Finishing Up the Research - Student Reflections

Students today finished up the last of their research projects.  I loved the creativity that some of them showed.  I had the students reflect upon the project by asking them what they thought about it and what might they do next time.   I loved reading their answers:

"What I thought of the project is it was the best because we got to pick our own topic, we got to pick how we wanted to make our information and we got to research on our topic. What I would do next time is I would pick the wars because I want to know is who started the war, who won and who was the leaders of the wars."

"I liked the project. It was fun. It also was interesting. Next time I will probably do turtles. Researching the Fire Bellied Toads was great. I got lots of information I did not even know about before. I could not imagine how much new information I would get."

For me, these reflections indicate that they are excited to continue this type of activity and that the choice of choosing was interested them was what made it most engaging.  Personalizing their learning while addressing the new literacies and other Common Core Standards really helped to open up new doors.  Not once did I have to redirect the kids to get back to their research or their topic.  They were consistently engaged in reading, watching, or exploring.

Summary of the Skills and Fluencies Required for 21st-Century Literacy

The need for traditional literacy skills is still just as important today, but being literate has taken on a different new meaning in the technology age.  There are new literacies that we must incorporate in to our teaching if we want our students to be ready for the world when they graduate.  “In his book The Third Wave futurist Alvin Toffler noted that, ‘the illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn’” (as cited in Jukes, 2007).  This is a critical skill as we embark on this digital age. 

Davis Warlick tells us that it is not merely the ability to read that article; it is about exposing the truth, evaluating the information, understanding the “grammar of the internet”, and finding the source of the information.  These are our new basic literacy skills.  (Laureate Education, Inc., 2009).    Ian Jukes helps us break it down farther saying that “we need to move beyond literacy to an expanded list of 21^st century fluencies” (Jukes, 2007).  These are the same fluencies I see being addressed by the 21^st Century Fluency Project, Fluency 21, and the skills that are embedded into the Common Core State Standards.  The fluencies that Jukes talks about include:

• Speaking and Listening Skills

• Reading & Writing Skills

• Information Skills

• Technical Skills

• Media Skills

• Personal Skills

• Group/Team/Partner Skills

• Professional Skills

• Teacher Skills

These skills are not just ones that happen on the Internet, they are ones that happen in all forms of learning, teaching, communicating, collaborating, critically thinking, and creating.  Out of all these though, I see teachers struggle the most with teaching the information skills, which includes evaluation strategies.

Traditionally, being able “to read and understand the text was sufficient to be literate” (Laureate Education, Inc., 2009).  Now students do not always go to print encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, and textbooks to get answers to their questions, instead now go online to find the information.  However, going online, reading, and evaluating websites takes a completely new set of literacies.  “The formats of webpages vary greatly…with such varied forms of websites and pages, it is difficult to provide novice Internet readers with consistent information about where to find information on a website“ (Eagleton  & Dobler, 2007, p.166).  All websites are created in different ways, with different visuals, and by different publishers.  On the net, anyone can be a publisher, which makes evaluating the content that much more important.   Students find it difficult to tell what is real and not real, so having them be able to critically think about the content on the page is so important.  It is also just as important to know if this information is from a reputable source.  “Just as you might teach students not to cite a book without knowing who is responsible for he information, consider applying those same principals to Web pages”  (November, 2008, p. 39).  This is not just as easy as it is with books and turning to a specific page that contains the publisher and copyright information.  On the web, finding the author or source of a site may require a few additional skills.  This is why, just like with our traditional literacy, we must begin at a young age and scaffold.

Evaluating the information is not where it ends.  Being able to understand the information that is being presented to you can be difficult due to the nature of its presentation.  On the web, information can be presented in text, visuals, video, audio, and images.  Webpages can have visuals that may not even relate to the text.  There are many strategies we need to teach are students to help them get beyond the 'pretty'.   “Sometimes it is difficult to get students to look beyond the colors, pictures, cool Flash animations, and graphics to see what the content is actually saying” (November, 2008, p. 36).

“Helping students develop research and critical-thinking skills on the Web can be a daunting task” (November, 2008, p. 95).  This is why I believe more teachers are not making the move to teaching these new literacies.  Like anything though, it is all about taking that first step in the right direction.  You will not be able to teach them all the skills they need in one class period, one semester, or even one school year, but you are giving them a foundation to which they can continue to build these new fluencies upon.

  

Resources

Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Jukes, I. (2007). 21st Century fluency skills: Attributes of a 21st century learner. Retrieved from http://tkcstemp.pbworks.com/f/Attributes+of+a+21st+Century+Learner.pdf

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Supporting information literacy and online inquiry in the classroom. Baltimore, MD: Author.

