Low-tech student response system

These past few weeks, I have been preparing the guestroom/spare bedroom as a home office space, the quintessential "room of one's own" for this, my final year -- I hope! -- of the PhD marathon. (Note: I did not say final year of education. That will never end.)

In the process, I have been going through boxes from my teaching days and purging things I could not bear to part with when I left the classroom in 2005.

This time around, some stuff was easier to let go of, such as the crate of office supplies that no longer fit my paperless lifestyle. I hope the ladies at the church rummage sale find a good home for all those notebooks, dividers, and packages of loose-leaf paper.

But other items proved more difficult to dispose of, perhaps because they represent my past life as a classroom teacher in ways that a generic, 3-ring binder never could.

For instance, I located a box of multiple choice "flip-cards" and a set of laminated pinch cards that contain some of the more challenging homophones from our local 9th grade English end-of-course test.

Students used the flip-cards or pinch cards to indicate their answers to sample test questions that I read aloud during whole group instruction. A sort of kinesthetic twist on (yes) the very worst form of call-and-respond, teacher-centered instruction.

These "relics" are less than ten years old, but in these days of automated digital response systems, I was struck by the elegant ingenuity that inspired these homemade tools for active learning and student engagement (inspiration I completely stole, mind you, from another teacher somewhere along the way).

Although these low-tech precursors to modern-day clicker technology were used to prep students for the oppressive onslaught of AYP testing, they also remind me of how teachers improvise and innovate to make time in the classroom (a little?) fun. And when you think about it, the flip-cards and pinch cards and clickers and text-message polls do what the mass-administered, standardized tests will never be able to do: they support real-time, classroom-level assessment with instantaneous feedback to the learner.

So, I am keeping these handmade artifacts, if for no other reason than to remind me of those fast and furious days of NCLB test-prep. And, besides, no one would buy them at the church rummage sale.

Low-tech student response system

Rewriting Identities (Hall, 2012)

This commentary by Leigh A. Hall in the February 2012 issue of the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy was especially helpful to me as I thought about the composition of my letter to students.

Rewriting Identities: Creating Spaces for Students and Teachers to Challenge the Norms of What It Means to Be a Reader in School - Hall - 2012 - Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy - Wiley Online Library

Rewriting Identities (Hall, 2012)

Another metadata extraction experiment

Several months ago I was comparing how well Mendeley and Zotero reference managers ingested digital content and "spat out" formatted APA citations.

In that first metadata extraction experiment, I used four article PDFs ranging in date from 1989 to 2011. I did not try other resources commonly referred to in graduate study, such as conference proceedings or -- ahem -- books.  (Let's not forget books!)

So, this time I will try a basic webpage (actually, a Flickr image), a conference proceeding from an online database, and a book. For the book, I "grabbed" its data from the Amazon.com web page.

First, I must acknowledge that both Mendeley and Zotero provide multiple avenues for adding content to your library, from "single-click" technology to manual entry, if necessary. I decided to put the single-click option to the test because the functionality of this option is going to make or break the tool, at least in my mind.

When you install Zotero, built-in icons/buttons appear in your browser's location bar. Mendeley provides a web importer button that you can drop-and-drag into your bookmarks toolbar.

So, here we go again.  As in my initial post, I utilized both Mendeley's and Zotero's capability for inserting formatted citations by drag-and-drop technology straight into the text editor of this blog. (The drag-and-drop piece is almost flawless within both applications, but I personally prefer Zotero's split-screen format that integrates with my browser and mimics the iTunes interface.)

For comparison purposes, I added my manually formatted APA citations first, with the Mendeley and Zotero citations following. I changed the text color within citations to indicate deviations from APA or missing information.

Manually formatted APA citations:

Belshaw, D. (2010, Oct. 3). Pragmatism, critical theory and post-structuralism. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougbelshaw/5046693346/

Jorgensen, M.W., & Phillips, L.J. (2002). Discourse analysis as theory and method. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Williams, M.K., Wetzel, K., Foulger, T., Kisicki, T., & Giacumo, L. (2011). Explicitly addressing TPACK in preservice teacher curriculum. In M. Koehler & P. Mishra (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2011 (pp. 4429-4434). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

  
Mendeley drop-and-drag citations:

Missing author name. pragmatism, critical theory and post-structuralism. (n.d.). Retrieved February 16, 2012, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougbelshaw/5046693346/

Jorgensen, M. W., & Phillips, L. J. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (p. 230). Missing place name: Sage Publications Ltd. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Discourse-Analysis-as-Theory-Method/dp/0761971122

Williams, M. K., Wetzel, K., Foulger, T., Kisicki, T., & Giacumo, L. (n.d.). Explicitly Addressing TPACK in Preservice Teacher Curriculum. Missing editors' names, Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2011 (Vol. 2011, pp. 4429 - 4434). Missing place and publisher. Retrieved from http://editlib.org/p/37030

Zotero drop-and-drag citations:

Belshaw, D. (2010, October 3). Pragmatism, Critical Theory and Post-structuralism. Retrieved February 16, 2012, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougbelshaw/5046693346/

Jorgensen, M. W., & Phillips, L. J. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (1st ed.). Missing place name: Sage Publications Ltd.

