Tuesday, December 13, 2011
ICONN Resources
One of the great things about being a college student at BU was how much information I got to access through the University Library. The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center had hundreds of amazing artifacts and pieces of historical literature for students to examine. And when you logged into the library website, you could search for books, articles, journals, magazines, any scholarly material really, through extensive databases...the database for Mugar Library itself, and third-party databases like LION, and my personal favorite, JSTOR. If I wanted to find academic articles on any topic related to English Literature, I went to JSTOR and was never disappointed.
ICONN.org is the Connecticut State Library database, and is very similar to the database at BU and on other college campuses. All you need is a library card number to log into the digital library, and you're taken to a page where you can access at least two dozen databases (infotrac) to search for materials. There are databases for specific topics like fine arts, business, and the environment. One of my favorite databases is Academic OneFile, since it reminds me so much of JSTOR. On Academic OneFile, you can find, "peer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources...with extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects." I typed in a few random search topics like "Walt Whitman and the Civil War," on Academic OneFile, but I was disappointed when few full-length articles appeared. Many of the search findings were excerpts from Publisher's Weekly, or book reviews of books about Whitman in the Civil War. I'd therefore have to search for these books somewhere else to get any real information. I did find some full-length articles, but not nearly as many as I would find on JSTOR or databases like it.
So while Academic OneFile was slightly disappointing for me, if you're a Connecticut high school or middle school student, and you want to do research on the Civil War, chances are you'll find a lot of great articles on Academic OneFile. There's also a General OneFile, but I don't see much difference between the two.
It's so important that students have access to online databases like this, because it's the quickest and most user-friendly way to get reliable information about academic topics. Students don't need Wikipedia when they can use databases like Academic OneFile. Many students wouldn't know where to look for this information if they didn't have a database search engine to do it for them. When I was doing a research paper on Walt Whitman, JSTOR was a life-saver because I didn't know who the Whitman scholars were, and I didn't know which academic journals I should read to find information about the poet. Another great thing about Academic OneFile is you can access articles from the New York Times and other publications for free, when you'd normally have to pay for a membership to read them online.
ICONN.org is the Connecticut State Library database, and is very similar to the database at BU and on other college campuses. All you need is a library card number to log into the digital library, and you're taken to a page where you can access at least two dozen databases (infotrac) to search for materials. There are databases for specific topics like fine arts, business, and the environment. One of my favorite databases is Academic OneFile, since it reminds me so much of JSTOR. On Academic OneFile, you can find, "peer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources...with extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects." I typed in a few random search topics like "Walt Whitman and the Civil War," on Academic OneFile, but I was disappointed when few full-length articles appeared. Many of the search findings were excerpts from Publisher's Weekly, or book reviews of books about Whitman in the Civil War. I'd therefore have to search for these books somewhere else to get any real information. I did find some full-length articles, but not nearly as many as I would find on JSTOR or databases like it.
So while Academic OneFile was slightly disappointing for me, if you're a Connecticut high school or middle school student, and you want to do research on the Civil War, chances are you'll find a lot of great articles on Academic OneFile. There's also a General OneFile, but I don't see much difference between the two.
It's so important that students have access to online databases like this, because it's the quickest and most user-friendly way to get reliable information about academic topics. Students don't need Wikipedia when they can use databases like Academic OneFile. Many students wouldn't know where to look for this information if they didn't have a database search engine to do it for them. When I was doing a research paper on Walt Whitman, JSTOR was a life-saver because I didn't know who the Whitman scholars were, and I didn't know which academic journals I should read to find information about the poet. Another great thing about Academic OneFile is you can access articles from the New York Times and other publications for free, when you'd normally have to pay for a membership to read them online.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Non-Linear PowerPoint
What I love about non-linear PowerPoints is they allow students to almost have a conversation with the material. Depending on what they want, they can go from slide to slide, forwards, back, and sideways. I wanted to create a PowerPoint where students use the slides as a form of reference, almost like an encyclopedia.
So I took a soliloquy from Shakespeare's Macbeth and highlighted certain words in the excerpt that might confuse students. Student can click on whichever word they want and are led to a definition. Even if students don't need definitions, they can still use the PowerPoint as a reference because I added articles and videos to the presentation as well. On the bottom of each slide, I allow students to click back to the soliloquy. On the bottom of the soliloquy slide, I have links to different interpretations and a video of Sir Ian Mckellen performing the soliloquy.
I'm happy with this PowerPoint. I can actually imagine students using this presentation, especially if they were doing a specific writing assignment on this excerpt and needed help understanding it.
