The #Comments4Sophs Dilemma

Reading Russ Goerend’s recent post about his many projects for the year got me thinking about my integration of social media into my classroom this year. One of the major areas that Russ discussed, and which he credited with making his classroom blog successful, is his participation in the #Comments4Kids project, which he succinctly described as a system where “students write blog posts and teachers tweet out links to the posts and tag those tweets with the hashtag  #comments4kids. The hashtag makes it easier to search for all links about a specific topic.”

Reading Russ’s laudatory comments about the positive effects that #Comment4Kids had on his students got me thinking about the success (or relative lack thereof) that I’ve experienced this year with my students and their blogging.

My arrangement is a bit different from Russ’s. While Russ has a centralized blog for his class where each student has author privileges and can post their work, I created a hub-and-spoke system (well, in retrospect, it’s really more a bunch of disconnected spokes, with the only thing resembling a hub being the RSS packet that I created through Google Reader). My intention in establishing a system where each student curated his or her own blog was to establish a sense of personal investment on the part of the students. Ideally, students would design their pages, themes, and images in accordance with their own vision of what they wanted to project. However, (and perhaps because of the RSS readers that we’re all using) the particular design of each students blog hasn’t proven that appealing a lure for the students.

The other, and perhaps more important, rationale for why I wanted each student to have individual blogs was so that students would have a deeper investment over their own writing. Moreover, each student would theoretically be able to look back at their posts from the beginning of the year and trace a trajectory of improved thinking, writing, use of citations, analysis, hyperlinking, and the like. While I still think this change-over-time dynamic will play out (if students willingly, and self-critically, look back at their earlier writings) the blogs have effectively served as digital notebooks. Students write an entry, hand it in to me at a given deadline, I then grade the work, and then typically return it with feedback and a grade via Edmodo.

In essence, the way my students’ blogs have developed into digital notebooks means that the social element of “social media” has gone almost totally unharnessed. Students hand in homework and I grade it as I have in my previous years of teaching — except now, there’s no paper for me to carry home; just a queue of unread posts in my RSS reader. Unfortunately, the students don’t seem to be terribly interested in their classmates’ posts as reflected by the dearth of comments that they write to each other. The M.O. seems to be: “get the post up (e.g. homework done) and move on” — an entirely understandable and rational choice given their other academic and extra-curricular obligations.

Now, that’s not to say that the blogs have been a waste. In fact, I think they’ve been quite good at having students write a larger volume and become more comfortable with the idea of how to cite sources and connect one’s own assertions to their place of origin. I also see that some students are interested in tracking their stats and realizing that their work has in fact been read (though not commented on) by a broader audience than just me or their classmates.

The Initial Comments Flop

Early in the year I specifically assigned students to comment on one another’s posts. As a form of guidance (which I now recognize as too nebulous to be very helpful) I gave the students vauge, principles-based guidelines for their comments, such as “be specific and thorough,” “offer commentary and honest feedback on specific things the authors has said,” and “remember, these comments aren’t a reflection on the quality of your soul, but are intended to help you become a better writer.”

In spite of these admonitions I generally saw feedback akin to the generic spam comments that Clay Burrell alludes to in his recent post. For instance, here’s a good example that I received last October and continues to live in my Spam queue:

I don’t know If I said it already but …Excellent site, keep up the good work. I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say I’m glad I found your blog. Thanks,

A definite great read….

Pablum, right?

Anyhow, I found that these vague, life-affirming comments not only did not meet the guidelines and expectations I had set out, but that they also didn’t seem particularly helpful to the students receiving them. This lukewarm reception to the comments combined with a variety of other factors led me to move away from my social media rotation and my plans to have students comment on one another’s posts with frequency.

The New Comments Challenge

Now I’m trying to rethink my plans and work more strenuously to have the blogs serve as a way to get students to interact with one another and with a genuine audience. I’d like to have my students’s writing read–and especially commented on–by a wider audience, as I hope this will give them feedback and constructive critique from voices other than my own. However, I see some potential areas of challenge — both philosophical and pragmatic.

