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Snapshots – Integrated Units, Traditional Evolution, New Tools
by Elizabeth Helfant

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We are now eight days into the school year, our second year with a 1:1 program that now spans grades 7-11. It has been a smooth start and the tech use is even more evident and more necessary for us this year. Technology is moving from merely integrated to integral. If you were to take snapshots of the opening days of school, technology would be in the picture- and not because we value technology but because we value both the efficiencies and the possibilities for innovation that it gives us.

For the second year, we started school with students examining an interdisciplinary theme in each grade level. We ignored all trappings of schedule and discipline and concentrated on asking questions, researching answers, and creating a finished product and presentation around the grade level them. The purpose of the units is to stress research and information literacy skills, to introduce or review the use of a number of technology tools and software applications, and to learn cooperatively for the sake of learning. The integrated units originated with our move to 1:1 and were only done in those classes who were getting tablets last year. This year that was not the driver but the units still included the use of diigo, OneNote, blogs, wikis, and photoshop. However the real value in the units shifted from technology training to community building. Technology provides some of the tools that fostered cooperative learning, critical thinking and creative expression. The units were:

9^th Civilization and Sustainability – Students examined what constitutes a civilization and what it requires to sustain one

10^th Responsible Consumerism – Students designed, marketed and create a disposal plan for a product.

11^th Navigating Frontiers – Using Lewis and Clark as a motif, students had an experiential learning experience that centered around exploring and understanding new frontiers.

12^th Citizenship and the Greater Community – Students explored the greater St Louis community from historical, environmental, political, and service learning perspectives.

As we moved back into classes, signs of traditional learning emerged. There is still a place for traditional learning skills and basic literacy in today’s high tech world. Technology offers a new look to the old tasks of note taking, lecture, research, handouts and homework.

Our students use OneNote to take notes on a regular basis. It’s just a normal part of their workflow at this point and is not driven by teacher mandate. Students appreciate the searchability of OneNote. They love that they can tag important notes and efficiently create a summary sheet for review. They like the ability to share their note pages with each other and take notes collaboratively. The auto-save feature ensures that as they rush from class to class, their notes are saved.

Traditional lecture and discussion classes have been enhanced and personalized by the use of Dyknow which is even more prevalent this year. DyKnow turns the more teacher centric tasks of delivering information into a two way interaction. It’ ability to make formative assessment second nature by utilizing rich polling, status update, chat and panel submission provide teachers with good information about each student's learning during the class period and informs their thinking on pace, content, and depth of study.

Walking into our math classes and our history classes, you notice that text books are not central to learning. In history, content is provided on a course webpage and is largely current event, scholarly articles or podcasts or it is a primary source file that could be a document, an image, or a multimedia file. In math teachers are providing content using self-created interactive Maple worksheets and screencast explanations. They are using webassign and Maple TA to provide homework sets that are self-grading. Both disciplines, as well as several others, have adopted scribe blogging or collaborative wiki workbooks to provide spaces for students to create study guides, ask questions, discuss, and reflect. It’s business as usual and yet, because of the toolkit, it isn’t business as usual at all.

Our awareness of information literacy and what it takes to ask good questions and find the right resources to get good answers has definitely increased. Research is happening across all disciplines. Using scholarly articles and non-fiction to support classroom instruction is a goal this year. We are using a number of tools that make this easier to do. Zotero provides a great plug-in for more advanced research projects. For simpler ones, OneNote or Zoho Notebooks are good alternatives. Sharing in Zoho makes it the tool of choice when we are teaching research as the research project can be shared with librarian and teacher so they can provide feedback during the process. All three tools help with conversation about intellectual property and citation as they have mechanisms for tracking the websites used and for generating bibliographies and footnotes. Our students have also been happy to learn about the Manage Sources options on the Research tab of Office 2007. If we emphasize citation and show them tools to make it manageable, students become more amenable to and adept at the task.

Finding good information means more than “Google it!” It means consulting scholarly articles and databases. It means learning to read academic periodicals and journals. In an effort to make this more apparent to students and to add rigor and relevancy to classes, we are also trying to move non-fiction reading into the classroom. One tool that has been helpful for this is Lesson Writer. Lesson writer takes the scholarly article and generates vocabulary, grammar, and short answer exercises around the text. We are also using Diigo’s annotations quite a bit to have students annotate and discuss difficult readings as well as to have teachers pose guiding questions on Diigo sticky notes that help student’s make connections as they read. Two more fun tools that we are using to expose students to nonfiction reading are Vocabsushi and Wordnik. Both tools look up voacbulary words and find them in recent news articles. It’s traditional stuff done with in a non-traditional way because it maximizes student learning. And increasingly, it is moving things that happened in the classroom to homework and freeing class time for richer more student centered tasks.

Along with the nonconventional integrated units and the evolving traditional tasks, there are also new tools emerging that will play a prominent role in learning. We are introducing Wimba as an electronic classroom and oral communication tool. We are really excited about implementing Learnosity.                Learnosity turns cell phones into powerful assessment tools, especially in World Languages. Students dial our Learnostiy number (or use Skype) and they can respond to oral prompts or engage in conversations that can later be reviewed an assessed through a web browser. Lastly, we are piloting ChalkandWire portfolios. With only two assignments submitted and assessed via the portfolio system, the conversation around what we grade and how we assess things has already been elevated.

The portfolio tool forces you to consider skill levels and to clearly articulate what it is you really value with respect to student learning.

The snapshots look somewhat the same and yet there is a marked difference in this year’s snapshots over last year’s.  It isn’t really technology; it’s the shift in curriculum and the shift in what we value as evidence of learning. More than the presence of technology, it’s the presence of playful experimentation and student centric learning. Their senior classroom is looking more like a snapshot from kindergarten- it’s an image of learning to learn- and that’s a nice picture to start the year with!

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.