Absolutely not!

We are often tempted to think that each student must have their own computer to effectively implement a technology-infused project. But 1:1 computing, while a laudable goal, isn’t remotely necessary for student to benefit from the rich experiences that technology can offer. Consider…

Scheduling

Perhaps you have three computers in the provebial “back of the classroom.” Have you thought about how you can schedule their use to ensure that each student has ample access? If not, consider your guided reading groups and centers that you perhaps use for traditional language arts instruction. You may have a small group you work with for direct instruction while the rest of the class is divided among the completion of various activities (centers) such as reflective writing, vocabulary development, or peer editing. Why couldn’t computer use be one of those centers? It might take only 10-15 minutes for a student to write a reflective blog entry or respond to a message board prompt, meaning you could make it through half of your class in just one 60-minute language arts block. Need more time for project work? Most technology-based learning projects work better in small groups rather than individually, so resources can be stretched farther – though the occasional computer lab visit or laptop cart use certainly helps. And if you’re creating learning menu-style project lists where not every choice is technology-based, your students can engage in the kind of variety of experiences that are necessary to build a robust education without needing computer access at all times.

Software

Do you think you need high-priced software such as Adobe Photoshop or Premiere, Pagemaker, Inspiration/Kidspiration, or even Microsoft Office in order to meet student needs? Hopefully not! There is an amazing amount of free resources, both general and educationally-designed, to meet needs. Intel’s Thinking Tools, Glogster, VoiceThread, Photo Story, Movie Maker, Rubistar, Bubbl.us, ThinkQuest, Wikispaces, PBWiki, Edublogs, Weebly, TeacherTube, Google Docs, Google Earth, Picasa, SketchUp, Zoho, Bubble Share, Gcast, OpenOffice, Kerpoof… these form merely a tiny fraction of the free tools available to support your efforts. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, so find the tools that best meet your needs. Then share the knowledge! Your colleagues will love you for it.

Hardware

Okay, so generally you’ll need some kind of robust computing devices to implement many of your plans, whether desktop computers, laptops, or netbooks. But what about other computing resources? There are numerous low-cost digital video cameras available such as the Flip Video line. Most of today’s digital still cameras can also capture fair-quality video. Skype, when combined with an inexpensive webcam, can provide a video-conferencing alternative to expensive Polycom systems. They can also be used for make-shift but effective document cameras when paired with a stand or tripod. $15-20 voice recorders / mp3 players obviate the need for iPods. Student cell phones that support text messaging or web browsers can get you research capabilities through Google and other sites. They can also be used as a replacement for student response systems by using such a site as Poll Everywhere.

Idea 1: Poem recitation (professional poet)

Standing up and reciting a poem of their own hand can be an embarrassing experience for students. They are sometimes hesitant to engage in the social risk of putting a voice to their own thoughts and emotions live and in front of their peers. However, technology may offer hope here. You can task students with using audio recorders for their recitations. These may take the form of dedicated hardware such as iPods with microphones or inexpensive mp3 recorders, or you may use computers with audio recording software such as the free Audacity or the built-in recorders for Windows and Mac OS X. In any of these cases, students have the ability to play back what they’ve recorded. This is essential in getting them to become more and more expressive over time; they can re-record until they are satisfied with their tone, pronunciation, rhythm, and so on. Further, when they hear their own words read aloud, they are more likely to go back and edit for greater clarity, and, as appropriate, different rhyme schemes. And perhaps inexplicably, having their recorded file played for the class may well be a source of pride to them, rather than embarrassment – having had the chance to perfect their recitation means there is far less fear of perceived incompetence. Bonus points go to teachers that find a means to post the audio files online for a greater audience to access.

Idea 2: Investigative journalism

Many students love to find out the whys of controversial issues that they care about it, whether in a large social context or near and dear to their daily lives. They may become passionate about the deteriorating environment in their neighborhood, the choice and healthfulness of the food served in the cafeteria, or the children exposed to violence on a daily basis in war-torn regions. A greater teacher will tap into and feed such passion through the selection of reading material that helps students come to deeper understandings and that offers interesting and diverse perspectives. Having been engaged with such material, students can take on the roles of investigative journalists through the creation of video reports or documentaries. Working in groups, student teams can be tasked with researching additional material to supplement their class readings, can interview key figures associated with the issue, and can produce a compelling video statement that brings everything together with their own particular conclusions. Skills of research, writing, and interviewing are combined with creativity, editing, and self-presentation. As was mentioned before, bundled video-editing software such as Windows Movie Maker and iMovie offer very powerful tools for such work.

Idea 2.5: Point/counterpoint debate

Using the same overall outline as above, students can create a video point/counterpoint debate of an issue instead of a report or documentary. This allows for divergent viewpoints in the working group to both be supported and acknowledged, and offers the further benefit of increasing the analytical thinking skills of students as each side attempts to trump the other’s arguments.

Idea 3: Multimedia newsletters

Many issues in our world are relevant and interesting to students without being controversial. Ask any student about pop culture – music, movies, video games, etc. – and they’re likely to surpise you with how much passion and insight they have. Since passion is one key to highly effective learning, why not tap into that? Task students with creating multimedia newsletters that inform and educate others about such topics. Students will exercise their writing skills not in the essay format, but in a variety of ways to persuade, inform, comment, and critique. By bringing in multimedia elements such as video clips, images, sounds and music, students gain more practice with the integration of media that is a hallmark of our current society. Tools such as Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, or Apple Pages offer options, as well as do online tools such as Glogster.

Consider the ideas below. Each can be used for assessment, review, or practice. Each involves reading and writing skills. Each can be posted online for various purposes, whether for review, for commenting by a larger audience, or as a showcase.

Idea 1: Recorded interviews of characters

How can students demonstrate that they understand a character’s outlook, motivations, and experiences in a novel? Have pairs of students write and perform an interview between an outside observer and a character from the material. The interviews can then be recorded as podcasts or in video form using such tools as Audacity, Garage Band, Movie Maker, or iMovie. Be sure to emphasize to students that someone that has never read the novel should be able to learn all of the most important insights about the character from the interview. For advanced work, students can write multiple interviews of the same character from different times in the novel, each representing a different part of their character arc. The interviews of different pairs of students, each from the same novel, can be collected and hosted online so that all students can use them as review material.

Idea 2: Multimedia advertisements for a novel

Students generally understand material when they are able to effectively entice other students to read it. Let students act as advertising executives by having them create multimedia advertisements for a novel. These might come in the form of radio commercials, television commercials, movie trailers, or kiosk-style presentations. Plot, theme, characters, and other important elements should be addressed by the advertisements. In addition to the software tools above, students can use Photo Story, PowerPoint, Keynote, Glogster, or VoiceThread.

Idea 3: Interactive sequels to novels

If you grew up in the 80s… or maybe even if you didn’t… you surely remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books. These engaging books allowed readers to make decisions that affected the plot – go through a door to face a magical dragon head-on, or circle around to retrieve a golden sword. The concept is perfectly suited to the electronic interactive tools available to students today. Have students become authors by creating a sequel to a novel wherein they take the main character and lead him or her through various further experiences. Using the technique of linking in such tools as PowerPoint, SMART Notebook, or any webpage editor, students can create multiple if-then decision points. Emphasize to students that they should write the character in ways that demonstrate that they understand the character’s outlook, motivations, and prior experiences, just as in the interviews above. For advanced work, students can include audio or links to external resources such as Google Earth to make their work even more engaging.

These three ideas are merely a snowflake on the tip of a huge iceberg. We’ll present more ideas for authentic application and assessment. Stay tuned.

Practice, reflection, and analysis.

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.