So I took a soliloquy from Shakespeare's Macbeth and highlighted certain words in the excerpt that might confuse students. Student can click on whichever word they want and are led to a definition. Even if students don't need definitions, they can still use the PowerPoint as a reference because I added articles and videos to the presentation as well. On the bottom of each slide, I allow students to click back to the soliloquy. On the bottom of the soliloquy slide, I have links to different interpretations and a video of Sir Ian Mckellen performing the soliloquy.
Bridging the Digital Divide
Before I read these two articles about the digital divide in public schools, I imagined the "divide" meant that low-income schools in urban areas had little to no access to technology, so their students performed poorly, compared to high-income schools with lots of technology. Parts of my initial understanding were true; low-income schools do not have access to as much technology as high income schools. And low-income students are often identified as needing remedial help on state/national exams.
However, the most important thing I learned about the digitial divide is that the "divide" has nothing to do with how much technology students are exposed to. Minority students in low-income schools have laptops and cellphones, and use them often. No, the "divide" has to do with the type of technology these low-income schools are given. Furthermore, just because kids are given remedial computer programs to raise test scores doesn't mean those programs will work! Computers do not euqal amazing performance.
They can, if computer programs are used in tandem with excellent instruction from a competent teacher.
As Alec MacGillis writes in his article Law, Softward Fuel 'Digital Divid', "When students are drilled over and over on the same standards that they're going to be tested on, skeptics say, one would expect that their scores would go up somewhat. What is more important is whether the software is benefiting students in ways that will stick after the tests are done" (Macgillis).
If a bad teacher is drilling students on testing materials, it doesn't mean the students will score higher because they were drilled over and over again. Students will score higher if an exceptional teacher is drilling them, and hopefully, teaching them some useful reading, writing, and math skills along the way they can use after the test is over. The same rule applies to technology. It's not enough to give a school millions of dollars to use a computer program if that program is ineffective and not backed by research.
In her article Understanding the New Digital Divide, Mary Beth Hertz explains the Divide can be understood if we consider the kind of access students have to technology, not whether they have access at all. So as teachers, we need to be wary of any remedial programs that come our way. Just because it's been funded by millions of dollars and promoted around the district does not mean it will help our students. Schools and teachers should not be so "desperate," as MacGillis describes, to get our kids in front of computers because we want to raise test scores. There is no substitute for excellent, hands-on teaching. One excerpt from MacGillis' article really struck me:
"At one station, a student from an eighth-grade special-needs class was doing an exercise on identifying the roots of words, a skill included in New Jersey's state content standards. The exercise was dressed up as a baseball game: a word appeared on a base on a diamond, and the boy, the "batter," had to choose one of four words that described the meaning of the word's root. The word "missile" appeared on first base. Confused, the boy clicked on the "help" icon, and was told by the computer that the root of "missile" means "send." But he didn't understand that he was being given the answer, and instead clicked on a wrong choice, "miss." The program proceeded to the next example anyway: "dictation" appeared on second base. Again, the boy clicked for help, which told him the nswer was "say." This time he realized he was being given the answer, and he dutifully picked that choice. The program congratulated him: He had hit a double! Despite the boy's troubles, he wasn't about to get any help from his teacher, Sharae Huff. She was watching the class from a distance, holding back from approaching those who were stuck. For Huff, the Compass period was a time to let someone else - the computer - do the teaching."
We can't allow computer programs to do the teaching for us! Technology should be used to enhance teaching, not take the place of it.
Don't even get me started on standardized testing and the pressure it puts on school systems. Or on its ability to waste months of meaningful teaching time. If this country weren't so focused on getting those "great" scores, the digitial divide would be easier to bridge.
However, the most important thing I learned about the digitial divide is that the "divide" has nothing to do with how much technology students are exposed to. Minority students in low-income schools have laptops and cellphones, and use them often. No, the "divide" has to do with the type of technology these low-income schools are given. Furthermore, just because kids are given remedial computer programs to raise test scores doesn't mean those programs will work! Computers do not euqal amazing performance.
They can, if computer programs are used in tandem with excellent instruction from a competent teacher.
As Alec MacGillis writes in his article Law, Softward Fuel 'Digital Divid', "When students are drilled over and over on the same standards that they're going to be tested on, skeptics say, one would expect that their scores would go up somewhat. What is more important is whether the software is benefiting students in ways that will stick after the tests are done" (Macgillis).
If a bad teacher is drilling students on testing materials, it doesn't mean the students will score higher because they were drilled over and over again. Students will score higher if an exceptional teacher is drilling them, and hopefully, teaching them some useful reading, writing, and math skills along the way they can use after the test is over. The same rule applies to technology. It's not enough to give a school millions of dollars to use a computer program if that program is ineffective and not backed by research.
