students with emerging Spanish skills from Darlington Community High School in Wisconsin at http://www.epals.com/media/p/236857.aspx.

 

The Teacher View of ePals Message Center

The Teacher View of ePals Message Center

There are also student forums that are organized by topic and a Student Media Gallery, which provides a safe and secure place for teachers to post student work. Students can communicate with other students from across the globe on a range of topics that they find interesting, from the impression of Justin Bieber’s hairstyle to the impact cheating has on schoolwork. The forums are moderated by real people and nothing gets posted without review. Oates notes that music and sports are some of the most popular topics, however, the single most popular social issue based on student responses is “Do glasses make you a nerd?” So while the teacher-moderated communications in the ePals Global Community may be more formal and stress the use of academic language, the student forums provide a level of engagement through social interaction with other students with similar interests.

Teachers can choose the purpose and intensity of interaction, from once a month, once a week, or several times a week. It just depends on what they work out with the teachers they collaborate with. For example, one teacher required her students to compose three sentences twice a week to share with students in their ePals collaborating class in Italy. Oates recounted that the response from Italian students would often incorporate cognates that were familiar to them but not so much to the American students, who often had to look them up in order to reply—emphasizing the difference between academic and social language use and building connections between the two languages. (As an interesting aside to that particular story, the scores for the American students on their tests of English writing improved so much after the experience that the teacher was investigated by the state to ensure that the students hadn’t cheated!)

Teacher request for connecting via languageTeacher request for connecting via language

How to Get Started

One of the best ways to get started is to visit the ePals website at www.epals.com. The home page scrolls the news ePals classrooms so you can see where the classes are located and view a profile with the age and grade level and number of students in each class and the type of interaction the teachers are looking for. A search feature allows you to find additional classrooms from the hundreds of thousands that are registered in the system based on location, grade, interest, and other parameters. You can also sign up your class on the ePals website but all new members are reviewed and must be approved before their requests are posted or they are able to participate in any activities.

If you’re not sure how you’d like to interact with another classroom, ePals has some suggestions and offers other products and services that could serve as a focus of a project. For example, in2books is a curriculum for grades three through five that incorporates eMentoring, and the ePals LearningSpace is an online collaborative environment that encourages the sharing of curriculum and supports common Web 2.0 tools, like blogs, wikis, and forums. New services are developed and delivered based on input from ePals uses, so you can have a say on what additional services might be helpful.

One of the many projects ePals offers participantsOne of the many projects ePals offers participants

If you need more information, it’s likely you’ll run across Rita or one of the ePals team members at a conference, but in case you don’t, you can attend a free webinar to learn more about ePals. Rita actually presented the webinar I attended. To sign up for the ePals 101 webinar, sign up at http://epals.101.sgizmo.com. Get other questions about ePals answered at support@corp.epals.com.

There are other electronic pen pal services that you can investigate, so compare and find the solution that is best for you. I do want to thank Dr. Rita Oates, however, for working with me and sharing information about the technology-based solutions ePals provides that language teachers may want to use to address the critical need of student interaction with native or fluent speakers. It was nice to move from an awareness of the program to a better understanding of how teachers are using these services in their classroom. If you’ve used ePals or a similar program, I’d enjoying hearing about your experiences, as well.

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All A-Buzz: The 21st Century Language Classroom

18 May 2011, 9:42 pm

Last Fall I visited some schools in Henrico County, Virginia, which is on the outskirts of the Commonwealth’s capital, Richmond. During those visits I had the great fortune to observe a fantastic 21st Century lesson delivered by Spanish teacher, Patrick Wininger. Patrick teaches Spanish to seventh grade students and works in a district that has a one-to-one laptop initiative. While that may be a plus for technology integration, his lesson was an excellent example of varied and seamless technology use that not only supported skills often referred to as 21st Century skills, but repeatedly gave students practice in the critical areas of reading, writing, listening, and speaking Spanish. It was also one that could be accomplished in classrooms without the laptops, but maybe just not as efficiently. Patrick graciously agreed to a follow-up interview and has some great tips to share for incorporating technology in language acquisition instruction.

Focus on the Student

While I was invited to visit showcase lessons for 21st Century skills, you could tell this was pretty much just another day for Wininger—a day brimming with excited and active students very much engaged in the business of learning language. In fact, the class was so full it was almost bursting at the seams, with some students squeezed into corners to accommodate the visitors. The noise, at times, rose to a pleasant roar of excited students clearly engaged in learning, collaborating, and communicating with and without their laptops. I love that sound.

