The Best Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers - 2012 Edition from Rafael Scapin

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Makes You Think!

I've realized that although we consider students digital natives, students still resist using tech tools in purposeful ways. We somehow expect that digital natives have the instinct to want to use tech tools to have insightful discussions, write collaboratively or to produce a thought-provoking, original piece of content. However, we fail to realize that creating original content requires a lot of time, effort, perseverance, trial and error, and above all, lots and lots of critical thinking. 

Lately, or perhaps it's always been that way, students don't want to work that hard. It's easier for a student to function in a teacher-centered classroom than it is in a learner-centered one. Some teachers or should I say, the system, have trained our "millennials" how to be straight A students with minimal effort in a pseudo critical thinking learning environment, and when we shift the paradigm, not only do the teachers resist, but so do the students and their parents.   

Teaching students to use tech tools in a purposeful way may cause some tension because kids want the fun games; many parents want the least amount of work for their kids, and teachers either don't have the time to design critical thinking lessons using tech, or they simply don't know how. The tech tool cannot stand alone, and is not going to make students think critically. It's how we use the tech tool that will teach students to think. The problem is that some kids have a lot of unlearning to do. By the fourth grade, students who have had ineffective teachers learn exactly how to manipulate the system so they are perfectly comfortable filling the blank and bubbling in a circle. Students will resist when we make them write a script using their imagination, or add their thoughts to a wiki, write a script for a video, or collaborate with peers directing their own video.  Using tech tools effectively is not all fun and games; at first glance, tech tools appear to be flashy, but there's nothing flashy about them. Used effectively tech tools require lots of hard work, and it's hard work to think!  So students, teachers and parents have a lot of bad habits to unlearn. Sometimes parents enable a lot of the "I can't" attitudes too. We assume that because kids love using tech that somehow they are going to want to use it to think critically. Thinking requires effort, perseverance, even sacrifice.

It's hard to believe the statistics of students underperforming on standardized tests while attending schools with cutting edge technology. We must constantly evaluate how tech tools in the classroom impact student achievement.  All educational stakeholders are responsible for constantly evaluating what we expect students to do with technology, and how tech will impact student achievement. Without this constant accountability, educational tech tools lose their effectiveness.

Educational tech tools cannot be all fun and games; otherwise, it's the students who hurt in the long run.

Nook or Book, That is the Question?

I grew up a 20th century student reading physical books. I wrote in my books, dog-eared pages, spilled tears on breathtaking passages, borrowed them, and lost many classics to friends. Now, technology has asked me to rethink the efficiency with which I read introducing e-readers to contest my reading status quo.  I struggle to make up my mind, and abandon one for the other because I love the reading experience they both can offer.  But, as a non digital native, I’ve realized that today's students haven’t had the same reading experiences; therefore, they cannot have the same nostalgia for physical books like I do because they spend more time using digital products than paper ones. They were born into a society with an entirely different delivery system of information. It is the non-digital natives, like me, who will need to embrace new technology, like e-readers, if we are to fight illiteracy and aliteracy.

Ironically, the first e-book I read on my e-reader was Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. While reading this e-book, I was actually more connected to people than I ever was when reading physical books.  My e-reader made it easy for me to adapt and for my students to engage with text.

E-readers allow readers to:

• instantly share pages, short passages or quotes with anyone via Facebook, Twitter or email. 

Books obviously can’t compete with these features! 

E-readers also let readers instantly:

• rate and post an online review of a book
• share a reading status with friends on Facebook and Twitter so they know how far along readers have read.
• bookmark pages
• add notes about a page or passage
• highlight key sections while the e-reader keeps track of it all.
• search for keywords
• touch a word to look up its meaning
• adjust the size of the text or the lighting 

Although e-readers’ features empower reading experiences, why do so many of us non digital natives still long for physical books? 

We long for physical books because they are and were a part how information was presented to us to process and learn. Our brains got used to this type of delivery system of information.  The 20^th century learning experience lacked the level of stimulation and engagement that tech like e-readers offer today. Today’s students rarely engage with paper products, and the printed word in a physical book, no matter how well written, does not offer the degree of stimulation students are used to receiving through other media.   However, just because we, as non digital natives, are not used to this delivery system, we cannot hold our students back from the benefits this technology offers them to improve their reading skills. 