Starting with the philosophical:

• I wonder how fifteen and sixteen year-old students will react differently to outsiders’ comments than the sixth graders that Russ Goerend teaches? Will they perceive these outside commenters as  (to borrow the popular parlance I’ve observed) “creepsters” who are somehow invading their privacy and their private thoughts?
• Will the students be thankful and interested in the reactions from people beyond our classroom and willingly engage them in a dialogue about their critique?
• In the process of this dialogue (assuming it does develop) will students learn both how to improve their writing and thinking and also learn how to participate in a constructive intellectual discourse?

Now the pragmatic:

• Is the best way to solicit feedback through Twitter and a unique #Comments4Sophs hashtag? (I think the answer to this is most likely “yes”).
• What type of online repository would be the easiest for people to access and use for feedback? Should I create a Google Reader bundle of the feeds and have them accessible?
• Should I point people toward a Wiki page listing the various feeds, which then provides commenters with a centralized place to go to find the postings that they can then comment on?
• Should I create (a la Russ Goerend) a dedicated class blog where students can select particular posts to share and to which I can then point commenters? This solution offers the most convenience for those willing to provide comments. It seems vital for this project’s to work that it not be an onerous task on those willing to offer feedback and commentary.

What other solutions might I be missing? What techniques have other people used to foster genuine, thorough, constructive, and meaningful feedback for their students?

 

And this essentially explains the title of my blog

Image courtest of GraphJam.com

I’d always know this statistic to be true via my gut sense, but now someone has thankfully quantified it precisely! This evidence helps ensure that my dismissal of the garbage on the History Channel doesn’t simply appear as capriciousness or purposeful cantankerousness to my students.

 

Graphing the teenage worldview

A Reformed Cantankerous Curmudgeon had an interesting post this morning about his reversion to using more traditional (read: didactic) presentation techniques in his classroom. His post got me thinking more generally about how students’ willingness (or lack thereof) to embrace process-focused and inquiry-based teaching approaches might be linked more generally to developmental trajectory and the teenage mindset.

Now, I’m no psychology wizard, nor am I an expert in cognitive development, so please recognize that this theory (and the following graph) have no basis in research, other theories, or some might argue, critical thinking. It’s merely something I cobbled together based on my observations as a teacher and my own self-reflection. So now that I’ve given the necessary caveat emptor, here’s the graph of my theory:

Explanation:

In high school students steadily progress on a trajectory toward full-mastery and complete knowledge of the entire universe. In short, they know how everything works and how it should operate. This trajectory progresses from about 88% total knowledge of everything in the universe as a freshman to roughly 99% total knowledge by the end of one’s senior year in high school.

However, students suffer a rude awakening shortly after graduating — they recognize how much more complicated the world is and how much more of it there is to know. I imagine a similar pattern takes place whenever any serious life-change occurs, but this is the transition that I observe most frequently.

Now, here’s the related tech question. Does anyone have a good (and quickly intuitive) graphing website? I fully recognize that my graph above looks very bush league, but it was made with the aptly titled “Simple Data Grapher.” Embarrassingly, I was too impatient to figure out the Dept. of Education’s “Kids Zone” Create-A-Graph webpage, so that leaves you with the not-too-easy-on-the-eyes graph above. Sorry.

 

The most important criteria in peer evaluation?

Today we read the most recent collaboratively-written essay that I assigned my classes with MixedInk. We’re currently studying Congress and its operation. For the past few years I’ve had my classes read excerpts from a book by Morris Fiorina about the true operations of Congress, which he argues are pork barreling and casework rather than law-making. Typically, this essay proves challenging for students given the high level of writing, sophisticated vocabulary, and relatively nuanced argument. Most importantly, I think the essay is really interesting and it certainly provides a different look at Congress than we get from our rather benign (if not celebratory, in a political socialization kind of way) textbook.