When you visit a classroom, it’s usually pretty obvious when what you are watching is SOP—standard operating procedure. Students know what to expect, what to do, and are familiar with the transitions from one activity to the next. Wininger was a great conductor, but the students were truly the stars. He confirmed with me, later, that he really tries to give the students what they want. “Foreign languages, especially Spanish,” he told me, “are growing in popularity and students really want to be able to use it to speak with others who speak Spanish.” These may be other students who go to their schools, play on their sports teams, or others they meet in their communities. “Many people,” he says, “now see Spanish as useful in day-to-day life. It changes the reason why students take a language.” So he capitalizes on that.

In fact, Wininger is a career switcher who came to language instruction from corporate training and communications. In the business world, you focus on the customer, which is also what Wininger does in his classroom. He focuses on what the students want and uses the available technologies to engage them and help them learn language. “It has to be useful. If teachers can’t explain why this matters, they shouldn’t be teaching it.” He notes that students are becoming more consumer-oriented, and if what you are offering doesn’t have value, they won’t buy it.

Freedom to Learn

Wininger notes that “It’s more about how you teach than the tools you use.” Yes, his students have laptops, but in many places increased access to different technologies is blurring what one can do in the classroom and at home. He incorporates a textbook series with many digital resources, including handouts, recordings, presentations, and even a website where students can go online and listen to native speakers. The district has a web-based student information system, so students don’t even have to turn in homework at school. In fact, it’s probably better if they don’t because then his instruction can focus more on active language acquisition than checking homework.

During the 45 minutes I was in the classroom, the students quickly moved through a logical sequence of instruction that was building to an assignment they’d complete for homework. Students focused on action verbs and vocabulary and worked through writing, listening, and speaking (and reading, of course) supported by digital handouts, presentation software, digital recordings and lots and lots of interaction. The digital resources served as a basis, but all activities were customized and required students to create their own examples, to relate it to their own lives, and to speak with others. They spoke with each other, they spoke with Wininger, and they responded to the digital voice that hovered over the room, with reminders all the way through—by Wininger—of where they were headed, why they were doing this, and constant reminders about the connection between reading, writing, listening and speaking. And what were they going to do? Students had to build on the sentences they wrote during class to post a blog response related to a favorite hobby or pastime. It was practical, relevant, and used tools the students enjoyed.

Wininger notes that foreign language classrooms have always had tools, like language labs, it’s just that the tools are different now and can all be in one place. “It’s not about what you have, it’s about being skilled at what you have.” Technology empowers students. Many of them are using it outside of school already, whether it’s texting on their smartphone, mastering multi-player games, or chatting with friends online. His students just use technology to learn a new language in ways that feel comfortable.

Wininger says his students are like sponges. They love to try new things, especially with technology. He said he’s never had a student not want to participate when technology was included. He says, “Whatever I’ve tried with technology, they’ve been willing to try it, too.” Even if it’s something new they don’t know how to use. Once they begin to use it, even in small ways, they feel empowered. One example was when the young girl next to me had a problem with her document, before Wininger could get to her, she had several classmates at her computer who overcame the issue in a few seconds. He notes that the more students interface with technology, they build a repertoire of skills they can use elsewhere.

The Tips

So, what are some of the activities Wininger and his students participate in during class—and beyond? I’ve already described what could have been a very traditional worksheet-based lesson that was put into overdrive and ended up being a blog post. Following are some additional technology ideas Wininger shared.

Create games to play in class or online. Many applications have multiple functions, like the ubiquitous Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. With these, you can manipulate text, images, video, and include hyperlinks that connect information together. You can create a presentation to use during class, or add buttons and links that branch to different parts of the presentation.

Bring in the world. Most teachers have Internet access, and so Wininger uses it to go beyond the walls of his classroom to engage his students with cultural artifacts as a subject for language acquisition. One example involved a painting by the artist Frida Kahlo. He provided background information through a lecture supported by presentation software, and the students read a section about the picture in their text. But then Wininger “visited” the Smithsonian where the students not only got to see the image projected larger than life in class but explored more information about it. Students followed up by writing a reaction paper, which could be in Spanish for more advanced students.

Build a website. There are many different tools that you and your students can use to create a website, it’s how you frame those activities that matters. Wininger has had his students participate in the traditional travelogue activity in which students plan a trip to another country where Spanish is spoken, but he also requires students to create budgets and build a website based on their trip that includes a daily blog that they keep while they are “traveling.”

