Mind-Mapping Tools in Classrooms

This is an image of my mindmap creation. I use Mind42 to create it. I think this is a great graphic organization tool because it allows you to organize information very easily and can very quickly turn it into this very useable image, and you can so easily link other informational sites or student projects. I chose to use an author as the basis for my mindmap. This was great because I was able to branch off in so many directions so quickly, such as his life, his books, and themes in his writings. I definitely can see this being an interesting assessment and reflection tool at the end of a unit. It would allow students to collaborate on projects, and they could even divide up responsibility for the various branches. This way students could see the "big picture." I think it might even be a neat way for me to graphically represent the curriculum we cover over the course of the year, to give students a "big picture" version of our course and how everything fits together.

Digital Students: Teaching in Context of Culture

No one would think it makes any sense to head out into the tribes of Papua New Guinea armed with lesson plans full of laptops, video cameras, wikis, blogs or digital storytelling tools--I suppose it makes no more sense to head into a 21st century American classroom without them. I am still not sold on the idea of replacing the traditional classroom with technology, but it does make sense to integrate. I really honestly just think it is good pedagogy to be mixing things up and offering variety, and opportunities to create and explore new information. It just so happens that if technology is involved, it generally means that these things are happening. Great, interactive lessons can happen without technology, too, and they should. People shouldn't be dependent on technology, but they should have opportunities to use it to better themselves and their educations.

I found both of these videos to be interesting. The video about the college students was very poignant and exposed a lot of truths about college education. It is not only true that many college professors do not utilize technology, but that they do not even utilize good pedagogy. This combination, in this place and time, can really be devastating for students. Especially since we are paying for this education.

The video about the k-12 students reminded me of Lisa Delpit's book Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, if only because of the moment when the children ask what would you want "if I were your son? your daughter?" It reminded of an important conflict. We as educators have to remember to value our students' education as highly as we would value that of our own children's, but that we also have to remember that not every parent wants the same for their children as we do for our own. For example, if we do paper and pencil all the time, the education will not be engaging or effective, and many parents will be angry with this. If we do "fun" interactive technology lessons all the time, without maintaining a visible level of rigor, relevance and applicability to a curriculum, we'll have yet more people to answer to. We have to find a balance between our own values, the values of our students, and the values of our students' parents.

Bloom's Taxonomy and Literacy Skills in a Technological Classroom

In a classroom that utilizes technology there will be three types of literacy in play: computer literacy, information literacy, and integration literacy. Generally, for all secondary classrooms, information literacy is an extremely important part of teaching children. We ultimately want them to be able to learn without the teacher being present, and that is exactly what information literacy is. It is knowing how and where to find information, and what to do with it when you find it. In my English classroom, this might mean researching a controversial topic, say abortion or the death penalty; students would have to know where to go to find reliable information, which is essentially a knowledge-based skill, and they would have to be able to evaluate that information to see if it is actually valid. Then, they would have to know how to synthesize that information and create something new. These are extremely high-level skills on Bloom's Taxonomy.

In today's world, we are asking student's to have another knowledge-based skill added as a component to their information literacy; and that is computer literacy. Knowing how to use a computer and how it functions has become an integral part of being able to even use information literacy skills today. People no longer know how to research, let alone present information, without the use of their computer literacy skills. It is sad in a way that older skills are phasing out, but these new computer literacy skills are very accessible and much more appealing. This makes it easier to apply students' information literacy skills.

Which brings me to the most difficult new skill for teachers: integration literacy. This is knowing how to integrate computer and information literacy in a classroom. This is no small task. It is easy enough to integrate the two on a very low level on Bloom's Taxonomy; just ask student's to research something simple and make a PowerPoint. But the best of classrooms will not only integrate technology into traditional activities, they will use it to bring students to higher levels of thinking. This can be tricky. How might technology be used to bring students to a level of synthesis, analysis or evaluation?

The Internet certainly makes it easier to attain the application level of the taxonomy. It is now easier than ever to "produce" almost anything; puzzles, movies, filmstrips, pictures with text, songs, and more. Actually, it also makes it easier, or at least far more necessary, to operate on the "evaluation" level as well. With the issue of wikis and personal websites, anyone can publish anything, so when asking students to use the internet as a resource, we are actually constantly requiring them to evaluate information and where it is coming from. This is a good thing as far as education students, but it can certainly be a bad thing in the sense that as teachers we will constantly have to be monitoring them to make sure they are accurately evaluating material.