In her article Understanding the New Digital Divide, Mary Beth Hertz explains the Divide can be understood if we consider the kind of access students have to technology, not whether they have access at all. So as teachers, we need to be wary of any remedial programs that come our way. Just because it's been funded by millions of dollars and promoted around the district does not mean it will help our students. Schools and teachers should not be so "desperate," as MacGillis describes, to get our kids in front of computers because we want to raise test scores. There is no substitute for excellent, hands-on teaching. One excerpt from MacGillis' article really struck me:
"At one station, a student from an eighth-grade special-needs class was doing an exercise on identifying the roots of words, a skill included in New Jersey's state content standards. The exercise was dressed up as a baseball game: a word appeared on a base on a diamond, and the boy, the "batter," had to choose one of four words that described the meaning of the word's root. The word "missile" appeared on first base. Confused, the boy clicked on the "help" icon, and was told by the computer that the root of "missile" means "send." But he didn't understand that he was being given the answer, and instead clicked on a wrong choice, "miss." The program proceeded to the next example anyway: "dictation" appeared on second base. Again, the boy clicked for help, which told him the nswer was "say." This time he realized he was being given the answer, and he dutifully picked that choice. The program congratulated him: He had hit a double! Despite the boy's troubles, he wasn't about to get any help from his teacher, Sharae Huff. She was watching the class from a distance, holding back from approaching those who were stuck. For Huff, the Compass period was a time to let someone else - the computer - do the teaching."
We can't allow computer programs to do the teaching for us! Technology should be used to enhance teaching, not take the place of it.
Don't even get me started on standardized testing and the pressure it puts on school systems. Or on its ability to waste months of meaningful teaching time. If this country weren't so focused on getting those "great" scores, the digitial divide would be easier to bridge.
Girls Can be Computer Geeks Too
This article by associate professor Diane McGrath entitled "Closing the Gender Gap," addresses the question of why boys often dominate the field of technology. Why is Best Buy's "Geek Squad" usually made up of tech savvy boys? McGrath argues its not because girls are less engaged with or adept at using media resources. She argues its because of the way math and technology is taught to students in primary and secondary school.
She compares technology to the dilemma girls have with math. Studies show that girls can struggle with and have less proficiency in math than their male classmates, and are less likely to choose a career in the math or science fields. Female astrophysicists, for example, are an anomoly, an exception to the rule. McGrath says the best way to teach math, science, and technology so this gender gap doesn't happen is to use a project based learning (PBL) approach. In contrast to traditional teaching methods, PBL allows students to "become more deeply involved with technology to enhance their understanding of what they are learning." With PBL, students are using technology and science to complete projects that can be used in the real world, like an astronomy project made on MicroWorlds that can teach kids astronomy.
It seems like a no-brainer that such projects would promote literacy and confidence in using technology. It harkens back to that question we always asked in math class: "Why am I learning this? Why do I need this?" With PBL, students don't have to ask that question. They're not just learning concepts, they're applying those concepts. Raife Esquith, who's won national awards and recongnitions for his work at Hobart Elementary in LA, says he takes students to baseball games so they can practice math. They think about and compare player statistics to determine the lineup! Cool, right? Math has meaning. PBL makes technology have meaning too.
McGrath closes her argument stating that as teachers, we need to be aware of girls' social and spacial needs when doing PBL. That's what brings it all together. She writes:
"Answering to girls' needs for social able to participate, and they want the social, cognitive, and physical space in which to do so. They want to have their issues listened to and addressed. And when we do these things, when we teach in a connected way and take into account girls’ need to engage deeply with the subject matter, then girls do work-even in math and technology, fìelds we always thought girls didn’t like."
Makes sense to me!
She compares technology to the dilemma girls have with math. Studies show that girls can struggle with and have less proficiency in math than their male classmates, and are less likely to choose a career in the math or science fields. Female astrophysicists, for example, are an anomoly, an exception to the rule. McGrath says the best way to teach math, science, and technology so this gender gap doesn't happen is to use a project based learning (PBL) approach. In contrast to traditional teaching methods, PBL allows students to "become more deeply involved with technology to enhance their understanding of what they are learning." With PBL, students are using technology and science to complete projects that can be used in the real world, like an astronomy project made on MicroWorlds that can teach kids astronomy.