In another web-based project Wininger identifies 20 contemporary Spanish songs that students select. They learn the song, of course, but they also learn about the performer and partner with another student to develop a fan website. Some of the students didn’t want to stop, and even during the class I visited I could hear students singing along to some of the Spanish pop songs that played in the background during one activity.

Shoot a video. Again, you don’t have to have access to an expensive videocamera and suite of editing software to incorporate video into your instruction. Wininger’s students researched, wrote, and produced daily weather reports in Spanish…for Spanish-speaking countries. They searched the Internet for real-time data and presented the whole project in Spanish on video, even using green-screen technology so it could look like they were “on location.” He said the students were not only engaged, but motivated to do a good job and to deliver the reports convincingly.

Make it interactive. Wininger admitted he was a little reluctant to get a video beam projector, not wanting to give up his trusty overhead projector. But now that he has one he absolutely loves it. It projects large, clear images that the students find engaging and focuses their attention unlike everyone staring at their textbook, and is useful for a variety of video resources, as well. He’d like to have an interactive whiteboard, because he feels it would make it that much easier to move images and objects around and he’d like to get his students up and interacting with the content—highlighting, summarizing, matching, ordering…there are many possibilities. While he doesn’t have one currently, he suggested—my favorite tip—you can create your own interactive whiteboard out of a Wii game remote and an infrared pointer for about $40. Honest! There are dozens of videos on YouTube that show you how, so go check it out.

Practice What You Preach

Wininger does more than have his students do all the work; he has modeled 21st century communications for his students, friends, and teachers. He participated in a Fulbright-Hays Study Abroad seminar in 2009 that took him to Mexico with 15 other teachers, and to keep everyone informed he kept up a daily blog (http://patrick-wininger.blogspot.com/). A blog alone can be a lot of work, a daily blog even more so, but while traveling?!?

However, “the experience was really valuable,” says Wininger, as he was not only able to communicate with friends and colleagues back home, but it really helped him understand the potential of this form of communication. His blog entries include reflections, new learnings, and incorporate images and even videos. Some of the images make it into his instruction, as do some of the things he learned, like how the textbook he uses inaccurately described the Sun Stone in the Aztec room in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

The textbook describes the stone as a calendar, but that’s not what the museum reports. Wininger can now not only describe its real purposes to his students but show them pictures he’s taken of the stone. His excitement on his blog is palpable, “…now I get to teach my students the RIGHT thing instead of the wrong.” The 21st Century has already emphasized the shift from receiving information to creating information, a key characteristic of Web 2.0 and social networking technologies. Wininger’s blog is a great example of creating information that is available not only for his students but with anyone with a web browser.

No, not those Natives vs. Immigrants again!

I get a little tired of people telling me I’m not a “digital native,” Marc Prensky’s famous description of students who grow up with digital technologies. And, no, I didn’t. I’m comfortable not being a digital native, because I think I do pretty well. I work in educational technologies, after all, and I work with others to try to help them figure out how to use them to support teaching and learning. I have never been one to think it matters much. But Wininger may have changed my mind…may have.

He notes that it’s not the digital natives that we have to be concerned about right now, it’s us digital immigrants. He agrees that 21st Century skills that promote communication and collaboration, solving complex real-world problems, and being creative and innovative are valuable. The issue is that most digital immigrants have never been shown how to teach them. He said they’re very different teaching skills, and since they haven’t really been valued so much in education until recently, teaching digital natives is a bigger challenge than being one.

I’d like to thank Henrico County Schools and especially Patrick Wininger for allowing me not only to visit but to follow-up with my many questions. Patrick may not be a digital native either, but his students don’t care. They’re learning, and having a great time while they’re doing it, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re an immigrant or not when you make that happen.

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Voices from the Field: Stephanie Krajicek

27 January 2011, 3:42 pm

Stephanie KrajicekLast summer I attended the ISTE conference (formerly called NECC) in Denver, Colorado. ISTE is sponsored by the International Society for Technology in Education and is one of the largest educational technology conferences. While I was there, I tried to attend as many sessions possible related to technology and language acquisition, which is where I met Stephanie Krajicek, whose enthusiasm drew people like a magnet to her poster session. Her presentation focused on Technology Integration for English Language Learners (ELLs) and was a colorful and engaging amalgamation of ideas she has used in her classroom and with other teachers. Now a graduate student at Purdue, Stephanie continues to provide training to teachers on using technology matched to the needs they have for working with ELLs. I was able to catch up with her after the conference by phone and she provided some great practical tips.

