Visuals and Questioning

When I viewed these incredible photos of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, I saw a perfect opportunity for teachers to share these visuals with students and allow students to generate their own questions.  Frequently as educators, we generate and pose questions to students.  In reality, we want our students to generate their own questions and seek understanding. 

Take the opportunity to project these photos to your students or have them view them together in small groups.  Have them write questions that come to their mind on Post-Its or notebook paper as they view the images.  Let the students get into small groups to discuss what questions came to their minds when they saw the photos.  Remind them that the goal is to ask quality questions, not find answers to the questions. 

Once you view these photos, I think you can imagine a number of questions your students will generate.  This can then be followed up with having students generate search queries to use in a search engine.   You can preview results of these search strings and offer suggestions.  I frequently have students in the elementary grades add "kid" or "student" to their search strings to zero in on better sites.

Interactive Whiteboards and Clickers in the Classroom

Marzano Research Laboratory has an online webinar as a preview for a summer two day workshop. I encourage all educators to view the webinar/preview.  Debra Pickering does an exceptional job of tying the clickers and interactive whiteboards to effective instruction.  The initial research on with whiteboards is showing great promise for enhanced instruction.

If you have the opportunity to attend the actual workshop, I highly recommend it.  Last year's summer session was excellent.  They have done additional work in this area, which will make this year's workshop even better.

Clickers in the Classroom

I have been working with teachers on using clickers for instruction.  Clickers have the potential to really guide teachers with informative feedback as they teach.  Clickers also provide an opportunity for students to be involved in the learning.  We no longer have to survey a few students and assume that these students' responses represent the majority of our students' understanding.  Teachers can ask a question and have instant data to guide their lesson.   An even better method is to pose a question and let students discuss with peers what they think is correct and then have students vote on the correct response.    

When clickers become an integral part of instruction, it benefits all learners.  However, clickers will only have this impact when they are used in conjunction with quality instructional strategies.  The infamous Ferris Bueller's Day Off Voodoo Economics is not going to become much better even with clickers.  If you combine good instruction with "wait time," pair-share, and other instructional strategies, the payoff will be student engagement and learning. 

The videos on this link site are geared for university level teaching, but these same methods can be applied to k-12 teaching.  Douglas Duncan's book, Clickers in the Classroom, provides some good techniques on how to use clickers in your classroom.   This link provides a preview of the first two chapters of Duncan's book.

Web 2.0 Tools for Schools

I am a huge fan of harnessing Web 2.0 tools with students.  There are so many different tools available and the list keeps growing.  I will not even pretend to be able to keep up with all of them.  Cool Tools for Schools is a great wiki that has tons of Web 2.0 tools to use for teaching.  The list could be overwhelming, but I encourage you to find a new tool you can use with students to enhance a learning goal.

Research Behind Integrating Technology into the Classroom

Integrating technology has a proven track record for improving student learning as far back as 1987 with ACOT, Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow,  and 1997 with  eMINTS, Enhancing Missouri’s Instructional Networked Teaching Strategies.  Both of these models of instruction involve project based learning using technology embeded throughout the curriculum.  Even with these proven models, technology has been slow to become fully integrated into classrooms  because of cost.  In addition to the cost, other studies that relied on software that provided repetitive "drill and practice" for students showed no real gains in student learning, which did not justify the cost.

I am particularly interested a study Ian Jukes mention on January 15, 2010.  In a Michigan study students who were involved in project based learning with technology tested equally well with the traditionally taught control group at the end of a unit.  The real testment was in the follow-up test two years after the study.  The kids who learned the information in the traditional teaching remembered 10% of what they learned.  Students who learned through technology rich project based learning retained 70% of what they learned two years later!

I think there is great evidence in these studies that is worth analyzing.  Would time spent on creating meaningful technology rich project based learning prove to increase student learning and show results on high stake tests?  Are we willing to stray from some comfortable practices that produce adequate progress with high stakes tests?

Online Drawing Tools

I found this great list of online drawing tools, when considering options for a kindergarten solar system project.  These sites provide an interesting way for students to create and share art work.  Some of the tools are easier to use than Microsoft Paint and others are much more complicated.  Most of these sites use Flash and would require saving the artwork online, which was not my original intent.  However, it would be easy to embed links to student art work within a web page, blog or wiki.  These drawing tools could be used to have students draw a non-linguistic representation of a BAV word.

Have any of you used online drawing tools with your students? 

