Why I’m more excited about #pblworld than #ISTE13

Tomorrow is a big day for me. It’s the first day of my first ever PBL World – I’m going to attend some great sessions and meet some wonderful people. But it’s also the day that I’m presenting with my edu mentor, Suzie Boss. OK, she might not be my mentor technically, since she hasn’t a clue that I see her that way. She’s more like a role-model. She’s someone that I aspire to be like. I’m not going to explain why; just read her books, blogs and tweets and you can find out for yourself.

Next Monday will be the first day of #ISTE13 – another massive deal for me as a teacher who is keen on innovative and creative teaching methods, especially those involving the use of current and emerging technologies. So why am I more looking forward to PBL World over ISTE? After all, ISTE features hundreds of presenters from all around the world as well as very respected key note speakers. It’s also attended by 13,000+ educators. Well, I am excited for ISTE, but the nature of PBL World suits me better. It is a much more intimate conference that is structured (obviously) around a single teaching approach – project-based learning. However, I believe that PBL is so much more than one style, one way, one approach. It is so wonderfully flexible and dynamic that I often see the BIE 8 essentials as being like a blank jigsaw waiting for an excited teacher and/or students to scribble cool stuff all over it.

PBL World limits the number of attendees to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to speak with ‘experts’ or experiences PBLers, to ask questions and get answers, to share stories and worries. It means that the sessions will be more catered to your needs. I like that I can spend a few sessions focusing on time management and team dynamics in projects and then spend the next couple of sessions being inspired by creative and critical thinking strategies that have been tried and tested by actual teachers.

I also like that PBL World is not about egos. It’s not about individuals. It’s about teachers and students. Mostly it’s about students – the people who profit the most from we educators spending a week of our holidays hanging out with other teachers and being all PBL nerdy. I like that there really aren’t any PBL ‘big shots’ who we are all required to listen to in revered silence. There isn’t a guru who is untouchable in his/her PBL genius – you know, the type who has 50k+ followers on Twitter and only follows 20, and who never replies to your tweets. Over the last 3 years, I’ve found the PBL people to be some of the most genuine, caring and generous of the edu peeps I’ve connected with. No lie.

The main reason I’m more excited about PBL World, though? I know that my students will benefit from me being there. I won’t be sitting in a session and thinking, ‘Yeah, a gadget/web tool … so what?’ I’ll be in sessions that connect with me and my practice as a PBL teacher. I’ll be lapping up the ideas, the tools, the strategies shared by other practising teachers. We all have our own passions and our own preferences for how we teach – PBL is mine. I understand that lots of teachers are very, very excited about tech tools and gadgets and ISTE is their mecca. But me? I’m going to be in nerdy PBL teacher heaven this week … and I can’t wait! (I just hope I’m not disappointed, haha!)

Project Based Learning and the Australian Curriculum ‘General Capabilities’ (Part 1)

**Disclaimer: during these posts I will be referring to the General Capabilities as outlined in the Australian Curriculum. However, I am a NSW English teacher and therefore I will be implementing the new NSW K-10 English Syllabus in 2014. All AC content (including the General Capabilities) is embedded within that syllabus document created by the Board of Studies. These posts, however, are designed to be relevant and accessible to all teachers in Australia, hence my reference to the Australian Curriculum and not the new NSW Syllabi.

There’s a lot of talk about the Australian Curriculum at the moment – some positive and some negative. I know that I often come across as a negative person on this blog and via social media, but I’ll say confidently that I am optimistic about the Australian Curriculum. Why? Because it is an opportunity for change and renewal, two things our schools desperately need. I’m also excited because of the AC’s clearly articulated awareness of the need to change our perceptions of our learners and our practice as teachers. This is articulated through the General Capabilities and the Cross-Curriculum Priorities. In this post I’ll only be focusing on the former, however. If you don’t know what the General Capabilities (GC) are, check out image below, taken from the AC website (click on it to enlarge). I love the central description of our goal as educators for our students: successful learner, confident and creative individual and active and informed citizen. It really gets to the heart of my personal philosophy as a teacher, that my job is to help shape great human beings. But since the term ‘great’ is relative, I think it’s safer to stick with what they AC says, lol. As I go through the GC, I will show how each capability aligns with elements of BIE’s ‘8 Essentials for PBL‘ (Voice and Choice; Significant Content; In-depth Inquiry; Public Audience; Revision & Reflection; Driving Question; Need to Know; 21st Century Skills) and, where possible, give examples of how I have engaged with each capability in my PBL English classroom. It is my belief that PBL is a pedagogy that provides students with the opportunity to strengthen, develop and demonstrate each of these capabilities.

LITERACY:

As an English teacher, I’ll happily argue that this is one of the most important capabilities in the list. The most important? Yeah, it probably is. I think literacy is the need to know for all young people. Being literate opens the door to the other capabilities. Without being literate, it’s very difficult to contribute and participate meaningfully in society. It’s not impossible, it’s just very difficult. Remember as well, that literacy includes visual literacy and critical literacy as well. During project based learning, literacy is developed through both explicit instruction and through more constructivist, constructionist and collaborative learning strategies.

A key driver of all successful projects is significant content. As I’ve explained previously (add link), content may be deemed significant by the teacher (as in, it’s in the curriculum), by the students (personal interests, contextually relevant or real-world problems) or both (negotiated curriculum where teacher discusses with students the content to be covered and through negotiation a compromise is reached where individual interest, contextual concerns and real world problems are connected meaningfully to the content the teacher is ‘required’ to cover). If the content is deemed ‘significant’, engaging, relevant, real-world and interesting by students and the teacher, then greater learning outcomes should be expected. How does this relate to literacy? If young people feel passionately about the content they are more likely to push their literacy skills further (reading and writing more complex texts). I’m sure many teachers would be surprised at the technical and complex vocabulary of many gaming and coding websites that teenage boys read.

Furthermore, a key aspect of PBL is the process of planning, drafting, peer/self assessment and revision. When applied to written or spoken products, this process has a significant impact on students’ literacy skills. This process becomes more pertinent for students when they are producing the product for a public audience – online or face to face.

As an English teacher, my students frequently engage in this iterative design-like process. I have even developed a feedback-feedforward peer and self assessment method to support student learning even more. You can read about it here.

Oh, and remember, literacy is not just the domain of the English teacher. ALL teachers ate responsible for it – the Australian Curriculum makes that quite clear. Scared? Well, looks like it’s time to do a cross-KLA project and invite your favourite English teacher to join!

NUMERACY:

Just like literacy, numeracy is the responsbility of all teachers. This terrifies me a little because numbers simply aren’t my friends. BUT, just because I don’t get into Maths, doesn;t mean my students don’t. PBL provides students with the opportunity to think in a more open way about their subjects. The segregating of subjects is an unfortunate consequence of the traditional schooling model. 30 minutes on a sport bus trip chatting with colleagues from other faculties and you’ll discover wonderful connections between your subjects. My colleague (a Maths teacher) and I got excited talking about poetic metre and imagined all sorts of other cross-overs between English and Maths. The moment we stop talking about covering content and we start talking real-world applications of our subjects, we realise the need to see our subjects as interrelated. This links back to what I said above about significant content, when we are driven by interest and real-world application, not only does engagement improve, but so too do learning outcomes.

