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5 Effective Uses of finalsiteSocial to Engage Students and Promote Essential Skills

 

As anyone who’s checked out finalsiteSocial will point out, there is a potential for features like the Activity Stream to become a distraction for students. Without the teacher’s guidance, silly comments or inappropriate shout-outs will surely be a temptation for some. With that in mind, I’ve come up with what I think are five effective ways to use your classes’ Activity Streams as an engaging learning tool that fosters essential skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration, and communication.

1.Have students evaluate and discuss resources on the Web. Foster critical thinking and Web literacy by posting links to articles/stories related to the current concept you’re teaching that come from different perspectives and biases. Then have students analyze the purpose and tone of each. Or, post something that lends itself to fact-checking on the Web. The way the current presidential campaigns are playing loose with facts presents ample opportunities for social studies students to analyze and research their claims on the Web. As leading educational thinker Alan November points out, common sense and the Common Core are two driving forces that create an urgency to redefine what it means to be literate in today’s world. This means giving students opportunities to gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources and assess the credibility and accuracy of each source.

2. Electronic exit slips! By now we’ve all heard about the benefits of collecting exit slips at the end of a class. It’s a proven informal formative assessment tool that allows us to gauge student understanding. But who wants to collect and flip through 20+ scraps of paper that students scribble on as they rush to get out the door? My guess is that students will be much more thoughtful in their responses in a digital environment. Plus your not wasting paper, and you have one easy place to read their understandings that you can access at any point in the future. Moreover, students have the added benefit of seeing each other’s insights and questions. Now your end-of-class ‘exit slip’ activity fosters that essential skill of collaboration by establishing your class as a community of learners. One caveat of course: Your students will need mobile computing devices. But with the increased number of laptop carts in our buildings and a robust WiFi network on the horizon, this will be much easier to accomplish in the not-too-distant future.

3. Student scribes.  Alan November often talks about getting students to own their learning. One strategy he promotes is rotating the responsibility student scribes, or note-takers, for each lesson.  Summarizing and note-taking is one of Marzano’s Nine Instructional Strategies for Effective Teaching and Learning, proven to promote greater comprehension by asking students to analyze a subject to expose what’s essential and then put it in their own words. With finalsiteSocial’s Activity Stream, students can easily post their summary of what they’ve learned in class so that their classmates can re-learn concepts from them, or fine-tune their own understandings. This is great for students that missed class that day, too. Of course, this will probably require some coaching along the way so that all students understand what constitutes an effective summary, but it will pay huge dividends in building students’ collaboration and communication skills. For more on student scribes from a teacher who swears by this strategy, click here.

4. Student researchers. This strategy really fosters student-centered learning and exploration. How many times has a student asked you a question in class, and you had to tell her that you’d have to get back to her after looking it up, probably the next day (if you managed to remember the question)?  With WiFi blanketing all grade 5-12 classrooms in the near future, why make them wait? Assign one student the responsibility of being that day’s researcher, and have that student look up relevant questions on the Web right there in class, and post their findings to the Activity Stream. Here is yet another way teachers can foster Web literacy, critical thinking, and the sense that our students are part of a community of learners.

5. Virtual office hours.  As a former English teacher, I know…spending one to three hours (or more!) planning lessons and grading student work at night is the norm for today’s teacher. But occasionally, we have those nights where last year’s lesson is perfect and no student work has been collected for grading. Maybe you’ve just taught a challenging concept and you know some of your students will struggle. Try holding virtual office hours that night. Let your students know you’ll be on the Activity Stream for a specific window of time to answer any questions they might have about that night’s assignment.

So that’s the view from my’ivory cubicle. Five strategies you could try out immediately with one of the laptop carts in your building, and I didn’t even touch the flipped lesson model. Anyone want to put these ideas to the test with students? Drop me a line and let’s develop a plan. Or, if you have any other ideas for how educators can harness the power of fsSocial, leave a comment below.