Before we read the final winning essay, I led my class off today with a question for which I asked the students to write a brief paragraph response: “What criteria were most important in your evaluations and ratings of the MixedInk essays?” I’m interested in process-oriented questions like these to not only make students more aware of their own intellectual approaches, but also because I’m interested in doing some data and anecdote collection in preparation for my upcoming presentation on MixedInk in the classroom at this summer’s ISTE Conference.

The above picture is a list that my A Period class generated today. The numbers in parentheses next to each criterion reflects how many students included that element in their responses. The aspect I found most interesting (but also one that came out later in our conversation) had to do with one rating essays based on the author’s perceived academic reputation (which in many cases is well-deserved). One initial question I had when exploring MixedInk and discussing its implementation with the site’s founder, Vanessa Scanfeld, is how high school’ social dynamics play out in the evaluation process. Well, it appears that social dynamics and reputations do play a significant role in the minds of most students. However, whether this element is stronger than the other criteria is another area for further investigation that I’ll have to pursue.

The final point — that students avoided reading and rating essays that were too long — I interpreted as reflecting both an aversion to voluminous reading, and the pragmatic necessity to do other homework.

I’ll be interested to see if this pattern continues to hold true for my other classes, or if they’re willing to be as honest with me regarding their approach as A Period was. Perhaps it was simply the early hour that caused my students to let down their guard and speak honestly about how they approached this task, but I think not. In the next go-round of MixedInk I’ll try using pseudonyms (or more likely random numbers) that will at least provide a mild deterrent to students in terms of know who the author is. However, I have no illusions that this measure will be a fool-proof one as students will nevertheless likely share their identities, but this at least makes those snap judgments and evaluations based merely on name alone (hold on, am I writing about peer evaluation dynamics or the appeal of shopping at Neiman Marcus?) slightly more difficult.

FY-collective-I, here’s the link to the text we read. If anyone has tricks about how to embed a Google Books document into WordPress, I’d be very interested to hear them. My standard VodPod trick isn’t working here. C’est la vie.

 

Have I missed all the tweets on this article?

Yesterday I got a copy of the new issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine, which features a really interesting article entitled “What Makes a Great Teacher.” The article deals with the Teach for America program and the ways in which it constantly refines its formula for determining which applicants will make successful teachers. I’m surprised that the way I first discovered this article came via the passé medium of print (not Twitter or my RSS Reader), but in spite of how I discovered it, I’d encourage others to read it (and check out the webpage; its got some really great clips, like this one):

Here’s a few noteworthy excerpts that struck me as particularly interesting. Mostly these quotations address characteristics of successful teachers and practical classroom strategies:

Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness. [...]

Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.

Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls. [...]

Mr. Taylor follows a very basic lesson plan often referred to by educators as “I do, we do, you do.” He does a problem on the board. Then the whole class does another one the same way. Then all the kids do a problem on their own. During the “we” portion of the lesson, Mr. Taylor calls on students to help solve the problem. But he does this using the “equity sticks”—a can of clothespins, each of which has a student’s name on it. That way, he ensures a random sample. The shy ones don’t get lost. [...]

What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record. In the interview process, Teach for America now asks applicants to talk about overcoming challenges in their lives—and ranks their perseverance based on their answers. Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues have actually quantified the value of perseverance. In a study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology in November 2009, they evaluated 390 Teach for America instructors before and after a year of teaching. Those who initially scored high for “grit”—defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-choice test—were 31 percent more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students. Gritty people, the theory goes, work harder and stay committed to their goals longer.

While this article doesn’t deal directly with technology in the classroom (in fact, many of its examples, given that it focuses on Teach For America, deal with school communities that struggle with an extreme lack of resources), it does speak to the issues of innovation, self-reinvention, the desire for constant improvement, and the willingness to challenge oneself to overcome obstacles. While social media and technology tools provide a venue for these elements, certainly this same type of self-driven professional growth can take place without those resources.

