Student Digital Portfolios

After reading the article How Do Digital Portfolios Help Students Learn?, what are your thoughts on student digital portfolios? What makes a digital portfolio a more meaningful collection of work?

The author writes that "digital tools such as iPads and Evernote provide [...] ways to efficiently capture [student] learning through a variety of techniques, including audio, images, and text," providing chances for the teacher to respond and to celebrate achievement. In general, I picture these tools working well for collecting, displaying, and promoting certain projects or getting "snapshots" of representative (or exceptional) work from a class. Digital portfolios also make it possible to connect different types of media, as the author demonstrates with his example of kids' written stories coupled with their audio reflections.

I see large issues with managing digital portfolios in middle or high school classes, however. I will probably have 160+ students next year. There is no way I could manage that many individual digital portfolios as a teacher, unless my students had the technology to keep their own portfolios under my management, which they won't. I also wonder about the practicality of putting each student's work, especially graded work, on the web without risking major FERPA issues. The author says, "It is important that the audience – the [student?], teacher, the students themselves, other staff, the parents – see the growing and culminating pieces side by side." He's a school principal, so presumably he has thought through the FERPA issues somehow, but at a middle school level I definitely foresee privacy issues with his approach.

ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Standards

What is the most important ISTE standard for teachers? Why? What are you doing to promote this standard in your classroom?

I really, really hope my answer to this question will be different a few years from today, but right now my views of how to use technology in education are heavily influenced by what access to technology we are providing to ALL students -- which is very little, at least in my school district and I believe generally in my state. I hope someday that I can promote Standard #1 as the most important with a clear conscience, because it would be amazing for students to use technology to explore real-world issues, create innovative solutions, and communicate those to anyone on the web. However, right now, there is no way I can guarantee my students access to technology on any particular day, because resources are so slim. (It's true that many students have some access to the Internet, especially on phones, but I'm not going to design any lessons that depend on technology and therefore leave kids without Internet access behind.)

For this year, in my classroom, I see Standard #5 as most important. Already in a week of this class, I have explored so much of how other educators use technology and what great math teaching ideas other teachers have. Some of what I learned was from class (about diigo.com or iMovie, for example), but just using the Twitter account I set up in class and looking more closely at blogs and articles people tweet about has led me to incredibly helpful ideas in a relatively small amount of time. For instance, I found a quick guide to acceptable image use, an app for sending texts to students about homework safely, great ideas for rethinking homework, and a ton of good lesson and math problem ideas at opencurriculum.org , openmiddle.com, Five Triangles, and mathalicious.com, among others. (I guess several of these also fall under standard 3.c,  communicating to students and parents.) I passed some of these, along with other ideas, to other teachers in tweets and blog comments, and can easily picture communicating more once I set up my own (more permanent) teacher blog. I couldn't keep up the pace of web browsing I've done over the past few days forever, but so far each hour has led to several useful and often time-saving ideas.

What is the most important ISTE Standard for students? Why? What are you doing to promote this standard in your classroom?

For middle school students in general, I would say that Standard 3 is the most urgent, because in non-math classes, they do a lot of online research and report back on it, and they need skills for that. For math class, probably Standard 1, about creating and developing their own products and processes, would be most important. It would be great to use software for graphing (the like Desmos calculator) or for geometry (like Geogebra) in class, or to set up online polls for statistics lessons. I'm also very intrigued by the idea of students making videos to show how to apply math in various situations. I hope to accomplish at least some of these things in my classes this year, depending, again, on computer availability. 

Mobile Devices for Every Student and Staff Member: Which Would Be Best?

If you could distribute one of these devices to every staff and student in your district, which one would you choose and why?

The Atlantic article "Why Some Schools Are Selling All Their iPads" is a pretty interesting read. I don't have enough experience with (or interest in) tablets yet to judge the issues involved with choosing a platform that handles tablet apps well, but I do desperately wish my students had more universal access to the web and to word processing and other apps at school.

The district in the article did a pilot comparing the experiences of students (apparently middle and high school students) on Chromebooks vs. IPads, and their conclusions, described in the article, could be summarized like this (look at me doing a list!!):

• Chromebooks are cheaper ($280 vs. $400)
• Chromebooks were perceived by students as more for work and IPads for fun
• Chromebooks have keyboards (which are also required for Common Core testing)
• It was easier for tech support to support a large group of Chromebooks, partly because students can easily switch from one to another, and new apps are easy to push out
• Google apps for education, which are widely used, work slightly better on Chromebooks

From my point of view, these reasons are compelling, and I'm excited Portland is leaning toward Chromebooks. But as I have this post open, a PPS elementary teacher has just made the excellent point that it's frustrating to have a one-size-fits-all model for students of widely differing ages, educational needs, and keyboard/writing capabilities. (On the other hand, another elementary teacher says IPads are designed as individual machines and are a pain for whole-classroom use, two PPS science teachers say it's extremely frustrating IPads can't run Flash, and one adds he favors a district-wide acceptable use policy that lets students use the devices they already own and use.)

Hans Rosling: 200 Countries, 200 Years

This amazing video shows how with the proper technology tools, we can follow several different types of statistical information at the same time. (It's much cooler than that makes it sound!)


Hans Rosling - 200 Countries, 200 Years from PraesidiumLabs on Vimeo.

Dos and Don'ts of OERS: Thoughts So Far

A colleague of yours tells you they are ditching the textbook and are about to go all OER (Open Education Resource). What would you say to them?