Focus on the Learning

Stephanie’s poster was brimming with colorful screenshots of student work using many different technologies, especially social-networking applications—those that encourage students to communicate and collaborate with each other. She notes that the problem is not having access to interesting and engaging tools, but finding the right one.

“Many students,” she reports, “may or may not have had access to technology, so you have that extra level of language teaching.” An example she gave was that a common standard is to compare and contrast main characters in a story, which can be difficult concepts for ELLs to begin with, but adding technology means you may have to teach them what it means to log on, what a mouse is, when to right-click vs. left-click. She cautions that you have to be able to determine how much content knowledge they are going to get out of a technology that is complex.

With the teachers she works with now, she starts with a specific project, challenge, or need they have in their classrooms, and then she finds tools to help them meet those needs. She focuses on what they have access to—right now—and how it can be used to meet their needs. She’s done her homework, too, and has amassed a list of many different tools that can be applied in different situations for students at varied age and language levels. You can find some of the examples she’s identified, presentations, and helpful tips on her blog at http://eyeontransformation.blogspot.com/.

A Short List

So what are some of Stephanie’s favorite tools? Below are a few we talked about.

Storybird. Storybird is a collaborative site this is intended for families with younger children. One of the best aspects, according to Stephanie, is that the interface is really simple to use so you can get kids writing and creating short books literally by “clicking on the page and typing.”

The focus is on telling stories, but a benefit is that it allows ELLs to not only tell their stories but to share them. “Too often,” Stephanie admits, “teachers forget that final critical step of the writing process—publishing.” Storyboard allows them to publish their stories for each other, their teachers, and their families. Since the stories “go beyond the teacher’s desk” they carry greater weight, they have greater consequence. Students can also collaborate on stories and share them with each other during the writing process.

I visited the site and noticed that it is in “Public Beta,” which means that it’s free for now, but probably until they can figure out a reasonable business model. There is drag-and-drop art of many different styles students can incorporate into their work, and they can put text anywhere they want to with a click of a button. Storybird automatically creates covers, for those that might need that help, but they are also customizable. Your account tracks the storybirds you are working on, those you’ve published, and those you want to read, so you could actually create reading lists for students.

Webbing tools (concept maps). Stephanie notes that when teachers get caught up in teaching content they might overlook the need to help ELLs use higher-order thinking skills in the target language. Content requirements, especially in the higher grades, often include abstract terms, like compare and contrast, analyze, organize and others. Webbing tools provide visual supports for students to master skills like these using language and images that can visually be organized, linked, or highlighted. She likes to use them for prewriting, as well.

Many teachers have access to the popular Inspiration and Kidspiration software (Kidspiration is designed for younger students), but Stephanie has been using the web-based version of Inspiration’s concept-mapping software called Webspiration. Like Storybird, Webspiration is in free Public Beta but the plan is that it will eventually be offered as a subscription service, hopefully with a break for schools and following acceptable guidelines for secure use by younger students.

Webspiration is similar to its offline versions, and you can even upload or download files from Inspiration. But Webspiration adds the component of collaboration. You can collaborate synchronously or asynchronously, but Inspiration recommends you not collaborate with more than 25 people synchronously. In most settings, more than 3 or 4 might get confusing, anyway. There’s also chat functionality for additional real-time interaction. Collaborators do need an account, so you should follow acceptable use for setting up accounts for students.

Comic strip makers. There are several free and for-fee online and offline tools that allow students to make comic strips or cartoon-like presentations. The benefit for ELLs is that they are highly visual and give them an opportunity to practice English skills with simpler language. Plus, they’re fun and engaging. A short list follows (an Internet search will find many more):

  • Chogger. Create comics with drawing tools or by uploading your own images.
  • Comic Creator from readwritethink. Free online tool from the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English with templates for short black-and-white comics.
  • Comic Strip Maker. Create one-page, three-panel dialog-based comics using one of six character templates.
  • Make Beliefs Comix. Make three-panel comics you can print or e-mail using characters you can manipulate with simple click-driven commands.

Feed aggregators. Aggregators pull in information from different kinds of websites, such as news sites, blogs, and others. Google Reader is an example, but many e-mail programs also serve as aggregators. (You may find helpful the comparison of dozens of different aggregators found on Wikipedia.) The idea is that you can pull in information you are interested in from your favorite sites, or even set up searches for specific content that shows up in your mailbox—or reader—every day.