So, what connection, if any exists between these traits and those who blog (presumably reflectively) or actively participate in the edu-blogging/tweeting world? Can these activities foster the characteristics of “successful teachers” (as defined by the article) or are those who are successful more likely to be drawn to these online communities?

 

A better web-annotating mousetrap?

In browsing through my Google Reader feeds this morning (is RSS inbox zero even an obtainable concept? Would that goal drive one to the brink of insanity?) I came across what appears to be yet another browser plug-in/extension for annotating webpages — ReFrameIt. While I’ve previously written about Diigo and its role in my classes, I know other websites (in particular ProfHacker) have done write-ups on other web-annotating tools like Google SideWiki.

Here’s ReFrameIt’s brief sales-pitch/tutorial:

Moreover, the website also touts the fact that its tool allows one to solve the following dilemma:

Currently, to discuss a specific idea or excerpt from a webpage, one must email the URL, identify the exact location of the point of interest and then explain why it’s interesting. The person who receives such an email often misinterprets what the sender found important because the commentary within the email is out of the context of the specific, critical passage of text. Imagine that this first exchange of information and the subsequent discussions all taking place in a single, adjacent space. Reframe It creates this space and makes communication about external information easy and efficient.

Of course, the above dilemma can actually be solved by any of the web-annotating tools. Nevertheless, in the name of research and constant investigation, I installed the plug-in and began to experiment. My initial impression is that ReFrameIt is extremely cumbersome and quirky. Most immediately problematic was the fact that the sidebar plug-in wouldn’t allow me to sign in using my Google account without opening up an entire new browser window, thereby defeating the convenience of having all my tabs open in one browser window. Once I did get logged in, it was only ReFrameIt’s page itself that seemed to recognize that I was in fact logged in — the sidebar still prompted me to “Sign In.”

When comments did appear in the side-bar they were seemingly random and I found it hard (if not impossible) to tell what highlighted text those comments were connected to. However, it seems that others are also non-plussed with this tool:

Now, in all fairness, my investigation of this tool has been pretty cursory. Perhaps if I use the traditional sign-up method rather than trying to link my Google Account to ReFrameIt, I’d have better luck and find the tool to be more useful. Actually, ReFrameIt’s feature set seems pretty cool, allowing one to (ostensibly) automatically share one’s annotations with others via Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, WordPress, FriendFeed, and/or via a variety of embeddable methods.

In the process of checking out ReFrame it, I came to realize all the biases I’d developed in favor of Diigo. A small point, but something that makes ReFrameIt less appealing than Diigo, is the way in which ReFrameIt mushes the page on either the right side when making annotations, whereas Diigo doesn’t mush the browser window as one makes annotations through a pop-up dialog box. However, this criticism is rather minor and speaks more to the appeal of the familiar. By contrast, I have no (well, fewer) problems with the way Zotero’s plug-in squeezes the browser’s field of vision from the bottom margin.

Ultimately, my continued favoritism toward Diigo is most likely attributable to the fact that I’m not only familiar with its interface and functionality, but also that it is a tool and repository into which I’ve invested a lot of time and information (links, annotations, summaries, etc.). The idea of having to recreate all those links, notes, insights, and tags on a new site makes one inherently adverse to switching over. (Though, in praise of Diigo, it made porting over all my Delicious bookmarks and tags really simple, which is something to further recommend it). Moreover, now that I’ve been through the process of establishing Diigo accounts with my students, I also found that Diigo was quite intuitive to set up, install, and start using — an appealing element of a software tool that should not be discounted.

So, for the time being I’m definitely sticking with Diigo for the reasons listed above. Has anyone out there used ReFrameIt or Google SideWiki extensively and found it to be far superior to the alternatives? If so, please share your thoughts. I’m always interesting in finding better, more effective social media mousetraps.

