Educational Research I Want to Read

I am currently sitting in a graduate course titled: EDF 689 Methods and Teaching of Educational Research offered by SUNY College at Buffalo in Bangkok, Thailand.  I am one course away from a second Master's degree which I am fairly excited about.  That being said, I personally hate doing research.  But I feel pretty passionate about ePortfolios and I am attempting to practice what I preach to my students everyday:

Always find a way to make your learning personal.  

So since I already know what I plan to do, here are my ideas for everyone else thinking about doing research: 

• Look at the attitudes of parents to technology in the classroom-what role does technology play in their lives (i.e. Do they blog, Facebook, Twitter?)  What are they really so afraid of?
• What technology tools are teachers finding the most useful/least useful in their classrooms?
• What is the correlation of GPA scores for college freshman compared to students that were full IB diploma candidates?
• What are the real attitudes and perceptions of parents, teachers and students about homework?  Look at HS, MS and ES.
• Do teachers that give more homework more or less effective teachers?
• How does class size relate to learning?
• How does the educational background of the teacher correlate to student achievement?
• Are international schools more technologically advanced than stateside schools?
• How can technology or curriculum coaches be better utilized during the school day?
• What independent reading programs are working at different grade levels?

What are you passionate about?  Is there any research to back up your beliefs?  Become the research educators rely on to prove we know what we are talking about when it comes to educating the future.


  

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Looking an Your ePortfolio Profile

The next step to transferring your blog into an ePortfolio is looking at other ePortfolios and seeing how others view your online presence.  Go to netvibes.com and click on your class section (i.e. 10/6=ENG 10, period 6).  Read a minimum of 5 ePortfolios from our class and complete at least 2 questionnaires below for your fellow classmates.

ePortfolio Profile

1. Name of ePortfolio author:

2. What is the first thing you notice when you pull up their ePortfolio:

3. List one word you would use to describe this student:

4. Does the student seem to be interested in learning? YES / NO

5. Based on the ePortfolio, if you were to guess, what grades do you think this student earns in school?

A+ / A / A- / B+ / B / B- / C+ / C / C- / D+ / D / D- / F

6. Does this student have any outside activities that they are involved with? What? List them?

7. Name two things you enjoyed about this ePortfolio:


       1.


       2.


8. Name one thing you would like to see more of on this ePortfolio:


9. Does this student give too much information about themselves: (i.e. phone number, address, hangouts, etc.)?         YES  /  NO

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Next Steps to Creating Your ePortfolio

After my high school students created tags and categories for their ePortfolios, their next steps were to:

1. Add one Widget that represents something about their personal interests
2. Update Shelfari with the latest novels they have read and are currently reading (each student had previously created a Shelfari widget for their ePortfolio)
3. Add a minimum of two links (maybe one to your Week Without Walls blog) that represents some of their interests
4. Add an “About me” page that showcases something about who they are as a student and member of society.  They were told not include their complete name, address, phone number, or picture. 

Once each student goes through this process, we will begin to look at one another's ePortfolio profile to analyze and access how each student is perceived digitally by their peers (my next post).  

Students begin to feel empowered as digital citizens when they control their personalized learning environment.  So far, only about 60% of my grade 10 students understand the possibilities available to them by using an ePortfolio to showcase their learning.  They are far more concerned with their status update on Facebook.  This is my attempt to change how they view the web and how they are seen by the outside world.  We'll see what happens next . . .

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Creating an ePortfolio out of a Blog: Directions for Students

First Steps to Create an Eportfolio from Your Blog

Step One:

• Log in to your blog and go to your dashboard 
• Post any recent papers /update your blog with your newest learning (for example: the Literary Analysis Essay and the Research Paper from MWH and English 10)

Step Two:

• Go to the Edit page on your dashboard
• Go through your entries and label your posts correctly with Tags and Categories

What is a Tag?

• Known names
• One, two or at the most three words
• Tags can be categories
• Tags help search engines find you
• Posts = as many tags as you want
• Tags help visitors once they get to your site
• Work like interactive yellow pages for the web

What is a Category?