The trend in the US at the moment is STEM – that’s the integration of the study of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Through multidisciplinary projects, students are mastering STEM skills that they identify they need to know in order to be successful. Moreover, these projects drive students through a process of in-depth inquiry as they determine what they need to know and just how to find out this information or develop these skills. You can look at some truly impressive STEM projects here.

As an English teacher, running projects in just one subject area, my students still develop and apply their numeracy skills. Sometimes my projects require students to conduct in-depth inquiry through surveys and analysing the data they collect. They also engage with the data collected by others (often accessed online) and use this to support their findings about their topic. It seems silly, but even everyday numeracy comes into play as students estimate and calculate the amount of food and drink needed (and related costs) when planning the presentation of learning to a public audience.

Project-based learning necessitates in-depth inquiry. A significant part of both qualitative and quantitative research is accessing numerical data – be it graphs, statistics, tables etc. This applies to all subjects. If we don’t give our students the opportunity to engage with significant content through in-depth inquiry, we’re missing a wonderful chance to allow them to appreciate the power and importance of numbers, not just in Maths class.

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION CAPABILITY:
Whilst PBL isn’t about technology (you can easily complete an awesome project without access to any technology, I know – I’ve done it!) it certainly is enhanced by access to a range of ICTs. I think what’s cool about PBL is that ICT capability develops naturally as part of the students’ learning. It’s not about learning to use a particular online tool or program just for the sake of it, or because it might make boring work a little bit more engaging. The early stage of all projects is in-depth inquiry – this is the stage where students are driven by deep and personally-developed questions about the project. Like everyone in 2013, students will begin their research on the Internet. This phase gives teachers a wonderful opportunity to model effective research skills and the importance of curating information using a variety of online tools (social bookmarking sites and tools like Pinterest, Scoop.it are popular at this stage). Students learn this skills not because the teacher has determined it’s good for them, they learn them because they need to know them in order to be successful with their project.

Collaboration and communication are key to PBL because students spend most of their time working in small teams. We’re told so often that these are the 21st century skills for young people to master – the workforce is collaborative and globalised therefore our students need to be able to work in a team and to communicate effectively with anyone, anywhere, anytime. This is where a online classroom is essential – not a space where resources a access, but rather a space where students can collaborate and communicate whenever they need to. I’m an edmodo fangrrrl and everyone knows it. This social network for education allows students to develop their digital citizenship (communicating with courtesy, compassion, and clarity) in the eye of their teacher and they can communicate with their teams whenever they need to. Teachers can easily assess the development of these 21st century skills and quickly give feedback to praise good behaviours and redirect negative behaviours.

ICTs play a big part in the revision and reflection process of PBL. In all projects, students are required to draft and revise their work. This process is enhanced through the use of tools like google docs (great for collaborative writing and planning) and more familiar programs like MS Word where students can use track changes and comments to illustrate their revisions. One of the core routines of PBL is goal-setting and reflecting on learning. This process can be done in a workbook, but it’s far more effective when it’s done using a site like edmodo or blogs. Blogging throughout a project really allows students to appreciate that learning is a process and that improvement happens over time. Blogging gives students a place to voice their concerns about the project as well as the joy of successfully solving a problem of creating something amazing. You can read about how I use the think, puzzle, explore protocol for students blogging here.

Finally, the most obvious use of ICTs during PBL is for the creation of the product and accessing a public audience. Allowing students to have a voice and choice as part of a project is essential to ensure engagement and relevance of learning. This voice and choice typically comes into play around the product that teams will be produce to demonstrate their learning. If you’ve seen BIE’s ‘PBL explained’ video, you’ll know that students might choose from a range of forms, some including ICTs, such as videos, websites and online magazines. Sometimes I don’t give students a choice. I love setting a challenge for my students, so they need to create a type of text they know nothing about, forcing them to develop their ICT capabilities. This can make some students uncomfortable, because they’re really being pushed, but ensuring that you’re there to provide support just in time means that this is responsible risk taking. My students have created cool products such as websites, podcasts, short films and online fiction – things they would normally not get the opportunity to do in English.

Of course, all of these products would mean nothing if they didn’t have an authentic, public audience. Teachers are time poor (and our students are too!) so having access to an online audience rather than an after-school audience of mums and dads, can be really helpful! The best thing to do, in my experience, is to connect with another class from somewhere else in the world – even if it’s just the primary school 40 minutes away. We have a range of technologies at our disposal that can facilitate this connection – skype, edmodo and YouTube have been our favourites. If connecting with another class sounds too risky for you, do a bit of networking and see if you can get a guest expert to Skype in to hear your students’ final presentations. Our young people need these experiences – their learning should not be confined to the four walls of the classroom!

In the next post, I’ll look at the last four capabilities and how I think PBL provides students with the opportunity to strengthen, develop and demonstrate these capabilities.

Just some things I have to say about edmodo …

At the beginning of this year, I was asked by the peeps at edmodo if I would agree to be interviewed by the Huffington Post for an article about edmodo. Um, hello – the Huffington Post? I always see their stuff being retweeted by my Twitter mates (and yes, I even occasionally read the articles which is a big deal for someone like me who skims everything!) – let’s just say I was a little bit stoked at the chance to be quoted in one of their stories! I also was stoked because I really love edmodo and it’s always super cool that they think of little old me down here in Australia – they really are a shining light of loyalty in the ever-increasing corporatisation of education. I really mean that. As you know, I’ve been using edmodo since 2009 and they have always made me feel valued as an educator and a contributor to their growing network of teachers and students.

Anyway, you can read the edmodo blog post about the Huffington Post article here and you can read the actual Huffington Post article here.

As is the way with people like me who live in the Southern Hemisphere, being interviewed proved difficult time-wise. To overcome this (and avoid me being up at 3am), the journalist (the very cool C.M. Rubin – woot!) sent me a bunch of questions to answer via email. Of course, I just rambled on and wrote waaaaaay to much and necessarily about three of the things I said were included in the final article. I thought someone out there might be interested in my original responses to the questions … maybe, haha. They were actually really great questions! So, anyway, here they are:

How have you used Edmodo in or out of your classroom to enhance learning? 

I’ve been using Edmodo with my students since May, 2009. I discovered it during a video conference on web 2.0 tools for education. It was a chance discovery because at the time my school was looking for an alternative to email and USBs as a means for students to share their work with teachers. I quickly discovered that edmodo is so much more than that!

Can you share any examples of things you have done in your classroom recently or even plan to do in the near future which illustrate the important added value/unique benefits of Edmodo versus other learning platforms/tools?