Stephanie notes that after time of constant English use, ELLs can bog down and tune out. It’s just tiring to process all that information in a new language. Feed aggregators allow you to provide access to background knowledge in their native language to keep the learning going. Some of the things she suggests you try are:

  • Give students access to current events, those that parallel what you’re doing in your instruction, in their native language.
  • Provide extension activities for students who need enrichment.
  • Teach research and writing skills by having students bookmark and annotate websites, perhaps using a social-bookmarking tool like Diigo covered last month, and monitor their work. You can make sure they are finding relevant information, highlighting the most pertinent information, summarizing correctly, and making sure they’re not plagiarizing.

Walk the Walk

Stephanie had more great tips, both at ISTE and on the phone, so maybe we’ll hear from her again. When I asked her what higher education faculty could do to better help their teacher candidates learn about and use technology effectively, she emphasized modeling. She says that most of the technology experiences for many teacher candidates coming to her workshops is using Blackboard (or other learning management systems), but that’s not technology integration. That’s information management.

Since space is limited, Stephanie recommended—in a very 21st Century skills sort of way—that you might want to follow some higher education faculty that are modeling what they want teachers to do through social networking. One of her favorites is the English Companion Ning. She’d like to see something comparable for ELLs. A short list of sites she follows is below. Maybe we can all follow her lead and set up a feed aggregator to follow them. Thanks, Stephanie!

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eCoaching: Using Technology to Support a Statewide Coaching Effort

3 January 2011, 5:34 pm

Over the past four years, I worked with the Title III staff at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) in my role as the director of technology for the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center (ARCC) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. North Carolina has one of the fastest growing populations per capita of ELLs in the country, and DPI had identified the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) as a framework for helping teachers meet the needs of these students. Joanne Marino, Title III Consultant with DPI had taken steps to develop a statewide network of coaches trained in SIOP and the demand for coaches was tremendous. However, her limited resources prevented her from providing enough initial and follow-up training to meet the demand.

When designing the ARCC program, the management team had proposed something we called eCoaching, which owes much of its genesis to Dr. Sharon Harsh who became the director of the program. eCoaching uses readily available digital technologies to connect educators with accomplished peers to promote professional growth by building, expanding, or refining skills and knowledge. No specific technologies are dictated, instead, the idea is to use technologies that are available and appropriate that might help educators connect across school or district boundaries when it wasn’t reasonable, feasible, or even possible to do it otherwise. eCoaching is not a coaching model, but is intended to support existing coaching models, which is why the coaching effort in North Carolina was a good fit.

Over the four years, we learned several lessons that could be considered when you consider using technology to support professional growth. This was a large program, impacting every district in the state, and the results have been very positive. I think it’s a good example of using data to know where to start, but gently expanding experiences and skills. Following are some lessons learned.

Lessons Learned

Know your audience. The ARCC involvement began with an online needs assessment of the coaches that was instrumental in selecting the right entry point for using technology. With more than 270 responses, we found technology use for school-based activities was low. Participants who responded indicated they accessed computers both at home and school, but most often at school. Of the fairly long list of technologies we thought they might have available, the technologies they reported as being most comfortable with and had the greatest access to were e-mail, taking digital pictures, and searching the Internet. Few reported using social networking, participating in web conferences, or creating or posting to a blog or wiki—which was a technology DPI staff had first considered. This helped us to realize that if we wanted to support these people to develop their coaching knowledge and skills, we had to begin with activities similar to sending e-mails and searching the Internet.

Practice and learn. During the first year, we developed an eight-week online book study for a pilot group consisting of 20 members from the cadre. The book study used discussion software that was similar to sending an e-mail—one of our audience’s proficiencies. The book study was facilitated but conducted asynchronously with weekly deadlines. We did hold a kick-off webinar to introduce the discussion software and provided an orientation to the topic, including showing two classroom videos developed by DPI. At the end of the book study, the facilitator arranged to have the authors of the book participate in a second synchronous webconference so the participants could ask them questions directly. That was a unique benefit that technology afforded us, as the authors never had to leave their offices to participate. Nor did the participants, for that matter.

One thing we learned from the evaluation was that there was a lack of awareness about SIOP with educators outside of the coaching network, especially district administrators and building-level principals, and this made it difficult to get buy-in and support for the coaches. This volunteer group also graciously told us that if this had not been a pilot effort, they would have been reluctant to participate for eight weeks with no incentive or compensation. We also learned that about half of the school districts blocked all streaming media, so very few could view the videos at school (where most of them completed their computer time). We took all of these lessons into consideration when revising the opportunities for year two.