 

“And now for something slightly lower-tech…”

Before the winter break I assigned my ninth grade students to write an argumentative position paper on one of three topics — an assignment described in more depth in this post. In the course of reading these papers over break, once thing became strikingly clear: developing writers are just that; developing. And thank goodness, too, because without that need for development I’d find myself adrift in a sea of existential angst. (Perhaps that’s a bit melodramatic, but seeing areas for student growth does provide me with a raison d’être or at least a raison de travail [did I get that right, French speakers? Full disclosure: I just cheated and used Google Translate]).

The particular (and as it turns out, recurring) area for grammatical development centered around three common errors — pronoun-noun agreement, verb parallelism, and the ever-pesky passive voice. Given that we’d just finished exams and the students hadn’t done any new content-based reading, it seemed that this first week back from break — a truncated one — would be an ideal candidate for a grammatical tour de force. So, I dug up some review sheets that I had made to address these problems, and we embarked on gaining a deeper grasp of how these grammatical errors occur and how to catch and correct them.

For going over this material I employed a very useful tool that I’ve had in my classroom now for three years, but that hasn’t received a mention on this blog (at least I don’t think it has): an AverMedia Document camera. I’ve used this tool on-and-off for the time I’ve had it, employing it more frequently the first year I had it, which was also the first year that I did away with desks and got a big seminar table. In that new context the document camera proved to be a particularly useful means of sitting at the table with the students while still be able to write notes for the class and have them projected for all to see. The only challenge there involved finding a very long VGA cable.

The tool, of course, also functions brilliantly for allowing students to share their work with one another. In essence it creates old school transparency by substituting paper and pencil for blogs, wikis, backchannels, and the like. I’ve used this approach to have students share their interpretations of political cartoons and their writing with one another.

For this particular grammar mini-unit we first reviewed the sentences that I gave them for homework as a class using the document camera. Then, for the next day, students had to select two sentences from their own position papers that exhibited these errors, identify the particular error, and then correct the sentences. The goal with both the worksheet and then this assignment was to get students lots of practice with these errors so that they’d be well prepared for a quiz on Friday. Moreover, because the quiz would involve correcting sentences from the students’ papers, I’d hoped that there would be extra incentive to essentially identify and review the answers for these problematic sentences before the quiz.

One surprising (unsettling?) discovery that I made in giving this assignment is that many students had not saved their papers or couldn’t locate them on their computers. Perhaps it is my interest in archives as a historian, but I can’t imagine not keeping track of the work one has done and having that work organized in an easily accessible manner. I guess I’m just banking on the fact that my Presidential Archives will certainly want to prominently feature all the notes I took and papers I wrote as a student. Needless to say, I used this as an opportunity to proselytize on behalf of Google Docs and the “Cloud” more generally. Thankfully (for the students) I still had hard copies of all their papers, so I could make them copies that they could use to complete this assignment.

Although I unfortunately didn’t have time for all the students to present their sentences and corrections, I did find the structure of this assignment to work really well. Asking the students to identify their own errors and correct them made the process of revision more accessible and less intimidating than it can be in other guises. With traditional peer editing I find that students are often unwilling to sacrifice social capital in order to be blunt and honest about the shortcomings of a peer’s writing. As a result, the excessive number of smiley faces and “you’re awesome” comments in the margins leave everyone with a warm fuzzy feeling inside, but also leaves the paper chock-full of crummy writing. Additionally, because this peer editing takes place in small groups I’m not privy to all of the precise feedback students give one another, so it is easier to provide a milquetoast critique without me discovering that the editor’s feedback was apparently cribbed from a self-affirmation “quote-a-day” calendar or came from this guy:

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve used the document camera to review students’ writing in front of the whole class. In this scenario, I have no trouble being blunt and honest about the shortcomings in the writing (though I try my best to frame these critiques in a constructively positive manner); however, students tend to perceive this type of critique as more akin to “hazing,” though I do my best to assure them that I’m not grading their souls. Moreover, I tend to get bogged down with the first few papers when using this type of review and end up not covering as many papers as I’d like.