I’ve had so many wonderful experiences with Edmodo that it is almost impossible to choose between them! I think the there are three experiences that my students and I fondly remember. In March, 2012, I used edmodo to facilitate an online role-playing game with my students which became fondly known as #HG2212. Essentially, I created a Hunger Games narrative where students played the roles of the tributes or citizens of The Capitol. I used Edmodo’s unique features to organise the game – students changed their usernames and avatars to reflect their characters, all students joined a group called ‘Northern Ridges’ (our version on Panem) whilst some students were put in an ‘Arena’ sub-group and others in ‘The Capitol’. Over the course of two weeks, students used blogs, videos and Web 2.0 tools such as Voki (all embedded into the Edmodo group by students) to tell the narrative of their characters as tributes in The Arena. The Capitol residents determined which tributes lived or died and how this occurred. It was truly an amazing experience with students so engaged that they were on Edmodo at all hours of the night – they even downloaded the Edmodo app to their phones so they wouldn’t miss any action. Essentially this was a creative thinking and creative writing activity, but Edmodo allowed it to be immersive, interactive, engaging and fun! You can read more about it here and see student work as well:
http://biancahewes.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/hunger-games-2212-my-rejected-iste-presentation/

Another amazing learning experiences was using Edmodo to connect my Year 10 class with a Year 10 class in San Francisco. My class was studying The Catcher in the Rye and I put a post on a couple of the Edmodo communities asking if any teacher had a class he/she who might want to help my students better understand life in America for teens. Within half a day I had lots of people offering to connect and ultimately chose one class – I would have loved to connect with them all and I plan to do so eventually! Our students joined an Edmodo group to chat about their lives and what they find difficult or inspiring. They also made videos and posted them to Edmodo, answering questions the other students had posed. It was such an eye-opening experience for my students! They learnt so much about American culture – especially the danger of stereotypes presented on television and in movies. My 15 years olds really believed that all American teenagers looked like the teenagers in Gossip Girl and were very surprised to find that this is not the case! Edmodo was the best place for this type of connection to occur as it is a teacher-monitored space where young people can develop those much needed collaboration and communication skills with a guide right beside them.

Finally, I’ve used Edmodo to get writing mentors for my students. My class were working on individual research and composition projects and I knew it would be impossible for me to give quality, personal feedback on all of their work. I decided to reach out to my Edmodo professional learning network and asked if anyone would be interested in mentoring a 15 year old. I had so many offers it! Eventually my 30 students had mentors from all over the world, including many states of America, South America and England. All of the mentors were registered teachers with Edmodo, which means that they were safe to work with children – something all teachers need to be aware of when considering these types of activities. Edmodo supported the mentor process perfectly as I could invite the teachers to join our class Edmodo group and then create sub-groups for each mentor and student. All interactions in these groups and sub-groups are visible to me, the teacher. This allowed me to assess the progress of each student and learn a little as well!

The internet is our children’s medium and many believe it is an unparalleled learning tool.  How does Edmodo handle the challenge of educating kids to be good digital citizens – can you share examples of what instruction (unique to Edmodo?) you believe Edmodo provides kids to better equip them for the social medial world they now live in?

I always so that Edmodo is the social network with training wheels. It’s a safe platform where young people can learn how to communicate and interact with other young people – and adults – whilst at the same time being guided and supported by an adult they trust, their teacher. By introducing Edmodo to students at a younger age, teachers are helping to develop the habits of mind that are essential for students to be good digital citizens. Students learn the important of a quality avatar that is non-offensive and presents them as a thoughtful and sensible person. They also learn the necessity to use appropriate language, to speak kindly and with compassion, to be supportive rather than critical and to ask thoughtful questions. One of the best lessons that students learn in Edmodo is the impact that a lack of tone can have on written text – they quickly learn how important it is to be clear in what they write! They even just learn the basics of managing a username and password!

Of course, I believe that Edmodo has some unique features that allows students to develop all of these skills. Edmodo has a massive user-base (over 10 million users, I believe) and this means that teacher like me can easily connect their classes with classes from all over the world, simply be requesting a connection in an Edmodo community. Providing students with a safe and facilitated opportunity to connect with students they do not know means that they can put their digital citizenship skills into action whilst being supported by their teacher.  Last year I ran a project where my Year 9 students used Edmodo to connect with Year 2 students from a local primary school. The students collaborated on a story-writing project and in doing so developed their ability to ask questions effectively, communicate their ideas clearly and give quality, non-judgmental feedback to young people they previously did not know. Teachers can see all activity in an Edmodo group and this gives them the ability to quickly post a comment and praise great digital citizenship, or to quickly address any potentially inappropriate behaviours.

Why is it about Edmodo that engages students most?

This is a question that I’m always asking my students and myself. I think that initially students are attracted to it because it looked like Facebook! Younger students are really excited about the idea that they can quickly connect with their peers online – something they may not have as much opportunity to do if they are younger than 13. Ultimately, though, my students have told me that what they like the most is the range of learning experiences that it provides them with. They love connecting with other students and teachers, they love using it to role-play and of course it gives them security knowing that their teacher as well as class resources, are accessible online 24/7. My students made a video about their thoughts on Edmodo:

If there was one thing you could change about the Edmodo platform what would that be?

That’s a really tough question! It has so many great features that we teacher have already helped them introduce – they really are quite responsive to teacher suggestions and feedback. I think the thing that I’ve asked for the most is an embedded points system so I can gamify my classroom when I choose to. Basically, it means that during role-playing projects my students can be awarded a certain number of points for posts and comments. I think that feature would be awesome. But really, to be honest, Edmodo is such a flexible platform that I can make that happen myself just by being a little creative with the badge system and the reactions feature. I’m really excited to see what they introduce next because it is always based on the idea of a teacher somewhere around the world!

 

 

Using ‘Think, Puzzle, Explore’ for student blogging

My last blog posts asked for people to share their formative assessment ideas with me. I received a really great suggestion from my Twitter mate, Kim Pericles. She suggested using a ‘Think/Puzzle/Explore’ table in favour of a Know/Wonder/Learn table. I’d heard of it before, but this time it really captured my interest – funny how that happens, hey? I think it is awesome as a formative assessment tool and I will be using it in my classroom a lot this year. Oh, and for those of you who might think I’m hating on the KWL, I’m not – I used that more for prior-knowledge testing and generating student sub-questions for projects and then at the end of a phase of learning/project for reflection of learning. KWL FTW, I recko, haha.

Anyway, I started writing an edmodo post for my students about blogging and found myself using the ‘think, puzzle, explore’ idea to help them guide their blog posts. Here’s what I came up with:

What will you blog about?

There are three main types of blog posts that I would like you to consider writing each week (or after each lesson even!) … they can be loosely categorised by the verbs ‘thinking’, ‘puzzling’, ‘exploring’.

THINKING POSTS:

This is where you write about your thoughts on a topic, lesson, text, aspect of the project, etc. These posts are where you confidently show off your own knowledge and understanding! Be proud, share what you’ve discovered! Get excited! These posts are the passion-fuelled type where you can’t stop blabbering about something cool that you’ve discovered. Try to include links and videos and quotes from sources (like your text) to help you readers develop their understanding of your ideas. Backing up your arguments with evidence is a really good habit to get into!   

 PUZZLING POSTS:

Let’s face it, learning new stuff is really hard. Often we fail more than we succeed but through this process of trial and error we discover cool new things! These blog posts are the ones you write when you’re pissed off – when you just feel like it’s all too crazy hard and you wanna quit. You write these posts because something is puzzling you and you need to share that with someone, somewhere. Sharing is caring. Someone might just have the answer and reassure you! It’s better out than in, right?