Speak their language. In order to build awareness and generate greater buy-in from key stakeholders at the district and building level, we delivered three one-hour webinars for superintendents and principals, not the SIOP coaches or teachers, so the language used and examples selected were targeted to administrators. We demonstrated why this was important by providing background on the SIOP process, some of the research and data behind it, figures on the growing ELL population and how that was impacting student achievement across the state, and what to expect if they wanted to implement it in their schools. The third webinar featured stories from several districts across the state that had implemented SIOP and were in different stages of implementation. They were able to use local voices and experiences to share information and actual materials with those on the webinar and it went on 30 minutes longer than originally planned.

Even a small incentive can be powerful. For the second book study, we planned a shorter four-week study of a book that included a DVD, so we overcame the streaming media problem. We hoped to get 20 participants. Everyone who participated would get the book with the DVD, and recertification credit. That credit was crucial as the response was overwhelming. We had to close registration two days early because we had more than 200 people register for the book study. We eventually ran three rounds of the book study with two groups of 25 participating per round. Joanne was able to have representatives from every district in the state that had originally registered and really raised the exposure of SIOP across the entire state.

Keep moving forward, but provide support. During year three, the team intended to move beyond directed discussions to trying to promote more open-ended interactions using social networking software. Title III staff created a Ning, which supports discussions through forums, various media, a calendar, and many other functions. We targeted two small groups (approximately 30 each) to participate in our new social networking experiment. The idea was that the participants would focus on specific components from the SIOP framework during the year and would have conversations about them, not necessarily formal coaching sessions. We provided support in terms of a SIOP subject expert and a technology expert who supported operational issues.

We learned that incentives are still important, but perhaps more important are facilitation, structure, and buy-in at the local level. The group with the most success had a facilitator who provided weekly structured activities using the Ning, with the greatest success demonstrated at the school where the assistant principal attended sessions with her faculty and they were provided release time to complete the activities during the school day.

Moving into the Future

The program is still growing and has moved to a closed, online collaborative site developed specifically to support coaching and mentoring called TeacherStudio. Users can upload or download lesson plans, implementation plans, videos, and other artifacts. A group of coaches from the larger cadre is excitedly developing or repurposing training materials that can now be posted in a single place and accessed any where in the state to supplement face-to-face or online professional development offered by DPI or these coaches. As powerful and promising as this technology appears to be, if it had been available when we started, we would probably have not have been ready for it. That needs assessment was critical for helping us to know what our target audience would accept and I feel like we pushed them a step at a time until they are now ready for this dynamic social environment.

This information is adapted from the upcoming book, Online Professional Development. Design, Deliver, Succeed! by John Ross and available later this year from Corwin.

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Don’t Miss the Bus!

29 November 2010, 3:19 pm

Regardless of how you’re keeping track, the 21st Century is almost one-tenth over. Remember all the hoopla for the new millennium? Can you believe that was 10 years ago? An entire decade? We were worried about what the “millennium bug” was going to do to our computer systems, and educators were being encouraged to help students develop “21st Century skills.” Well, a decade pretty much places us into that new century. Are we there yet?

My November TechTips article explored the 21st Century theme from a broad perspective, and I’m glad to say I received some great feedback! Some asked me to “just tell us how to do it,” with “it” being technology. Others wanted to know more about “just what these 21st Century Skills are.” Over the next few months I hope to provide some more specific strategies to help world language teachers not just get ready for the 21st Century but put them square in the driver’s seat in their 21st Century classrooms. We’re already there, after all. That bus may be on the road, but there’s still time to get aboard. I’ll explore some of the “its” but also have contacted several exemplary teachers whose stories I hope to share in subsequent articles. If you know of some additional exemplary teachers, please contact me. I’d love to talk with them.

“It” Is All About Learning

I get the “just show me how to do it” response a lot in my line of work, and I have to admit I’ve been guilty of saying it, at least in the past. I sympathize but want to shift that line of thinking just a bit. As I’ve mentioned, the “it” that most people want me to tell them about is technology, whether a laptop, a podcast, or some other application. They want me to tell them which buttons to press, which menus to use, which steps to follow, but technology varies, and it all changes so quickly.

