I have been waiting to generate this post until I felt certain educators would be providing at least some instruction at a distance this Fall. I have decided Fall instruction will not be like the Fall of 2019 and tools for teaching online are worth considering.
I understand that educators have been overwhelmed by suggestions for teaching at a distance. I want to limit what I add to one concept. I call this concept “layering” (explained here) which is my way of suggesting that educators should learn how to take existing online content (web pages and video) and add elements that guide the learner. Informational rich content is not necessarily prepared as learning resources. Adding elements such as questions and annotations to remember something already learned can improve understanding and application. Help the learner process the information to increase understanding and retention.
I am making some assumptions about the tools educators already have mastered. I assume that educators have learned to use a tool for managing learning and reaching students (a course management system of some type – Google classroom, SeeSaw) and video communication tools (Zoom, Google Meet). I would then suggest educators spend time with the type of tool I suggest here. The tools I suggest are versatile so that the investment of time educators and students commit translates into frequent applications. It makes sense to spend time on such tools before exploring other tools that might be used now and then.
There are several different layering tools and you need to learn a different one for video and for web pages. Here are my two suggestions.
I created the following video to explain how educators can take advantage of InsertLearning lessons that have been made publicly available. If you are looking for online educational content, you might search this library.
For those unfamiliar with InsertLearning and wanting to use these resources, the following image may provide a quick way to see what is provided. The questions appearing in the following image were added to an existing web page using InsertLearning and the combination can then be shared with students. The red rectangle at the lefthand edge of the image shows the InsertLearning tools as they appear when using the service.
A few years ago now, I began promoting a concept I called layering for learning. This effort combined my personal interest in developing and applying skills that others might call studying with my interest in technology. Of the various learning activities involved in education, I would argue that studying tends to be one of the most overlooked of education and yet what is conveniently described as studying in a formal education setting is the basis for the learning we do throughout our lives.
The distinction between studying and say reading can be quite important. For example, the concern that has been associated with reading on a device ignores the special benefits a device can provide in studying a text. Highlighting, note-taking, searching the large archive of the content that can be identified and expanded through highlighting and annotating a large body of content (a textbook), sharing efforts at personal understanding, searching for confirming or disconfirming evidence, and so one are powerful advantages for the use of technology in studying. Where can learners develop the skills in applying such tactics to digital or paper-based studying and who will help teach these tactics?
Layering for Learning is intended to target a carefully defined body of content; i.e., the content offered online which may or may not be designed as a learning resource. When I teach these ideas, I often associate it with the concept of teacher as designer to emphasize the distinction between content designed for education and the additional work educators should do to help learners with content not designed for instruction. This more general purpose content could be text-only, multimedia, or video. I am interested in this body of content because many educators value the authenticity of such sources and because there are important copyright issues associated with this content educators should recognize. We are also becoming aware that this type of content comes with added challenges as it must be vetted by a learner for factual accuracy. Add verification to the studying skills that must be acquired.
I define layering as a technique that adds elements on top of the content provided by an Internet source which does not actually modify that original source and retains all of the expectations the content creator might have had when providing this source online. For example, if a content creator assumed her/his content would be displayed with ads, the ads will be visible and responsive when a learner studies layered content. If a content creator relies on the frequency with which her/his content is viewing as a revenue metric for a sponsor, layering still requires that the server providing this content continues to send this content each time it is viewed. A layered experience actually combines information from two sources (the server sending the original content combined with additional elements from the layering service) that are experienced by the learner as if the combination originated from a single source.
The elements that can be layered vary from service to service but include highlights, comments possibly including links to other sources, questions, discussion prompts and shared replies, and diagrams or images. Again, depending on the service, these elements can be provided by an educator or generated by a learner. The elements can be shared socially or shared in a limited way to individualize the experience of providing analysis and feedback. Some services allow the tracking of the use of elements through a dashboard used by the educator.
I have developed both a Primer available from Amazon and free online video tutorials associated with several different free and commercial services that allow educators to utilize these services in their classrooms. The Primer is intended to explain how the layering tactics facilitate studying and provide examples. The tutorials are focused on how to set up and assign the layering services.
My focus on layering is restrictive to allow a focus for my writing, but the concepts apply to other tools such as Edji or Newsela that allow the application of similar tactics, but assume the educator has the rights to the content to the content that is being studied. The same goals of developing technology-based study skills can be developed within these environments.