SMART Notebook 11 is here…

Over the summer SMART released its latest version of the software that drives teacher-created content on their interactive white boards — Notebook. Those of you with SMART boards in your classroom should have returned to this new version, Notebook 11. If you didn’t, just make the request for an update via SchoolDude, and your building’s tech para will take care of it.

All software companies tout their newest product versions as containing all kinds of wonderful ‘enhancements,’ but sometimes these so-called enhancements lead to more confusion than ease-of-use.  Remember the release of Microsoft Office 2007 and the ensuing public outcry: “Where the heck is ‘File’?”  By contrast, however, I’ve found that SMART’s latest iteration of Notebook to make good on its promise of being more user-friendly. As with all things new, there will be a brief adjustment period for some of you, but once you’re over that small hurdle, Notebook 11 has some pretty slick features that make the program less ‘clicky’ than version 10. Check out the overview I created below… Click the icon in the lower right corner of the player to view it in full screen mode.

BYOD…get used to these letters.

As the district Technology Committee drafted our recently BOE-approved 2012-15 District Technology Plan, one of the recurring concepts we saw during our research and planning was creating a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) learning environment. As mobile computing devices from smartphones to tablets to laptops have gotten more portable and powerful, there’s no denying their potential as everyday learning tools, especially with the corresponding explosion of cloud-based applications and services such as GoogleDrive and Windows’ Skydrive. It’s reached a point where I don’t know of many districts that aren’t at least considering some type of BYOD program, as early adopters like Monroe, CT report success in meeting Common Core and National Educational Technology Standards through the use of mobile devices at the middle and high school levels. That’s not to say that there weren’t some bumps in the road for our friends to the west. On a recent visit to Monroe members of their district’s Technology Department stressed the importance of pilot programs, teacher preparation, and professional development in the rollout of a BYOD initiative. Learn more about Monroe’s experience with the BYOD pilot they conducted this year and how they plan to expand it next year here.

And here’s an article from theJournal making the case for BYOD and describing seven strategies to ensure connected students will tune in when learning with mobile technologies. I have to say, I’m not really comfortable with #5, but the author makes a pretty compelling case for mobile devices as vital learning tools.

Wanna dig deeper? Here’s a white paper I recently wrote for one of my online courses about mobile devices in the classroom. Let me know what you think. Share your comments, questions, and concerns below.

 

Do You Know the NETS?

21st Century Skills…21st Century Learning…21st Century competencies…

To many, these just sound like education buzz words that won’t seem to go away no matter how much new technology becomes part of what we do in schools.   We’re well into the 21st century, so shouldn’t this stuff be self-evident by now?  I mean, after all, here in Madison we all have teacher web pages where students access homework assignments and other resources that teachers post, and parents can even check their children’s grades from home on Infinite Campus. Aren’t these examples of 21st century learning in action? Well…sort of. You see, it’s not just about using technology to automate the kind of work we’ve always done. Being able to post homework assignments is great for home-school communication, but it doesn’t have much to do with 21st century skills, other than knowing how to navigate and manage a web page. Real 21st century learning can be seen in other Finalsite features, like the discussion boards that allow students to exercise their critical thinking, communication and collaboration skills.  So it’s not just about the technology, but how we leverage the technology to develop deeper understandings.

For me, 21st century competencies are best described by the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) developed by The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE®), the premier association for educators engaged in improving learning and teaching through effective uses of technology. ISTE developed these standards not only for students, but for teachers, administrators, and instructional technology coaches like myself. It’s important to get to know them because they’ve definitely informed the recently developed Common Core standards, as well as some new initiatives in Madison’s new 3-year Tech Plan, which you’ll be able to see as the BOE approves it. You can check out all the different versions of the NETS here, but I suggest starting with the NETS for students. After reading through them, reflect a bit on where we do a good job fostering these standards, these 21st century competencies, and where we need to focus more of our attention. Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.