November, A. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Search Engines for Research (Class Discussion Post)

“There is so much information available to us today that it is important to have knowledge of available resources and to have flexible strategies for finding answers to compelling questions” (Eagleton, & Dobler, 2007, p.118). When I was in school and completed research for a project, our job was to go to the library to check out books, or look in the encyclopedia for information. The Internet was only just becoming a prominent search tool. Now, the Internet is a place with more information than anyone person could handle. So when we ask our students to begin researching their topic, they are met with an overwhelming amount of resources. Some of these resources are more reliable than others. The question is, how do we teach our students to surf this vast place and find information that they can validate. “Understanding validation as well as effective search techniques will help you both lessen the number of dubious sites that you might find and evaluate the ones that remain” (November, 2008, p.61). For my inquiry-based project, students will be researching famous people in our social studies and science curriculum to determine how what they invented, discovered, or established changed our world. Even though using a search engine is “the second most popular Internet task next to e-mail,” my students will begin first with using search techniques in our research center. This research center has subscription resources that the students can utilize to be sure that they are searching through relevant resources. Some of these research tools are Nettrekker, BadgerLink (offering Britannica School), and World Book Online. As I created my list of possible people students’ research, I discovered that not all of the resources above provided information. There were a few who tie back directly to our community of Janesville and therefor have little to no information available on these sites. The next step will then be the utilization of a search engine. More and more we are discovering the use of kid friendly search engines. I do provide these as clickable links on our research center page, but often the teachers do not direct students here, they just let them “google” it. The problem with this is that Google does not always put the most relevant sites first. “What this means is that the results of your search do not necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the information. A site at the top might be there based on how many links are coming into it from other sites. Popularity does not always equal the best quality” (November, 2008, p.22). There are a few strategies that can be followed in order to be sure you are receiving more relevant information to evaluate. The first strategy that I used is the “topic + focus” strategy. “Students who use this approach are able to locate target information more quickly because they’ve identified a specific focus area within a research topic” (Eagleton, & Dobler, 2007, p.134). The person I chose to use in my example search was Clara Barton. Clara Barton played a role in our history but the name is not well-known. To begin with I chose my topic and focus to enter into the Google search engine. This was Clara Barton and life. I also chose to add an extension. “An extension of the topic + focus method is to use more than two discrete terms when searching, which we call ‘multiple keywords’” (Eagleton, & Dobler, 2007, p.134). I added the keyword of historical. As I look through the list, I see the first result is from the Red Cross. This I think would be a fantastic resource as Clara Barton was the founder of the Red Cross. In order to share their history, they need to have accurate facts about her. The site itself breaks up the information into different topics and/or parts of her life. The next site I chose was from civilwar.org. I chose to look at this one because it is from the Civil War Trust and the URL indicated it was within their education section. Next, I chose to pass by a few resources from biography.com and historynet.com. I chose to pass these by because biography.com is covered in advertisements making it very distracting and historynet is a .com site that I know nothing about. I would need to find out who creates this site and its content. The last site I chose was from the National Historic site. This one really drew my attention since it had an extension of .gov. This would be a reputable site because “only government agencies can purchase and use .gov in their domain names. This particular extension is closed to the general public” (November, 2008, p.63). I opened this site to look closer and found that it gave exactly what I was looking for in an overall look at Clara Barton’s life. This site was actually located towards the bottom of the first page. One of the key things that Alan November shares is “how often people click on the sites that appear at the top of the list results” (November, 2008, p.21). If I had not chose to scroll and continue reviewing and evaluating the results, I would have missed this valuable resource.

References

 Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
 November, A. C. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Animal Research Project

For the last couple weeks, second graders have been working on a research project dealing with animals.  Each student was able to select any animal they wanted and learn about it and its life cycle.  The students then synthesized the information to create a script of what their animal would say if it was sharing the information about itself.  The students were then able to locate pictures of their animals and upload them into the web tool called Blabberize.

1. "Blabberize is a website that allows you to upload a photo, "draw" a "mouth" on that photo, and then upload a 30 second sound clip to make that photo speak or sing along with the sound."

