Author: grabe

Preparation for online teaching

I am trying to make a decision. I am beginning work on a revision of our textbook (Integrating technology for meaningful learning) and I am trying to decide how much to include about teaching online (remotely if you prefer). This decision has ramifications for how I spend time and whether the content produced is deemed relevant by those who make decisions regarding what textbook they assign in their classes. Clearly, nearly all k12 educators have now had a taste of teaching at a distance. Most had no preparation for working this way and neither did the students and families they served. The timing of my decision is awkward. Will the future bring a complete return to normal or will some of what is now the new normal carry over? Hard to say isn’t it? K12 education is very traditional as a rule, but so many say many aspects of normal (e.g., shopping, office work, entertainment) will likely be altered so why not K12 teaching and learning? Anyway, this is what I am thinking about.

It is not that I am inexperienced in teaching online. Working in higher education engaged with preservice and inservice teachers, I worked at a distance a lot. Often I went to where teachers were or at least near where they were. This was mostly a function of teaching grad students in education or providing professional development workshops. Mostly I drove, but because I worked most of my career at a university with a leading aviation program sometimes I flew. When I was lucky, we took a jet. Technology changed this approach and from specialized television to the personal computer approaches we now all use, we met from wherever we were. I have had no experiences teaching young learners in any of these experiences and while my experiences may have focused on preparing educators to use technology, little involved preparing educators themselves to teach at a distance. In evaluating the content I explored with educators that might be relevant, the one topic that seems relevant might be the recent interest in “flipping the classroom”.

I have been exploring traditional sources to see what others have done. There are some sources and the anecdotal accounts collected from recent experiences. Too many of the recent anecdotes seem to be negative – too much work, lack of engagement, problems with equality of access, etc. Organizations one might expected to have offered guidance to the preparation of future and practicing teachers seem to be scrambling just as I am. For example, ISTE seems to have little existing guidance when it comes to the standards that might be expected to guide teacher preparation focused on this situation. There just hasn’t been enough need with general instruction and niche topics – credit recovery, access to unique courses, home schooling, etc., providing the areas with the most development and guidance. What of this can be used to guide a possible new normal? I wonder what other textbook authors are considering at this point. Will they stick with traditional topics or will they make an effort to incorporate new themes?

Anyway, I likely will write about this topic more as I decide what I will do.

I have been exploring a bit and I thought I would offer one resource I found interesting. When I made the transition in my own experience going from driving or flying to workng with educators online, I read a couple of books to get some ideas. 

Kearsley, G. (2000). Learning and teaching in cyberspace. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. 

Ko, S., & Rossen, S. (2001) Teaching online: A practical guide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McKenzie, J. (2001, March). How teachers

I list these references only because in searching for work on the preparation of K12 educators to teach at a distance, I encountered one of these authors/researchers again.

Kearsley, G., & Blomeyer, R. (2004). Preparing K—12 Teachers to Teach Online. Educational Technology, 44(1), 49-52.

Reading this article (the journal no longer exists, but university libraries likely can provide access), I found the advice and predictions quite enlightening. I find what could be described as futurists’ recommendations to be quite interesting when examined in hindsight. Here are a few things I thought others might enjoy.

The authors examined who might be suited to distance education and the skills and attributes that would be important. The authors commented on the likely workload of content preparation and 24/7 availability. They warned that educators interested in this approach be prepared to sit at a computer for several hours at a time. Keyboarding skills should be well developed.

The strategies likely to be successful online included: student-centered activities; problem-based learning; collaborative learning; and  peer evaluation.

The authors also recommended that educators should have experiences themselves learning at a distance as part of their preparation. This is a recommendation I have seen many times in the literature predicting whether K12 educators would make much use of technology with their students leading to questions about how educators involved in preservice teacher training made use of technology themselves. 

One final issue that I admit I had not considered involved certification. What exactly should be experiences/skills involved in the certification of educators teaching at a distance and what should be done to assure that there was some commonality in these expectations from one state to the next. Commonality was more critical than with more traditional instruction because students would often be from different states. 

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Layering from the perspectives of research and practice

I have been writing about online services that allow content elements (e.g., highlighting, notes) to be layered on existing online pages and videos without modifying the content as intended by the original author. The options for both layering web pages and online videos have grown since I began commenting on this type of service. Because I mostly write for educators, there comes a point at which it might be useful to rank or at least differentiate these services. For example, what is the best free service? What is the best service no matter the cost? 

My early interest in this category of tools was encouraged by an exploration of Hypothes.is. I think I remember the origins of this service promoting “annotate the web” with a general emphasis on general interaction focused on the content the web made available. Fair or not, I think companies, even open source efforts, can become limited by their early vision. At this point, this service seems a general application with relevance to education, but not necessarily designed specifically for education. The tool options – highlight and annotate – seem limited in comparison say to the tool set available from a similar service – Insert Learning. So, for example, while Hypothes.is.’s annotate function could be used to ask questions or encourage discussion, Insert Learning has tools specific to annotation, questions, and discussion. The Insert Learning tools are flexible (e.g., a multiple choice tool) and can send the responses from individual students back to a dashboard from which the educator can see who has responded and who has not and assign grades or easily keep track of participation. This differentiation of tools and integrated data collection system is educationally very useful. Of course, Insert Learning is a paid service. 

