Dropping the F-bomb in Class Part 1: Why?

A couple of years ago, I saw a student post the solution to a math problem that he had worked out on Facebook.  Several of his classmates were tagged on the post.  When I asked a student in my class about it, she told me that they were all struggling to solve this problem, so he shared his solution with the class. 

When I saw the student's post, a few questions popped into my mind:  

1. How many of the students in that class actually understood this problem, or more importantly the problem solving strategy after seeing this post on Facebook?   
2. If this teacher does grade homework, how many of these students will own up to their confusion and how many of them will pretend to understand for the sake of the grade?    
3. How long will it take this teacher to discover that his students have not mastered this concept/skill? 
   

What were the first thoughts that went through your mind?  If your initial response to the post was that social media should not be allowed in schools because it encourages and/or facilitates cheating, you might be teaching in the wrong century.  We typically use technology to facilitate practices that are already in place. It is incredibly naive to think that students weren't coming together and sharing these solutions on paper long before Facebook arrived on the scene.  I know that I did.  This is the main reason that I stopped grading homework. Homework grades are as unreliable as effort grades when attempting to measure a student's mastery of standards in your classroom.  If the homework you assign is not meaningful and you don't have 100% student buy-in, some of your students will do whatever it takes to get the grade.  It is next to impossible to trace the source of the homework effort and certainly not worth the time that it will take to do so.  Facebook is simply another medium, and one with endless possibilities and benefits for learning.   Let's face it, social media is our new reality.  It is time for us to embrace it or be left behind.  At least this is how I see it so... Rather than trying to change something that was out of my control, I decided to embrace Facebook and leverage the benefits of these exchanges for some "just in time" teaching opportunities.  The next day I created Facebook groups for all of my classes as a space for them to have these discussions about homework.  The only difference was that I would be able to formatively assess my students understanding "just in time" to teach my class the next day.  

Two years later, Facebook has become my go-to "LMS".  I  could actually write a book about the benefits of using Facebook groups in your class coupled with strategies for teachers to leverage these benefits.  However, since this is just a blog post, I will leave you with my top three reasons for using Facebook Groups in my classes:   

1)  Students are constantly checking Facebook at school, at home and on the go via their smart phones.  Every time someone posts in the group, all of the members receive a message alert, and who can resist that? FB groups now have a feature that tells you which members have seen the post.  As a result, I use FB to post assignments, resources, and discussions.  This allows me to adjust and modify plans on the go as well.  The example below was an assignment that I created in response to an awesome discussion my students were having about AIDS in my FB group.  I completely changed my lesson plan the following day to allow them to continue their learning on this topic.  If I hadn't witnessed the conversation that they were having, I would have moved on without leveraging this opportunity. 

2)  Students don't normally work on their homework until it is past my "bedtime".  Before Facebook, a student would get stuck and then send me an e-mail.  If I didn't respond immediately, they would give up and show up to class with an incomplete assignment, unprepared to build on their learning.  Let's face it, e-mail is unreliable.  Students check it less and less, and the responsibility of responding is yours and yours alone.  With Facebook, students can post questions to the group, and other students can respond (immediately), thereby increasing the chance that they will sort out their issues prior to class.  Another benefit of this is that if several students respond incorrectly, I will know this before class the following day and be able alter my plan accordingly.  This helps to minimize the gaps that get created in learning due to time lapses between learning, assessments, and grading of assessments, which consequently alleviates some of the frustration and motivation issues that accompany this disconnect between teaching and learning. 

Student requesting help for her lab write-up.  ​

Notice the time difference between the post and the first response.  ​

3)  Facebook syncs with Dropbox and most social media apps (Flipboard etc.).  You can also upload files from your computer like presentations from class.  Because of this, I can share articles and discoveries to extend their learning beyond the curriculum.  Students do the same.  After modeling this practice for a couple of months, my Facebook group became a place for students to share and discuss their own personal finds relevant to class discussions etc. One example of how I use this extend my class beyond the 85 minute period is described at the end of my post, 21st Century Magic 8 Ball.  Facebook has helped me to transfer the responsibility of learning to the students.

This is handy for revision, or when students are absent especially when away on school trips etc. 

A student posted his own review flash cards to share with the class.  ​

Again, student initiated post to share with classmates.  ​

By now I hope that I have convinced some of you to embrace social media in your classrooms.  For those of you who are ready to take the leap, my next post in the series will be about how to set up secure, private, unsearchable groups on Facebook WITHOUT being friends with your students.  For those of you still on the fence, stay tuned for my follow up post on busting the myths about Facebook groups in the classroom.  In the meantime, if your only barriers are policies set by the administration or school district, feel free to share this post with them to begin a dialogue. Let's see if we can't change their minds! 

