Both of these problems led me to a decision:  I will move my lesson planning into the cloud.  For 2011, I am going to use Google Docs to plan lessons, write lecture notes, and store materials.  I believe that Google Docs will allow me to take care of both of the aforementioned problems.  First, I can simply overwrite my lessons year after year (or day after day), keeping them in one file, yet always having the ability to revert to something I did years ago.  Additionally, I can use this same “see revision history” function to review changed made year-to-year or comments added after I implemented a lesson.  Even better, I will have access to my lessons at my fingertips.  I am always logged into Gmail (at school, home, mobile), making my work much more accessible than through good ole Citrix.

There are a few drawbacks to this approach.  The first of which is collaboration.  Yes, it is easy to collaborate on Google Docs, but most of my colleagues are much more comfortable reviewing documents through the network drive and Microsoft Word.  That said, it might be easier to share documents with substitutes, who do not have access/knowledge to get in and out of our shared folders.  In addition, for both substitutes and colleagues, Google solved the problem of not having a Google account with its recent sharing updates.  Another drawback is the fact that I am without my content if the internet goes down.  With everything in the cloud, if there is an internet outage, I would not be able to access my content.  That said, this also could happen (and does) with our network drives.  Third, I am beholden to Google as a safe repository of my work.  If the company goes rogue, I am in deep trouble if I have not been backing up my items regularly.

These changes are important to me because I believe one principle of great teaching is lesson reflection and improvement.  Ideally, some reflection occurs within 24 hours of a lesson and then again at the end of a unit.  During class, unintended teaching opportunities arise that we hadn’t anticipated.  Capturing these insights is much more likely with reflection. In reflecting, we can take advantage of those unintended opportunities that arose during class.  By reviewing a lesson after a summative assessment, we have more perspective on how our formative work helped/hindered objective mastery.  Unfortunately, this is a time-consuming task and often gets pushed to the bottom of our to do list as it is important, but it is not urgent.  I think moving my lessons to the cloud will not make time for reflection suddenly appear, but it may eliminate some of the barriers making it harder to do.

• Investigate a specific historical problem during the Gilded Age
• Utilize primary sources to develop a historical argument.
• Review effective research note taking procedures.
• Conduct research using Google Books and develop a bibliography
• Appraise how different historians view a specific historical event.
• Defend a historical interpretation in an oral presentation.
• Document research on a specific historical event using Google Sites.

The project consisted of three main parts: collecting evidence using Evernote, presenting findings through Google Sites, and defending conclusions with oral presentations.  Forcing my students to use Evernote had mixed results.  Most of the problems occurred because some students had to use the mini laptops, while others brought their Macbooks from home.  The mini laptops, or netbooks, seem to really bother students and I would say their productivity compared to the Macbooks or desktops was around half capacity.  Perhaps I will share more on this and Evernote later, but today I wanted to talk about Google Sites.

I am fortunate to work at a school where the students have access to Google Apps.  This made it very easy for me to use Google Sites in class.  The students simply login to their email and they can see the “Sites” link at the top of the screen.  Within two minutes they had created a website.  I did not have to worry about setting up accounts for students or finding a wiki service that offered everything I need.  Also, the sites could easily be shared with me, peer editors, the entire school, or the world.

This project focused on collecting and presenting research.  I asked each student to research a historical ‘problem’ or question from the Gilded Age.  For example, “How does social Darwinism, influence the role of the government in the economy during the Gilded Age?”  For this unit I gave them around 20 possible ‘questions’ to research or allowed them to choose their own.  Ideally, in order to make this truly student-directed, each student would create his or her own problem, but I did not have the time to do that in this unit.

On Google Sites, the students created a small five page website.  The main page website included student produced background paragraph(s) and thesis.  The students created subpages on the research they collected to build their thesis.  For the subpages, one page presented a bibliography of the books used, one a bibliography of the internet resources used, and one excerpts and analysis of primary sources found.  Some students took the site to the next level.  Google Sites makes it really easy to embed music, YouTube videos, and other multimedia from the web.  It also allows you to add a “comments” section at the bottom of each webpage.  This allowed each student to get feedback from their peers, similar to a blog posting.  I was also thrilled to see students sharing tips about Google Sites and research resources over our class Twitter feed.

I liked the Google Sites approach because this allowed students to take ownership over their final product.  I wanted to force students to think critically and devise their own historical interpretation.  This meant taking ownership over their ideas and thought process.  Creating a personal website simply continued to build off of this theme.  I could have done better with this by not giving them a framework for the site (letting them choose how to present their findings).  The students will be using the research skills developed in this unit for their fourth quarter research paper.  I will not force them to use any of these tools, but many are already using Evernote and Google Books for that project and even other classes.

As a side-note, I tend to grade projects without rubrics for a variety of reasons.  After some negative feedback about this approach, I caved for this project and created three detailed rubrics.  I could explain how this was both beneficial and detrimental, but that is a much longer post.  That said if anyone is interested in the rubrics, contact me and I will be happy to share.