If your school happens to have e-readers, here are some ideas that could help change students’ attitudes toward reading:

• Create a Class Facebook or Twitter page.  This can be done safely giving access only to students and parents. As students read class wide or independent selections, they can use the e-reader’s Facebook and Twitter share feature to post their favorite quotes and thoughts to discuss texts with each other. (If students need coaching on how to select significant passages and write effective FB and Twitter posts, then I recommend modeling how to do this first using a high interest text all students will enjoy.) Schools could even connect with grade levels or other schools inviting them to add to the Facebook and Twitter feeds uniting students nationally or even globally in their reading experiences.
• E-readers may even motivate students to take the time to look up unknown words while they read because the dictionary feature makes it virtually effortless. Students just tap on the unfamiliar word to see a definition in a pop-up window. 
• E-readers also reinvigorate the concept of the “book report” because the book review feature is limited to 3500 characters or less. Students benefit from learning how to write a succinct book review. Although there’s no guarantee an e-reader motivates students to write book reviews, the connectivity aspect of writing a review for an online community may attract more students to use this feature since they know they will be writing to a real audience of fellow readers.  Determine what your students like to read: humor, mysteries, sci-fi, romance, etc.  Allowing them to read books they like may encourage them to use the book review feature without a fight. 
• E-readers even facilitate annotation because it takes seconds to highlight a passage of interest and add notes to it.  No more lost sticky notes, or illegible marginal notes.
• Students can also lend each other books through the e-reader, and there’s been talk of apps enabling e-borrowing from local public libraries.

E-readers are not the panacea of illiteracy or aliteracy, but an e-reader’s features definitely offer a level of engagement physical books cannot. E-readers connect readers to each other in a way physical books cannot. We’ve tried using traditional strategies to fight illiteracy and aliteracy, and many of these have failed. Why not try the technology of e-readers where students not only interact with the text, but can also connect with an online community of readers.   

One Scoop or Two?

Building your own "sundae" of information is as delicious as a double scoop of chocolate ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top! Scoop.It is the banana split of bookmarking when browsing the web because you get to choose and garnish an information "sundae" with content you find deliciously interesting.  You can share your scoops of information with a community of readers on various social media, and on Scoop.It.

Here’s how you scoop your way to a delicious "sundae" of information! 

1.) Pick a title for your topic, e.g., “Tech Tools To Improve Parent Communication”

2.) Enter a brief, but engaging description of the type of content your scoop will contain e.g.,   

     Connecting with parents in a snap using web 2.0 tools!  

3.) Identify the language the content will be in: English

4.) Enter keywords to describe your topic: parent communication, parent contact, etc.

5.) Upload an icon to represent your scoop if you’d like.

Then, watch the magic happen! Scoop.it scans the web to scoop up any relevant content related to your topic. Like an ice cream bar with unlimited toppings, Scoop.it presents you with content choices to add to your information sundae. You decide to add or discard the content depending on its relevancy and interest.  You can also decide on sources to locate your content. Adding a Scoop.it bookmarklet to your browser also makes it easy to scoop up content whenever you're browsing and come across content worth adding.

Once you have scooped up content for your information sundae, you can share your scoops on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wordpress and Tumblr, join a community of scoopers, follow their scoops or be followed.  Scoop.It is still in the beta stage, so I hope they will sweeten up to the idea of adding Blogger to their sharing options. However, you can add a sweet widget of your scoops to your website or blog! 

Students, teachers and parents are in for a real treat with Scoop.It because it’s a delicious way to organize content and taste each scoop of information one at a time to meet so many instructional purposes and needs.  


Different reasons for creating your own Scoop.Its:

• Disseminates information such as important articles, videos, links, and other content to parents, colleagues, and students
• Organizes resources for group projects for struggling students to save time and help students see various content that reveals a topic's focus or theme.
• Facilitates students' research efforts for projects. As they research a topic, students can scoop their sources and submit their scoop.it page to the teacher as their lists of works cited. 
• Supports reading instruction. Students can work individually, in pairs or small groups reading content the teacher has pre-selected and saved on Scoop.it. Students can analyze the differences in the text structure of each selection featured in the scoop.it page; they can set a purpose for reading each selection; identify key or difficult vocabulary in each selection; summarize each selection, and find connections among all of the selections on the Scoop.It page.  

Here’s a double scoop I created. I will be adding the Scoop.It widget to my blog, so you can always see new content I’ve scooped up, or you can get a taste on my Twitter page, Facebook, or by following my scoops on Scoop.It itself.    

We're Lucky To Have Tech, But Are We Any Wiser?

In the age before tech tools, a.k.a. the analog world, teachers had to find creative ways to engage students with difficult texts or concepts, and help them transition to more challenging reads and ideas, but it wasn’t always easy or even achievable in 180 days! And, naturally some teachers were better at it than others. Now that we’re lucky enough to have tech in schools, are we any wiser? What’s changed in terms of how we use our resources? How are we using tech tools effectively to motivate reluctant learners and help them make the necessary transitions to become literate, educated adults? 

If students reach the fourth grade without strong math or reading skills, how many of these students overcome their deficiencies in middle school, high school or even adulthood? How are we truly using tech tools as interventions to stop the cycle of illiteracy and aliteracy?  