21st Century Magic 8 Ball: Knowledgeable Networkers Part III

For the past week I have been living vicariously through the twitter feeds of those attending SXSWedu in Austin, TX.  Today, Melissa Greenwood wrote about What's Changing in Education for Smart Blog.  The first item in her list was Teach Students to Find the Answers.  Alan November told attendees in his session entitled Creating a New Culture of Teaching and Learning that 100% of questions that students ask teachers are Google-able.  He goes on to say that educators must become learning facilitators, teaching students, among other things, how to create solid queries for online research and use the technology and tools available to them. 

We can no longer function as the Magic 8 Ball for our students.  It is time to throw out the standard responses, and change our Magic 8 Ball rhetoric that we use with students.   ​

Last night I received a message from a former student who is taking a biology course at the moment. ​

Student:  Ms. Newcomb at the end of the ETC why does oxygen have to be the final acceptor of electrons?​  (Definitely Google-able)

Me:  (answered a question with a question) 

Student:​ (continuing to bombard me with Google-able questions, then has a thought) Maybe that's why evolutionary oxygen was the most efficient option.

Me:  It would be interesting is to look into the evolution of the ETC. If you think about it, when life began, theoretically there was only anaerobic bacteria. How did those organisms transform energy? Then the photosynthetic bacteria evolved and started to produce O2…which lead to the oxygen catastrophe. So theoretically, it could have been somewhere in this time period when eukaroytic organisms evolved alongside of the increased production of O2 that these mechanisms would have come about. Look it up and let me know what you find!​

Student:  That's awesome and makes so much sense and I definitely will.  One site is saying that it is only because oxygen has a great electronegativity. The only substance with a greater electronegativity is fluorine which is poisonous.

This conversation would have gone differently had I simply answered his question.  Instead, my magic 8 ball response was, "Better not tell you now".  This approach helped him to refocus his questions and pointed him in the direction of other research possibilities. 

I woke up this morning to a message containing a series of links that attempt to answer the evolutionary origins of aerobic respiration.  One peaked my interest.  ​In the article, Evolution of energetic metabolism: the respiration-early hypothesis, the abstract states: 

Other molecular data predict that this ancestor was unlikely to perform oxygenic photosynthesis. This evidence, that aerobic respiration has a single origin and may have evolved before oxygen was released to the atmosphere by photosynthetic organisms, is contrary to the textbook viewpoint.​

Textbooks can be wrong???​  :-)

21st Century Magic 8 Ball response suggestion #1:  I don't know.  Why don't you find out and share what you learn with the class? 

I do this frequently in class even if I know the answer.  The other day, we were discussing the mechanisms of movement at a molecular level.  ​

Student:  Your heart is a muscle that is constantly contracting.  Why doesn't it ever get tired?  ​(Google-able question)

21st Century Magic 8 Ball response: I don't know.  Why don't you find out and share what you learn with the class?  ​

Student post to class Facebook group:  ​

In case you are curious, here is the link.  Which brings me to my question for you.  What suggestions do you have for the revised 21st Century Magic 8 Ball?   While you ponder that, I am off to research this obscure hypothesis from 1995 that could very well turn everything that we think we know about the evolution of aerobic respiration upside down...or not.

Knowledgeable Networkers Part I​                Knowledgeable Networkers Part II ​              

Knowledgeable Networker Part II: It Takes One to Know One

Image credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/75279887@N05/6914441342/

The other day, a colleague of mine asked me how to insert a hyperlink with text into a Google spreadsheet.  I remembered doing this once before, but I had forgotten how to do it because I don't practice it on a regular basis.  I immediately searched for a solution and within 30 seconds, I solved her problem. In case you are wondering, you simply enter the following code:  =HYPERLINK ("URL","visible text"). Though I instinctively search out a solution on the Internet when I don't know the answer to something, I am not confident that this is everyone's instinct.  In fact I suspect that many people would give up on finding an answer before venturing down that rabbit hole.