 EXPLORING POSTS:

English poses a range of baffling questions (you’ll be asking yourself many of these – see the ‘puzzling post’) and delves deeply into humanity’s biggest dilemmas. That’s what makes this subject so awesome! These posts are the place where you ask questions – big, complex, challenging questions. These posts might be classified as tangential – this is a kinda smart-sounding word that means ‘random’. There’s always something that you want to know more about: a character or a scene in a text or the composer of a text or the latest piece of bizarre philosophy/psychology your teacher has tried to introduce. Use these blog posts to be curious; ramble on about what fascinates you …

Hunger Games 2212: my rejected ISTE presentation

I wasn’t ever going to blog about this, I really wasn’t. The project many of my Twitter friends know as #HG2212 was one of my most favourite learning experiences of last year – and a favourite of my students as well. That’s why I applied to present it as ISTE in San Antonio this year. Well, as you can guess from the title of this post, my presentation wasn’t accepted. I’m not writing this post to bitch about being rejected (because I think karma played a big role in my rejection and that makes things balance out in my head) but to share the project a little for the first time. Why? My very dear Twitter mate @carlaleeb asked me about the project today because a colleague of hers is about to teach the Hunger Games. My other great Twitter mate @pollydunning is keen to give this project a go as well.

I don’t plan to write a long and detailed post about the project. What I will do is share the recording of my presentation from edmodocon12 in August last year. It was a truly emotional experience sharing this project – yes, I cry in the video – simply because the project was such a moving learning experience. It was my life and my students’ life for two weeks straight, 24/7. There are some aspects of the project that I am not at liberty to disclose because they do not belong to me – they belong to Dean Groom who helped me nut out the project and sort out the annoying details that involved numbers. The idea for the project was also pretty much stolen from @Towney77. However, when I run this again this year I will definitely be simplifying the gaming elements and using edmodo much more cleverly to tally XP. It can be done.

So here is the video – be warned, it goes for well over half an hour and I do literally cry in it. You need to click on the link here and scroll down to my name and click on the little arrow beside it. It’s a lot of scrolling, haha!

I’d also like to share some of my students’ blogs from that project. Their writing still gives me goosebumps and will serve as wonderful models for my class this year.

Leefern R Skipberi

Harlow Lilywalk

Daniel Giunter

Leigh Walk-lily

Ruchit Seeaster 

Finally, I’d like to share the storify of the #HG2212 tweets carefully curated by my friend @missjessm. I am so very grateful that she did as it has given me a lasting record of the experience. Here it is: Bianca does Hunger Games

KEEP YOUR EYES OUT FOR THE NEXT … #HG2313

Year 8 PBL: Tim Burton Project

For pretty much most of the last term of 2012, my Year 8 students were thinking about director Tim Burton and his distinctive style. I’ve taught the ‘Tim Burton as Auteur’ unit heaps of times with students but this is the first time that I made a proper project out of it. Every year the Burton unit (focusing on distinctive style) leads into the Year 8 RockFest project – where the whole year group works together for three weeks to plan and run the annual rock concert held in the last week of term. The link between the two has been tenuous – basically students try to make their RockFest ‘distinctive’.

This year I wanted the link between the two projects to be more significant – so basically I just mushed them together somewhat accidentally. Ultimately RockFest became ‘Tim Burton’ themed – colours, posters, music etc was all influenced by his style. Each Year 8 class was allocated a particular role in the planning and running of RockFest. We had five teams: Catering, Management, Entertainment, Publicity and Creative Teams. I also tried to create a ‘layer’ of PBL for the other teachers by suggesting a series of activities for their students to complete. You can see it all on this PDF: RockFest 2012 You can also watch the video I created to launch RockFest here: Year 8 RockFest Mash-up.

The other classes studied Tim Burton’s films before they began work on the RockFest project. My class knew that the Tim Burton project was integral to their contribution to RockFest – they were actually creating part of the day’s entertainment. That put a lot of pressure on my students and many were very resistant to the idea of their films being shown to the whole school – my response was always, ‘Make a great film and be proud of it.’ The argument goes that sometimes stakes have to be high for students to commit. (Sounds like Mr Gove, hey?) My students committed, but they were lacking in some key skills and knowledge about film-making (that they tried desperately to get but far too late into the project) and this resulted in films that they weren’t that proud of. But we’ll get to that later.

Here is a rough outline of how our Tim Burton project ran:

1. Project launch: I read my class some of Burton’s poems and we watched some of his short animations on YouTube. We discussed our initial responses to the art of Burton. I posed the driving question: ‘How can we make a short film that will impress auteur Tim Burton?’ and handed out the project outline: 2. Need to know: Students used a KWL table and class discussions to establish what they ‘need to know’ to successfully complete the project. Immediately they were intrigued by the word ‘auteur’. The ‘W’ column was filled with lots of inquiry questions such as ‘How do you edit a short film?’ We used a project calendar to plan the next few weeks of the project. This was displayed at the back of the classroom.

3. Significant content: Students identified that they needed to learn a bit about Tim Burton as a person, so we read some information about him and I gave them a 10 question quiz. They also felt they needed to watch films by Burton to understand his distinctive style and discover what he clearly enjoys in a film. They had identified a need to know about film techniques (editing, shots, angles, movement, sound) and watching the films would help them find out about these. We watched four films by Burton: Vincent, Edward Scissorhands, The Corpse Bride and A Nightmare Before Christmas. Whilst watching the film, students in their teams were allocated an aspect of the film (characters, lighting, sound, camera work) to take notes about. They used a baby lotus (Baby Lotus Scissorhands) to record their information and then shared this with the rest of the class using the jigsaw strategy. At the end of watching the films, the class wrote a collaborative essay answering the question: What makes the films of Tim Burton distinctive? This took far too long. I need to be much more firm in my expectations for each lesson. I worked hard with this class to teach them the minutiae of quality writing – we focused on sentence structure and paragraph structure. Hard work, time-consuming but totally worth it. Oh, and at this stage we also managed to Skype with a class in New Zealand who were studying Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. My students learnt about Burton’s dark romantic comedy style from this conversation.

4.a. Applying the content: The next stage was the planning of the films. Students had been given their teams right at the beginning of the project and worked in them every lesson during the ‘investigate’ stage of the project. This is a sneaky way of having a seating arrangement as well, haha. In teams, students brainstormed ideas for their short film. I definitely need to steal some strategies from the Design Thinking guys for this stage of the project, like the iterative thing where kids generate heaps of ideas and then settle for one. We kinda did this but not in a visible way. It should be visible. They should be aware of the process they are using at this creative stage. We used a lot of A3 paper and textas for this process. At the end each group had a film synopsis that they could justify as being something that would impress Burton – they focused on emulating his type of characters, themes, music, genre, symbols, lighting and camera style.

4.b. Planning: The next part was script-writing and story-boarding. I feel passionately that students need to learn this process when film-making. It can be really painful for students to work through the process because it is time-consuming but ideally they need to understand that film-making is a team-sport (usually) and one person can not do the whole job. There is a great piece of software you can use for scriptwriting, Celtx, which is on the DER laptops but Year 8 don’t have access to it so we just did it by hand. I showed them a sample script that I downloaded from this site: Silent Love. We read through it as a class and discussed the features of layout and content. Students then were given a few lessons in the computer lab to write their scripts. This was a really challenging activity for them as they kept wanting to write blockbusters when they only needed a very basic narrative. Some kept writing short stories despite my insistence that they were to emulate the script model given. A BIG learning curve for my students!