So, if interest, I encourage your exploration of a few of my free tutorials. If these tutorials spark an interest, the $3 primer might be worth the investment.
Technology offers learners some study skill opportunities often not available until recently. A vast literature investigating highlighting and notetaking exists, but few K-12 educators have been trained to help their students learn to use these study skills effectively. While some may offer advice on taking notes, highlighting has been largely ignored because marking up content intended to be used in the future by other students was forbidden. The use of digital content eliminates this problem, but the opportunities of this content in digital form have been largely ignored.
My own familiarity with highlighting and notetaking go back to the late 1970s and 1980s. It is my impression that these study strategies were heavily investigated during that time frame because of the interest in generative strategies. Interest seemed to wane, but I sense a return of some of these ideas.
I recommend two recent sources:
Miyatsu, Toshiya, Khuyen Nguyen, and Mark A. McDaniel. (2018). Five Popular Study Strategies: Their Pitfalls and Optimal Implementations. Perspectives on Psychological Science 13, 3, 390-407.
Miyatsu and colleagues make an interesting point about study strategy research. They suggest that researchers have focused on developing new study techniques, but these techniques have been largely ignored. Miyatsu recommends that greater attention be focused on study strategies that are used and how these strategies might be optimized.
Highlighting and annotating (simplified notetaking) fit well with my interest in opportunities for the application of online layering opportunities.
Here is a quick perspective on the highlighting and notetaking research.
The potential benefits of both techniques are approached as potentially resulting from generative processing (activities while reading/listening) and external storage (improvement of review or studying). Of course, these are interrelated as better highlighting and notetaking should improve later review (I will make one comment on whether this relationship still holds at a later point). A quick summary might be that a) the benefit of notetaking appears to be in review and b) the benefit of highlighting appears to be in the generative act of highlighting. I cannot offer an explanation of why these strategies appear to work in different ways.
One further comment related to my reference to layering is that highlighting and notetaking can be provided rather than generated by students. Providing highlights and annotations can benefit review and may be a way to teach a better generative approach. One of the findings of these more recent reviews of the literature is that K-12 students do not benefit from highlighting opportunities while college students do. This could be because younger students have not practiced this technique and when provided the opportunity do not highlight in an effective way. They do benefit when important content is highlighted for them.
With notetaking more generative strategies (paraphrasing vs verbatim) improves the benefits of the note taking process, but verbatim notes are more effective for external storage (review). I think this could possibly be improved by use of apps that allow notetaking while recording presentations. The notes taken within such apps are timestamped allowing review of the original recorded content when the notes seem confusing. Students using this approach could also just enter a marker, eg., ???, in notes when confused rather than overload working memory and use this marker to return to the spot in the recorded notes for more careful thought when studying. The notes could even be improved later using this same approach.
If you don’t have access to a college library, you may be unable to read the Myatsu paper, but the second reference is online and offers some useful analysis.
Among the things I sometimes complain about is feature bloat. This is the expansion of the capabilities of a specific application often with a price increase beyond the point at which most users will benefit. However, once in a while, there are capabilities that end up unexplored in these expanded applications.
Diigo has long been my social bookmarking app. Perhaps others have gone on to other ways of understanding this category, but to me it is a way to organize online resources I have found in a way that is searchable AND to share my resource collection with others. Pinterest is probably a more popular way of doing this type of thing.
Diigo has a free and a pro version, but also offers a free expanded capabilities version for educators. The version for educators allows a teacher to establish classes and to share resources with an individual class. I had forgotten about this function when I was writing reviews of online services allowing a teacher to layer instructional components on online content.
Diigo allows highlighting and annotating of bookmarked pages.
These capabilities would allow for “expert highlighting” to bring student attention to key content and comments directing students to consider specific things or perhaps to answer questions.
Layered content created in this way can then be shared with class or using email with anyone.
I have written on multiple occasions about the educational potential of layering educator annotations and prompts on existing online content. My interest is prompted by the great amount of online content that could be improved as educational resources by such additions. There are a growing number of surfaces that provide this capability and they do so in different ways.