My IB students just completed their photosynthesis design labs.  Since they have to take a minimum of five trials for each of their five independent variables, there is no way that they could have used one probe for all of their trials due to the time investment that would require.  As a result most of them ended up with data that was not aligned because the different probes were calibrated to a different starting point.  In order to take the mean and standard deviation of their five trials, they first have to calculate the cumulative change in their data.  As surprising as this might be, this is not instinctive for most students :-)  So today a student asked me how to do this on Excel.  After I explained the method to the class, Shiva the Destroyer had a look of exasperation on his face.  When I asked him if he was confused, he confessed that he had individually calculated each and every cell of his data rather than using the Excel functions to program a couple of cells and then dragging through the rest of his column.  Now, I don't know how many of you have used Vernier probes to collect data before, but imagine 25 trials with data points collected every 15 seconds for 10-20 minutes.  He might as well have just used a single probe to collect his data!  Just a few weeks ago, I posted about how resourceful Shiva was at finding information on the Internet.  Yet, when he encountered an issue with Excel, he did not think to use that same skill to solve his problem.  Nor did he think to come and ask me for a solution.  There are two other pieces of information that you need to consider when you reflect on this.  Shiva is taking two higher level science courses, and this was at least the third design lab in biology that we have done in a year and a half where he has had to process his data in this manner.  He had been shown this method before as had the rest of my students.

What are my takeaways?  ​

1. We as teachers in the 21st century need to be knowledgeable networkers.  If you are not sure what this is, check out the links in my previous post, Old Habits...Don't Seem to Die.  If you rely on textbooks for the majority of your information, how will you prepare your students for what awaits them once they graduate?  Check out this provocative video called Infowhelm and Information Fluency.
   
2. I am responsible for the fact that my students did not remember how to process their data using Excel.  ​Practicing this skill on three isolated assessments over a year and a half was not sufficient to make this stick.  However, in this day and age, that is not my failure.  My failure is that they did not take the initiative to find a solution to their problem on their own.
   
3. It is not good enough to just model these practices.  We need to embed these skills into our lessons across disciplines on a regular basis so that our kids can not only practice these skills but also transfer them to new situations. 
   

​On a positive note, Shiva did redeem himself.  I posted a link to Kottke's blog on our Facebook group and asked the kids to identify the specific enzymes used to produce the sugars mentioned.  The Destroyer had an answer for me within minutes.  :-)

Oh, and if you are ever wondering how to customize error bars using the 2008 version of Excel for a Mac, here is a video tutorial for you :-) 

Shiva the Destroyer

There is a student in my class whom I refer to as Shiva the Destroyer. 

1. Because his name is close to Shiva, a revered but complicated Hindu god, and we live in India.
2. Because he manages to destroy every class discussion on Facebook with his resourcefulness.

Though these reasons might appear to have negative connotations, the truth is he earned this nickname out of a sign of respect.  Though he is not the top student gradewise in class, I can truly say that his information fluency/literacy skills serve as a model for all students in my class.  He is the one student who I can count on to be over prepared for class on a consistent basis.  By over prepared, I mean full of "fun facts" beyond the scope of the content defined by the curriculum.  It is a given that in any discussion, he will interject at some point with a statement that he begins with, "Fun fact..."  I call it passion.

Today we were discussion  the reproduction of angiosperms.  Now I have to confess that botany is my least favorite subdiscipline of biology.  I can't even keep an ivy alive.  So here I find myself, the possessor of a black thumb, rushing to the finish line before IB exams, attempting to cram content into my students minds that will make them old school factual experts who will pass their exams with flying colors in May and soon forget everything they ever knew about plants.  Bad teacher moment # (I think I will leave that one blank). 

Enter Shiva the Destroyer. 

Me:  Here is a picture of a dicotyledonous flower and here is how reproduction occurs in these plants.  Lalala, wind, lalala, hummingbirds, lalala, bees...

Shiva:  Fun fact!  Did you know that there is a species of wasp that has a symbiotic relationship with figs.  The females don't have wings and they mate with the males in the immature fig fruit (which is actually a flower).  While they are reproducing, pollen is transferred to the female structures of the plant where the wingless female wasp resides (facts are a little jumbled...see below).

Me:  Things just got interesting.  Could you post a link to that research on our Facebook group (that you discovered while independently researching obscure examples of pollination to prepare for our one hour class of information cramming)?  

He was a bit shaky on the details, but this article explains it all.  It is a harrowing tale of dismembered wasps and tragic death all in the name of sexual reproduction and survival of a species.  If nothing else, it will make you think twice before biting into a fig.  It is examples like these that breathe the life into learning and provide our students with vibrant imagery and curiosity that will lead the rest of them down the rabbit hole.  Is this what IB wants the kids to know about pollination?  No.  Is this what biology is all about?  Absolutely.  Is this the kind of pursuit we should be encouraging in our students?  That was a rhetorical question.

In my alternate reality, all students show up to each and every class filled with fun facts to share and discuss.  So how can we as teachers encourage even a fraction of this exploration outside of class?