A Social Media Success Story: Global Collaboration Anyone?

Thirteen years ago, I started my overseas career in Caracas, Venezuela at Escuela Campo Alegre.  It was there that I met my first true mentor teacher, Rich Lehrer.  Unfortunately, he met with an untimely "demise" in my forensics science project the following year, "Who Killed Mr. Lehrer".  ​ I guess he took it personally because he moved to Brazil that summer, and I didn't hear from him again until last Thursday...on Facebook chat.  

Rich: Hey Rory! ​

Me: Hey Rich!  Long time! How's it going?

Rich:  That's for sure!  Thing are pretty good. Hey, can I tell you about a cool global project my kids are involved in?​  (No small talk for this guy!)

In short, Rich has developed a PBL unit around efficient biomass cook stoves. His 8th grade science class has formed a global collaborative with schools from Rwanda, Brazil, Uganda, and now Mumbai to explore energy usage in these country as it relates to their project. It is pretty much awesomeness.  Check it out at this link.  One of the aims of their project is to involve other schools from around the world in their ongoing Global Efficient Cook Stove Education Project. They are looking to assist other schools who are interested in mounting a global, hands-on, evidence-based, design-challenge approach to this and other issues of sustainability.  Rich's contact information can be found on his wiki site.  He would love to connect with other schools so give him a shout if you are interested!  I am hoping to connect his class with a couple of my students who are working on a connected project here in Mumbai.    Gotta love social media!

Coincidentally, I came across a post this afternoon by Steve Wheeler on my Twitter feed that speaks to the importance of global collaboration for educators.  ​In his post, Three Things, Steve states:

"Learning needs to be globalised. As we develop personal expertise, and begin to practice it in applied contexts, we need to connect with global communities. Students who share their content online can reach a worldwide audience who can act as a peer network to provide constructive feedback. Teachers can crowd-source their ideas and share their content in professional forums and global learning collectives, or harness the power of social media to access thought leaders in their particular field of expertise. Scholars who are not connected into the global community are increasingly isolated and will in time be left behind as the world of education advances ever onward." 

​Indeed, Steve.  Well said. 

Redos and Retakes? Management Strategies for that Endless Pile of Grading

I participated in the #sbgchat on Twitter a few days ago and the topic was redos and retakes.  It was a great discussion, and you should definitely check out the archive on Storify.  On simple grading tasks like quizzes or tests, this is a no brainer if you use standards-based approach to learning in your class.  If they haven't met the standard, how can you not give them an opportunity to reach it?  However, the waters get a little murkier when those long assessments like essays and labs start to pile up and then pile up again and again.  ​There is an element of time that has to be taken into consideration. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day.  In fact, I am writing this as I procrastinate grading a stack of labs that I will be looking at for the second and for some the third time before sending them off to IB for moderation.  A few people voiced this concern in the chat, but interestingly enough, when I went back to offer a suggestion to one of the participants, her tweet had mysteriously disappeared.  Was she shamed into retraction in the face of all of the enthusiastic responses championing the redo?  Perhaps, or maybe she was just having a day like I am today...drowning under a pile of labs with no end in sight!   Feeling Anonymous's pain, ​I am going to share some strategies that I use in class to cut back on the regrading. 

Strategy #1: ​Todaysmeet

First and foremost, you must have a culture of trust and collaboration in your classroom coupled with strong formative assessment practices. One strategy that has worked well for me in the past is to ask for a volunteer from the class to present their lab to the class for feedback.  Students usually LOVE to do this, as it is a safe environment to get some feedback before they have to submit their "final" write-up.  While the student presents, I have the rest of the class use Todaysmeet as a backchannel for commenting and asking questions during the presentation with me monitoring the conversation.  Since labs are divided into separate sections, we stop after each key piece and then discuss as a class, and review the chat.  I then give students about 5 minutes to make notes on their own labs.  Here is a link to the specifics of running a Todaysmeet backchannel in class, including examples from one of my lab sessions. 