4.c. Storyboarding. Another really frustrating activity for my students but really important. Once again I showed a model storyboard to students and we chatted about its features and why they were included. I actually discovered the creative talents of a few of my students – amazing artists/cartoonists and they were joyous at being praised for this skill in English. I enjoyed sitting with each team and quizzing them on their use of film techniques for each frame: What can we see? Why? What can we hear? Why? How should we feel at this point? What film techniques are helping us to feel this way? Why? Whilst they found this process annoying (‘Can’t we just film now miss? I know what it should look like in my head!’), I could see that they were learning through doing – they were learning the metalanguage of film as well as how meaning is constructed in film. Awesome.

4.d. Filming. By this time of the term I had my wonderful prac student Peter with me. He gave a great impromptu lesson on the importance of production management – make lists for everything! We only have pretty dodgy flipcams that chew through batteries fast, so filming is hard. Also, tudents spent ages on set construction because they chose to do claymation and sock puppets … make sure you factor time in for this OR require students to construct these at home. Some students didn’t even manage to get to filming because they spent so long with their storyboarding and set construction. Some students did get to filming but never managed to get to editing. Other filmed but did so badly – shaky/unfocused camera, bad/lost storyboard or missing members were some problems encountered. Finally, some filmed successfully – typically the cohesive, well-organised teams.

4.e. Editing. Thank goodness for Peter! I don’t know how we would have managed without him – he brought 6 macbook pros to school for students to use for editing. He sat with them during lunchtimes so they could record voice-overs and make music using GarageBand. Really, this part of projects is hard because it is the pointy end – the teams who completed their films did so about ten minutes before they were due to be presented at RockFest! I’ve used Adobe Premier and MovieMaker to edit films, but without a doubt iMovie is the BEST editing software for students. It’s unfortunate that most public schools don’t have access to it.

5. Presentation. Only four out of seven films were completed as part of this project and shown to the whole school. This might seem like a failure to some, but if you had seen the hands-on learning that was occurring in my classroom or listened to the discussions of my students about what they learnt during the project, you would know that it wasn’t a failure at all. There is a lot that could be improved with how this project came about, but in light of the fact that kids were absent all over the place, it was the end of the year and we are seriously lacking in film-making resources, I reckon it was awesome. Below are three of the films that were ‘completed’.

Project-Learning (aka PBL) for beginners #plsm13

This blog post is probably not written for you, even though you may have stumbled across it accidentally thanks to your search engine. This blog post isn’t even written for the people who follow me on Twitter, although a few of those do just happen to be in the group for whom this post is being written. This blog post is being written for the eager, dedicated, risk-taking and generous educators who will be attending the inaugural Project Learning Swap Meet at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum on January, 19th 2013.

I’m getting very excited about the event because I know wonderful things will come of it. I know that you lovelies who are attending will be bringing your questions, your experiences, your ideas and your enthusiasm to the day because you want to do more than just listen to people talk about new pedagogies or new technologies or new designs for classrooms. You want to plan and run epic projects that will bring your students into contact with other people from all over the place. You want to plan and run epic projects that will challenge your students to do/create amazing new things and to think in weird new ways. You want more for your students and you know that money can’t get that – the only thing that can get that is time, effort, risk, connectedness and heaps of crazy ideas.

Before you embark upon this day of mega planning and brain-melting mashing of inspired ideas, you probably need a tiny bit of background information about this project-learning stuff. You’ve heard of PBL (it’s pretty hip right now and before you know it the big guns will be here to sell you their wares and their methods) and maybe you’ve tried it out and just want to do more. You’re probably thinking, ‘Why are they calling it project-learning and not PBL?’ There is a good reason. We don’t want you to get carried away with the hype around PBL. People are starting to see it as a poultice for every edu ache and pain. But learning through projects is not a quick fix solution. It requires painstaking planning, tireless commitment, the willingness to get to know each and every one of your students individually, and a toolkit of daily quality teaching strategies. You can’t just download a PBL guide from the internet or watch a YouTube clip then go tweak an assignment or unit of work and think that it will solve your teaching woes. Oh no. Time must be invested if your students are to really get the most from learning through projects. Proper project-learning is completely personal and entirely do-it-yourself. Listening to a keynote, attending a workshop (even the one we’re running) or getting in an ‘expert’ to your school simply isn’t enough. You’ve gotta commit.

Below is a list of blog posts, YouTube videos, PDFs and websites that I recommend you look through to get a general picture of what learning through projects looks like. You don’t need to read them closely, just skim read – that’s what I do! Just get a feel for what these projects look and feel like for teachers and students. Remember that the difference between the types of projects that you did as a student and the types of projects we’re talking about is that the learning IS the project. It is THROUGH the project that your students will be learning content and skills – and a whole bunch of other random and unforeseen stuff! The project doesn’t come at the END of learning – it’s not an assessment although assessment is built throughout the projects – it comes at the BEGINNING because it is the catalyst for the learning taking place in your classroom. The project comes first. IT is all there is.

If you’re like me and you just never manage to read much, preferring to jump in head first and learn to swim through drowning (the perfect project-learning student!) then all you need to know is that there are three components to all great projects:

1. EXPLORE/RESEARCH/INQUIRE/DISCOVER

2. CREATE/PRODUCE/DESIGN/COMPOSE

3. SHARE/PRESENT/CONTRIBUTE/PUBLISH

The quintessential PBL video: PBL Explained by BIE.

An overview of a project that I ran this year with my students: The 8 Elements of Project Based Learning

A great article explaining why project-learning is different to doing a project: Main Course, Not Dessert

A video summarising research I’ve done into PBL and assessment: PBL: Is asking questions the answer?

Suzie Boss (amazing advocate for PBL) writes about new research into PBL: New Research Helps Make Case for PBL

Suzie Boss (again) writing about PBL World and some really great example driving questions: Yong Zhao: PBL Develops Students’ Creative Confidence

This is where most people start with PBL – with the BIE Freebies. I say ‘start’ because they need quite a lot of adapting to make them suit you and your students – you’re human beings after all, not robots! BIE Planning Tools

A seven-minute Pecha Kucha I did on PBL whist ISTE-drunk (it’s embarrassing): PBL PK

Another blog post by me (form ages ago) about why I like PBL so much: PBL + me = why?

I really love the model projects (year 1-12) shared on The Project Approach website: Project Examples

Book published – achievement unlocked!

Ever since my Year 12 Extension students presented me with a hardcover copy of a book we wrote collaboratively as a class, I’ve wanted to have a go at publishing more student work in this way. And I just did it! To get a hardcover copy is a bit pricey from Blurb ($74 delivered for one copy!) but I paid for it because I was excited and having the book in your hands is so much more awesome than just flicking through an eBook. I did, however pay the $10 to make it an ePub book as well which you can download for free using the link below. I’m sure there are cheaper options and someone out there will let me know

The last project Year 10 worked on was the ‘Wild at Heart’ project and if you click on this link you can see the finished product – a whole bunch of wonderful, creative, insightful personal essays … published for the world to read! We’ll be putting our class hardcover copy in the library after we all have a look at it. I just hope it arrives before Year 10 leave!