As we move farther in the direction of technology, it will be more and more necessary for people to have higher level skills. Computer literacy does not necessarily require higher level skills at all, but we will all need them in order to distinguish between the "good" and the "bad" that is out there, especially as technology, information and advertising all become more invasive and more prevalent in our lives.

Engrade

I have to say I do particularly like this Engrade tool. It definitely makes it very convenient to manage all of the numbers. I really know nothing about gradebooks or the software out there, or how most teachers even manage their grades, but I had envisioned myself using Excel to make it easy to get quick snapshots of how everyone was doing. The thing I liked about the idea of using Excel was that I could easily make visuals out of it, to chart how my class was doing overall, compute averages, or even to analyze particular tests in order to reflect on my own ability to write reliable assessments. So, I appreciate the fact that Engrade similarly makes it easy to quickly get averages and overall pictures.

I played a little bit with the tool, and if I am understanding correctly, the students can see their own information by logging in. I think that is excellent. I had wondered how I would deal with the problem of making sure my students could track their progress in my course. Having them record their own grades in a notebook or something was the best I could come up with, but I was not pleased with that idea. Engrade would solve that problem for me.

I love the fact that I can create quizzes and mini-lessons on this site as well. Whether or not that is useful to me will depend on the level of access my classes have to technology. It would certainly make grading and recording grades a much easier process, but being that I am an English person, I am far more interested in "subjective" assessments such as short, written responses, as opposed to the multiple choice quizzes. Still, it could definitely be a useful tool, even if I only used it for occasional lessons or quizzes, and maybe used it as an extension to the grading method I set up in Excel. I definitely intend to explore with it when I have my own class and real assignments, to see if it helps me set up a grading system that I feel accurately reflects performance in my classroom.

As an answer to the blog prompts, I think students and parents would love this software because it would be an easy way to keep them informed of the student's progress in the class. This is important, especially at the secondary level, because I would have so many students that it might be difficult for me to keep the level of contact that some parents might want. I think classroom teachers in general would find Engrade useful for that reason, but also because it would make grading easier if they set up their quizzes on the site itself. I could see this being especially useful in math or science classrooms, or in English/History when doing vocabulary or terms assessments.I think Engrade could be even better if it provided visual tracking of a student's progress. For example, graphic representations like line graphs to track if there is a particular period of time in which a student was struggling or a particular type of assignment that is causing them trouble. It would also be nice if the quiz generator would also analyze the results to see if any particular question was not valid because a certain percentage of students missed it.

VoiceThread and PhotoStory Project

I created both a VoiceThread project and a PhotoStory project. I did both of mine on literary elements; one was on assonance and one was on alliteration. I found it a little difficult to follow the guidelines for making the project "personal" and still tie it into something that could be used in a classroom curriculum, but ultimately I think it is personalized in a way since it is my own narration of poetry, and my own selection of photographs from the internet.

I enjoyed the PhotoStory project far more than the VoiceThread. I could not figure out how to add music to my VoiceThread project, so that seemed to be a little lacking as far as the interest it holds. I also did not like that it is so "choppy" in moving from one picture to the next. Aside from the fact that you have to download and install PhotoStory, I really thought it was incredibly user-friendly and very professional. I was extremely impressed with how smooth the video looks at the end. It really looks like a far more involved and complicated video than what it actually is.

I definitely foresee using PhotoStory in my classroom. I think it is a great way to make very quick but very professional presentations. It would be a great replacement for another more "boring" or "traditional" assessment if I asked students to present information back to me in a PhotoStory. I would like to make sure that it still involves some higher level analysis, though, and not just information recall. My stories would not "count" as an appropriate presentation if the poems had been covered in class; however, if the student were able to find and identify assonance or alliteration on their own, or create their own verse that utilized those devices, that would be an excellent application of knowledge. I would like to make sure, however, that the use of the pictures was also somehow relevant, and not just random. It would be interesting to require the students to use historical pictures from the time of the poem, or artistic representations of that poem, in the presentation. This would add an extra element to the project.

Regardless of what the details of the project might be, I was definitely impressed by the ease of using PhotoStory, and by the overall professionalism of the project.