• Unique names
• Long wordy names
• Categories can not be tags
• Categories do not help search engines find info
• Posts=1-4 categories
• Categories help visitors find you on the web
• Reflect the Nature of Your Site

Now go to your dashboard and begin to add new Categories.  Your categories should might include School Subjects and After School Activities that you are currently involved in such as:

• English
• Modern World History
• Modern Languages
• Art
• Music (formal and informal)
• Math
• Science
• Drama
• Photography
• Community Service
• Sports
• Interests
• Travel/Week Without Walls
• Think about how you spend your free time

And then your next step: add a Category widget to your sidebar and possibly label it: Subjects/Areas of Study/etc.

Stay tuned for what to do next . . .

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Turning WordPress into an ePortfolio

A portfolio is not built in a day.  It is a collaboration of a body of work over a period of time.  An ePortfolio works the same way.  As a teacher, we can't say, "Today class, we are creating portfolios."  The students will all look at you as if you have three heads.  
    
An ePortfolio has to be built up over time.  With students in the driver's seat of their presence on the web, we allow students to control their digital footprint, and utilize the power of web 2.0 to showcase their strengths to a specific audience: the world.  This year, my HS English students have begun their first steps (and mine) at using ePortfolios to represent their online profile as lifelong learners by using WordPress as their storage.  Although I have looked at a multitude of different options to house their portfolios, such as Google sites and Moodle tools, I am still a firm believer in starting with a blog for a number of reasons. 

One: a blog is transportable.  I teach at an International School where my students are transient.  I have 9 new students sitting in my class that were not there in December.  I need to provide my students with a tool that they can take with them to not just other schools, but other countries and region of the world.  If their ePortfolio is housed in Moodle on our school server, it will stay there.   With WordPress, students can take their blog with them, not just when they move but when they begin university and life in the real world as well.

Two: a blog allows students to edit.  You know what I am talking about.  How many times have you posted something and then realized you made a mistake.  Maybe it was a colossal mistake (accidentally writing something that is taken the wrong way by a reader) or a minor one (a spelling error), but we have all made them in our lives.  A blog allows the writer the freedom to go back and edit at any stage in the game.  Not only that, it allows writers to control when an item was published.  (This is my little trick that I may have used in the past when I was taking a few graduate courses and didn't want it to look as if I had completed 3 blog posts in one day.)  In GoogleSites, anytime you edit a document, the document is "posted" as your most recent item.  If a tenth grade student decides they would like to go back and edit something from 7th grade, do they really want their 7th grade Humanities report on Geography listed as their most recent learning?  WordPress allows them control.

Three: WordPress makes sense.  It is easy to navigate.  It allows a multitude of Widgets, control of your header, lots of freedom with the HTML code, and comment moderation.   And it is compatible with a multitude of other web 2.0 services on the web like YouTube and Flickr. 

So this brings me to this week in my classroom.  My students have been using WordPress this year to host their blogs.  Now, 6 months later, we are ready to begin transferring their blogs into ePortfolios.  I now have my students posting work from a multitude of classes across the curriculum.  They are comfortable with using WordPress.  Now the real work begins.  Over the next few weeks, I will take them through a variety of steps to transform their blogs into an ePortfolio.  Stay tuned for what will come next . . . 

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The Holden Caulfield in Each of Us

A few weeks ago, I was in the midst of teaching my favorite novel as a teacher, and J.D. Salinger passed away.  If I could start off every year with a novel, Catcher in the Rye would be the one novel I would begin every school year with.  When I teach Catcher, it allows my students to see that I was once a teenager, I was once conflicted, I was once lost and I have made it through.  Holden Caulfield embodies the voice I wish I had been strong enough to stand behind in high school.  The world is full of phonies, and it is hard to not get caught up in other people's ideas of what is right and wrong in society.  Holden is put to the test again and again and again, yet each time he is on the brink of making a questionable choice, he stands by his beliefs.  