  The students recorded their information and had created a fantastic visual presentation to share with the rest of their classmates.  Here is an example below:

The Research Project Continues

The kids have been fully engaged in their Inquiry-based Project.  They have been excited to meet with me a hour each day and find out the answers to their questions.  I wish I would have had more time to really pre-load the new literacies more than I did, but despite that, they are still doing a good job.
The students have developed their questions that will drive their research and have used both print and online resources to find their answers.  Some students were unable to find information in our non-fiction books and subscription resources here at school.  For those students, we discussed how to turn on Google Safe Search and evaluate the resources we came across.  An example was one of the students who chose to research Harley Davidson motorcycles.  He chose this topic because his dad owns one and he wanted to know more about how they were invented, why are they so popular, and what the cost is on them.  He idd a great job of focusing his topic onto a specific motorcycle.  As looked together at the resources that displayed in our search, my student was able to notice that a timeline of information was on the list and was specifically from the Harley Davidson website.  He stated to me that this would be a good spot because we were getting the information right from them.

Here was one reflection I really enjoyed reading. "I liked to pick my own topic because we get to research on maybe our favorite person or our favorite thing.  It [this project] is going great and it is just right because WorldBook Online is giving me lots of information that answers my questions. What I like so far is getting to research on the Chromebooks because instead of going on google and finding lots of websites and google giving you lots of not true information the Chromebooks give you lots of really true information."

I conferenced with most of the students today and found out that a lot of them are doing great work.  They seem very engaged in their topics and some have been doing additional work outside of school.  They are eager to read more.

The challenge is that there are a few who are eager to learn but need a few reminders, as well as a quiet spot to not get distracted.  They do better work when I have them find a quiet corner with the Chromebook. 

Another challenge so far has been that the students read and absorb the information but they lack the note taking skills needed to record the good information they find.  This is something I will do a lesson on in the future.

Overall, I can see that the engagement level has increased for most of these kids and that they love the idea of choosing their own topics.  Some of the students benefit from it being completely individualized and on there own, while others need to have more collaboration with me or others. 

Developing Essential Questions

There are many challenges that can be faced when your students begin developing questions to guide their inquiry projects.  “Because inquiry is not the norm in many classrooms, students need to be taught how to formulate interesting questions” (Thornburg, 2004, p.8).  Although students find it easy to ask questions about things as they cross their mind, asking them to develop questions does not always come easy.  They tend to come up with thin questions where the answer is only yes, no, or another one word response. 

It is also difficult to have students take the time to create good questions.  “Some students are impatient with this planning stage and eager to get going on the computers” (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007, p. 84).  We must work with the students to teach them what makes a good question.  Some things to remind students are that we want a question that can be researched.  “Inquiry means not just questioning, but questioning into something” (Thornburg, 2004, p.2).  Dr. Thornburg shares that good questions should also be

·      Ones we do not know the answers too

·      Have answers that are defensible

·      The door is opened for more research and projects that are in-depth

·      Anything can be created from a class project to a doctoral thesis

·      The focus is not on the surface knowledge but on the understanding

·      Other questions will develop

These are important things to remember when teaching student how to create good questions.  They need to know that thin questions will not develop a new level of understanding.

Another challenge has to do with helping students focus their topic.  Often they want to do inquiry projects with a very broad topic such as dinosaurs.  This can sometimes result in their questions being too broad or not meaningful., especially when told they have a set number of questions to come up with.  Surprisingly though, it is often the questioning that allows you to help them focus in on their topic.  “Focus areas can be derived by having students brainstorm as many questions as they can about their topics, then grouping similar questions together by using 3x5 index cards.  Most students find that obvious categories of questions emerge” (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007, p. 89). 

One strategy that can be used to help students develop good questions can be with the use of K-W-L charts.  “The K stands for ‘What I already Know’, the W stands for ‘What I Want to know’, and the L is used to record ‘What I Learned’ during and after reading and/or inquiry” (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007, p. 90).  I like to use the updated chart that incorporates the H for “How do I find out” (Kuhlthau, Maniotes, & Caspari, 2007).  The use of this chart helps students to take their background knowledge and build upon that to create questions that will be meaningful to them.

Another strategy I like to use is modeling.  Going through the inquiry process with your students can be very valuable.  They can see the steps you take and questions you create.  At a younger age, this is more important in helping them develop questions.  “An extremely powerful use of modeling is the teacher think-aloud” (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007, p. 19).  As you also embark on your inquiry journey, thinking aloud as you develop your good questions can model for students ways to create more meaningful questions.  This shows the opportunity students have to really dig deep into a topic that they want to know more about and it is not just creating questions for the sake of creating questions.