I recently developed a workshop for a school that had just gotten new laptops running Windows 7, so I upgraded to that operating system and created some step-by-step handouts with screenshots from the latest version of Microsoft Office. What I didn’t know was that they didn’t have the latest version of Office, just Windows. My handouts didn’t look like their screens or have the same steps. What to do?

This is a pretty common occurrence in technology, actually. Trying to tell people how to complete a task in common software, like Microsoft Office, varies depending on which computer you have, the version of the operating system on that computer, and the version of the software. In a single workshop I can have Macs and PCs, two or three different versions of either operating system, and a similar range of application versions on each. All of these differences change the steps to follow. What I do—or try to do—is to focus on the learning, not the technology.

In this case, I took an activity like inserting an image into a document and I turned it around on them. I showed them some common places to find images. I demonstrated how I would insert an image on my computer, highlighting some common commands or menus to look for. We even talked about when and why to insert an image. Then, I told them to work together. They had to figure out how it worked on their computer and then share it with the rest of us. They could go online and find tutorials or ask me for help, but mostly they shared with each other. We revised the handout together which they could then use with students or other teachers in their schools. I got new handouts out of the deal, too.

That’s a simple—and true—story of 21st Century skills in action. It also demonstrates shifting the focus from teacher-directed to student-centered instruction. Instead of telling them what to do, walking through a handout step-by-step, ending up with cookie cutter products that all looked the same, my teachers had a very real-world problem to solve. They were going to have to teach these skills to other teachers in their district after I left! It was an authentic problem that required them to do a little critical thinking along with communication and collaboration. And some of their results were more creative than my solution, including one who posted her handout to her blog.

Beyond the Handout

Moving from teacher-directed to student-centered instruction can be a hard shift if you’ve never been given autonomy as a student. I started out teaching the way I was taught, and probably so did you. But just like my handout story above, you can take small steps and don’t have to give yourself over to full-scale student autonomy—at least not right away. Digital resources make this easier, because we’ve gotten to a point where there are more high quality materials and applications that are available 24/7. These give you more opportunities to interact with or engage your students in language acquisition in and beyond the classroom.

While sometimes a handout or two may be helpful, I’m encouraging moving beyond relying solely on prescriptive activities in instruction—whether that instruction involves teaching teachers or younger students. Think about when we use our own language skills. Maybe you’re trying to figure out a train schedule in a foreign country, or you’ve been asked to talk with a new parent who doesn’t speak English, or you’re going to chaperone a student group to another country. How often will you have to fill in a blank or answer a multiple-choice question in that setting? Now consider the situations where your students will use their language skills.

As I mentioned last month, it’s not all or nothing. There’s no cosmic switch that will help a teacher magically transport to 21st Century teaching and learning every lesson of every day. And sometimes, you may not want to. Language acquisition, like all content areas, requires foundational skills and knowledge, and sometimes students have to practice those. But we can move to more authentic and relevant instruction for our students, often relying on the many free digital resources available now.

What would I suggest if you wanted to do that? What would I do if I wanted to move to more 21st Century teaching and learning? Following are a few suggestions.

Set a goal and monitor your effectiveness. Remember, it is generally understood that teachers progress along a continuum as they learn new technologies. One of the best strategies to move forward is to set a periodic target to incorporate technology that promotes 21st Century skills (e.g., creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, or communication and collaboration) until you feel more comfortable and they become second nature. You can start a class discussion list or blog. You might incorporate a weekly podcast, that you or your students create or find. Or have students create newscasts—print, web, or video—in the language they are studying. You may want to conduct one of these activities once a week, or maybe try a longer activity once a month if you have limited technology access. If your students have access to laptops, I’ve seen technology experts recommend once a day.

Use what you have. We don’t all have access to interactive whiteboards or a laptop for every student, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create more authentic learning opportunities that rely on the digital technologies at our disposal. Using one computer a teacher can still create concept maps, digital stories, or explore web resources during whole-class instruction. It can become a student center during small group activities. When relying on a lab, plan ahead and prepare students in during class before getting to the lab, so time is focused on applying language skills and knowledge, not the technology. Technology is not required to create 21st Century teaching and learning, but in this century we use technology for everything from shopping to finding medical breakthroughs. Technology is the way we do things in the 21st Century, so use what you’ve got.

