I wrote a post about increasing skills in selecting from web query search results in March 2011. I continue to refine the investigation every year. This year instead of setting up twelve preselected websites I presented the class with a prompt. I asked the students to try to find the best website to learn who started the Academy Awards and the date of the first awards show.
Learning to Use Social Bookmarks
In the fourth and fifth grade, the students bookmark websites in Firefox's Bookmarks tool. The bookmarks are placed in a folder but they are locked into whichever machine the students used when they bookmarked the site. I create student accounts through the teacher console in Diigo. The students create a music video using Creative Commons licensed music. They use Pics4Learning to interpret the song through images. They bookmark the pictures in Diigo and learn how to give the bookmark a title (in this case a name that will remind them of the picture). They enter a description for the Diigo bookmark (in this case what lyrics in the song they will use with the image). Finally, they enter a tag (this year it was America for the song God Bless America). We post their final video with citations in Vimeo. Over time the videos have included God Bless America, America the Beautiful, He Got the Whole World in His Hands, and Go Tell It on the Mountain.
They continue using Diigo to bookmark images for their Dinner with Guests presentation. The students do not share the bookmarks with classmates in this grade level. They are just getting used to the idea of signing on and saving bookmarks. They can use Diigo from home or school for any project.
Deciding Between Web Queries
The next project builds on the fifth grade queries they practiced in order to write reports. As I noted in the opening to this post, I asked two classes of sixth grade students to find me the best website answering the question about the Academy Awards. There were a wide variety of responses. I labeled them A-L and posted them as tiles on a Symbaloo page.
I broke the students into four groups of four to five students. Each group received a job sheet and a grid to analyze their assigned sites.
Authority, Bias, Content, and Usability Experts
Each student takes on an expert role after I walk them through the job sheets. As an example, I use Google to search for "george washington" biography. It gives us a way to tie into what was learned in the fifth grade about using quotes around search terms. I selected this George Washington biography which came up fifth on the list and a second biography which was first on the list. We kick off the discussion with my question, "Why does Google list the links in this order?". The answers range from "it is the best answer" to "someone paid for it to be there" to "I don't know".
I shared information about how Google looks at the title of the web page, the URL, and how many times your words appear on the page. There is a great short video by Google about this topic on YouTube. We did a search for Jet Blue Airlines to see what an ad looks like as opposed to an unpaid search result.
We look at the job of the content specialist. This person finds the strengths and weakness of the page based on how understandable the content is to a sixth grade student. They see if they can find out when the work was updated or created. They think about whether they would find better information in a book or encyclopedia.
The bias/purpose specialist finds the strengths and weaknesses of the site based on the purpose of the site. They think about why the site was created: to discuss, sell, promote, or parody information. We talk about the meaning of the domain of websites: .com, .org, .edu, .net, .gov, and country codes. We learn about personal webpages within sites that contain a tilde (~).
The usability/design specialist concentrates on how easy or difficult it is to maneuver around the site. They see if other links work or are broken. They look for grammar and spelling errors. They determine how well laid out and easy it is to move around the site.
The authority/credibility specialist has the most difficult job. They try to learn about the author of the site and their credentials. They try to find out who owns or sponsors the site. We learn to truncate the URL by cutting back from the starting site and removing part of the website address until we can determine who wrote the site. In the example from George Washington we started out with the original URL.
http://www.oswego.edu/library2/archives/digitized_collections/granger/georgewashington.html
http://www.oswego.edu/library2/archives/digitized_collections/granger
http://www.oswego.edu/library2/archives/digitized_collections
http://www.oswego.edu/library2/archives
http://www.oswego.edu/library2
http://www.oswego.edu
As the URL is cut back to a smaller URL by removing the rightmost / and the words that follow it, the students can find out more information about who wrote the website. I point out that sometimes they might receive a message that they are not allowed to access that portion of the site. They can continue trimming the URL and they will again see more information.
The authority specialist also tries to find out who links to the website with a Google option:
link:http://www.biography.com/people/george-washington-9524786
We look to see if every link is from the main parent website (biography.com) or other sites. We see if there are a few links or many pages.
The students self select jobs by choice or rolling a die. The student who rolls the highest number gets first choice of job and so on.
Solo Work and Group Work
Students work independently to look at six websites and evaluate the site based on the job sheet. The type their analysis into a document with a chart. Once they are finished, they rank the sites from 1 to 6 with 1 being the best site and 6 being the worst. As they finish, they see if their partners need help analyzing the sites from a different perspective. Finally, all group members come together to decide which was the best site overall and which was the worst.