There are many great resources available to help you begin teaching your students how to create good questions.  LearnZillion has a whole unit designed around the Common Core.  Check it out: LearnZillion Research

Resources

Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: strategies for internet inquiry. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Kuhlthau, C. C., Maniotes, L. K., & Caspari, A. K. (2007). Guided inquiry: Learning in the 21st century. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Thornburg, D. (2004). Inquiry: The art of helping students ask good questions. Executive Briefing No. 402, pp. 1-14. Retrieved fromhttp://www.tcpdpodcast.org/briefings/inquiry.pdf

Evaluating My "New Literacy" Skills

According to Dr. Douglas Hartman, what literacy means has changed with time (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010).  I completely agree with him.  I have witnessed the evolution from the time of when I was in school to now my own classrooms.  We are now not just teaching our students to be literacy skills when reading print text, we are also teaching them to be literate when using digital tools and resources.

Part of my job as an Innovative Learning Specialist is to educate teachers in just this area.  David Warlick said, “We are preparing our children for an unpredictable future” and he is exactly right (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010).  We do not know what kind of jobs and resources might be available to our students when they graduate college or move into the workforce.  “The most important thing we can be teaching them is how to learn” (Laureate, 2010).  I consider myself strong in my understanding regarding the new literacies, as it is part of my job description.  By no means does this mean that I am an expert.  Most often I reference the 21^st Century Fluency Project when educating myself or others regarding the new literacies or in the fluency projects case, the new fluencies.  Either way, it is important that we begin to shift our views from the past to the future.  “Our past was rooted in book culture.  The future will be rooted in online and digital media” (Laureate, 2010).

As I took the quizzes, I was aware that I already had a good understanding of the new literacies and I was teaching my students important skills.  I could also see, that just like anything, there was still room for improvement.  With the first quiz on Web Strategies, I scored a 68 out of 75.   Although, I teach almost all of these skills to students, I often don’t follow them all myself.  On the second quiz, I scored a 54 out of 60.  For my role in my schools, I am required to be really good at most of these topics which gives me a leg up.  The only area I chose “I’m ok” at was on the computer games.  I chose ok because my schedule does not allow me to keep up to date on most of them.

As for teaching these skills, I usually utilize resources from the 21^st Century Fluency Project.  There are many lesson and units available that help me to integrate these new literacies into my already existing curriculum at any grade level.  I often like to introduce one at a time as we move through the year so that we can build upon our previous knowledge.  My favorite lessons to teach are on evaluating and searching.  I have videos that show a student trying to navigate a search engine to do some research on baseball but is overloaded with the abundance of information.  We discuss how we can locate information more effectively and use our background knowledge as well as doing some inferencing, to select a good resource.  For evaluation, I use hoax websites to trick students about the relevance of sites they find.  The motto they walk away with is to not trust everything they read on the web.

References

Crockett, L. (2014, April 9). Introduction to the 21st Century Fluencies. Fluency21. Retrieved May 8, 2014, from https://fluency21.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201965037-Introduction-to-the-21st-Century-Fluencies

Eagleton, M.B. & Dobler, E. (2007).  Reading the Web:  Strategies for Internet Inquiry.  New York:  Guilford Press.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2010). Supporting information literacy and online inquiry in the classroom: New literacies [Video webcast]. Retrieved from Walden University database.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2010). Supporting information literacy and online inquiry in the classroom: Skills for the future [Video webcast]. Retrieved from Walden University database.

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem - A Virtual Lesson withYellowstone Nature

Third Grade students in our challenge classroom spoke virtually with Robert Chapman from from Yellowstone Nature about the Ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park.  This was part one of a two part lesson.

By the time the lesson is complete he will have taught the students about Coyotes, Wolves, Badgers, and Lichen in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The kids will examine closeup the teeth of the coyote and the wolf and compare them to ours. They will measure the length of the canine teeth and understand the use of the teeth and how that has been an adaptation helping the animal survive in the environment. They will see the type of coat and why it is important to have a guard coat as well as an undercoat. They will discuss how both the coyote and wolf are complex family members vs the badger that is a solitary animal.

Mr. Chapman was very knowledgable about the ecosystem.  He shared his knowledge with the students and built upon the their background knowledge as well as discussing in terms the students could understand.  This lesson was very interactive and the students were able to comment, and ask and answer questions.

Let the Action Research Adventure Begin....

This week I began implementing my Action Research project.  I am excited and nervous about this endeavor.  The journey to this point began with looking at my school demographics, goals, and what I already wondered about.

My elementary school has approximately 370 students in Pre Kindergarten through fifth grade.  Our student population includes:  2.7% Asian, 5.7% Black, 16.3% Hispanic, 66.9% White, and 8.4% identified as two or more races.  Of these students, 13.6% are English Language Learners, 60.7% are economically disadvantaged and 18.2% receive special education (Jefferson Elementary School, 2013).

