To Tweet or Not to Tweet
Most of us strive to be relevant. In his keynote address at Pearson eCollege’s CiTE 2009 User’s Conference, Michael Wesch talked about the crisis of significance and how education technology can help us be more relevant to our students. As formal educators we are all digital immigrants but more of us everyday are teaching to digital natives or immigrants that are assimilating quicker than we are.
As I’ve participated in education conferences over the past year I’ve noticed that sessions that include Web 2.0 or gaming are packed. This speaks to our collective desire to continue to be relevant to students. Personally, I’ve struggled to become an avid user of many Web 2.0 technologies. Perhaps it’s because I don’t feel like I’ve had anything to say. I had been perfectly content as a passive recipient of information and hadn’t felt the need to actually participate.
A few months ago I tried to commit to tweeting at least once a day. It lasted for two or three days and then sputtered to a stop. It felt like I was whispering into a vacuum.
Over the Summer I went to see the movie Julie and Julia. Most of us have heard of Julia Childs, the gourmet chef who taught us the art of French cooking. The movie wove her story into that of a young woman who was struggling with significance and decided to cook her way through Julia Child’s cookbook in one year as a way to become more engaged with life. She began to blog daily about her experience and then desperately hoped that someone would care. I won’t spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it but she did eventually get a few fans.
The noise from Twitter continues to grow. Over the past few months alone we’ve heard about this tool being a primary outlet for the seeds of revolution in Iran following their disputed presidential elections. There was also a major hack attack against the platform which speaks to its stature as an important medium.
A distance education list serve I follow recently has a post about tweeting in the classroom. A stats professor had offered his students the opportunity to earn extra credit by tweeting about good and bad uses of statistics in the media. I also thought about how K-12 educators could ask students to tweet ideas about writing prompts. They may actually be motivated to write!
So, I’m making it public. Does anyone read this blog? I’m going to try to Tweet my way through the next 30 days. You can follow me @bmelearner to see how I do. I’m actually traveling in at least four different countries during that time span so if I meet my goal it will be quite an accomplishment.
Brian McKay Epp
Academic Trainer and Consultant
“Vaccinating” against academic dishonesty
Flu season is right around the corner and many are contemplating flu vaccines. However, as I’m dealing with yet another situation of academic dishonesty (which unfortunately seems to happen about once a semester… so hopefully this is it for a while!), I’m reminded of a great article from our Educator’s Voice newsletter on “Vaccinating against the plagiarism plague” by Charlotte Redden. I like the idea of a vaccination as something we do to in an attempt to prevent an uncomfortable situation we’d rather avoid. So rather than being reactive to situations of academic dishonesty, why not be proactive and try to create a preventative regimen to prevent it in the first place? The main preventative strategies proposed by Redden include educating students about your expectations, warning them that you do monitor for academic dishonesty and also to create less plagiarism-prone assignments in the first place by giving specific directions and scaffolding stages of the assignment.
Whether or not cheating is more common in online courses is a matter of debate (and see some comments here about a recent study suggesting that students are less likely to cheat online than in a traditional classroom). However, whether we teach online or in a traditional classroom, we should all consider our “vaccination” and take a look at our teaching materials. Are there any of Redden’s suggestions that we can implement?
– Gail E. Krovitz, Ph.D. –
Senior Academic Trainer & Consultant
Redden, CA. May 11, 2005. Vaccinating against the plagiarism plague: design and techniques. Educator’s voice Volume 6, Issue 5. Accessed online at: http://www.ecollege.com/Newsletter/EducatorsVoice/EducatorsVoice-Vol6Iss5.learn
Tapestry is coming!
09/08/09: I’m on a plane on my way to perform my first Project Tapestry training. After in many ways suffering through the curriculum meetings and organized “meet and greet your child’s new teacher(s)” sessions that accompany the beginning of the school year in my own children’s schools, I finally get to say all of the things to teachers in another state that I wish I could say to my own children’s teachers here in my own (Denver Public Schools) district. Things like, “Yes, you can see test results immediately after administering the test (or even just a test question), and here’s how to do it.” Or, “differentiation just got a whole lot easier—here’s how to find and distribute online remediation and enrichment to members of the same class, and then to easily monitor and document their progress so that you have more time for teaching them.” Or “this is how you can leverage those eager parents who want both insight and engagement in their child’s day to day learning-- in less time, and with more parental satisfaction.” This is a tool I wish our school district had.
As a teacher, I’d love the integrated approach. I’ve not had long exposure to the inner workings of a K-12 school district, but in the past few months on Project Tapestry, I’ve heard about more tools that don’t “talk” to each other than I ever knew existed. I’ve heard about the woes of Scantrons, the difficulty of reaching out to struggling and high-achieving students, and the plague of paper. I’ve also heard about the crazy things parents do to teachers in order to try to understand what their kids are learning and not learning and how they can help. (OK, I have had long exposure to this last one…I can totally be THAT parent….)
Project Tapestry facilitates the daily reporting of attendance and lunch count and the use of the ever present but now electronic Gradebook with which we are all familiar. It adds to the up and coming technologies of online and Smartboard/clicker-based instruction and assessment (this is much easier when conducted through one interface), and it allows sharing of assessment materials between schools in the district (like benchmark tests that can be authored by lead teachers throughout the district, then released and administered across all schools). Teachers can see the results of these tests immediately, so that curriculum adjustments that used to wait weeks on collective test results reporting can be made the next day. And, standards based assessment results can be looked at over time through a data analytics tool—if Johnny is struggling with reading, when did that start to happen? What step was missed or where do we need to backtrack and pick up again to get him on course? Having an easy interface in which to get this sort of historical information on a student or a class is the first step in the teacher identifying Johnny and getting him remedial content that will bring him back up to grade level.
