Today, students in Mr. Apple’s class at Woodworth Middle school began their next tech-integrated project for 8th Grade U. S. History: A Civil War Google My Maps group activity. Google My Maps allows students to create and collaborate on a custom map in a familiar way since My Maps works just like a Google Doc or Google Slides presentation.
We were live on Google Hangouts on Air this morning discussing how to set up a Moodle Workshop module (view the recording below). Here’s a glimpse of what Amy and I talk about when we’re not meeting with teachers, and also a tutorial (in full or in part) on how to set up the Workshop module for your own class!
Every endeavor into a new tool or strategy comes at the expense of something else that isn’t being pursued. Every endeavor involves a tradeoff as well as an investment. And if the investment is mostly financial (which is often the case for the most “user-friendly” tools), we can be in for a rude awakening when the funding dries up, the focus shifts, or the vision changes. People who invest time and energy in using a particular tool can find themselves in a quandary when it suddenly goes away or becomes a paid service. So much of what we try to do or use in education simply isn’t sustainable in any sense of the word.
Over the past couple weeks, students in Ms. Angela Altomonte’s U. S. History class at Fordson have been working hard at preparing lessons to deliver to their peers on various topics. They learned valuable lessons about what it takes to be a teacher–and taught us a lesson about what students are really capable of when it comes to technology.
“Every day is filled with uncertainty. Learning prepares you to deal with uncertainty. ‘Education’ prepares you to deal with certainty. …There is no certainty.” -Dr. Sugata Mitra
The problem isn’t with videos. Sometimes the best way to learn about something is to watch a video about it. Sometimes a video is necessary to support other materials in learning about a particular topic. I tell people that half of what I’ve ever learned has been from YouTube. I’m kidding, of course, but it may not be that much of an overstatement. The problem, as always, is what students are doing with the video.
Just this morning, I received an email from Kahoot reminding its users that they can administer “homework that corrects itself”. As a teacher, this is intriguing to me for many reasons. Giving self-corrected homework helps me avoid a little of the mundane practice of manually grading multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, numerical, or matching questions. And we all…
…it’s an imperative. If you’ve paid even scant attention to any of the educational research conducted over the last 30 years, you are aware that giving students specific, timely, actionable feedback has the most significant impact on student learning of any strategy known to humankind.
It’s not a secret anymore. The answers are out there. Whether it’s a high-level writing prompt or a simple multiple-choice question from the publisher’s question bank, the reality is the same: if it’s been used at all before, the answers are likely posted somewhere on the internet.
For some students, publishing work online raises the stakes a little bit. Because it will be viewable by more people than just their teacher, many students put forth the extra effort to make things look good, care a little more about their grammar, and spend a little more time on the presentation.
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