I have never understood why so many people are afraid of this novel.  Isn't Holden the person we all want our children to become?  No, I don't want any of my children to spiral emotionally into a black hole, but yes, I do want my children to stand up for what is right in this world, even if they may get hurt in the process.   It was with great sorrow that it was time to  put Catcher back on the shelf again this week.  Thank you J.D. Salinger for providing so many with the voice they wish they had courage to speak.

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Use, Abuse or Lose

Last week I was fortunate enough to meet with a group of innovative HS English teachers during a job-a-like session at ASB Un-Plugged 2010. We spent one hour discussing the ways we integrate technology and web 2.0 tools in our classrooms. I titled this post "Use, Abuse, or Lose" because that is my mantra at ISB when I share and collaborate with my peers. I honestly could care less if my colleagues use, abuse or lose the stuff I send them.  But if somehow by sharing, I can save them 1-2 hours of work so that they can read to their own children, share a romantic dinner with their spouse, or give them 30 minutes to do whatever they please, then my job is done.  So here is a list of things I have used, abused and a few I have lost in my experience as a high school English teacher. Take a minute and see if anything can inspire or relieve you of our never ending duty of creating meaningful teaching moments in our classrooms.

I house all my ePortfolios on www.netvibes.com/teachwatts. Everything is streamed into one account and I manage/read all of my students' work on one site. Check it out if you have a minute. I love it.  Their work comes to me and my life can now manage approximately 100 student blogs without falling too far behind with my grading.

I use Word Press for my students' ePortfolios.  Although they are still a work in progress, it allows my students a lot of freedom and ownership of their work.  Since I teach at an International School, I see their ePortfolio as a transportable gift.  As third culture kids, sometimes my students are given less than a week to relocate to a new country or school.  Word Press allows them the freedom to bring their ePortfolio with them without it being housed by our Moodle site.

Voice Thread: I have posted different passages from "The Odyssey" on VoiceThread and allowed my students to comment/write what they have found in each passage. Worked amazingly well for my ESL students and the ones that need more time to process their thoughts before making them public. This would work really well with a unit on poetry as well.

Digital Storytelling: I LOVE http://www.xtranormal.com/. So easy, if my 8 year old son can do it, so can my 10th graders.

Independent Reading: I use shelfari and have each of my students update what they are reading, friend me, and place the shelfari widget on their eporfolio. An easy way to make suggestions on novels.  I used to use a Ning but found that after my students had completed my class, their conversations stopped.  Shelfari keeps them going and there is an easy widget to add onto their ePortfolios/blogs to showcase what they are reading.

Oral Commentaries for IB: Take a look at audacity.

FanFiction: OK, this site rocks.  Students can add their own twists and turns to any story (popular, classics, plays, short stories, etc) and read what others are writing as well.

Turnitin.com: This site checks for plagiarism and now you attach a rubric and post comments and grades on the site.  All of my students use turnitin.com to submit their work.

Twitter: OK, I admit it took me awhile to "get" Twitter and there are times when I can't stay up with everything that is going on, but the number one device that made me love twitter- my TweetDeck.  If you download TweetDeck onto your browser, you can plug in hash tags for all of the conversations that are happening on twitter that you care about (some hash tags I follow: #eportfolios, #edtech, #asbup2010, @safety, #edchat).  My professional development comes to me.  Another way to use it is to watch a popular subject as it unfolds in the news.  For instance I typed in #salinger on the day Salinger passed away.  My Grade 10 English students could see the profound effect this author had on the lives of people all around the world by the minute.  We were only half way through the book and my students couldn't wait to finish the novel to see if Salinger would have as profound of an effect on them as he did for all of his fans around the world.  It helped me prove my case that Holden is just as relevant today as he was almost 60 years ago.

That's what I can think of for now.  As I think of more things I have used, abused, or lost, I will send them your way.  I promise.  Please feel free to comment on what works for you!

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