Student engagement with Twitter Take 2

In earlier posts I have detailed how I have made use of Twitter in classes by asking students to tweet responses to questions that I have posed them in and out of class (mostly in class), or of posing questions that occur to them during the more didactic episodes in the lesson. I was in a planning meeting with friend and colleague Pauline Henderson (@paulinehendog) and we were discussing some research question on the impact of Twitter in classes.

In order to do this I had to explain more fully to Pauline how I use Twitter. One of my uses was inspired by an example related to me in a Masterclass run by Alan November last year. He related the example of a Maths teacher who tweeted to her students examples of Maths in real life. As time went by they began to tweet back to her and the rest of the class examples that they had seen too.

Engagement? I think so.

This inspired me to start to tweet articles of interest in my own subject area of Economics. Often I would hold a brief class discussion on the articles, working hard to 'decode' the economists' language to make the material more accessible to my students.

The interesting behaviour (and the one I had hoped for, even mentioned to the students themselves) is that they began to tweet interesting articles that they had found. Out of 30 boys in my classes, four boys have taken the trouble to tweet articles to me and the rest of the class, in all cases more than once. I know that that's not too many, but it's four more than none.

The articles have all been relevant to the content of the time. 

Our arguments (that is, Pauline and I): 

1. To bother to do this is a sign of engagement.
2. To be able to do this those boys must have engaged in some pretty serious thinking. The focus of our course is on deep thinking, and on that score this was pretty deep.

In each case I made sure I took the time and trouble to then discuss the relevant articles with the whole class. I felt that this was important in order to legitimise their posting behaviour. The articles themselves were also genuinely interesting and relevant, and in most cases they were articles that I hadn't found myself.

We talked these articles through together, the posters often taking the lead in the discussions. We were all learners together.

Improving the learning with Web2.0 tools

Improving the learning with Web2.0 tools 

The teaching profession is filled with good people, well intentioned people, people who want the best for the students that sit in front of them. These are people who would often almost literally give the shirts off their backs for their students.

Yet these are also all too often people who fill their daily working lives with practice based upon little more than mythology. Challenge it and the response is all too often that wonderful professional 'put down' - 'well of course it works, and you'd need to be pretty stupid to think otherwise.'

That observation leads to more than a touch of nervousness when I start to describe the impact of what we might call 'Web2.0' tools in the classroom. In between those bouts of Senior Management 'stuff' that fill my day, I teach two Level 2 Economics classes, and over the past 5 years I have progressively brought several new tools into the class repertoire. The focus of the work has been on developing students' ability to think critically, and to express that thinking in writing. It is no coincidence that the three external Level 2 Economics standards now count towards UE literacy (writing) in NCEA terms,  a commentary on the reasoning and writing expectations of these standards.

I now have a well established pattern of development through the year. Running in amongst the more traditional 'direct instruction' I begin by developing students' ability to reason and write with the use of online discussion forums. I moderate these carefully, giving every student detailed feedback on their posts (perhaps one of the more powerful differentiation tools?) before setting them to the process of constructing and deconstructing argument with each other.

As students develop confidence in their ability to argue, and to record those arguments in writing, I then transition them to more formal writing using GoogleDocs. I create a writing structure using the SOLO framework, ensuring that their written work closely matches the expectations of the NCEA standards and assessments. Each piece of work receives detailed feedback from me in writing.

While content tends to be developed through more than traditional direct instruction, I often use GoogleForms to elicit responses to content related questions. I gather this data under 'test' conditions. This provides a rich array of thinking, not all of which is correct. Students then take this response data (which I have shared back with them) and in groups co-construct the correct answers to a range of questions that help them to develop their understanding of subject content. Throughout all of this classes are engaged with the use of Twitter both inside and outside the class.

I am also teaching specific writing techniques (in particular the Statement, Explanation, eXample/evidence structure with which our English colleagues are enamoured).

Finally, because our external assessment system still requires students to sit examinations in which they write their answers using traditional pen and paper, I then start on the final transition to answering questions on paper.

What have I found? I can hear the voices (quite rightly) calling 'where's your data?' I have no reliable, authentic, replicable data on the outcomes.  I have some observations to make.

Consistent with international research (Goldberg et al), students in my classes right more and write better than they ever did before. Whereas 10 years ago on paper they might have written a paragraph of 5 lines, now they will write anything between 15 and 30 lines in explanation (mostly - there are ALWAYS exceptions). The reasoning is clearer (in general) and the examination results improved. The students are now more often writing responses  that I would classify as Relational and Extended Abstract as they respond to questions. A class taught without these approaches over the same period saw reasonably static results.