Williams, M. K., Wetzel, K., Foulger, T., Kisicki, T., & Giacumo, L. (20110307). Explicitly Addressing TPACK in Preservice Teacher Curriculum. Missing editors' names, Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2011 (Vol. 2011, pp. 4429–4434). Missing place and publisher. Retrieved from http://editlib.org/p/37030

I hate to say it, but I still think it's a draw. What do you think?

Another metadata extraction experiment

A letter to my students

I am taking a course this semester in which one of the assignments is to write "a letter to your students."  This letter should explain to my future students why they need to know what I teach and why the subject is important -- even essential -- for them to learn.

I am grateful for this opportunity. When I first started teaching in Texas almost 20 years ago, I wrote an introductory letter to my 9th and 10th grade English students. In those early letters, I seem to recall focusing on what we were going to study and learn, kind of like a "friendly" syllabus. 

My orientation to teaching and learning has radically shifted in the last several years. I now spend more time thinking about how we teach and learn in the language arts, and I wanted this open letter to my future students to convey that message. 

For starters, I decided to publish my letter as a blog post and as a podcast (embedded below), with the hope of stretching readers' (my future students') conceptions of reading and writing in the 21st century.

(I was partly inspired by the work of Leigh A. Hall around reader/writer identities in a secondary school context.  Hall's commentary on this subject appears in the February 2012 edition of the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.)

Dear Students,

I look forward to working with you this year, and I expect to learn a lot from you.

I also expect you to learn a lot.

My goal is to enable you along a path toward becoming "truly literate." What does this mean? Does it mean knowing how to read and how to write? Yes, and no. It's reading and writing, and much, much more. Being truly literate means being engaged with reading, comfortable with numerous ways and purposes of writing, and able to hold your own in an intelligent debate with your teacher and peers. 

I expect you to learn more than basic reading and writing skills. In our classroom, you will participate in practices of "high literacy": reading and responding to a variety of texts familiar and new, writing and publishing original texts, discussing in large and small groups, applying knowledge and skills to new situations, and demonstrating mastery of knowledge and skills through a variety of tasks. 

Perhaps most of all, I expect you to identify yourselves as readers and writers, and to recognize the many ways in which you are readers and writers both inside and outside of school. We will work together to define for ourselves what it means to read and to write.

For example, this letter is not printed on paper. It is located in a blog. You may access this letter online, and, if you choose, you may listen to it as a podcast or watch it as a multimedia presentation.  

Is any of this reading? 

To create this letter, I picked up neither pencil nor pen.  No paper was wasted in the production of this letter! Instead, I composed at a keyboard using word processing software to revise, edit, and format my words on a computer screen.  I used built-in tools such as a spelling and grammar checker as well as an online dictionary. 

Is this writing?

Then, I cut and pasted my words into my blog, where I performed additional formatting changes, added hyperlinks, and inserted pictures and graphics. Then, I clicked a button and published my letter. Now, anyone in the world with an Internet connection and browser may read this letter. Even more interesting, anyone in the world reading this letter on a personal computer or mobile device now has the ability to duplicate, disseminate, and share it with others.  The audience -- and that means you -- may react to this letter by publishing comments below. 

But is this really publishing?

There is an old expression: The medium is the message. It means how we communicate our words is as important as, or sometimes more important than, the words themselves. In the case of this letter, the medium is definitely part of my message. I am trying to make a point that the reading and writing processes are greatly improved when we allow them to occur as interactive, collaborative, and social activities. 

You don't need a computer to experience the social aspects of reading and writing, but mobile and digital technologies give us more opportunities to create, collaborate, and communicate quickly, easily, and cheaply. Some people will argue that you -- today's youth -- already use enough digital technologies, and you do so irresponsibly, unethically, and ineffectively.  Thus, we shouldn't have these technologies in school.  

But I can think of no better place than school to stretch the boundaries, while modeling and practicing safe, responsible, and ethical use.

Above all, my goal is for you to take up reading and writing as a set of tools for creating and imagining social spaces where everyone has a voice. When you find and unlock your voice, you can take your place among the ranks of literate citizens and enjoy lifelong engagement with language, words, and ideas.

So, let's get started! Now it's your turn to compose a letter to me and to your classmates.  Choose your favorite communication tool and tell us about what you are reading and writing at home and at school. What kind of reader and writer are you?  What kind of reader and writer do you want to become?

A letter to my students

More experimentation

I have never uploaded a digital storytelling project to my blog using a tool other than iMovie.  This is just a quick clip I edited in Windows Movie Maker.

More experimentation

The more I learn, the less I know

Playing around with Prezi tonight, and found the first Prezi I made -- from more than a year ago.  As I watch this presentation titled, "Dissertation Ideas," I am struck by how nothing has changed. I am officially in a rut!

The more I learn, the less I know