Therefore, this assignment, which had the students critique themselves and then present that critique to the class, avoided the shortcomings of both peer editing and my public critique. Students demonstrated that all of their writing needed improvement, and in the course of their presentations we were able to discuss these errors and others (e.g. when to use “less” vs. “fewer,” how to avoid beginning sentences with vague pronouns, the conventions of formal writing that discourage contractions, etc.) in a productive manner. In many cases the students’ corrected sentences preserved the error or created a new one, but in the course of the presentations many students were able to identify these mistakes mid-stream and make the necessary corrections. Moreover, structuring the class in this way also moved us through a larger number of students’ papers that I’d be likely to get through as the primary document camera-jockey.

Now, let’s just hope doesn’t includes any of the skull-and-crossbones errors over which I just quizzed my students!

 

Vimeo Renaissance!

Before the winter break I assigned my 9th grade classes a brief research project about one of three controversial topics — the death penalty, the drinking age, and health care reform — as a way to gain experience in researching, organizing, and writing an argumentative paper and presenting that argument orally. I selected those three topics because they were all ones that ProCon.org had substantial resources on, and in the case of the death penalty and the drinking age provided a fairly clear, straightforward set of arguments and evidence for the students to draw on.

As I’ve noted before, students tend to turn to the internet as their immediate research resource, so by pointing them to a centralized source of information at ProCon.org, I hoped to avoid the information-vetting step, which is a skill unto itself and likely merits its own exercise or assignment. Therefore ProCon.org proved appealing because it pre-screens its sources of evidence and provides researchers with access to substantial, well-regarded reports, quotations, and the like. In this way, I structured the assignment to force my students to focus the bulk of their energies on assessing the different arguments, selecting the most persuasive ones, and then organizing the major claims and pieces of evidence into a concise, coherent essay. Ultimately, this assignment prioritized essay structure and composition above research, though hopefully my students learned something about their topic nevertheless.

So, at this point you might be wondering, “isn’t this post terribly mis-titled? Where is the discussion of Vimeo?” (If you’re savvy, and don’t suffer from tunnel-vision, [or would it be "letterbox vision"?] you’ll see just a few lines down that I’ve embedded a Vimeo video. Thus, the title. Or you could play along, read the next line, and avoid the spoiler alert that you just read.)

Well, let me tell you: I exhumed my Mino Flip camera, which I hadn’t used pedagogically since recording this video toward the beginning of the school year, and after I finished teaching my first class of the day, I decided to make a brief recording that recapped my board notes. Here’s the result:

more about “Position Paper Organization“, posted with vodpod

Certainly these board notes were an ideal candidate for capturing via video — they were concise, concept-based, and covered material that I’ve taught many, many times, which made it easy for me to recap quickly. Ideally my narration also helped clarify any confusion that the students may have had during class. By contrast, other, more content-based material would lend itself less well to being captured in this way as it would be longer, more complicated, and ultimately more time-intensive to recreate. Nevertheless, I hope to be more conscientious this next semester about using the Flip Camera to record and share this type of material with my students. Additionally, recording my class notes in this way allows me to share them with students who missed class that day, something else I mused about previously.

Now, herein lies the tragic (well, that diction choice is perhaps a bit melodramatic) irony: I recorded these notes immediately, imported them onto my computer, and attempted to upload them that very day to no avail. For some reason Vimeo wasn’t playing nice. So, only is it now, weeks after having made this video and once I’m back home from my transcontinental journeys, that I’m able to upload it from my home computer, where it works great. Oh well.

The good news is that I’m planning a follow-up assignment using the students’ papers and MixedInk to help them gain further experience critically evaluating and editing their peers’ writing. Therefore, this video will likely come in handy to help remind the students of my expectations for essay structure and how to marshal evidence — something they perhaps haven’t been obsessing over during this break from school.