When all analysis is complete, I call the teams up to the front of the room. Two different groups (which I call Group 1 and Group 3) analyze sites A-F and two other groups (2 and 4) have analyzed sites G-L. It is interesting to hear the students explain from the four different perspectives why they selected their site as the best. After group one presents their evidence, group three has a minute to ask clarification questions. Group one then has a minute to confer and respond. It was most interesting to find that the students in one class had chosen the same site as best in one group and worst in the second group. The search result in question was from the Wikipedia.
My Goal
I want my students to really start thinking about how to not only choose search terms but the merits of choosing one result over another.
The fifth grade students continue to extend their learning through presentations and reports. They write a report on an influential person around February and a president around April. The intention is to have the student complete all the work in class and learn how to independently find answers with a guide in the classroom.
I include links to web sites we use and my project wiki with more detailed directions.
Who Wrote This Information
We begin the year with a little research into time zones. In the fourth grade, the students practice paging forward and backward through pages. They learn to do simple searches in Pics4Learning to find images. They copy citations for images into presentations. The students review those skills as they complete a worksheet about time zones.
After they work, we regroup to review the answers and begin thinking about who wrote those pages. It is important to know that the Internet is a collection of pages that anyone can write. I chose two pages for the students. America's Story is maintained by the Library of Congress. Mystery Class is maintained by Annenberg Learner.
Digital Citizenship Skills
Every year, I attempt to have the students collaborate with another class outside our time zone to collaborate and share through Skype and Edmodo. We need to work synchronously with our partner to have a Skype call. Skype allows us to work at the same time from different locations. This year, Vicky Sedgwick and I connected our students via a Mystery Skype call. The students used their geography skills to determine where the partner class was located. The students moved from hemisphere, to continent, to state, to county, to town. It was very exciting. We will eventually work on digital citizenship skills as the students connect with each other in small groups in Edmodo.
The students learn to communicate appropriately while on a Skype call. There is a lot of learning involved in inviting another class to join ours including speaking clearly, listening well, and behaving appropriately in front of a web camera. Mistakes are made in a learning environment. After the call, we talk about how to improve our communications the next time we work together, if necessary. The students eventually collaboratively edit a Google Drawing and learn to respect the work of others by adding to, not destroying, another student's work. They communicate with posts to an Edmodo group and learn to type appropriate and respectful messages.
Research Skills
The fifth grade teacher assigns each students a historic figure in late January. This is the first time I assist the students in finding their own answers for a teacher's essay. The students receive a template in a document to collect their answers. We have tried paper worksheets over the years, but the document seemed to really help them this year.
The big skills in completing their research is learning how to build a query in Sweet Search 4 Me and Google. I want the students to begin to build on thinking about who wrote the website. The learn to use quotation marks around search terms to make sure the name of their historic figure is on the results page. They work to bookmark the actual web page so they can return a create their citation.
Citation Skills
Through the searching phase, the students bookmark web pages and note the name of their bookmark or encyclopedia in a word processing document. When the project is nearing completion, the students and I practice creating a citation for the encyclopedia on one class day, the web sites on a second class day, and formatting of the entries in a word processing document on the third day.
Giving Students Feedback
The students turn their completed work into Edmodo. I give the students feedback by marking up their documents. When they open their documents with my highlighting I ask them to reply in Edmodo with sentences about what they will improve in their next document. These are solid first steps in looking for information in encyclopedias, on the Internet, and citing sources.
In my last post, I was recapping my path with Kindergarten through third grade in introducing Internet skills. In the fourth grade I extend their knowledge and understanding of searching on the Internet and begin working on citations. One of the reason I love this writing space is that it helps me remember projects and lessons. As I was working on this post, I came across another piece I do with the third grade.
Third Grade
I consistently find the need to focus students on the need to actually read the pages in all grade levels. We practice reading skills through working with a printout from the Enchanted Learning website. The students individually read the printout and respond as a group through the use of our Activote reponse system.
Fourth Grade
The fourth grade students are really third graders at the beginning of the year. We begin with the creation of a mission patch in Kid Pix (after viewing NASA mission patches) and write a "mission report" responding to the lyrics in a song. I have modified it since the original rendition. This year, we started the mission by viewing The Planet Song from Blues Clues on YouTube. I asked the students if they could find one error in the song. They were also to find out why at least two of the lyrics were correct. The forms I use and a sample student report are here. I give the students direct links to each planet via my Symbaloo page.