Today’s tech tools proclaim to boost critical thinking and combat all types of illiteracy, and I believe they can...someday in the near future, not just yet! I visited a Title I school recently where thousands of dollars had been spent on lap top carts, yet no one had bought the software for the lap tops. How effective was that decision to buy the hardware without the software? How long will the lap top carts sit in a closet before students and teachers can take advantage of them? Like this school, not all of our nation’s schools have caught up and established the infrastructure needed to support complete tech integration, and in those schools that have, we need to ask if the tech is being used wisely to teach critical thinking. 

With good reason, there’s been a lot of buzz about the September 3rd, 2011 New York Times article revealing the stagnant test scores of the Kyrene School district of Arizona. Many pro tech educators, including me, claim these statistics don’t tell the full story. However, what is the real story? I am a firm believer that learning how to critically think, without ever teaching to a test, increases a student’s chances of scoring high on standardized tests. Of course, for some students, it’s just not that simple; there will be other factors that affect their test performance. But, on the whole, if there is an entire school who has been using tech wisely and meaningfully for several years, statistically wouldn’t the scores tend to be higher? So, the questions remain: With tech tools as support, what critical thinking skills do students need to learn from year to year, and how are all subject area teachers across grade levels working in vertical teams to achieve “digital” continuity from kindergarten to high school? How are teachers building on the tech and critical thinking skills students mastered in previous years? We need to reflect on our curriculum goals that integrate tech and identify exactly how these goals help students develop critical thinking, study habits, and mastery of concepts to progress to more rigorous thinking levels. 

  

However, if schools have struggled to achieve this continuity and consistency to build vertical teams and meet benchmarks when we first began to use pen, paper and books, what are we going to do differently now that we have tech?  Have we grown wiser? These are questions  I think we must continually ask:

• How are we using specific tech tools to effectively address illiteracy and aliteracy?
• How does my school or my district’s vertical team create continuity, consistency and increase rigor year to year? What conditions create successful tech integration?
• How are we using specific tech tools to effectively teach critical thinking year to year?
• How are we using tech tools to engage and build autonomy?
• How are we using tech tools to help reluctant learners transition from less challenging work to more rigorous academic levels?
• How has tech integration lead to increased academic achievement? 
• What specific tasks and roles are we assigning reluctant readers and writers when we use tech tools in the classroom? How we are we using tech tools to help build these students’ skills so that they can have an active role in our classrooms, and become independent learners?  

Tech in education remains undiscovered country for many schools, and our students exist as digital natives held back by an analog world. Many of our nation’s teachers remain afraid to abandon the analog world. The sooner we begin to coordinate our efforts, the wiser and luckier we will be.   

Please check my webdoc and share your thoughts! Thanks for reading!

Are They Talking Behind Your Back?

Whether you want to admit it, or not, there are two societies thriving in your classroom; one is in plain view which you take credit for leading fearlessly, and keeping under control,and then something very human begins to happen right behind your back. Whether we like it or not, an “underground” society emerges which you as the teacher are not privy to, a secret society inaccessible to you because of the role you play: “The Teacher”. Regardless of how cool you may think you are as a teacher, and how much you think your students admire and respect you, students do talk behind your back!

Todaysmeet.com is a service allowing us as teachers to enter the teen psyche and surreptitiously discover what they are talking about “behind our back” during a lecture, a discussion, a guest speaker, a viewing of a film, and so many other school activities requiring them to be a passive audience member. Todaysmeet.com EMPOWERS you as the teacher because students are held accountable for listening; they are no longer spectators, but participants in an interactive audience requiring them to hold their own by providing comments, questions, speculations, arguments, answers, solutions, evidence, opinions, explanations, reflection, analysis, application…the list of possibilities is endless and dependent on the criteria YOU set for the * “backchannel” conversations students undeniably have behind our backs. Obviously we cannot control the conversations students have outside of our classrooms, but Todaysmeet.com EMPOWERS us to control the conversations students are having “behind our backs” inside our classrooms.

* Backchannel is a term used by James Socol, creator of Todaysmeet.com. Socol says “backchannel” is “everything going on in the room that isn’t coming from the presenter… where people ask each other questions, pass notes, get distracted, and give you the most immediate feedback you’ll ever get.”

The temptation for students to pass notes, and have sidebar conversations is virtually eliminated with Todaysmeet.com.

Todaysmeet.com EMPOWERS you as the teacher to know exactly what students are thinking, and therefore instantly obtain feedback about a student’s depth and breadth of understanding during any type of presentation.

How does Todaysmeet.com work

Step One

Prior to any type of presentation, demonstration or listening activity, visit Todaysmeet.com to create and name a room where your students will be talking to each other while they hear the presentation.