 

 

Using Skype in the English classroom

I’ve often read on twitter and blogs about how teachers have used Skype in their classrooms to connect their students with that strange and terrifying thing, ‘the outside world’. Whilst I’m always interested in their experiences, my response is usually ‘le sigh’. Why? Because I knew I couldn’t use Skype with my students. At my school we don’t have the permissions to add programs to our DER laptops and since my mac has been unable to connect to our school’s wifi, I thought I was doomed to be caught in the Skype-envy limbo forever. But not anymore!

About a month ago I tweeted that my Year 8 students were working on a project studying the films and style of auteur Tim Burton. I was excited to receive a reply tweet from Christine Wells whose class in Auckland, NZ was also studying Burton – she asked if our classes could Skype … and that was just the catalyst I needed to prompt me to probe further into my Skype dreams. I went down to our TSO (technical support officer, who unfortunately is only with us until the end of the year due to the Liberal government’s cuts to education) and asked him to connect my mac to the wifi. And guess what? He did it! I then raced upstairs to my staffroom, jumped onto my mac and tried out Skype. The only one of my contacts online was Darcy Moore, so I clicked that little green phone icon and within a few rings I heard the dulcet tones of Darcy’s voice. I swiftly shared my exhilaration with Darcy by saying (and I quote), ‘Oh my god Darcy! Skype works! I’m so excited I could shit my pants!’ Haha – yeah, I know … shocker! It was pretty cool that Darcy was the first person I skyped with from school because his experience with Year 10 skyping with a games designer was something that had got me interested in Skype at the beginning of the year.

So the time came for my class to connect with Christine’s class. The night before I skyped with Christine to check it all worked and then on the day I spent a bit of time organising my classroom to suit the activity. I moved all of the tables to the edge of the room and made a big space in the middle for my students to sit on the ground together. You can see my classroom layout below.

I invited my HT in to watch us Skype – we haven’t done it before in our faculty. He was keen to come and watch and I thought his presence might make my students less silly … well I was wrong about that, they were too excited to be sensible! I spoke briefly to my class about the expected behaviour and the proper etiquette of turn taking when asking and answering questions. Once the connection was made, the students were awesome. Christine’s students had chosen to come in during their lunchtime, which was adorable. In between questions about Burton, the students managed to ask each other questions about the food in the canteen (or ‘tuck shop’ for the Kiwis, lol), how close they are to the beach and whether they like Gangnam Style. The latter resulted in the clip being shared from the Kiwi side and the Aussies showing off their dancing skills, see pic below.

After we said our goodbyes, I got my students to write a brief reflection on the activity: what they loved, what they learned from their new Kiwi mates and what they would like to do better for the next Skype. They were all very confident that they had learned a bit from the chat, especially about the genre of Burton’s films – dark comedy with a touch of fairytale-esque romance. This we had not covered in class, but they felt was important to note for their own short films in Burton’s style. They also decided that the Kiwis would become the audience for their films – cool! Finally, we all learnt that a bit more order was needed for a Skype chat to be truly productive. They felt that they needed to plan their questions in advance and to decide on an order of question asking and answering. I think this is important too, but I also think that your first connection needs to be playful – they were all engaged and having a great time and I think that’s pretty cool.

Thanks so much to Christine and her students – we had an awesome time and can’t wait to do it again.

Really, with Skype in your classroom the potential learning experiences are almost limitless.

How can using edmodo help you to be a ‘quality teacher’?

Below is a copy of a speech that I wrote for a keynote (my first ever, finally a woman and a teacher gets be a keynote … sorta) on edmodo and the Quality Teaching Framework. It is similar in style to how I write blogs, but of course it is a speech, so there is a bit more rhetoric

In the early months of 2009, there were rumblings in my school about technology … it was coming, there was nothing we could do to stop it, so we better be prepared. Yup, Kevin ’07 was delivering his promise to provide every student in Australia with their own computer – it was to be a digital education revolution. My school, like all of your schools probably, knew that we needed to be prepared for this momentous change to education. So we did what all schools do in times of change, we set up committees. I remember distinctly my head teacher telling me to choose the policy team. He knew that this role would involve a few painful, tedious and frustrating meetings nutting out the school’s policy for using the laptops, and then the job would be over. I remember him distinctly telling me to avoid the teaching and learning committee – he knew very well that the job of that group would never be complete. Always being a little rebellious at heart, I opted to ignore his advice and put my hand up to join the DER teaching and learning team.  And you know what? He was completely right. Whilst the ‘team’ is now just ‘me’, the job is far from complete. In fact, it never will be because learning is forever, right? I know that sounds corny, but I truly believe it to be true.

 

So the revolution hit and whilst we thought we teachers would be washed away by the tidal wave of technology, we weren’t. We’re still here. Well, maybe we lost a few but I’m confident they were the 55 year olds who had the old Super, those bastards. But let’s get back on track, shall we? One of the first missions I set myself was to find a better way than email to share resources with students. How innovative am I? The truth is, however, that was our priority. In 2009, I had been teaching English at the same school for four years. I liked my students, but I was bored. They weren’t bored – not most of the time because I like to crack jokes and muck around … I’m a bit of a clown around teenagers, you see. Mostly I spent time making pretty worksheets and getting students to fill them in and glue them in their books. DER and the Lenovos meant that my pretty worksheets could be completed digitally … I just needed a way to get the worksheet to the students. Originally DER consultants suggested a range of strategies – USB, Bluetooth, email and worst of all, Moodle.

 

I’m just going to take a moment here to warn those moodlers out there that I am not a moodle fan. Why? Because I went through four days of moodle training and all I got was a headache and a massive textbook of instructions. As an English teacher, I simply wasn’t interested in learning how to do basic html coding to make my moodle site look pretty. I wanted something simple and practical. I wanted something teachers could manage themselves without relying on the ‘IT guy’. So moodle, sadly, just didn’t cut the mustard.

Luckily I am a nerd and opted to participate in a MacICT video conference looking at Web 2.0 tools. Ah, Web 2.0 tools. That phrase is almost quaint to me now … so many memories of 2009. But seriously, during the VC the presenter mentioned edmodo, I went home and checked it out and the rest is history. I like history, so I’m going to give you a quick history of edmodo and me. I promise I’ll get to the topic of this talk at some point in the next 50 minutes. When I first started using edmodo in 2009 there were less than 500,000 users. There were no quizzes, no communities, no folders, no connections feature and no badges. Mostly we had the post, alert and file upload option. Back then, that was all we needed … simpler times, hey? After my first few months of using edmodo, I became a bit of a fangrrrl. I was their number one champion in Australia. I tweeted about it, I blogged about it, I presented about it. I even had the CEO ring me up at home to talk about what I saw in edmodo’s future – what a trip for a young teacher! After the first year I had helped shape edmodo to be something a little bit different … instead of simply being a virtual classroom, it became a professional network for teachers. And, to be honest, it kinda became a big part of my life. As edmodo evolved through the input of thousands of teachers just like me, it became a very big part of my classroom. I feel like I’ve grown up with edmodo – they now have over 10 million users worldwide – which is all kinds of crazy. It’s true to say that because of edmodo, I have grown as a person and as an educator.