In my second project, I begin with the idea that children are very visual. In the fourth grade, I want the students to begin to recognize the need to "thank" people for the content they use from the Internet. What I do now started with a project in which every student created a PowerPoint presentation on birds following an idea I got from Brian Crosby in Nevada. Last year, the students wanted to do the presentation on their choice of an animal. How could I say no? I limit the choice to an animal they can find on the Pics4Learning web site. There have to be at least six different images of the animal.
Once they have their animal. They write sentences which become their speaker notes and find images that relate to those sentences. Pics4Learning makes it easy to cite the source on the last slide because the citation is directly below the image. We add the citations to the last slide. I improved the project since my original write-up. When the students save their images to the hard drive, they open them using Preview and resize them to 640 pixels wide for landscape photos or 480 pixels tall for portrait pictures so they are easier to fit on the slide and take up less memory.
I have examples from the 2008-2009 school year on my project wiki.
Work Continues in FIfth
The next section I write will be about the work the students do to write a report and find information in paper encyclopedias and the Internet.
I have been diligently working on taking my students through the ranks of learning to look for information and understand what they are seeing on the Internet. Here is a short list of ideas from Kindergarten through third grade. I will come back soon and write about our fourth and fifth grade projects. Finally I will conclude the article with sixth through eighth grade.
Kindergarten
We learn to use the mouse. I think things are coming full circle. Ten years ago, many Kindergarten students had a hard time operating a mouse. Then it became a skill I really didn't need to teach. This year, I am finding many Prek-3 through Kindergarten students don't understand the right and left mouse button. I think it is a result of so many tablet devices and smartphones. We begin the year with the adorable Headsprout Mousing Around site. As time passes, we learn to navigate the Internet through Starfall's ABC page. This year, for the first time, I found the free for teachers ABCmouse.com. The students are enthralled with it. It is free to private and public school teachers at this time (Spring 2013). You can share premium content that the students can use at home with the help of their parents.
First
We begin to use the Internet to practice spelling words at Spelling City. The students learn to carefully read the words on the screen to find the links to move between lesson choices and practice levels. I followed the basic idea in a lesson plan on Common Sense's Sites I Like Lesson (formerly www.becybersmart.org). The students use the All About Me portion of Starfall.com and then rate the site. We followed that lesson up by creating a bar graph in Kidspiration with the paper survey data from the Sites I Like lesson.
Second
I use my Little Explorer's Picture Dictionary lesson to teach the students how to find answers on a web page by reading clues about birds and scanning the page for pictures of birds. We learn to choose a state from the list at Fact Monster's Fifty States page. The classroom teacher has the students find various facts about a state. They practice scanning the page for the key words and carefully copy the answer to their worksheet. It is important to learn to accurately copy the answer - including capitalization. Finally the students work to find answers to a biographical reading exercise when they follow a cloze activity for an assigned person.
Third
The third grade students participate in a snail mail project called The Great Mail Race. The students are assigned multiple states. The teacher likes pairing up the students with a Catholic school. In advance, I populate a wiki page with two different Catholic schools per state. This helps us complete the activity in a 42-minute class period. The children look at the web page for each school and then they copy down the school's name and address. This extends their work on accurately copying information from the second grade lesson. The letter will not get to the other school if the address is incorrect. They try to find out what the children's uniform and school building looks like. They find out what activities the school has for the students. We use Little Explorer's Picture Dictionary States page to find what their state's capital is on a map. Next they follow the Facts, Maps, and Symbols link to the left of the map to answer an information sheet for their teacher. One year we had the students do a little tourism research.
Heading to Fourth and Fifth Grade
These projects get the students ready for more extensive web page reading, scanning, and analysis of what they find. It prepares them for the future middle school skills that include analyzing the strengths and weakness of web pages based on criteria; creating a Wikipedia entry to understand that site; and understanding copyright, Creative Commons, and public domain content.
It has been four years since I had my own math class. This past school year I was asked to teach seventh grade math, pre-algebra, and algebra class for about six weeks. My computer classes were all shifted to the morning, several adjustments were made in the number of times per week I taught computer class, and the afternoon was dedicated to math. I am recording some new insights and how easy it is to reactivate old websites to quickly help students in class.
Math Podcasts
I made a number of screencasts several years ago. I use JingPro. I used to use screencasts for quiz and test prep for the students. I knew right away that I would resurrect my Mrs. Oro's Study Cast page on Podomatic. It was fantastic because the dedicated page was right there waiting for new uploads, it still feeds into iTunes, and is easy to use as a standalone page.