What if Johnny not only reads, but exceeds? Rather than allowing his exceptional learning abilities to languish, Tapestry’s enrichment materials repositories can aid in giving Johnny the extra challenge that keeps him in his seat at school. We can reach into materials that allow Johnny to push ahead while not taking a lot of instructional time from his classmates.
At the end of the day, all of this prescription and progress lives in the same place, under the same happy URL. The Assessment Manager talks to the Gradebook and to the online classroom, feeds the Data Analytics tool so that it can help the teacher move in the appropriate direction for each child without rewriting the whole lesson plan. Student work is held in a secure, electronic environment that is secure from dogs and the things that can happen to it on the way to school, as well as on the way home where parents can see the grade. Soon, parents will be able to check in "at will" in a way that a mere portal doesn’t allow. All of this without an email snowstorm for the teachers, without a phone, and on an ongoing basis that takes the “SURPRISE” out of report card day.
Anyway, I know I’m excited. Not just for the parents, the teachers, the school districts, but for the students. I know of so many students who don’t know where their grades come from, who have no idea that their efforts are measured against standards and not just some idea a teacher has of what is “good.” Being able to use and share this tool with our students will help our kids to understand that they have control over their learning, that the measurement of learning has a logical face to it, and that they can get help or move ahead as their learning dictates. They will be able to work from home, from the library, and from school on material that appeals to where they are at in a given subject, and they’ll be able to know when they’ve succeeded and quickly go on, or recognize where and how they are challenged and go back. I can look at my own kids-- one who struggles and one who speeds ahead of the others-- and I see how this can work.
09/09/09: First training completed, and there are now some excited teachers and admins in this district! Yep, this is going to be good.
Where’s the Instructor
“Where’s my instructor? Am I being taught by a computer?” “I got an 80 on my paper and the only comment was good work—how do I improve?” Sad to say that these are not uncommon questions, they are all too frequently raised by students in some online courses or at some online institutions. Over the years my colleagues and I have “reviewed” hundreds of courses for our Educational Partners and have, more frequently than we would like, asked similar questions – where is the instructor presence that is so necessary to the success of students in a course and the retention of students in a program.
I once had a professor, in a brick-and-mortar classroom, tell us on the first day of class that we wouldn’t be meeting during the term because we had our textbook and we only were required to come to the classroom for the midterm and the final. I wondered at the time, what is he being paid for? I transferred to another section but other students didn’t and they received no value for the tuition they paid (beyond the credit hours) – only value for the textbook they purchased. How can a similar, completely undesirable scenario be avoided in online courses. How can we provide students with an answer to the question – where is my instructor?
As some wag might say, “it’s not brain surgery!” Any instructor with the desire to actively “teach” students can be “present” in the course and provide students with that desirable presence and support that are the hallmark of a good instructor. As our Academic Training and Consulting staff has said in many venues, you can achieve a strong instructor presence by following some clear best practices:
Welcome your students to your course:
• Send a Welcome Email the week before your course starts and then send a very similar First Day Email the day the course opens.
• Post a Welcome Announcement that students will see when they enter your course.
• Respond with a personal “welcome” to each student in the Introductions discussion site which we recommend be placed under Course Home.
• Place a “welcome” message with the course overview statement on the Course Homepage.
Tell your students who you are and how to contact you:
• Post contact information in the Syllabus and in an Announcement referring students to the Syllabus. We recommend an Office for course-related questions and email for personal issues. And, don’t forget to tell students to use the Help Pages or to contact the Help Desk for assistance with technical issues.
• Post a biographical statement and a photo in the Syllabus with your contact information. Here you might also add a link to an audio clip. An alternative is to have an Instructor Introduction content item under Course Home with this information.
Communicate regularly throughout the course:
• Respond within 24 hours during the week to course-related questions posted in the Office discussion site which we recommend be placed under Course Home.
• Respond within 24 hours during the week to personal issues sent to you by email.
• Post a Weekly Announcement, at a minimum, to keep students informed of course events and consider sending a Weekly Email with the same information to ensure that all students are seeing your “messaging.”
• Actively facilitate unit or weekly discussions with a presence on multiple days in the discussion – many institutions require an instructor presence in discussions a minimum of three days a week but we recommend more active facilitation.
Provide constructive feedback on assessed course items:
• Provide constructive feedback on assignments in the Gradebook or the Dropbox comment areas.
• Provide constructive feedback on assignments themselves if you download them to your desktop and make comments using track changes or a similar program.
• Provide constructive feedback on discussion participation in the Gradebook.
• Provide constructive feedback on exams and quizzes in the Gradebook comment area unless you allow students to see both questions and answers on the review date.
As you may have heard our Academic Trainers and Consultants say before, “Good teaching is good teaching – in the classroom or online.” Much of what is recommended above would be a carryover from the classroom of any good instructor.
Our advice is to be proactive in establishing and maintaining an instructor presence in your courses. Get actively involved and let education happen for your students.
Ken Switzer, Ph.D.
Senior Academic Trainer and Consultant