So, in conclusion, here’s my very attainable New Year’s Resolution: I’ll be more punctual with my follow-up about this next assignment than I was in getting this particular video online.

 

Further MixedInk observations and follow-up, or “My slowly geminating best practices list for MixedInk”

Wow! I had no idea when I started writing the title to this blog post that it would quickly spiral out of control into a Victorian novel.  Well, if it were a Victorian novel, here’s what the cover would look like:

That brief visual digression was in part brought to you via Picnik, an online image editor. Pretty savvy, no? Now on with my MixedInk follow-up!

As I wrote about yesterday (or early this morning, depending on what time zone you’re reading this in) I’ve got a presentation to be prepping for in late June, which means I’ll now be taking more copious and rigidly structured notes about my experience with using MixedInk in the classroom. At this point I’ve used MixedInk a number of times now (more with my sophomores than with my freshmen, something I hope to remedy this next semester) and have noticed some definite patterns as to what type of assignments work well with this software tool versus which ones do not.

This topic of my presentation at the ISTE conference came up at dinner the other night with my wife’s family who we’re presently visiting in Philadelphia. In the course of explaining the process of how MixedInk works to my mother-in-law, who just retired this year after twenty-five years of teaching middle and upper school students at an independent school, I realized two important things: 1) that the process and steps of working through a MixedInk writing topic is a rather involved one, and 2) I need to become more concise in my ability to explain its functionality. As perhaps I’ve mentioned here before, concision is not my strong suit.

Related to the first point is the fact that not all types of writing assignments work well with MixedInk given its multi-step writing, revision, and rating process. One of the by-products of using MixedInk for a writing project is that it generates a deep familiarity (perhaps bordering on annoyance or exhaustion) with the topic and/or text about which one is writing.  My sophomores made this fact quite apparent to me after we used the tool to engage in a close textual analysis of our textbook author’s portrayal of early humans. In that instance the topic that I had the students write on was too narrow, which meant that by the end of the process the students had seen the key quotations from the text and one another’s analysis so much that they had lost any motivation or desire to discuss it in class.

I had much better success with my most recent foray, which involved writing a response to a so-called “historical puzzle.” I adapted and scaled down this assignment from one that a college professor had assigned in a Medieval History course. The puzzle requires that students closely read six accounts of the same event, in this case the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 CE, in order to achieve two things: 1) suss out the authorial bias that distinguishes the Christian accounts from the Muslim ones, and 2) determine the order in which these documents were authored. However, the students could not simply answer these questions, but instead had to justify their responses with quotations from the text and logical reasoning to support their conclusions. The exercise not only exposes students to the idea of historiography and the ways in which the interpretation of the same event can change over time, but it also pushes them to worry less about the right answer and instead focus on the reasoning and substantiation for their argument. In short, its a good, valuable assignment for getting students to practice the habits of historical thinking in a safe, low-risk setting.

MixedInk turned out to be an ideal tool for this type of assignment for a variety of reasons. Firstly, although the students were dealing the same textual excerpts, each one tended to gravitate to different passages or phrases, so that the entire class didn’t end up reading the same quotation over and over again in the remixing and rating phases of the assignment. Secondly, the way in which the assignment is framed a “puzzle” or mystery to be solved makes it somehow more exciting or compelling. Finally, the goal of the assignment was to remix one’s original essay by drawing on the ideas, reasoning, and evidence of one’s classmates in order to create an essay that garnered the highest ratings from one’s classmates. As a result, the fact that students could see one another’s responses and answers through the transparency-creating feature of MixedInk provided them with alternative perspectives that would both challenge their initial interpretations and also provide them with material that they could use to improve their own essays.