Edheads - Interactive Simulations

In Multi-Media Learning, Richard Mayer discusses the value of computerized simulations in education.  Edheads has several science simulations including Deep Brain Surgery.  The brain surgery simulation captured my eight year old's attention through the entire twenty minute simulation.  It begins by explaining the need for brain surgery for a woman with Parkinson’s disease.  The simulation requires the student to simulate everything from sterilizing the scalp to making incisions.

While going through this simulation, I was thinking of ways to integrate this into a science lesson for middle school students.  It would provide relevance for students if used at the beginning of an anatomy unit, career exploration unit or a health lesson about disease.  Having students write questions that come to mind while going through the simulation and after the simulation could guide their learning in researching diseases and treatments. 

Blogs of Note

 Blogs of Note is a showcase of exceptional sites from Blogger.  The links below are blogs that caught my attention for older students. 

• Serendipitous is an excellent example of daily blogging for older students. The simplicity of the images and words are noteworthy. 
• Abby's Blog is a sixteen year old girl blogging as she sails alone around the world. 
• Sound of Splinters is a daily blog of simple poetry. 

Blogs for elementary students and teachers:

• Who Says Elementary Kids Can't Blog is a class blog site.  Each student has her/his own blog.  Some posts show great depth.
• Get Your Blog in Shape is no longer updated, but it is an excellent example of a PE teacher's blog. 

 Please share any examples you have.

Wikis in Education

Wikis are an excellent tool to have students work collaboratively on projects or to use as a classroom web site.  Listed below are good examples of Wiki's in education.  These examples are from WetPaint and Wikispaces, but any Wiki site can be used. 

Littlewood's Nature Guide is a fifth grade project where students create pages that describe animals and plants in their nature center.  The navigation is well established and student templates for plant and animal pages are established with directions on how to use the template.  The main learning goal for this site appears to be around biological classification.

Surrey Connect Science 8 Wikinotes - This is a comprehensive 8th grade science course site that is used in a similar manner to a Blackboard course.  The teacher shares information on the site including assignments, modules, and calendar items.  My favorite part of this site is the integration of other online technologies through student projects. Each of the four module has a link to student projects.  Many of these projects show how 8th grade students used different technologies to complete their projects that obviously had the same learning goal.  Student projects are not cookie cutter examples.  For the same project students use youtube, voicethread, wiki page, and web pages to demostrate their understanding of a topic. 

Bergmann Science -  This teacher uses this wiki to provide links to documents, web resources, and videos to support the science curriculum.  He includes a message to students and parents explaining that students do not have to join wikispaces to get the information, but provides the benefits of joining along with online safety guidelines.

Please share examples of wikis that you feel are exceptional examples of using wikis in education.

What Technologies are Essential for Today's Classroom?

Add your thoughts to this Wallwisher.

PowerPoint and Other Presentations for Learning

I am currently reading Multi-Media Learning by Richard Mayer. This book is an excellent resource to assist with designing presentations that enhance student learning. Many of the points discussed reinforce what we know about quality teaching in terms of chunking information and providing cues to signal importance of specific information. The simplest message I take from this research is to design your classroom presentations with powerful images and limited text, but use narration to tell the story or concept. Keep the bullet points in the notes.


Debra Pickering has a presentation that provides a background lesson on the war in Afghanistan. It is an excellent example of how to use PowerPoint for teaching. If you get an opportunity to see her presentation on this, I highly recommend it.

This article provides the "Cliff Notes" version of Multi-Media Learning. Cliff Atkinson, who co-authored the article with Richard Mayer, looks at multi-media presentation from a business perspective. His business perspective can easily be translated to classroom teaching. We have limited time to present to our students and we want our limited time to have a lasting impact. Atkinson discusses the Hollywood research that has been effectively using multi-media to communicate without using bullet points. Additionally, he reiterates the need for business presenters to run through a presentation with colleagues to perfect their presentation. As educators we are great at sharing our presentation, but do we spend time together critiquing our presentation to make them better?

Let me know your thoughts.

Research with OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is an excellent resource that allows students to keep all of their notes easily organized. The days of laboriously writing out snippets of information with proper citation onto little note cards is no longer needed. Students easily create OneNote notebooks with sections and pages in place of the note cards.

The best part of OneNote is that students can capture text and images online and have an immediate citation created for the captured information.

I assisted our second through fourth grade gifted students in using OneNote as they researched information on inventors. The students needed minimal support in bouncing between the Internet and OneNote as they researched. These students were in the gifted program, but I firmly believe this tool is appropriate for all regular second through fourth grade classroom students.

The most valuable implementation lesson I learned was to start out with OneNote prior to any searching and having students create OneNote pages for each topic they intended to research. The students created a page for images, history of inventor, history of invention and interesting facts.