The school report card for 2012 - 2013 shows we are "exceeding expectations".  My school has been recognized as a school who is "Beating the Odds" in the state of Wisconsin.  Our building mission is student achievement is our priority.

Our building goals include third to fifth grade students will close the achievement gap as measured by exceeding the state score on the Fall 2013 WKCE in reading and math.  All grade levels will have a mean RIT and a mean RIT growth above the 50th percentile as measured by the Spring 2014 MAP test in reading and math.  Eighty-five percent of all students will be proficient or advanced as measured by grade level or district common assessments (Jefferson Elementary School, 2013).

While decreasing the achievement gap is important, our focus for RtI (Response to Intervention) has been directly related to those who need Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions for scoring basic or minimal.  While this focus is happening, I do not always think our students who are talented and gifted are receiving the interventions they need.  It was because of this that I began to focus my wondering on how educational technology could benefit these students.  I wondered how the use of educational technology and personalized learning would help to increase the motivation, engagement, and writing quality of gifted students.  Within my school, we have the resources to access educational technology but it is not embedded into the everyday classroom.  These students do not have time to do exploration of topics relevant to them that could help them make achievement gains in the area of research, creativity, collaboration, and writing. 

Another reason I chose this wondering was after working with a group of students on a research project.  Although the students were somewhat able to choose their animal for the ecology project, they were very limited on any other choices that they could make.  I noticed the students lacking interest and projects that lacked any kind of creativity.  There were also many students who wanted to work on the same animal but were not allowed too, taking away any possibility of collaboration.  They were to sit at their computer and research, with no skills taught, and put certain information into certain places in the same type of Prezi as everyone else.  This is what began me wondering about what it would be like if we offered more of a personalized learning model, as well as opening the doors of creativity and collaboration.

I have had the opportunity to see a few presentations after this project on personalized learning.  The model shared in these presentations helped me to see how it could benefit our kids in the areas of engagement, creativity, and collaboration.  My wonderings continued to grow and this opportunity will give me the chance to see the results of this type of learning model.

I also wanted to narrow my focus for my first action research project.  I chose to focus just on second grade.  Within our district, we have two schools that house challenge classes grades third through five.  It is at the end of the second grade year that students are tested and the top scoring students are offered a place in the program.  It is therefore that I chose second grade students.

I came up with my initial wondering of how can the use of educational technologies and personalized learning increase the motivation, engagement, and writing quality of gifted second grade students. I came to this wondering after working with a small group of students on an independent research project.  This was a basic form of personalized learning for some of our top second graders.  The students were very interested in the use of educational technology to research a topic that wanted to know more about and use of their creativity to share what they learned.

Our students today use “technology as an integral part of life, both in work and play, and therefore do not view technology use as an opportunity, but, rather, as a fundamental tool for normal day-to-day functioning” (Housand & Housand, 2012, p. 706).  Keeping this in mind, I realized that my focus should not just be about motivation and engagement, but should also include collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking, as these are also tools students will need when leaving school and entering the workforce.  I also chose to not include the focus of personalized learning but have that just be a part of some of the lessons I plan.

After thinking on all of this, I knew I needed to revise my wondering.  I want to know how can the use of educational technology can build a second grade gifted and talented students’ creativity and collaboration skills when combined with personalized learning.  I want the students to be able to show achievement in these areas through the use of a variety of educational technology available.

Since my role in the elementary school is that of an Innovative Learning Specialist, I am already well versed in the different educational technologies available and their uses with students.  After completion of this study, I hope to use my research finding to show others the effectiveness of using educational technology with gifted and talented students as a way of creating meaningful learning opportunities and interventions.  I also hope to show the importance of the 4C’s (creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking) in their instruction as a means of promoting student achievement, engagement, and motivation.

References:

Dana, N. F., & Yendol-Hoppey, D. (2009). The reflective educator's guide to classroom research: Learning to teach and teaching to learn through practitioner inquiry (Laureate Education, Inc., custom ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.  

Housand, B. C., & Housand, A. M. (2012). The role of technology in gifted students' motivation. Psychology in the Schools, 49(7), 706-715.

Jefferson Elementary School. (August 28, 2013). GreatSchools. Retrieved March 23, 2014, from http://www.greatschools.org/wisconsin/janesville/691-Jefferson-Elementary-School/

Jefferson Elementary School. (August 2013). School Improvement Plan - Reading. Text file. Retrieved March23, 2014 from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ZibPBuHEhKOEpUSGEyd2swdHc/edit?usp=sharing