In some ways, I still see Hypothes.is as driving developments in this field. It is a service with roots in a research community and I think this base is important for productive developments. These roots come with what might seem limitations to some as a noncommercial approach has limits on the resources necessary for rapid innovation. For example, the Hypothes.is blog describes the Indiana University social annotation project and interest in using learning analytics to investigate annotation.

I find myself working and writing at the intersection of research and practice and I can appreciate both of the services I have described here from these perspectives.

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SoundNote – take notes for review

This is one of the most practical digital recommendations I have for upper-division students or those of us who take notes from presentations. SoundNote simultaneously records audio content and allows the user to generate notes (with simple images). The advantage of this simultaneous recording of the sound and the notes is the later opportunity to use the sound when the notes taken prove inadequate. What do you as a student do when the notes you took no longer made sense? Click on the note that makes no sense and listen to the associated audio again.

This is my answer to those who want to argue that taking notes longhand is superior to using a laptop/tablet.

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Read the Methods section

This citation has been circulated widely in the past week:

Urry, H. L., Crittle, C. S., Floerke, V. A., Leonard, M. Z., Perry III, C. S., Akdilek, N., … & Zarrow, J. E. (2019). Don’t Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies. Psychological Science, 0956797620965541.

You get the idea from the title. The replication of a previous study showing that taking notes with pencil and notebook is not superior to taking notes using your laptop. This study challenged the results of an earlier study that was often cited by using a notebook and pencil while taking notes.

OK – it is now OK for tech folks to argue students can use their laptops during class to take notes.

I am not impressed by either study for this reason. Neither study offers a good model for note-taking as the first step in studying which is really what students are doing when taking notes.

Here is a key couple of sentences from the Abstract that explain the method used in this research:

participants watched a lecture while taking notes with a laptop (n = 74) or longhand (n = 68). After a brief distraction and without the opportunity to study, they took a quiz

This is really a method that would be appropriate to the generative function of taking notes. Do you understand better while taking notes and in this case do you understand better when taking notes longhand versus using a laptop. The results do not indicate that it matters, but this is not why you take notes anyway. You don’t take notes and then take a test. You take notes over a period of time, study your notes, and then take a test. The delay and the amount of material are the reality faced by students.

My recommendation goes further and involves a combination of recording and note-taking only available on a digital device (see my description of SoundNote). This app allows the taking of notes, but records the audio in the background and time stamps each note to a location in the audio. This combination makes it easy to listen to sections of the audio when the notes that exist are not adequate. This would work would also benefit from the research finding that laptop users take more notes.

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Garden Update

I started my hydroponic garden in early December and decided it was time for an update. The garden is 96 days old and just starting to provide cherry tomatoes. We have been eating the lettuce for some time now and I decided it was time to replant the side of the garden dedicated to lettuce. I am preparing my own lettuce “plugs” this time as I continue to experiment with modifying various components of the stock system. I decided I will keep a tally of the number of cherry tomatoes I harvest and I added a meter to measure the amount of power consumed. I am not under an impression that growing your own vegetables indoors is cost-effective, but some estimate of the on-going cost would be interesting.

The following images show the lettuce/herb side of the garden before replacement, the new setup, and the first cherry tomatoes.

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Create a YouTube Playlist

Educators may want to assign a collection of YouTube videos to students for a project or study assignment. This tutorial will explain how this is done and relies mostly on a series of images.

I see this process in three stages – create a playlist, add videos to the playlist, share the playlist with a specific audience. The process works a little differently depending on whether you want to use videos you have created or videos created by others.

Stages 1 and 2 using videos created by others.

Beneath a video from another source, you will find this save icon. The save icon brings up the option of adding to an existing playlist or creating a new playlist. You would first create a new playlist with a video you wanted to use and then continue to add additional videos. The order of selection can be modified at a later stage so you don’t have to worry about the order when first creating the list.

Working with your own videos or a mix of content from your own creations and existing videos seems to work a little differently. To create the list and add your own creations, work through the YouTube Studio.

Within the Studio, you can then identify a video you have created to be added, open the video as if to edit, and then use the playlist feature to add to an existing playlist.

The final step is to share the list with students. Note in this image the share button (left) and the list of selected videos on the right. A key feature of this list of videos is the opportunity to reorder the videos. You drag the video with the small parallel lines icon to change the position. The share icon offers the opportunity to share to various outlets or allows the copying of the URL for sharing with specific individuals.

A sample playlist focused on my own efforts to explain Layering services was created using this process.

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Battling Online Toxicity

We have learned that social media can be very inappropriate. While the promise of interaction for greater understanding is certainly there, the negativity of such interaction seems to have destroyed this opportunity leading to the expectations of many that political pressure must be put on social media services.

There may be an alternative. The idea of middleware proposes that a technology fix can be positioned between the user and the service. This concept is explained in this article from the Wall Street Journal. While the article describes the potential and approach in some depth, it lacks specific examples.

Work is underway on at least one approach. Jigsaw, a group associated with Google, has been working on the development of Perspective which proposes the use of AI to develop an API to screen comments before they are sent or before they are read. The link provides an explanation and an opportunity to test a comment you might send. Research has demonstrated that users will often make modifications in reaction to what are called nudges. The proposal is that such technology could be incorporated by social services, but also function as middleware.

While this technology exists and is being refined, you can already use a version of what is now available. Tune is a chrome extension you can add to screen comments you would be exposed to through several social media platforms.

Toxicity middleware may be coming to school technology equipment in the near future.

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