Tech Thursday -- Visible Thinking With Technology

My friends at Presbyterian Day School and the Martin Institute introduced me to Harvard's Project Zero and their work in Visible Thinking about two years ago.  Since then I explored ways to integrate the Thinking Routines and technology in core curricular content areas.

One of the seemingly easiest routines, the Headlines Routine is none-the-less extremely powerful.  This routine asks "thinkers" (isn't that a nice way to think of our students!) to summarize or capture the essence of an event, idea, concept, topic, etc. in a newspaper type headline.  Basically, students should ask themselves, "If I could capture the most important aspect to remember from this ____, what would the headline be?"

Summarizing is a powerful review strategy and is a great method of determining whether a student has grasped the main idea or the heart of a story or lesson.

My friend, Cindy Brock, introduced me to Big Huge Labs, a terrific website with many very easy to use templates with which students can create fun visuals to display their learning.  Best of all for teachers, it is free, and they offer an educational account where student accounts can be created without e-mail addresses.  The educator account allows the instructor to review student work and to save the work on personal computers (note the site only saves work for a few weeks).  The educator account requires proof of the instructor's educator status and approval from the website administrators.  I received my approval within two hours of applying for educator account status.

Several of the templates work marvelously well to showcase student thinking with the Headlines Routine.  The first template is the Motivator Poster template.  After reading the story Koala Lou by Mem Fox, students had to come up with a headline that summarized the theme or main idea of the story.  They then had to "justify" or "explain" their headline with evidence from the text.  This is one of the students' creations.

Note: The poster template allows up to three lines for the "explanation" portion of the assignment.  

The Headlines Routine can also be used to review the most important ideas or facts in a content area lesson.  For example, the assignment below asked the student to create headlines for some of the most important ideas from her study of the French Revolution using the Magazine Cover template from Big Huge Labs.

From this example, the instructor can see that the student has a good basic understanding of some of the personalities and events of the French Revolution.  (Notice the date of publication is Bastille Day and the "price" of the magazine reveals additional information about what the student deems important from her study.)

For both assignments, the technology is incredibly quick and easy to produce when students have completed the "thinking" portion of the assignment beforehand.  The most time consuming part of both assignments is finding photos or art in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons' license. 

Always Learning -- Refections on Presenting Professional Development

It's a Professional Development summer this year.  I am a bit of a PD Geek, but I firmly believe teachers should be models of life-long learners for their students.  If teachers are not willing to attend professional development opportunities and continue learning throughout their lives, then how can we expect our students to make the effort to continue their learning throughout their summer vacation? Thus far this summer, I've presented and attended two fabulous educational conferences: The Martin Institute Summer Conference and The Hot Springs Technology Institute.

The first conference I attended this summer, The Martin Institute Summer Conference was held at one of the premiere elementary boys' schools in the nation, Presbyterian Day School.  The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence is a wonderful organization founded by Brad Martin to provide world class professional development to teachers in both the private and public sectors of education.  The summer conference is so exciting because private and public school educators have the opportunity to share experiences and learn together.  The featured speaker at this year's conference was John Hunter, the innovative educator known for his development of the World Peace Game. Further reflections on this aspect of the conference will be forthcoming in a later post. Today, however, I wish to devote my reflection on the presentations which I was a part of at both The Martin Institute Conference and the Hot Springs Tech Institute.

For the second year in a row, I have been honored to be able to present at The Martin Institute Summer  Conference with my friend and colleague, Megan Salemi.  This year the focus of our presentation was on our collaborative work integrating technology and literature studies in Dr. Salemi's fifth grade classroom.  We have found that the use of social media technologies, specifically Kidblog, Glogster, and Edmodo increases student engagement with text, creates excitement among students about books and reading increasing the time students actually spend reading, and has a positive effect on student comprehension as evidenced by standardized assessments, in reality, Rewiring the Reading / Language Arts Block in more ways than one. This year, Megan and I decided to invite two of our students to assist us in presenting our methods and findings.  Who better to speak of the effectiveness of these techniques than the students themselves?  This was the highlight of the presentation.  Teachers who take their own time during the summer to attend professional development opportunities are not in teaching for the money; they are in this profession to make a difference and they appreciated the opportunity to discuss educational methods with two articulate students. I learned from this experience that we should allow our students to tell us what they think of our lessons and how we are going about teaching them and most importantly, that teachers, administrators, and other interested persons should listen to them.  They have a lot to say, and while we may not always be able to accommodate them, they make some very valid points.  It's a real shame that there were not more administrators and policy makers in our session to hear what these students had to say.

Megan and I also traveled together to attend The Hot Springs Technology Institute held at President Bill Clinton's Alma Mater Hot Springs High School to present two separate presentations about our work to integrate technology into core curricular content.  Her session, Enrich Literature Circles with Technology, focused on how a classroom teacher could utilize technology to enrich literature study without massive amounts of hardware.  For all but one month of the school year, Dr. Salemi had only three consistently working computers in her classroom.  She did schedule additional computer lab time through me and utilized it consistently establishing the importance she placed on the use of technology as a learning tool.

My presentation, Visible Thinking With Technology, also focused on utilizing technology in the classroom as a learning tool and as a showicase for student learning and understanding.  Taking 5 Thinking Routines from Harvard's Project Zero's work in Visible Thinking, I showed how these routines could be easily integrated into existing lesson plans and how educators could use free or inexpensive technologies as tools to supplement and showcase the understandings students derived from the use of these routines in core curricular lessons.  While my session was not heavily attended, I received very positive feedback about the information presented from the attendees.  I definitely wish to refine and expand this presentation.

Hot Springs was a great experience.  I was able to spread my wings a bit, speak to a totally different group of educators, and share my passion for learning and technology.  An educated, critical and creative citizenry is a must for a robust 21st century economy and workforce.  Technology integration is not an option as the world becomes more wired each and every day.  Teachers and techies within the school must work and continue to learn together or not only the teachers but our students will fall behind.