 

That’s a really odd statement to make about an online tool, isn’t it? Earlier this year when I was trying to figure out why edmodo is so central to my practice, I realized that it ticks the boxes of all of the elements of Quality Teaching. Did I see a few people sit up a bit straighter then? Wipe the snoozy sand out of their eyes? Yes! You’re right – I am finally getting to my topic! I told you I’d get there … it’s just that I’m an English teacher and I love narratives. Storytelling is a massive part of my teaching style. So I must warn you – there are more stories to come. If you were after a PPT slideshow and a ‘how to guide’ for edmodo, you probably should sneak out now and see if you can scab a left-over muffin from morning tea.

As I’m sure you all know, the quality teaching model has three core dimensions – intellectual quality, quality learning environment and significance – and under each dimension is a series of elements. What I aim to do in the remainder of this talk is to share with you stories about how each of these quality teaching elements can be met using edmodo. You heard right folks – EVERY element … don’t say I didn’t warn you, OK? Feel free to run to the coffee … I won’t be offended, I promise!  Oh, wait … before you run off I think you should stay for the next 5 minutes and 30 seconds. I have a video of my students I want you to watch. They are very sweet kids. I had planned to bring them with me today but my executive said the couldn’t come. They have their end of year exams and being in Year 10, those exams as seen as important. I won’t share with you my feelings on the matter – I’ve had complaints about my swearing at previous talks I’ve given, so I’ll spare you.

(WATCH VIDEO – 6 mins approx)

The first dimension I’m going to cover is intellectual quality … doesn’t it sound fun? This dimension has six elements, all pretty important ones because if you don’t meet them in your teaching, you’re pretty much wasting your students’ time. For real.

Deep knowledge

The knowledge being addressed is focused on a small number of key concepts and ideas within topics, subjects or KLAs, and on the relationships between and among concepts. In layman’s terms, this means don’t try to cover too much content in too short a time period. It’s a no-brainer, but somehow we manage to forget it in the rush of things. Keeping focused for students is done best when they’re organised. Edmodo has a folders feature where the teacher can add a range of rich, engaging and useful resources for students to use relating to a specific topic. I like to create just two folders per project/unit of work in which we house all of the important resources students will need. Using your key concepts as the names of your folders helps to keep your students focused on what is central to their learning.

 Deep understanding

Students demonstrate a profound and meaningful understanding of central ideas and the relationships between and among those central ideas. One of my favourite edmodo activities is the backchannel. It’s kinda stolen from an idea of Darcy Moore and mashed up with the idea of a twitter backchannel during a conference or presentation. Basically you give your students a text to engage with – like a film being viewed or a book or article being read aloud – and you have them make notes and ask thinking questions via edmodo. In edmodo posts come up in real-time, so students can interact whilst the viewing/listening is taking place. Trust me, kids are great at this – they’re all over multitasking. I often set a series of initial posts for students, with simple words as headings for their posts – like ‘characters’, ‘music’ or ‘challenging ideas’. Under these posts students add their replies – like I said before, usually these are observations made during the viewing/listening. Later students spend time reading through the posts and responding to ideas of their peers that they find fascinating or troubling. Stealing another idea from Mr Moore, I like to have students participate in silent discussions – using edmodo for the discussion platform enables more students to have a voice and for them to demonstrate their understanding of the ideas being discussed.

Problematic knowledge

Students are encouraged to address multiple perspectives and/or solutions and to recognise that knowledge has been constructed and therefore is open to question. Being an English teacher, this is one of my favourite elements of quality teaching. I don’t think it happens enough in most classrooms – students seriously need to spent time debating, considering contrary views to their own and questioning the ideas of the teacher. Often students are very uncomfortable doing these things in the traditional classroom environment … they have been conditioned to accept that the teacher is right, or if she is not, then you can’t actually say so in class. A really creative way of engaging students in this type of learning behaviour is to create character accounts in edmodo. The character can be an historical figure, an imaginary mad mathematician or a fictional character from a text being studied in class. The role of the character is to ask challenging questions of the students, and for the students to ask challenging questions of the character. This frees students from feeling as though they may be ridiculed for their interpretation of events, and allows them to express themselves more fully.

 Higher-order thinking

Students are regularly engaged in thinking that requires them to organise, reorganise, apply, analyse, synthesise and evaluate knowledge and information. I wonder if this is an element of quality teaching that is met often … clearly it links well with our beloved Blooms Taxonomy, but can it seriously be covered by students working on questions on a worksheet with information sourced from the web? Probably not. I’m a big fan of project-based learning and therefore have my students working in small groups quite a bit. Edmodo has a small group feature where students can communicate freely just to the members of their group. I love being able to see my students move through the stages of a project via the comments and posts they make in their small groups. That early stage of confusion and frustration through to those glorious moments of insight and the euphoria of bringing their learning together in some tangible form. These moments of visible learning are actually priceless for a quality teacher.

 Metalanguage

Lessons explicitly name and analyse knowledge as a specialist language (metalanguage), and provide frequent commentary on language use and the various contexts of differing language uses. Just like with other online learning environments, edmodo provides its users with a quiz feature. Quizzes can be multiple choice, short answer or fill in the blank and they are super easy to make. I love using these for formative assessment stuff – a bit of pre and post testing to check understanding once a week or a key points in a project. Nearly always I’m using it to check understanding of metalanguage – we use a lot of it in English … metaphors, simile, juxtaposition. Quizzes in edmodo are also cool because you can resend them again and again – that means mastery learning is crazy easy to facilitate for your students.

Substantive communication

Students are regularly engaged in sustained conversations about the concepts and ideas they are encountering. These conversations can be manifest in oral, written or artistic forms. Edmodo really is just one big sustained conversation … that’s what kids love about it. You heard my students on the video – they love being in contact with each other and with their teachers. Believe it or not, students actually LOVE to learn … it’s just our boring, crap way of teaching that makes them think they hate learning, haha. I’m often asked by teachers first using edmodo, how do I generate discussion? My answer is always Monty Python and YouTube. Jump on to YouTube, type in Monty Python and watch any video that comes up then tell me you’re not laughing. Sharing funny, quirky, interesting short videos in edmodo via the embed feature always results in a discussion amongst your students. This can be a class activity – post a video with a couple of discussion questions and tell students to reply below. It’s always worked for me. If Monty Python fails, try a Minecraft parody video … it really brings the cool kids out of the woodwork.

I can’t decide if the next dimension of quality teaching is my favourite one … I think it is but really they are all so good. Don’t roll your eyes; I’m being serious, haha. Having a quality learning environment really has been shown to have a significant impact on learning. In regards to technology, if you’re just pointing students to a series of random websites to ‘research’ content, then you’re not using technology to foster a quality learning environment.