The first piece of advice I would have for anyone asking my advice on this topic is to go to someone who knows more about it! It was clear to me from one evening's reviews of OERs that the quality varies enormously, not just from one site to another, but also from one subject or grade level to another within a site, or even from one topic to another. Therefore, anything I write here is just a preliminary impression.

LearnZillion seems to me to be completely inadequate as a stand-alone teaching resource and potentially harmful even as a supplement to other teaching materials. It is horribly boring and unclear, but far worse than that, it puts most emphasis on calculation procedures with no chance for students to think out the underlying mathematics, or even reflect on it after having it explained. (Examples: "You just add a zero for times ten," or for decimal division, telling students to multiply the divisor and dividend by the same power of 10 with absolutely nothing on WHY.) Even comments on the mathematics are bungled, such as "When finding a measure of center, such as median or mean, our data is constantly being driven toward the center," with an accompanying graphic showing a circle with arrows pointing into the middle. That doesn't even make sense!

On the other hand, opencurriculum.org looked, for Math 6, like an incredibly valuable, easily searchable resource that could be used to find great, innovative lessons on any Common Core math standard, collecting together lessons from many good resources. (I didn't look at nearly enough lessons to be confident of that, but that was my initial impression.) Even if my impression was right, there would still be issues with standardization: which teachers would use which lessons, and who would decide? Still, it certainly deserves a closer look.

Beautiful Fibonacci Numbers in Nature Video

Possible Role of Social Media in my Classroom

Social media offer a different way to encourage discussion amongst members of a class, or even students from different classes. Some of the most thoughtful online content comes from introverts who are not eager to speak to a crowd, even just a class-sized crowd. It's a great way to use written communication, with pauses for thought, and yet communicate socially.

Compared to a website or blog, social media can also be a way for families to sign up for essential information. This is probably more often a school-related use than a middle-school-math-teacher-related use.

(I can see the possible usefulness of Facebook, but I hate it for historical reasons and am still boycotting it.)

Thoughts on Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

Thoughts on Marc Prensky's article "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants":

What have you done recently to showcase your accent?

I often email or call people when a digital native would naturally text. Later I realize texting would have been quicker, more effective, and more flexible (they know right away they have a message and can get to it at their convenience).

I avoid using my husband's IPad because I don't really "get it" and don't want to invest the time in making it natural and familiar because I can't yet afford one of my own.

How can we help DI and DN connect in the classroom and avoid...

This article was GREAT at summarizing some of the reasons kids are bored at school. I had to laugh at the author junking "learning objectives" and criticizing step-by-step, one-at-a-time instruction, because in my experience, administrators and teachers want to prominently feature these, and they can be total turnoffs to students, who feel patronized and pushed in one direction. I basically completely agree with the author's assessment of what works and what doesn't to engage students, except that he says they like fast explanations, and (speaking as someone who tends to talk too fast) I think that varies a lot depending on the student.

The problem is that by having the classroom involve lots of digital-native-style learning, we also open it up to competition from things that are frankly more fun. College students or professionals are paying or being paid for learning, so they have some motivation to make their time count, but K-12 students who have an implicit choice between non-educational games and educational games are often going to pick the non-educational games. We have to design built-in accountability to steer them toward the (slightly?) less appealing choice. I can't compete with all of YouTube!! Nevertheless, since that is kind of happening anyway (bathroom trips to get on phones, etc.), it's better to at least close the entertainment gap some.

This article was written in 2001. Are Prensky's concerns still valid? Why or why not?

Heck yeah, they're valid. But I am not so sure about this binary of natives/immigrants. For instance, I'm a native on calculators, and close to a native on, say, email or document editing, but an immigrant on cell phone apps. I already see older students (or younger teachers) dealing awkwardly with some newer technology. "Immigrants" can model for "natives" how to keep learning the things that THEY aren't natives on, either.

Why Blog?

Do you see yourself blogging? Why or why not? What are the advantages of blogging? What are the possible hangups of blogging? Could you get 100% buy in? From staff? From community? What could a blog replace in your classroom?

I think blogging is a great way to communicate thoughts and information that are time-dependent. Unlike a static website, the fact that things posted a while ago "fall to the bottom" is acceptable or even good. The bad side of this chronological order is that it can be hard for users to find particular, specific information. Generally there are workarounds to this (links somewhere on the page to key posts, or something), but they have to be deployed thoughtfully or the blog gets weighted down by its own content.

I'm also concerned about accessibility issues. Of course there are people who may not have access to computers or phones to read the blog, and it's not fair to ignore them or leave them behind. Even with technology, people may access blogs in different ways. As I type this paragraph, I'm not sure what it will look like on different computers, browsers, phones, etc. For instance, I hit double return to get a paragraph break; will that look like a giant gap in some places?

On the other hand, things like newsletters have their own accessibility issues. Depending on middle school students to bring information home to their parents is stupid. Having open technology is interesting and fun for students and families, who generally love technology in other aspects of their lives. Maybe they will even be inspired to interact with it! Will 100% of students, families, and communities connect with it? Definitely not, because not all of them have access. But my experience so far is that more of them have access than we realize, and technology is the best way to reach families. This may be even more true as Google Translate and other apps help us communicate across language barriers.

A blog wouldn't exactly replace anything in my classroom. Right now, I post general information and interesting links to a weebly site (juliewright.weebly.com) and I think that static site is still the best for that purpose. On second thought, the constantly-updated homework assignment page would probably be better as a blog. Generally, what a blog would do is allow me to post thoughts that I might not want to distract from more essential information, and time-dependent information.