Digital Language Arts III: “I Reflect, Therefore I Am”

Practice, reflection, and analysis. The heart of the matter… can you provide students with opportunities to digest and process your instruction? It is in the acts of practicing, reflecting, and analyzing that students can build connections to prior material, can try out new modes of understanding, and can play with concepts mentally in such a way as to decide what makes sense and what doesn’t as well as what prior understandings need to be modified or discarded. Metaphorically, they pick up new ideas off the ground, mentally experiment with them, and then either throw them away if the experiments fail or put them in their pocket for safe keeping if the experiments succeed.

In traditional language arts instruction, these acts might manifest as some of the following: journal writing, student-led read-alouds, responding orally or in writing to teacher prompts, essay writing, or recitation of personal stories that students use to connect to the material. Each certainly can have value in refining student understanding… but each may also present a motivational hurdle to overcome with students. Technology integration can help! Let’s return to our two guiding questions. How can I improve what I do? What can I do that I couldn’t before?

Idea 1: Providing electronic means for journal writing and prompt responses

Web 2.0 tools such as those found at ThinkQuest can help motivate students to reflect meaningfully and to increase the quality of those reflections. Consider letting students blog about what they’re reading and how it relates to their life experiences – you’ll be surprised at how much more effort they’re willing to put into writing when a) it’s electronic and b) they know people besides their teacher will be reading it. And don’t limit each student to just writing their own reflection – let them comment on others’ reflections, too! They’ll constructively criticize the work of peers, thereby getting valuable implicit practice at evaluating their own future writing.

For the instances when there isn’t time for students to write full blog reflections, try using a message board or your own blog to pose prompts to students. Task each student with responding to you as well as to one other responding student. You can easily make this a daily activity with just a few computers in a classroom. Each student can have five to ten minutes to write quick responses. Just remember that the point here is not to evaluate the structure and grammar of their writing, but to help them flesh out their ideas through communication with others.

The activities above also provide a good context in which to teach ‘netiquette’ – responsible and respectful online behavior. Students that write insulting or inappropriate comments will quickly be called out by their peers since everyone will be reading everyone else’s words. With just a few simple netiquette rules established by the teacher and students together, inappropriate online behavior will drop to a minimum. You may also find that students are much more likely to complete their reflective homework assignments if they’re online!

Idea 1.5: Turning journal writing into journal speaking

If the primary goal of reflective journaling is to give students opportunities to, well, reflect, then certainly it need not always manifest itself in writing. Try letting students create voice recordings of their reflections instead. Using Audacity is a quick and easy way to generate MP3 recordings of student voices, and these files can be posted to websites such as ThinkQuest… where other students can still write comments. This method is generally faster than student blogging and so you can cycle your students through similar reflective experiences in less time and with fewer resources consumed. Websites such as VoiceThread offer fully-online options that don’t require software beyond a web browser.

Idea 2: Recording student-led read-alouds

Teachers, students, and parents all need to know that progress is being made when it comes to the fluency, speed, and accuracy of oral reading in students. This can be hard to recognize in the day-to-day grind of a long year. But consider – if you had audio recordings of your students reading different texts at various points in the year, you could not only make long-range comparisons quickly and easily, but could also share them with parents (and students!) to demonstrate the level of progress achieved. All you need is a microphone, a recording device, and speakers. The recordings can be created and catalogued using a computer and software such as Audacity, iTunes, and Windows Media Player, or on MP3 players such as iPods with voice-recording attachments. Many non-Apple MP3 players have voice-recording capabilities built-in, and are very inexpensive. Instead of sending parents a copy of a student’s most recent Running Record, why not E-mail them an MP3 file instead?

Idea 3: Developing writing process skills electronically

Word processing is not the end-all be-all when it comes to students writing using computers. With today’s tools you can help students develop writing skills by letting them practice writing models electronically. Consider such models as POWER, 4-Square, and others. They usually involve brainstorming, the organization of ideas into a coherent structure, the writing of a draft, editing, and then re-writing with final edits in place. Graphic organizer software such as Inspiration or Kidspiration makes brainstorming not only easy but more importantly easily editable in such forms as bubble maps or tree diagrams. Students may toss out a million ideas, but the software interface allows them to react to their own brainstorming by culling unneeded ideas and applying some sense of initial organization that would be entirely impractical on paper.

Taking the best ideas and putting them into a coherent structure that supports the writing of their first draft can be a challenge for some students. They may not easily see which ideas deserve their own paragraphs and which ideas should support others as details within paragraphs. The Kidspiration 4-Square writing template on this site can help! Students fill in the big ideas and the supporting details in the boxes, and then switch to the writing view where what they typed is automatically organized into a form resembling a four-paragraph draft. They can then flesh out the ideas further by rewriting the ideas and details into sentences. The color-coding and the ability to switch back and forth between the visual organizer and the writing view helps them develop the mental connection needed for more independent writing in the future. Throw in the fact that Kidspiration even supports voice-recording, useful for when students need to hear what they wrote in order to improve it, and you may come to realize that it is an immensely powerful tool for building the writing skills of your students.

Idea 4: Building analytical thinking skills through cooperative electronic tools

For decades educators have been advised that they need to teach critical thinking skills to their students. But how, exactly? Have you ever found a practical, efficient, and effective way to do that? Hopefully you have! But if not, may we humbly but enthusiastically recommend that you try out Intel Education’s Thinking Tools. They may very well be the best things since sliced bread!

The Visual Ranking Tool lets teams of students take a pre-defined set of elements – ideas, details, characters, events, processes, issues, just about anything you can think of – and rank them according to some pre-defined criteria. Seems simple enough… but how does that involve critical thinking and analysis? Just wait… Teams must justify the ranking of each element with an explanation. And it is in that one little twist that a simple top 10 list becomes an exercise in reflection, analysis, persuasion, and compromise (remember, they’re working in teams.) But it’s still not over. Each team can compare its set of rankings visually with any other team’s, or with the average rankings of the entire class – a ready-made opportunity for lively debate. The tool is easy enough to use even in the primary grades, but powerful enough to be valuable even at the college level. And through the practice of discussion, element ranking, justification, defense, and debate, students implicitly develop critical thinking skills. Just imagine how anything important that you want to stress from a novel or other ready material can be addressed with this tool. Oh, and did we mention that since it’s online, they can work on it anywhere with Internet access?

The Showing Evidence Tool is the sophisticated doctoral candidate to the freshman undergrad that is the Visual Ranking Tool. Maybe you’re skeptical and still don’t buy the supposed power of ranking elements. Try this on for size, then: What if you had a tool that led students through the process of reading a pre-defined claim or position, gathering evidence for and against that claim, annotating the evidence with its sources, evaluating the strength of each piece of evidence added to the for and against sides of the claim, and coming to a final conclusion based on the preponderance of that evidence? What if the tool allowed students to reach conclusions based not on intuition, emotions, or surface-level understandings, but instead based on careful analysis of different sides of an issue, supported by accurate and relevant evidence? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we were all good at that, let alone our students?

So you’re thinking, ‘Sounds like writing a research paper. Students hate that!’ Quite possibly they do. But they won’t hate the Showing Evidence Tool. It’s graphical. It’s team-oriented. It’s easily editable. It’s online. And it looks nothing like a writing assignment. Yes, it’s more complicated and more involved than the Visual Ranking Tool. But it’s still easy enough for elementary students to use adeptly. Challenge your students with it and they will rise to the occasion.

In our next entry we’ll dive into the incredibly rich and diverse world of technology tools that allow students to apply their learning in meaningful, authentic ways.