Explicit quality criteria

Students are provided with explicit criteria for the quality of work they are to produce and those criteria are a regular reference point for the development and assessment of student work. The assignments feature in edmodo has been thoughtfully designed. You can add a title to the assignment, add a written description, add links, videos, documents and interactive embeds like games, flashcards or slideshows. I use assignments for class-work, homework and for major projects. Once students submit their work you can use the annotate feature and give feedback, then students can resubmit their work once it has been revised. There is a feature where you can track student progress in the form of grades and badges that reflect successful completion of tasks. My favourite thing to do is create criteria with students in class and then post this to edmodo as the criteria they should use whilst completing a task. It helps them understand the skills and content they need to master.

Engagement

Most students, most of the time, are seriously engaged in the lesson or assessment activity, rather than going through the motions. Students display sustained interest and attention. Engagement and edmodo is a no brainer. There are heaps of ways that edmodo can be used creatively to engage students in their learning. I already mentioned the use of characters as a way of creating interest in question asking and answering. A few fun features of edmodo that students really like are the badges, playing embedded flash games and connecting with students from around the world. I’ll touch more on that in a minute.

 High expectations

High expectations of all students are communicated, and conceptual risk taking is encouraged and rewarded. The fact that edmodo is primarily an synchronous platform – meaning that the communication and interaction happens in real time – means that the teacher and students can be involved in a highly effective feedback loop. Basically a system of feedback and feedforward can occur 24/7. Peer assessment is beautiful in edmodo – the teacher often needs to establish guidelines for the form that peer-assessment will take, but often this type of feedback will occur naturally with peers encouraging one another via replies and comments. I have had great success with the star/star/wish feedback protocol, where students post their draft work or completed work to edmodo and their peers add a reply with two things they loved (stars) and one thing they think needs improving (a wish). Edmodo makes this feedback loop continuous and easy.

Social support

There is strong positive support for learning and mutual respect among teachers and students and others assisting students’ learning. The classroom is free of negative personal comment or put-downs. It is a teacher’s responsibility to establish really clear expectations for behaviour within the face to face and online learning spaces. This is best done by negotiating expectations with students. I really like to use the Habits of Mind for this. I am also an advocate for a class-created edmodo policy or user-agreement which students and their parents sign before using edmodo. In my experience – and from the comments you saw from my students – edmodo is a supportive, collaborative environment free from the sort of ugliness that often can accompany social media. Students know that in edmodo there is no private messaging and that everything is visible to the teacher – edmodo really is like social networking with training wheels … and don’t our kids need that?

Students’ self-regulation

Students demonstrate autonomy and initiative so that minimal attention to the disciplining and regulation of student behaviour is required. The cool thing about edmodo is that it has evolved over time through the feedback of real working teachers. This means it has heaps of cool features that we’ve always wanted. The best features to support student autonomy are the calendar where all events, assignments and alerts are automatically embedded, the students back-pack that allows unlimited cloud storage therefore no more lost USBs or forgotten assignments! So often the bahviour that we deem disruptive is the result of disorganization and I truly think edmodo goes some ways to solve some of this for students.

Student direction

Students exercise some direction over the selection of activities related to their learning and the means and manner by which these activities will be done. I like to use the polls feature to give students a choice in their learning. Polls are super easy to use and the kids love them. Before class starts (or even the day before) you can put up a poll asking students what activities or texts or whatever they would like to engage with in the next lesson. This might mean a bit of adjustment to what you had planned, but who cares? We live in a democracy, right? Another way of giving students a bit more direction over their learning is to post a range of different activities for them to select from … you can embed games, videos, quizzes, links to websites, all sorts of documents. I like to post those cool Blooms/Gardener matrixes to edmodo and have students select an activity from each column.

 Significance

Ah, significance. We’re nearly there – at the end of this enormously long and boring talk! What is the point of all this learning, Miss? Why do I need to know this? Will this be on the test? We’ve all heard these questions buzzing in our ears and all we really want to do is slap the kid and say, ‘Just do it cos I told you too.’ But we know that both unethical and illegal. Mostly it’s unprofessional because it is our job to either make the significance of content and skills easily understood, or support our students in discovering their own reasons for its significance.

Background knowledge

Lessons regularly and explicitly build from students’ background knowledge, in terms of prior school knowledge as well as other aspects of their personal lives. Prior knowledge testing is easy with polls and quizzes in edmodo – or even better, hold a class discussion in edmodo about the topic about to be studied to generate a clear picture of students’ background knowledge.

Cultural knowledge

Lessons regularly incorporate the cultural knowledge of diverse social groupings (such as economic class, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, disability, language and religion). In the video one of my students referred to connecting with students from San Francisco via edmodo. This took place as part of our study of The Catcher in the Rye. I posted to the Language Arts teacher community in edmodo that I was wanting to connect my class with students from the USA – to give them a perspective of American culture. Now as a DEC teacher there are a lot of road-blocks that I often hit – one of those is Skype. I know it’s possible to Skype in a DEC school, but it’s never managed to work for me. Another constraint to connecting in real time is time difference. The solution we had was filming 3 minute videos responding to questions about each other’s culture and then posting these to edmodo. Under every video our students posted comments … we had a shared edmodo group for the project. It was heaps of fun and our students learnt a lot – well, maybe my students are still to remember that the Latino students from the Bay area are not, in fact, Mexicans.

Knowledge integration

Lessons regularly demonstrate links between and within subjects and key learning areas. There is great potential for edmodo to be the hub for cross-KLA projects. I haven’t been successful with this in my school yet, but I have plans to get it going soon. The premise is having students in different classes (like Year 10 English and Year 7 multimedia) working together on the one project – like creating a film – and they communicate via a shared edmodo group. Would be so awesome.

Inclusivity

Lessons include and publicly value the participation of all students across the social and cultural backgrounds represented in the classroom. As you saw in the video, not all students love technology, but all students can use edmodo – it’s so easy. I like that edmodo is not image centred, it is text centred and therefore the pressure to ‘look’ a certain way really isn’t there. My experience is that students are very welcoming, accepting and supportive within edmodo – it becomes a place where everyone has a voice. That’s pretty cool.

Connectedness

Lesson activities rely on the application of school knowledge in real-life contexts or problems, and provide opportunities for students to share their work with audiences beyond the classroom and school. Right now my Year 10 class are working on their English Composition Project. I’ve made finding and communicating with a mentor throughout the project a requirement. Currently I have 15 superstar educators mentoring my students via the small group feature in edmodo. It is amazing to observe the dialogue between my students and this brilliant, generous people. The edmodo teacher community is huge, I urge you to connect via teacher community groups. Take a risk and invite teachers from somewhere exotic into your virtual classroom – one of my students has a Columbian mentor who is a 5^th grade teacher in Texas. That is just awesome.

Narrative

Lessons employ narrative accounts as either (or both) a process or content of lessons to enrich student understanding. Two of my students referred to a ‘game’ that we played via edmodo that involved death and alliances. Basically with the help of my friend Dean Groom, I used edmodo groups to create a fictional world for my students to ‘play’ in … they literally became tributes in the Hunger Games and immersed themselves in this imaginative world almost constantly for two weeks. Narrative is powerful for learning … don’t discount it even if you’re not an English teacher.