I will say upfront that there are some who object to this practice no matter the method used by a layering service. Some simply want their content to only be available as they have created it. While I can appreciate this position, I see a middle ground. As I suggested, the technology of how layering is implemented varies. Some techniques acquire the content from a source (a web site, a video available on the web), add the additions specified by second party, and then make the combined product available. Other techniques create a similar product by combining the product from the original developer and the designer wanting to add a layer of content each time the combined product is requested. What the user sees may appear very similar, but what is happening online is very different. In the second case, the server on which the original content creator has placed his or her content is involved each time someone uses the Internet to download the combined content to a browser. More to the point, activation of this server may be related to expectations that original author has for displaying ads or related sources of revenue.
So, take YouTube as an example. Some creators want their videos to include ads that appear when a video begins. They are compensated a few cents each time YouTube serves one of these videos. If I would download one of these videos and then serve it myself, the creator would not receive compensation when the video downloaded from my server was viewed. My use of YouTube content would not necessarily be inappropriate. My responsibility would not be to YouTube. I might make a request of the video creator, and if grant, serve the content myself.
In promoting layering services, I have made the decision to focus on services that involve the server used by the original content creator each time a viewer makes the request to view a composite product. This is the position I have taken in the book I have written on the subject and in the online content I have created to expand on the content in the book.
I great example of the type of service that meets the standard I describe above is TurboNote. This service allows comments/questions to be attached to video or web pages and then shared with designated learners.
I have created an example of an annotated video as it would be shared with a specific user. (TurboNote extension must be installed on Chrome browser to view)
I have not written about layering recently (you can search this site for the layer tag). A recent search for layering tools has prompted another post.
I use the term layering to describe an online service that allows a user to add content (annotations, highlighting, questions, external links) on top of the online content generated by a different individual. Actually, you could layer content on top of your own original content, but the core issues I want to address here involve the addition of content on top of what someone else has prepared. I use the word “layering” because the word offers a mental image I prefer. There is the content of the original author and there is the content generated by one or more different individuals. These “layers” of content are stacked so that the content of the original author appears as intended by that individual, but other content is added on top.
My interest in this capability is related to educational applications. I sometimes describe the opportunity a teacher has to take original content and to add elements to that content to generate a composite product that is more ideal as an instructional resource. These elements might include annotations intended to activate existing knowledge before reading new material, highlights added for emphasis, questions inserted to encourage beneficial cognitive activities or checks on understanding, etc. I have written a small book for educators on this subject and offer free online resources.
Others see broader opportunities in what I describe as layering. Some describe the opportunity to “annotate the web” as a way to expand or criticize online content. For example, it would offer a way to identify falsehoods in online content or a way to add discussion to a primary source.
The opportunity to layer content on the work of other authors is not without controversy. I have written previously about the negative reaction some authors have to others commenting on their work. One comparison that might help you understand this negative reaction might be what happens when authors allow comments on their material – say a blog post or a YouTube video. Not only can comments be negative, but comments can be completely off target or involve personal attacks. To prevent such comments, content creators may turn off comments.
I can certainly see how such concerns could be valid, my focus has been on layering methods that are limited to a controlled group (a teacher and his/her class). A moderated use such as this would only reveal comments within the group and would allow the teacher to supervise. Some, however, may simply object to the appearance of a modification (even when the original content is still intact) without permission.
As I have explored various layering services I recommend to educators, I have become aware of a different concern. This concern is related to some of the various techniques by which a layer of content can be added to an existing web resource. I was investigating a service called Genius. This service has positive goals and influential technology backers. The service is very easy to use but it has been described as a proxy server that overrides certain security features assumed by the original author. I have searched for more recent descriptions of how Genius works and sent an inquiry to the company for a comment on this concern, but to this point I am assuming the Verge concern (see link above) is still valid.
The practice of layering Internet content raises interesting questions. In what I consider the ideal application, the author’s original content is all presented (including ads) and the original content can be clearly differentiated from any annotations or added components by color or some other mechanism that makes clear what has been added. This composite is viewed by users who understand that what they see is a combination provided by multiple individuals and these viewers opt in to view this composite. By opt in, I mean the viewers must activate access to the service combining the inputs so that they understand what they are viewing is not the original. I don’t think existing copyright law would prevent this set of circumstances and I doubt the number of such services would exist should the practice be easy to challenge. You certainly don’t see comparable composites with print media, but similar composites in print would require republication of an original author’s work. This is a content model unique to the Internet.
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