Beginning to Blend

To say that today’s adolescents have a fascination with social media and communication might be an understatement. According to webwisekids.org, 73% of teens have a social media account. Once they go on a social media site, the website found that students do the following:

●        86% of social network-using teens comment on a friend's wall

●        83% comment on friends' pictures

●        66% send private messages to friends

●        58% send IM or text messages using the site

●        52% send group messages

Instead of focusing on the problems that these statistics create, I would rather look at the opportunity that they present and how we as educators are beginning to capitalize on them. Our students enjoy the level of interaction that social media sites such as Facebook provide them and willingly engage with each other on them. How then can a school harness these tools to enhance student learning?

Back when I was teaching Rabbinics at Krieger Schechter, I created an assignment where the students were interacting via Pinterest (You can read about that experiment here and here). The potential was there to engage students at a deeper and more meaningful level through a format they wanted to use. For me, this was just an initial foray and I knew that more could be done.

While we have primarily used Moodle this year as a tool for posting assignments, it has the potential to do so much more. 10th grade Tanakh teachers Becky Friedman-Charry and Esther Dubow have created a series of online forums in Moodle where 10th grade students in both sections of the course are extending their classroom conversations about various psalms. In a traditional classroom discussion only a limited number of voices are heard.  In the online discussion each student has the opportunity to share and be heard. Students are encouraged to post regularly and to read and comment on each other’s thoughts. Take a look at just a few of the postings about Psalm 13.

Student engagement in these discussion forums goes beyond their desire to be successful in a graded course.  They’re connecting to each other and they’re connecting to our Jewish tradition.

Social Studies teacher Kelly Delaire is similarly reaching out to her students through social media. As previously reported in Paw Print Now, Ms. Delaire realized that if she wanted her students to be more in touch with current events, she had to reach out to them where they were. On this Facebook page, news articles and essays are being posted that are relevant to her students’ studies and extending the learning outside of the classroom.

Each of these projects is an incredible way to make learning more meaningful and engaging. The assignments and information is interesting and allows the students to interact in a forum that they are comfortable with. They demonstrate our willingness to embrace a trend towards blended learning that combines online and traditional classroom interaction. But, perhaps, most importantly, they create opportunities for students to learn and model the online behaviors that we want them to present as they boldly venture out onto the Internet.

PowerPoint: What's the Point?

In an era where we are supposed to be promoting the use of technology, I have to admit that there is one tech tool that I just see as overused and poorly applied. It's PowerPoint.

When I taught instructional technology at Temple University, I devoted a few lessons to the appropriate usage of PowerPoint. I covered things like appropriate contrast between background and text, how to appropriately insert graphics, and how to properly use the animation tools. I often shared some more horrendous slides, like these and these.

When using PowerPoint correctly, it can support creating an engaging presentation with visual supports for the spoken word. Most of the time, though, I see PowerPoint presentations crammed with too much information and presenters read the slides instead of using them as a place to provide us with visual cues for their talk.

It is cases like these that my mind travels back to the classic film strips that I remember teachers showing in classes when I was younger. I was always really excited when the film strips would come out. These presentations combined audio and visual media and generally drew you into the presentation in the same way that a good PowerPoint presentation should.

The key to the good use of PowerPoint really does not lie in the technical skills of arranging slides and using transitions. So much of that is bells and whistles that draws away from the presentation. The true mastery of PowerPoint lies in creating enough visual information to help engage your listeners in your oral presentation.

One of the best ways to do that is to create an infographic. Believe it or not, these visual presentations of data are often produced in PowerPoint. With an infographic behind you on the screen, suddenly, you are able to tell your story in much greater depth. Your audience can explore the visualization of the infographic as you share with them your interpretation of what they see. There are even handy templates for building these infographics, such as this one.

So, what are you waiting for? Switch out your standard PowerPoint presentations for PowerPoint infographics.

Pinterest Project Update

It's been almost a week since I gave out the Pinterest assignment to my 7th grade Rabbinics class. Their reaction to the initial assignment was interesting. Most of them were not aware of the site, but were pretty awed by the basic display of graphics and text that makes up a Pinterest board.

At this point, I've received links to graphics from slightly more than half the class. The "pins" have been from a variety of sources and most strongly relate to the topic. What's been most interesting, though, is that there are other Pinterest users following the board and some of them have "re-pinned" the items on the board.

I'm still trying to decide what the next step will be in this Pinterest experiment. I'm certainly considering using it for other units as I think the challenge of succinctly summing up what a picture means to you is an excellent skill. Furthermore, I think there is value in getting the students to think about a text through a visual media. I'm considering re-using the pictures in the test for this unit, perhaps as a writing prompt.

What's missing, though, is the interactive element that should go hand in hand with a social network. This assignment would be more powerful if I was not serving as the conduit for the students to interact with Pinterest. Given that I'm working with 12 and 13 year old students, I'm not sure that I want to be the person who sets some of them up with their first social networking account.