Given that MixedInk topics lead to the creation of one “winning” entry, this topic also seemed ideal because it would generate a single document that the classes could then read, critique, and discuss before learning the correct answers about origin and dates of each document’s authorship. Moreover, because the classes wanted to know the correct answer, reading through this “winning” entry didn’t seem like a needless chore or an unnecessary re-tread of material because it provided a clear point of comparison with the right answer. Although I stressed to students that the accuracy or lack thereof in terms of their conclusions about the relative dates of authorship was not important, knowing the correct answer still proved compelling to students at the end of a process where they had invested a substantial chunk of time into a narrow range of documents.

One area where I hope to have more specific discussion and provide clearer guidance for the students is in terms of the criteria for rating a peer’s writing. It seemed that this portion of the process occurred rather quickly and without a clearly articulated sense of what one should be looking for. Perhaps having the class collaboratively develop a very specific rubric for the assignment before starting the rating stage would lead to a more careful and critical reading of the other entries. Nevertheless, the winning essay from this assignment was quite strong in its reasoning and use of evidence and provided precisely the type of counterpoint I’d hoped to have in contrast to the correct answer.

So, for those of you looking for the easy way out of this post, here’s the Reader’s Digest Version:
•    MixedInk a great tool for in-depth writing;
•    Especially strong for “problem solving” type writing assignment;
•    Requires substantial time investment;
•    Don’t skimp on time spent establishing criteria for “rating”

 

“Congratulation, and welcome the 2010 ISTE Conference…”

I’m not sure I ever mentioned this on my blog (probably as a way to prevent any intellectual espionage from taking place thereby dooming our chances at acceptance), but Vanessa Scanfeld, the co-founder of MixedInk, and I submitted a proposal for the 2010 ISTE Conference about using MixedInk in the classroom. After a few months of waiting for the various proposals to be reviewed, I learned earlier this month that our session, which is in the “Bring Your Own Laptop” division, was accepted and that our session is tentatively scheduled for June 30. This came as exciting news that was also opportunely timed to coincide with the start of college acceptance season, so I too was able to enjoy the thrills of being able to put on my new ISTE sweatshirt and brag about how only 29% of applicants in the BYOL division were accepted. How élite!

In any event, I’m quite looking forward to participating in the conference, though this will undoubtedly be the largest event of this type that I’ve attended and certainly my larger than my previous foray into conference presentation at the UTA Active Learning Conference.

Here’s our presentation proposal/description:

This hands-on workshop will provide attendees with the opportunity to experience what it is like to be a student engaged in a collaborative writing assignment. Participants will work together to (1) write short submissions, (2) remix language and ideas to create new, improved versions, and (3) rate to help determine the group’s best piece.

MixedInk’s collaborative writing platform has been used by the White House, Congressional offices, news agencies, and others to enable public participation. This session will demonstrate how the same process applied in the classroom yields a relevant, interactive learning experience that advances 21st century literacies.The session will include a brief introduction to MixedInk’s software and a hands-on collaborative writing segment. The session will conclude with a conversation distinguishing MixedInk from other collaboration tools, exploring various classroom applications, and discussing implementation.We explore how the structured process of writing, remixing, and rating encourages students to take creative risks, provides unique exposure to a range of peers’ perspectives and writing styles, requires critical analysis and evaluation, provides an opportunity for teamwork, offers a venue for constructive criticism, and teaches the complex task of recognizing and synthesizing compelling concepts.

As a result of the session, participants will understand:

* how MixedInk’s software can be used to engage students in writing and improve student learning across subject areas

* how MixedInk’s process differs from other collaborative writing opportunities in the classroom.

* effective techniques for structuring a collaborative writing project

* how to launch a collaborative writing project and guide students through the process

* ways to evaluate student performance in a collaborative setting
* potential outcomes of implementing this process in the classroom

In my next post I’ll have a follow-up about what I’ve done with MixedInk in the classroom recently and some additional things I’ve learned about how its implementation is made more effective and compelling. Until then!