My aha moment this time was using it for test review. I take as much time as we need as a class to review tests. This year, I decided to post test reviews too. I still asked the students if they wanted to review specific problems. This was an added support. The value of reviewing the test in class is that students can show how they did the problem and as a group we can talk about alternate methods of doing a problem. The students still really want to have time in class to understand their mistakes.
The value added by creating the review podcast is that students can, and did, take the test or quiz home and play the podcast to hear my explanation and try to do the problem again on their own.
Math Wiki
I had a wiki, initially, as a class website. This year, I realized it was a perfect place to store files for the students to review at home or download. It is difficult hearing a student say they didn't do a review or homework because they forgot a paper in the locker at school. I had the use of an interactive whiteboard and would sometimes put up problems to work on in the evening on the spur of the moment during class. The wiki became a quick way to link to a PDF or image file.
This is an example of a screen capture from a whiteboard assignment. This is an example of a PDF created from a Word document. We use Schoolnotes to post homework assignments. It was simple to add a hyperlink to the wiki pages from Schoolnotes. The advantage to this method is the students go directly from my math Schoolnotes page to the actual page containing the screen capture or PDF file. No need for passwords or remembering other websites.
Edmodo
The students and I had been using Edmodo in the computer classroom for the entire school year. I immediately created groups for the math classes when I learned I would be teaching math temporarily. Edmodo gave me a very different and extremely useful way to interact with my students. I posted links to all of my supports for the students. I was able to ask them questions and store them electronically in one place. It is private and just between my students and I. The following two examples are from post-work on a test the students took:
In this case, I was able to see what the student understood of their mistakes. Knowing the student in class combined with the response helped me see that they were ready to move on.
Through
the next student's response, I was able to see where the student and I
needed to work one-on-one. The child came in at recess and with the
extra help and some more practice problem became confident in filling in
the gap in their knowledge.
I could have done the same thing by having the students do their reflections on paper, but it saved valuable time. I was able to look at their answers that evening and know if there were still areas that needed addressing in the class the next afternoon. I also knew who I wanted to make appointments with at recess, before, or after school for extra support.
Interactive Whiteboard
I did not have an interactive whiteboard when I was teaching four years ago. I did not integrate its use in the classroom in any particularly interactive way during the time in the math class from April through May. It was a great improvement for my lessons, personally, because I was able to save the flipchart and look at what we did right before the next class. At the end of class, it was so easy to see exactly what homework problems were assigned when I updated my Schoolnotes page.
The students enjoyed the chance to solve problems and choose different colors when they were writing. This was not a stellar use of the tool, but anything that gets a student more involved in their desire to learn is a good thing.
The other positive side to the IWB was the ability to take lessons and narrate them for the podcast.
If I was going to teach math on a full time basis, I would look to make the lessons more of an analysis tool and much more interactive.
Voting Devices
We have a set of 32 Activote devices in the school. I was really interested in seeing how I could use the devices to promote student learning in class. One method I tried was doing homework review with the Activotes. It took a lot of effort on my part to create good answer choices for the problems. It was actually pretty amazing to find where common mistakes were happening based on the pattern of responses from the students to the questions. Often I would find a number of students making the same mistake and it enabled us to discuss the difference between the common mistake the the actual answer and the reasoning behind the work. It served a second purpose in helping me remember when I reopened the files and looked at the work. Today as I worked on this post, I could still remember the day I taught the material. These files would be invaluable if I was preparing to teach this content again next year.
Other Quick Ideas
There are so many quick ideas and tips I picked up by teaching math those few weeks.
- The cell phone camera is great for taking quick photos of the chalkboard. They can be added to a flipchart to continue work the next day.
- Word Equation Editor - This is invaluable in the math classroom for creating tests, quizzes, and worksheets.
- Upgrading to ActiveInspire 1.6.xxxx - ActivInspire now has a built-in math equation editor. I had been creating my work in Word and taking screenshots of the document to import into ActiveInspire. The built-in equation editor saved me a lot of time.
- Some students are auditory learners, others are visual learners, still others learn best by doing. The screencast can be modified to give all three groups what they need.
I wrote a post about increasing skills in selecting from web query search results in March 2011. I continue to refine the investigation every year. This year instead of setting up twelve preselected websites I presented the class with a prompt. I asked the students to try to find the best website to learn who started the Academy Awards and the date of the first awards show.