Strategy #2:  Collaborative Team Docs

When I have students work in groups to design a lab, I have them peer edit in teams.  If I have three groups then Team 1 shares their collaborative lab with all of the members of Team 2, Team 2 Shares with Team 3, and Team 3 shares with Team 1, and of course they all share with me so that I can monitor while they are working on their peer edits.  All students are required to comment on the docs.  I give each team a lab checklist and a series of question prompts to guide them through their peer edit.  Then as a group they read through the other teams lab and make suggestions using the comment function on Google docs.  While monitoring, I will occasionally pipe in if necessary to redirect, or point out something that they have missed.  Though it is great to get feedback from a fresh pair of eyes (or three or four), the real benefit of this strategy is that every time they find an error on another group's lab, they reflect on their own lab and secretly (or so they think) they make edits on their own lab as they go through this process.  I also strategically pair up a model group with one that seems to be struggling so that the weaker group can see what a well written lab design looks like.  Here is a screenshot from one of these CTD sessions. 

Strategy #3:  First Come First Serve

...or the early birds get the feedback :-)  I take the first five labs submitted before the deadline and give them a once over.  I then hand them back with my comments for revision, but in addition, I create a general comments list comprised of common mistakes and omissions that I share with students on Google docs.  I then take about fifteen minutes in class to walk them through some ​of the general errors that I found and give them some time to make notes on their own labs. I then extend the deadline by a couple of days and direct the students to our Facebook group if they have any questions while they are working through some last minute errors that they discovered on their own labs.  By doing this, student are forced to start to recognize errors on their own, which pays off in the end when they are writing up subsequent labs.  I find that if they only correct errors that I point out while grading, they tend to make the same errors over and over again. This helps to cut back on this recurrence. 

Regardless, I still do my fair share of regrading.  In fact one of the labs in my dropbox at the moment is labeled "Final, Final, FINAL Hydrilla lab".  I guess I better get back to it.   ​

Student Learning: A 21st Century Sci-Fi E-book

Remember when? This pic showed up in my Facebook feed this morning and it sent waves of terrifying flashbacks through me.  Incidentally, my mother was a school librarian, so you can imagine.  My heart started to race, my eyes opened wide...well maybe that was the coffee.  Either way, this is the form of "Googling" that I grew up with.  In fact, I immediately Googled card catalog images... and wished that I hadn't...back to the photo.  The reference card the girl in the picture picks up will most likely lead her to a book or research article with outdated information based on research carried out in a similar fashion. There will be no rapid connections made pointing her in new directions without opening a new drawer and sifting through a stream of unrelated or outdated resource references.  When I think about how I access information today, it doesn't even compare.  Imagine if the girl in the photo found out that within a couple of minutes, she could sift through endless volumes of current, relevant information, and contact experts across the globe to learn the information that she seeks without ever leaving her computer or picking up her land line phone.  At best it would be the makings of a great sci-fi tale, a Farenheit 451 or 1984 if you will.  Though this futuristic account of card catalogs would be frightening indeed, imagine if the situation were reversed and the sci-fi novel told a decidedly harrier tale, the disappearance of the Internet as we know it and a return to card catalogs and geographical isolation.   

This made me think about how we structure learning for our students.  ​In my last post about problem finders, I talked about Ewan McIntosh's design thinking school, NoTosh.  In his blog post about problem finders, Ewan states, " Teachers, for too long, have actually been doing the richest work of learning for their students. Teachers find problems, frame them and the resources young people can use to solve them. Young people get a sliver of learning from coming up with ideas, based on some basic principles upon which the teacher has briefed them, and the teacher then comes back on the scene to run the whole feedback procedure." 

Now I am going to make the assumption that all of you reading this blog exist on the tech savvy side of the learning continuum.  You are after all reading blogs on the Internet, and some of you were directed here from some form of social media or RSS feed.  As a teacher, do you define your own problems or does someone else find them for you?  Does someone else supply you with your resources for learning or do you discover them on your own? 

When asked why we do so much of the legwork for our students in terms of finding and framing problems and identifying resources, we usually respond that we don't have enough time, or they aren't good at it.  If that is the case, then isn't that the one skill that we SHOULD be teaching our students ?  As teachers, we need to reprogram our card catalog habits.  I propose that we write our own sci-fi novel; one where students are empowered to discover, research, and solve problems through prototyping using their special powers of information fluency and critical thinking.  

SPOILER ALERT:  In the end, these superheroes reverse global warming, cure cancer along with a host of terrifying diseases, bring peace to the Middle East, and force Justin Bieber and boy bands into obsolescence.  Well at least that is what would happen if I was the author. 