This year for the first time I ran an NCEA internal assessment using GoogleDocs. The results were dramatically different. The overall pass rate went from 55/75% to 94%. There is almost no evidence of collaboration (the task had to be completed independently). The answers were fuller in nature, the reasoning clearer and more accurate with most students. I have clear evidence of metacognitive thinking. As I supervised one of the 'in class' sessions of this assessment I watched over the shoulders of students as they used the comments function to pose questions of themselves on what they had written, ready for review later before they submit their work. Interestingly (perhaps??) this was not something I'd 'taught' them to do.

I see great engagement amongst students with both the class work, and the subject. The use of Twitter has been enlightening as students pose questions, offer answers to questions (both in and out of class), and tweet interesting resource material to me and the class. I run a unique class hashtag for each class.

Is any of this conclusive? NO!!! Is this any better than the mythologising of which I accused too many colleagues at the start of this post? Probably not.

It is quite possible that the results have nothing whatsoever to do with the technology. What is needed is some quality research. I'm a numbers man, I need quantitative data. I have little other than probably meaningless word and line counts (there are the NCEA achievement stats for both internals and externals), but I am not bold enough to try to suggest cause and effect yet. That's next year's Teaching as Inquiry project.

References

1. Goldberg A, Russell M, and Cook A "Meta Analysis: Writing with computers 1992-2002", Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative, Boston College.
2. Hattie J "Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning", Routledge, 2012

First reflections - online assessment

My first online assessment has been handed in by students. I would be lying to say that I was entirely relaxed about this as it is the first online assessment of this sort that I have written and administered. I've used online testing models in the past (collections of multiple choice or True/False questions as  a source of formative assessment and student practice) but never summative written assessments that are such high stakes.

The assessment was entirely open book, and I took 2 weeks to prepare the boys for the material, in particular to make sure that they were prepared for the depth of thinking that was required.

The assessment tool was GoogleDocs.

For me it was one heck of a risk. Had I written an assessment that required sufficiently deep thinking to mean that copy and paste would not help? Had I briefed the boys sufficiently on the lack of advantage and the ethical issues with copy and paste anyway?

I haven't marked any of the work yet, so can't comment on so many things, but what I have 'sampled' is the boys' responses to the task. I worried that they would find it easy. No, they all responded without a moment's hesitation. It was hard, they said. They had to think, they said. They found that they got things muddled in their thinking, and at times had to work hard to find clarity in their thinking and therefore in their responses.

The big tests will be:

1. The NZQA moderation - did I get the task right, and will I get the marking right?
2. Did the boys genuinely produce their own work in response to the tasks?

So far so good, now for the week of marking.

Online assessment behaviour & metacognition

I am fascinated watching the online behaviour of boys during their assessment.

The assessment is being completed using the GoogleDocs platform. The task is being completed in an 'open book' environment because it is about the thinking and synthesis, not about knowledge recall (although it obviously requires that knowledge in order to be able to synthesise).

Here's an interesting behaviour: a boy writes a piece of his response, and then uses the 'Comment' function to add a comment or question to the side on what he has just written. When I check, sometimes this is a 'note to self', other times it is a question as yet unresolved in his thinking.

This is the most visible illustration of 'metacognition' that I have observed.

'The Innovator's Mindset'

I thought this was an appropriate follow up to yesterday's blog post about assessment and risk taking:


http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/4783


Thanks, Pauline, a nice find!!

GoogleDocs assessment and risktaking

This year it fell to me to set and mark our large Level 2 Economics internal assessment. Normally I've had a colleague do this while I set and mark all of the formative assessment for external standards covered by the course. It seemed like a fair split of workload with which we were both comfortable.

The Level 2 Economics course is arguably a course in logic and philosophy as much as it is about economics. The external standards all count for UE literacy credits in writing which signals very clearly the writing expectations that students must meet.

In writing this year's assessment I decided to change things significantly by assessing online using Google Docs and an assignment format rather than an in class paper based written test. I was prompted in part by observation of colleagues' evolutions of assessment format, and also by our previous Moderation report which suggested that an assignment format might produce better outcomes for the students.

So here am I sitting supervising the boys in class as they work on their assessments. I was very nervous going into the exercise - this is a brand new experience for me, and quite a risk, but risk taking is something that we need much more of in education. My perception of risk is heightened by the fact that I lose some control over the process, that I hand control of more of the process over to the students. That's hard - as teachers most of us are at the very least closet control freaks at heart. However I have put in place a strong positive culture of working and thinking, I have emphasised the need for each boy to produce his own work. We have discussed the implications of using other people's work, both acknowledged and unacknowledged. And I have technical processes at hand to help where I suspect that collusion etc may have occurred. There does come a point at which we need to set our learners free and let them fly. They need to 'show their mettle'.

The intensity, the concentration, the output, are all truly prodigious. As with all of the formative writing that the classes had completed previously, the volume of writing appears to be significantly more than we would have seen in the past on paper. The quality will be judged when I mark the work next week of course.

Twitter discussions

Thanks to good colleague Pauline who found this video for me on one American Professor's use of Twitter in the classroom.