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.

“I become apprehensive when I hear people tell me about how our students are all “digital natives.”  My hesitation stems from the fact that some educators have twisted this buzzword beyond its original definition into a dangerous catchall.  For some, the phrase is used to define our students as a monolithic group of tech gurus.  At best, I think this tends to obfuscate students’ dearth of practical technological skills, and at worst, it leads to a conception that all students are technologically savvy.”

Be sure to read the rest of this post and check out what else is going on over at edSocialMedia.

“This school year I embarked on a journey to introduce my students to Twitter.  For the first three quarters of the year, I structured “Twitter projects” to supplement my in-class work and to provide additional support in meeting certain academic objectives.  Throughout the course of the year, the number of tweets coming across steadily increased …With no ‘official’ fourth quarter Twitter project, our class feed sounded much different.  Any tweets now coming across represented more of the proverbial “cricket” noise in an otherwise peaceful environment…”

• 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.

The first question I asked them was:

What is the best academic benefit of using Twitter?

Hearing what my peers think about issues 37%
Learning things I wouldn’t have otherwise 34%
Sharing historical resources 17%
Helping to draw connections between past and present 12%

My students, like most teenagers, enjoyed using Twitter for class, but would likely not use it if I had not introduced it in class. In an effort to dig more into this, I asked the following question:

What would make you use Twitter more?

Easier to see people ‘replying’ to me 31%
Better integration into Facebook 22%
Following more people/orgs who have similar interests to me 19%
Others using it more 19%
Better integration on my mobile device 10%

And then, just out of curiosity, I asked the following:

What ways do you use/follow Twitter?

Web interface (twitter.com) 93%
Tweetdeck 34%
I get emails telling me there’s been an update 10%
App on my mobile device 8%

I also had a couple of open ended questions:
Name one thing on Twitter you’d like to learn more about.
Ideas for 3rd quarter Twitter assignment?

I took these ideas and created our third quarter Twitter assignment.  In this assignment, I also added some appendices to help address the results from above.  For example, I created an appendix that walked students through three ways to see when people replied to them.  They seemed to like the tutorial on how to use a RSS feed email alert to see when people replied to them.

The sample size was 59, or about 90% of my US History students.  I used Google Docs to create a simple form for the students to fill out, it worked great.

Part of ‘entrepreneurial teaching’ is engaging with things you do not like (or hate).  That’s what I did with Twitter.  I originally I thought that Twitter was the dumbest, craziest, worthless site on the internet.  I had to put that aside to give this lesson a shot and it has been a great success.  Next time you think the same way about a teaching technique or anything in general, why not try it once?  After all, if you are not trying things outside of your comfort zone / personal bias (like Twitter was for me), you’re never going to improve as a teacher.

I wanted to take a few minutes to elaborate on the article and share some of my lessons learned.

• Just because a class is using Twitter, does not means that is all the class is doing.  I cannot believe I have to say this, but yes, people actually think that I have jettisoned the entire curriculum for Twitter.  Twitter is a supplement to our already robust curriculum.  Everything I do on Twitter is in addition to what we did last year.
• Twitter makes learning student directed.  There is no classroom, no textbook, no review guide.  It’s openness forces (allows) students to think on their own and organically apply knowledge.
• Students become more engaged in history when it is relevant (duh).  Since the students are, on their own, tying current news stories to themes from US History on a regular basis, it is fostering engagement.
• Applying themes from one era of history to another is critical thinking and critical thinking is a positive.  We know history repeats itself, but do you really know how much?  It only takes a student 140 characters to relate the credit crisis in Massachusetts in the 1780s to an article from today, but that student now has (at the very least) opened the door to a deeper understanding of both events.
• It doesn’t matter what type of student you are (quiet, loquacious, weak writer, creative, analytical, unfocused), Twitter can engage you.  I’ve seen it.
• Getting students to think about your course outside of class is always good.
• Some people will automatically shut off or tune out as soon as they hear the word “Twitter” – I know because I used to be one of them.
• My Twitter assignment does not “replace” the research paper component of the US History course.  However, for those not participating can opt to do a research paper instead.  Twitter, so far, has tremendously improved my students research skills, making them more information literate.  I see this as adding to, not taking away from (since nothing has changed) the research paper component of the course.  A few mentions in an EdWeek article helps give you a ‘taste’ of my class, but don’t assume you know everything that is going on.
• Twitter is not a panacea or a plague, but especially if it fits into your own strengths, give it a shot, you may be surprised at the results.

So here are some of the Twitter-related opportunities I see (for me personally):

1) all students can now carry cell phones in school
2) we’re going 1-to-1 (macbooks) in 2010-2011
3) students spend an incessant amount of time on their mobile devices and home computers.
4) Twitter offers a unique platform to aggregate different parts of the internet
5) Twitter is simple, instantly gratifying, and can be used from many different interfaces (all important to students).

I am sure that there are more, but this is what came to me at first. So the question became how can I use Twitter to enhance my classroom experience or, if I was an entrepreneur, how do I take advantage of this opportunity to add value for my customer?

Given my excitement over this opportunity, I turned to our first unit in US History. The US History curriculum (non AP) at our school starts with the present day first and then begins with pre-colonial North America.  This approach allows our team to highlight the key historical trends that we will be discussing all year with news stories that are happening today. It provides a nice level of relevancy that the students carry with them throughout the year.  Usually, as a team, we put together a plethora of news stories to make a little primer for the two-week unit.

I currently have two ideas for extending this unit, one short term and one long term.

1) short term: cut back on the number of stories that we ‘give out’ and let the students find them on their own and make brief comments through Twitter.  Use the stories and comments to facilitate our classroom discussion.  Allow, temporarily, to use cell phones (or if they are using a laptop) in class to Tweet thoughts on our discussion as we go along (that maybe we didn’t get to or didn’t want to say out loud).

2) long term: request that every student for each chapter highlight one (two?) of the key themes and then find current events stories addressing that theme.  After finding the stories they obviously have to tweet about them with a comment.  Once a month we can come together to discuss parallels, lessons learned, emotions, etc.  Each section already has a ‘note buddy’ that is responsible for taking good notes and posting them online.  I am considering making a Twitter buddy to aggregate the postings per section into a mini ‘report’ for us to use during these discussions.

Just wanted to share a practical way I am trying to take advantage of an opportunity in my school.