I'm considering bringing the next version of this assignment into the Google Site that I have successfully used with previous classes.I'm just not sure that it will have the visual flexibility that Pinterest has brought to this project.

Testing the Waters with Pinterest

Like many people, I have spent the last several weeks quietly laughing about my wife’s fascination with Pinterest. Very quickly, she has amassed a collection of photographs and web links about a host of topics ranging from recipes to DIY ideas. From a short distance, I was wondering with why we needed one more social media site.

In recent days, I’ve started to undergo a conversion of sorts. I’m not ready to spend hours “pinning” pictures on the site, but am wondering what it can be used for. Ali recently wrote on EdSocialMedia about how Pinterest could be used for schools. Resource collecting made perfect sense to me, as well as a few other uses, but I was wondering if it could be used in the classroom.

With that in mind, I’ve started a little bit of an experiment. Starting next week, I will be teaching a new unit in my 7^th grade Rabbinics class that focuses on the concept of “wrongdoing with words.” This is a pretty juicy section of the Mishnah (Bava Metzia 4:10) that compares wrongdoing with words to stealing:

Just as there is wrongdoing in buying and selling, so there is wrongdoing in words. One may not say to him, "How much is this item?" if he does not want to buy it. If he was a penitent, one must not say to him, "Remember your former deeds!" If he was a descendant of converts, one must not say to him, "Remember the deeds of your forefathers!" For it is said, "And a stranger you shall not wrong, nor shall you oppress him" (Exodus 22:20).

I’m looking forward to the discussion that this topic will generate, but I have a new project for my students that I’m hoping will add to our discussions. I’m planning on challenging my students to find images that they connect with our text and email me links to those images (plus a short explanation why). Since I’m just a little concerned about internet safety and since Pinterest's user terms limit it to age 13 and above (as do most social media sites), I’ll do the actual pinning for now. My hope is to create a visual collage that could be part of our end of unit assessment.

I’ve gotten started with a few images here already. You’ll notice that I’ve included some text, too. You can do this by using a tool from PinAQuote that turns text into images.

I’m not sure that Pinterest is the best tool for this task, but I’m going to give it a shot.  In a post,Twyla Felty suggests that Stixty might be a more student friendly tool. I’m thinking about giving it a try, too.

I’ll report back in a few weeks how this experiment works out. And, if you find images that connect to this topic, pass them along.

Learning to Share All Over Again

When I was first entering education, I worked in as a substitute teacher in a school that contained only kindergarten classrooms. It was a warm, friendly place that suffered from one critical flaw, no one shared. This included lesson plans and even classroom supplies (I have long hypothesized that this was because they spent their days surrounded by kindergarten students who were still learning that skill.) For whatever reason, however, the school lacked a culture of collaboration. 

Tip O'Neil, former Speak of the House of Representatives, once famously said that all politics is local. After having participated in several national and international professional development opportunities over the past year, I have come to the realization that all Jewish education is local. Much of our knowledge and resources as teachers stays within our own classrooms and at best is shared within our own school building. In a world of shrinking resources, high demands on teachers, and a desire to push Jewish education to adopt 21st century learning skills, this is no longer acceptable. Like my former colleagues, we have yet to fully embrace the key 21st century learning skill of collaboration. There are certainly plenty of places where collaboration is taking place, e.g. the North American Jewish Day School Conference, but this is only the beginnings of where we could go

Imagine that you are looking for educational materials that will connect your study of American government and religious rights with Jewish views on the role of government. Because of how loosely connected Jewish day schools are, we would never know that a day school a thousand miles away from us is working on the same thing or did a special program on this very topic last year.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was someplace that served as a clearinghouse for these types of lesson plans and resources?

Andy Smith, Head of Resources for TSL Education in the United Kingdom, recently spoke with me about the efforts to expand TES to be a global resource. Currently, TES (which used to be the Times Educational Supplement and still exists as a subscription based magazine) houses thousands of comprehensive lesson plans, resources and other useful tools for teachers that are cataloged and audited by TES on a regular basis. Just like a social networking site, you can follow people who have post resources and comment on the items that they have posted. Because of this collaborative resource, Andy hypothesized that hours and hours of teacher preparation time has been saved.

Andy made one interesting observation, though, about his company's efforts in the United States. He shared with me that as they begin to collect and organize materials that American teachers are not great at sharing. Maybe the phenomenon that I saw is more than just that of a single school. It is time for us to move into the 21st century and realize that through collaboration we become stronger. Novice teachers would not spend hours preparing the simplest lessons, rather they can focus on improving existing lessons to work with their personal style in the classroom, as well as building their classroom management skills and monitoring individual student achievement.

So, the question is do we as educators in Jewish day schools have the courage to embrace collaboration and build an on-line clearinghouse for educational materials? What will it take to help us create a virtual home for us to share? Sir Ken Robinson has called collaboration the stuff of growth. Are you ready to grow?