Entrepreneurial Teaching

I’m excited to join the edSocialMedia blogging team.  My first post on their site is now up: Where Have All the Tweets Gone?

“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…”

During the third quarter, my students completed an independent research project on the Gilded Age.  For me, the Gilded Age is tricky to teach in regular US History and historically students have retained the least from this unit.  I decided that rather than continue to give them a broad and shallow overview of the era, I would ask them to study one particular aspect that interested them in-depth.  I defined my objectives as:

• 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.

During the first semester my US History students completed two different Twitter projects.  At the end of the semester I asked them to complete a survey about these projects. The Twitter assignments were similar to the idea I posted on this blog over the summer.

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.

I’ve been pretty pleased (and surprised) by the excitement over a recent article that discusses the use of Twitter in my US History class.  I am especially happy that there has been a healthy debate over the use of Twitter in education.

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.