On that note, it is spring break and I am going to give this disappearing Internet fantasy a go! ​

Problem Finders: Tweaking KWL for the 21st Century

Hypertrichosis, the werewolf disease.

In my last post, I shared the new and improved version of the KWL graphic organizer, and how I tweaked this version for the purpose of my biology class.   ​I am in the middle of my genetics unit at the moment, and I was trying to come up with the best way to teach about transmission of genes.  Traditionally I would give the students a set of problems that requires them to recognize the connection between alleles, traits, and their mode of inheritance (dominant, recessive, codominant, sex-linked etc.) and then they would solve probability problems using Punnett squares and pedigrees.  However, I decided to challenge myself to find a more engaging approach that required students to question and think critically about the problems.  This is when I discovered this fantastic resource, a seemingly endless list of case studies that are nothing if not perplexing.  One great example of this is the Blue People of Kentucky.  It has all of the marks of perplexity that Dan Meyer speaks of, so I decided to turn my students into genetics detectives. 

Since this is an IB biology course, there is specific content that students are responsible for learning like sex-linked inheritance in hemophilia, multiple alleles with blood types, codominance in sickle cell anemia etc.  I selected five case studies for the students to investigate and began with the classic inbreeding royals example of hemophilia. 

A fabulously outspoken student that just arrived at ASB last year ​took one look at the first case and said, "Not this again!  This is only like the third time that I have studied this!"  O-U-C-H!  Fortunately, the werewolf and the rest were new and interesting to him, but he brought up a really great point.  One that I had already been thinking about after watching Ewan McIntosh's TEDxLondon talk a couple of nights before. 

You see though my intentions were to engage my students by providing them with authentic problems that were somewhat messy and difficult to solve unlike the classic problem sets, I DEFINED the problems for them which were indirectly DEFINED for me by IBO.  As Ewan states in his blog post, "Currently, the world’s education systems are crazy about problem-based learning, but they’re obsessed with the wrong bit of it. While everyone looks at how we could help young people become better problem-solvers, we’re not thinking how we could create a generation of problem finders."    ​

He proposes a model in which 20 to 30 global themes are presented and discussed and then the students began to gather information within and beyond the walls of the classroom and come up with problems that they would like to tackle head on.  This story ends with a prototype instead of a wiki.  I have actually informally proposed this course several times over the past two years.  Here is my vision:  

It starts with the book, High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them.  Students discuss the different global issues and then bring them down to a tangible local level.  Allow them to create interest-based teams of problem solvers and then mentor them through their research and prototyping.  With this course, students will begin to impact their world right now.  The graphic organizer for their course?  PKWHLAEN (I know, this is getting ridiculous.  It's time to abandon the acronym). 

P:  What problem in my local community ignites my passion to the point of ​action?

K:  What do I know about the variables that are affected by this problems or are contributing to its existence?  ​This would involve not only academic research, but also data collection from authentic sources and an evaluation of the problem in an authentic setting.

W:  What do I want to resolve about this situation?  What resources, including experts in the field and project participants, will I need? 

H:  How do I find out the information that I need to create a prototype that will attempt to solve this problem?  ​How do I contact the people whose expertise and talents will help to make my project a reality? 

L:  What have I learned through my research?  Can my idea become a reality or do I need to go back a few steps and change my plan? 

A:  What actions do I need to take to turn my ideas into a reality?  ​PROTOTYPE.

E:  Evaluate the prototype.

N:  What are the next steps?  Do I go back to the drawing board?  Do I share out my ideas and expand my protocol to other communities?  Do I build on what I have already done and tackle another face of the larger global issue?  ​

​In the middle of Christmas vacation, I received an urgent message from two students.  They wanted to call me to discuss a project idea that they had that would help bring clean drinking water to the slums of Mumbai.  They have now been doing independent research outside of school for the past three months.  Their idea has morphed from clean drinking water to designing a device that could help control the pollutants released into the air when people are burning trash.  A few weeks ago, they showed up after school to check out how the exhaust system works on the fume hood in my classroom. 

It sounds like I might have two problem finders who would make great candidates for this course.  I guess I just need to go ahead and make my proposal official.  

If you want to know more about Ewan's problem finder's mission, check out his lab! ​