It seems like a no-brainer that such projects would promote literacy and confidence in using technology. It harkens back to that question we always asked in math class: "Why am I learning this? Why do I need this?" With PBL, students don't have to ask that question. They're not just learning concepts, they're applying those concepts. Raife Esquith, who's won national awards and recongnitions for his work at Hobart Elementary in LA, says he takes students to baseball games so they can practice math. They think about and compare player statistics to determine the lineup! Cool, right? Math has meaning. PBL makes technology have meaning too.
McGrath closes her argument stating that as teachers, we need to be aware of girls' social and spacial needs when doing PBL. That's what brings it all together. She writes:
"Answering to girls' needs for social able to participate, and they want the social, cognitive, and physical space in which to do so. They want to have their issues listened to and addressed. And when we do these things, when we teach in a connected way and take into account girls’ need to engage deeply with the subject matter, then girls do work-even in math and technology, fìelds we always thought girls didn’t like."
Makes sense to me!
Monday, October 17, 2011
Copyright Scares Me
And based on everything I've learned about copyright laws over the past few weeks, it should scare you too. As our professor emphasized in class, while none of us are likely to face a lawsuit if we play John Lennon's "Imagine" in a presentation for our students (because no one is going to tell or care), we need to be prepared to face the consequences if we're caught or if a music exec's kid is sitting in our class. Don't forget about the teacher who showed "Shrek" from a bad DVD and got fired. That kid's father was such a jerk, by the way. I'd have given that teacher a nice, stern warning and confiscated the DVD at the next parent-teacher conference.
Anyway, the biggest implication I see copyright laws having on every day teaching involves websites and computer programs. Putting random online photos, videos or music clips on a website (a personal or class website) is something I will never do now. I will also never install another program onto any computer in my classroom unless I read over the copyright laws, thoroughly, and follow them to a T.
Since I'm not crazily dependent on using technology and since most materials can be used if its for an educational purpose, I don't see copyright having huge implications on my future teaching. But it certainly feels nice knowing what the rules are. I don't like messing with the government...
Anyway, the biggest implication I see copyright laws having on every day teaching involves websites and computer programs. Putting random online photos, videos or music clips on a website (a personal or class website) is something I will never do now. I will also never install another program onto any computer in my classroom unless I read over the copyright laws, thoroughly, and follow them to a T.
Since I'm not crazily dependent on using technology and since most materials can be used if its for an educational purpose, I don't see copyright having huge implications on my future teaching. But it certainly feels nice knowing what the rules are. I don't like messing with the government...
Ask questions, ask lots of questions!
Inquiry-based learning has a place in every classroom, and it will certainly be part of my English class. Some of my best memories from high school English are simply of me and my classmates sitting in a circle in our desks, a poem in front of us, answering questions like, "do you like this poem?" "what's this poem about?" and, "why is it important?" So many times before, I had taken as gospel what my teachers said was important about a certain text. Of course, we were asked to discuss the text but usually we were asked specific questions that had only one or two correct answers. We were expected to discern, for example, that "Lord of the Flies" is about primal human instincts and the degradation of society. Well sure; that certainly has a lot to do with it, but what makes learning extra effective, fun and meaningful is allowing kids to make those conclusions themselves, rather than telling them first. My favorite quote from an article on constructivist or inquiry-based learning is:
...Schools must change from a focus on "what we know" to an emphasis on "how we come to know."
Students in my English class will not be told why Shakespeare's language is effective. They will be provided the opportunity to ask why, and then given guidance on how to figure it out through research, discussions, writing and reading activities. Of course, teachers cannot create lessons that are 100% inquiry-based. That would be too frustrating for students. However, my goal as an English teacher is to create learners who constantly ask why and how, rather than create learners who recite what.
One of the most important reasons for this is in today's world, students are constantly bombarded with information from multiple sources. How do they know which news article to trust, which politician to vote for, which charity to donate to? These seem like basic tasks, but not for a student who never learned how to ask his or her own questions and find reliable answers. That's what I want my kids to learn, above all.
...Schools must change from a focus on "what we know" to an emphasis on "how we come to know."
Students in my English class will not be told why Shakespeare's language is effective. They will be provided the opportunity to ask why, and then given guidance on how to figure it out through research, discussions, writing and reading activities. Of course, teachers cannot create lessons that are 100% inquiry-based. That would be too frustrating for students. However, my goal as an English teacher is to create learners who constantly ask why and how, rather than create learners who recite what.
One of the most important reasons for this is in today's world, students are constantly bombarded with information from multiple sources. How do they know which news article to trust, which politician to vote for, which charity to donate to? These seem like basic tasks, but not for a student who never learned how to ask his or her own questions and find reliable answers. That's what I want my kids to learn, above all.
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