An example of an article I asked the students to find from the New York Daily Tribune (August 5, 1900, p 12).

One of the most exciting endeavors in digitization of historical sources is the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America project.  Anyone who has spent time in front of microfilm knows how powerful this project is.  Chronicling America currently searches newspapers (including advertisements) from 1880-1922.  This year, the project hopes to bring 1860-1880 online, offering the Civil War and Reconstruction era newspapers up for exploration.  The open platform allows you to save newspaper pages in PDF format and I had no problem using a standard Mac screen capture to grab parts of a page.

The implications for using this site in research projects are obvious, but I wanted to bring these newspapers in to supplement classwork as well.  In preparation for one of our classes during the Gilded Age unit, I decided to print out around 15 different newspaper pages from the era.  Each page corresponded to a different theme or identification from our reading.  For example, the students got to see examples of the “Gibson Girl”, Jane Addams’ work at Hull House, and immigration demographics.  In groups of two, I asked the students to take an entire newspaper page and locate the theme or identification from the reading.  The students then explained how the discovered connection relates (or doesn’t relate) to what they read in class.  When they came to an acceptable conclusion I swapped their page with another one and they started the process over again.

This activity served a variety of purposes.  Most significantly, the students began to see history as ‘actually happening’ as opposed to something just inside of their textbook.  They are all (believe it or not) still familiar with newspapers in their own lives.  Actually seeing one from over 100 years ago added relevancy and significance to the Gilded Age.  Obviously, students also got the added benefit of using and exploring primary sources to supplement textbook reading.  A natural (more student-driven) extension of this project would allow students to find the articles themselves.

Drawbacks: Most papers are “regional” in nature, some are near impossible to read when printed out, there are over 100 periodicals but they’re only from 16 different states, the site runs slow sometimes as the images are large.

I feel like this entrepreneurial urge sometimes conflicts with the ultra-serial nature of some entrepreneurs and some teachers.  That spirit pushes us to create, create, create, sometimes at the expense of scaling existing lessons.  I know, for me, that is something I really want to work on.  After all, a good lesson is something that should impact the class not just on that day, but for the rest of the semester … and I do not just mean in coincidental ways, but in planned, measured activities.  Can we take a good lesson and have it affect the entire semester supporting deeper comprehension and fostering critical thought?  I almost would say that, in fact, you cannot achieve deeper comprehension and critical thought without this type of scaled lesson planning.  Looking back on some of my lessons from last year and I definitely missed some great opportunities to ‘scale’ a lesson.  By not considering ‘scaling’ these lessons I effectively kept them in a bubble and my students missed out.

Obviously, this is not something applicable for every lesson.  As I allude to above, I am not espousing something that I am some master at, by any means, but I do strive to reflect this principle.  If I look at my US History curriculum and think of it like a house, most objectives serve as the bricks of the house allowing me to build up, or scale, it into the finest little abode on the street (or so I wish to believe).  Other objectives are like the furniture of the house.  Yes, they are tangential and part of its essence, but the pieces do not necessary build off one another.  In the end, I think we want to make sure that we have a house with furniture as opposed to some furniture with some bricks.

This type of planning is exactly what good teachers do when lesson planning.  I often come up with a great lesson plan and neglect to consider what type of student benefits most from that type of instruction; this is a huge, but common mistake.  I am sure every teacher has made this mistake least once, in fact, many I worked with made it every day.  I do not think that makes me (or them) bad teachers, but it does represent an area for improvement.  The main problem with not considering what type of student our instruction is that we cannot support the student who is not inherently wired to the type of instruction for that day.

This question inherently leads into differentiation.  This is an example of the teacher’s job being much more difficult than the entrepreneur’s is.  In fact, differentiation really turns a teacher into an uberentrepreneur.  The entrepreneur must focus on one target market; the teacher should focus on many different types of learners.  In an ideal world, we differentiate our lessons every day for every learner.  I am going to go out on a limb here and say that teachers who do this everyday, for every lesson are the rare gems of the educational world and not the norm.  For the rest of us, on those days where we choose not to differentiate on all levels, I think simply taking the time (before instruction) to recognize what type of learner would benefit the most from a certain day’s lesson it can help a tremendous amount.

I would even argue for adding a new field to your personal lesson plan template: targeted learner.  This way we could have a record of which classification is receiving the most value added from each lesson.  A quick way to do this would be to use intelligence divisions (analytical, practical, and creative).  This would allow us to look back through our lesson plans and note good (or bad) trends.  We may see that our last five lessons suited only analytical and creative thinkers.  A teacher then may be prompted to add in a lesson targeted to practical thinkers.  Also, by consciously thinking about who benefits most from a lesson beforehand, we can provide additional support to students who struggle with that type of instruction.

As a last aside, this blog entry only really discusses the lesson plan, but I think to be truly effective with identifying your target students, you really need to consider (separately) assessments as well.