• You can choose to have students talk to other students who are in the same classroom at the same time; or you can collaborate with another teacher to have two or more classrooms engage in a conversation by listening to the same content at the same time. Every student will need to have his/her own computer. If computers are available for every student in a school building to use all at the same time, an entire school can view a presentation and engage in conversation on Todaysmeet.com integrating subjects, grade and achievement levels, and encouraging cooperation and communication among all students and teachers.

Step 2

Decide when you would like Todaysmeet.com to delete the room, i.e., in 2 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours, one day, one week, one month, or one year. The type of presentation students will be listening to will determine the longevity of the meeting room. If you plan on having an on-going discussion, you may want to extend the time so you can return to the same room where the feed of previous posts will appear and serve as a recap of a prior conversation.

Step 3
Once you have created and named your “talking room”, provide your students with the URL of the room. For example:
Create a room
Name a room: Lab demonstration # 1
Delete a room: in 2 hours
Click on Create a room.

• Note: If the name you chose for your room is already taken, a red X will appear next to the URL under the heading of Name a room.
• Once you click on Create a room, the next window to appear will be a split page with two sides; “Listen” on the left and “Talk” on the right as well as a window for students to type their names.
• It is important to set specific norms regarding the names students will use. When working with middle school students who may hesitate to share their true thoughts and feelings for fear of how their peers may perceive their posts, a teacher can EMPOWER her students by asking them to generate a pen name, which only she will know. The teacher can keep a log of the student names along with the secret pen names. This will ensure confidentiality and afford students the piece of mind they will not be criticized for their posts.

At this point, the teacher will have a URL to provide her students once they enter the classroom and before a presentation. The teacher can write the URL for all students to see and enter once they each have their own computer. Upon typing and entering the unique URL of the teacher created “talking room”, students will see the split page of Listen and Talk and will need to enter a name and click join to begin adding their posts.

How can Todaysmeet.com EMPOWER you and your students

Students can use Todaysmeet.com to engage in conversation after listening and viewing a myriad of activities, such as a lab demonstration, a lecture on any subject, a guest speaker, a film, an audio recording, a student presentation, a play, a written exercise practice while learning how to write a second language, a debate, and so much more.

• You can even have a silent Socratic discussion after reading a specific text; instead of discussing the text out loud, both you and your students can post questions and responses on Todaysmeet.com rather than having an oral discussion. This may enable the more reticent and timid students to gain confidence in their role in the class since they can use their pen name to posts their thoughts and keep their posts anonymous.

How will you use Todaysmeet.com in your Empowered Class?                        Share your ideas

Teachers can use a Todaysmeet.com as an assessment tool in a variety of ways. Student posts offer teachers instant feedback showing a student’s understanding of concepts being discussed. Student posts can provide teachers with an instant assessment or even a summative assessment of concepts taught. The possibilities to use Todaysmeet.com as an assessment tool are endless. An Empowered Teacher needs to determine the content of what students will hear and/or see and identify how this content will help students meet the specific learning goals the teacher would like to students to reach.

Teachers can even use posts on Todaysmeet.com to teach students Self-Assessment. Teachers can use both teacher and student models as examples of quality posts. Teachers can allow students to experiment with the technology first so they can feel comfortable writing posts and then lead them in a discussion about posting etiquette and what makes for an acceptable and unacceptable post. Providing a rubric indicating the frequency and quality of the posts, and posting etiquette is a must! Before using Todaysmeet.com it is essential to explain norms for acceptable posts and provide specific examples of unacceptable posts. You may want to ask students to give you examples of what would be considered acceptable and unacceptable posts.

The Todaysmeet.com discussion can be used as a springboard to study and explore other topics, which will naturally come up in the conversations.

Allow and accept the natural digressions, which may surface away from the topic at hand since it is not unusual for people to get off topic if for a moment during discussions.

Assist students in evaluating and interpreting their posts and those of others; Teachers can print the posts(feed) and have a follow-up conversation out loud about the thoughts posted. Questions teachers can ask are endless such as, what were the patterns? What comments stood out? Who had the most insightful remark and why? The wittiest? The strangest? Evaluate the off-topic comments as well and discuss what effect they had on the conversation.

Always consider their strengths and weaknesses of your students and their varying degrees of ability regarding critical thinking, spelling, typing speed, etc. prior to the Todaysmeet.com session and after. The teacher should take time to self-reflect on what were the advantages and disadvantages for the different ability groups. What modifications can be made next time using Todaysmeet.com? What worked well and what needs tweaking? What did students appear to be confused about? What may have caused the confusion?

Bring your students’ hidden questions and thoughts to the surface of your classroom to promote conversation, critical thinking, and most importantly to determine the homogeneity and/or heterogeneity of your students’ thoughts. Todaysmeet.com lets you enter your students’ mind. Empower yourself in your classroom by guiding what your students are saying “behind your back”.