Practice, but you don’t have to be perfect. I know, as a teacher, I want to be the authority and don’t want to look like I didn’t know something in front of my students. But when I visit and interview exemplary technology-using teachers, they all tell me, “I learn from the kids.” All of them. Remember, technology is going to change. I planned a workshop on Delicious, the social-bookmarking website, which I have been using for years. When I got to the workshop, I discovered that Delicious is now owned by Yahoo! and registering was much different than when I had first created my account. You’re the learning expert. Keep the learning goals in mind, and when technology throws a wrench at you, use it as an opportunity to learn along with your students. You’re modeling valuable 21st Century skills when you do.

Find a buddy. You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, research on exemplary technology-using teachers shows that they don’t. These teachers have a network they can rely on to learn new things, bounce off new ideas, and even try new technologies and techniques with. It’s nice when your buddies are in your own school, but with technologies like webconferencing and web-based resources, including those from the NCLRC, you can find a buddy around the block or across the globe. You can communicate through webconferencing (e.g., iChat, ooVoo, or Skype), jointly create documents (e.g., using GoogleDocs, TypeWith.me, or Scribblar.com), and share your results (e.g., creating a podcast with Audacity or GarageBand or even uploading a video to YouTube or TeacherTube).

Technology Tip: Getting Your Act Together

In an effort to comply more with the “just show me how to do it” requests, I want to offer this real, bonafide technology tip. In the 21st Century, we have to deal with a lot of information, and now a lot of that information is found on the web. It can be hard to sort, store, and find when you need it. In order to deal with that information, I encourage you to set the goal of using a social bookmarking service, if you are not already doing so. It should help you get started in moving up the continuum.

Many of us are used to bookmarking information on our own computers, but what happens when we have to use a different one, or we buy a new computer? Yes, you can transfer bookmarks to new computers, but a more useful solution is to use a social bookmarking service. Essentially, this service allows you to store all of your bookmarks online, so you can get to them any time you want to, from any computer with an Internet connection.

They allow you to create tags, or groupings, so you can organize your bookmarks in different categories. Then you can share them (or not) with others. Coming up with the tagging scheme may be the most complex aspect of using them. You may want to do it by general categories (e.g., travel sites, government-sponsored resources, language practice, etc.) or organize them by lessons or units. This latter arrangement will take more planning and is probably something you might accomplish over time.

In homage to 21st Century skills (which encourage you to be creative, solve problems, incorporate critical thinking, and communicate and collaborate), I’m not going to tell you how to do it step by step. Each site contains tutorials and answers to frequently asked questions that provide that information. There are three social bookmarking services I know of, two that I use routinely and one that I have read reviews of that seems to be promising. You can decide which one works best for you, but I encourage you to use one of these free services to organize information for your language instruction and to model 21st Century skills for your students. Already use one? Be a buddy and help someone out who doesn’t, or check into one of the other ones. They may offer functionality you didn’t know about.

Social bookmarking services:

  • Delicious (www.delicious.com) One of the earliest bookmarking sites with an easy-to-use toolbar you can add to your web browser. You do have to create or use a Yahoo! account for this service. Unfortunately, if you have more than one Yahoo! account, you’ll have to switch back and forth, which is cumbersome. This is my problem because I have a Yahoo! personal e-mail account and one I created just for trainings.
  • Diigo (www.diigo.com) Another easy-to-use service that has really ramped up its social networking aspect. It also allows you to annotate websites, so you can highlight the most important information on the site for your students. There is an educator version (www.diigo.com/education) that allows you to share your bookmarks with a class and does not require students to have an e-mail account. Unfortunately, because it does have this social networking aspect, which I think can be pretty useful, you may have to get it unblocked on some school networks.
  • iCyte (www.icyte.com) I have only read about this service and viewed some of the tutorials, so I admit I’m not an expert on this one, but maybe you are and can let me know how you use it better. iCyte claims to be more than a bookmarking site, but both Delicious and Diigo are constantly evolving, so if you find a feature you like on one, chances are it will be on one of the others—if not now, then soon. Like the others, it appears to be very easy to use, allows you to annotate, and you can install the iCyte toolbar on your favorite web browser.

Creating and maintaining a social bookmarking site is a good way to get started with moving along the continuum towards more 21st Century teaching and learning, and it will help you organize all the information you collect, from the NCLRC and elsewhere. If you’d like to see one in action, please feel free to review the sites I maintain at the links below. If you do need some more help to learn more about social bookmarking, want to suggest additional topics, or just send some feedback, please feel free to contact me. I appreciate all the advice I’ve received.

My Delicious account: www.delicious.com/tltbookmarks
My Diigo account: www.diigo.com/user/tltbookmarks

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