MSWMM's and Turkey

I'm not sure, but I think everybody's checked out on me. Almost no use of out-of-class resources, disappointing quiz scores, even disappearing PLATO results. It's a week with few bright spots - except the AWESOME student projects for Speak. Geez, how'd I almost forget that? They did a really good job on the MovieMaker Projects, in spite of the many freezes and glitches that MovieMaker is prone to. Much better than in the past! Walter credits the improved machines and the streamlined directions (though few watch the video tutorials outside of class, they do keep their attention when you demo for the class). I think it's because I forced them to do the voice-over narration. In any case, they are certainly quite good, and I'm proud of the kids for that.

That said, the quizzes still stunk, and that's a problem. All of the other grammar work on parts of speech, phrases, and clauses, leads to the sentences. And they're struggling on sentences. So I need to come back with some lessons that hit the mark a bit better. And they need to study more. Scheeesh!

On a completely different note, the PLATO system runs much better thanks to some restructuring and increasing of bandwidth allocation! However, while we did run PLATO much more smoothly this week, for some reason the student use reports came back to me completely empty (for the most part). As though the students accomplished nothing and were hardly logged on. !?! So would I rather have them working uninterrupted but never find out what they accomplished, or have them frustrated and underproductive but know the details? Of course, knowing me as I do, I want both. So I'll have to follow up with PLATO and find out what happened.

On another completely different note, I'm encouraging the district to start experimenting with Sharepoint SLK and perhaps NOW it's going to click. Let's hope. There was a big school meeting this morning and, I think, the outcome was a push to lurch forwards. I mean that optimistically, but honestly. We went back around on the teacher interface and how to improve upon that (and why that would be a good thing to do not only aesthetically, but for morale as well). I suspect I'll get pegged to work on that because I'm a loud voice for having a much more polished interface for the working professionals here than the glued together "employee" tab that we've got now. Anyway, that led to questions about what advances are available for Sharepoint for the teachers. Hey, only about 27% are building active sites here! But, then again, how much can the Sharepoint sites accomplish? And who can access them? Lots of go-around about what remains public/what is private and how to do that. And the calendar as well as the public html embedded page within sharepoint... So, anyway, at least people are talking about sharepoint. For goodness sakes, if we're planning to make that our future, we better figure out how best to use it (and use the best version of it we can get).

This year I'll be running (once again) my surowicki (Wisdom of Crowds) test. Using the rubric evaluations of the students vs. my own impressions, I'll measure their grading of the student movie maker projects. I'd go through the mechanics here (conducting survey in sharepoint on 4 5-point scales, exporting results to excel, compiling the class score, comparing against my own score). But this year I though of something else. There is actually a way to measure teacher vs. student accuracy (students as a crowd, not individuals) in grading with a definitive RIGHT answer. I'm going to go over the writing scale with them and look at a few papers. Then, we'll all blindly grade a few essays. Since I can collect their feedback via sharepoint, I can measure my grades vs. theirs (as a whole). So long as I pick essays that have been scored already (say, the norm-referenced papers from some grading session, ACT, etc.), and assuming I don't cheat and look at the scores, then I should be able to test Surowicki's thesis while also getting valuable work done in the classroom. BTW, for those of you just tuning in, surowicki posits that a large enough group of ameteurs, when given enough information, will come to a more accurate assessment (solution, etc) than a professional. Sounds like fun.

Also, lots of new materials to design. And, of course, teaching high school and raising a family. Crazy.

Self-Inflicted Assignments...

Okay, point one. Sharepoint has stopped, just stopped, collecting site usage statistics and I hope that gets fixed soon b/c I was harvesting that data.

2. Self-assignment - make a cps game that integrates a camtasia movie that integrates powerpoint. Really. Learn how all that stuff fits together.

3. Self-assignment - make how-to videos for the scanner and the vision software. The vision will be hard b/c I can't install camtasia on the library screens, but the library screens will look different...hmmm

4. self-assignment - think of some new experiments that could be used to measure interventions. How well does something work. One quirky thing for sure about intervention - the thing that is most likely to work in general is not always the thing that will work for a specific kid. How would you measure both?

All right. I'm not tremendously ambitious today and I've got some grades to update. Enjoy the weekend.

Renaming the Past

Sorry, I don't think you'll find a single, intelligent, unified strand of thought here, but since, as I point out from time to time, I'm the only real intended audience for this blog, all that really matters is that I say these things and try to get the thoughts that bump around in my head clear.
First, the title of this post refers to the previous post about the communication between teachers and administrators about technology integration. I should have called it "What we talk about when we talk about tech" in homage to Raymond Carver and his outstanding short stories (see What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Vintage, 1989) (and thank you Marisha Pessl for encouraging annotation - see Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Viking Adult, 2006). But I didn't, and it would be cheap to change it now. So why would I want to have changed it? I think the title included the word frustration, and I think people might have been worried that I was making a targeted or specific accusation. Not true, at all, of course. With the exception of the empathy I felt for my neighbor at the conference, I wasn't expressing personal frustration at all. Rather, my gentle and collegial point was that technology is giant and all-encompassing and so needs to be discussed in more specific detail if specific outcomes are desired.

On with the show. Played with Camtasia last night to make a new video for recording voice over music on Movie Maker. I can't see Camtasia 6 as being that big a deal after Cam 4/5, but it worked pretty well. I uploaded to screencast and got good download speeds here at school. What has definitely not "clicked" with me is how Camtasia could be used often as my respected friend at Central assures me. He's half barking mad about Camtasia and screencasting as a revolution in education and I'm just not seeing the big picture. BUT, it is more reliable than movie maker so I think I'll make some more stuff more quickly this way. Hmm, what could I really screencast? How would Powerpoint/screencast theoretically work with Powerpoint/CPS? It's true, you can use powerpoint with the remotes (CPS Clickers) and you can use powerpoint with camtasia. Could you make movies that people take tests during? Kind of like those old interacTV games the kids had a few years ago. ...Which road should dora take..., and all that. Perhaps that's worth playing around with.

Computer 18 keeps restarting, it bugs me.

I updated all the Quia and Sharepoint stuff finally. It takes a long time to get the phrase/clause coding right (and then getting it all into quia), thank goodness for Macropro. It's not that the Macro saves me all that much time. Instead, I spend more time troubleshooting and programming and less time re-entering data. Let's face it, if you've gotta spend time doing something tedious or something difficult, the latter is the better choice. A bit behind on grading. Computers keep crasing on student projects. Gotta pitch MovieMaker next year. Way too unstable. We'll probably use Photostory 3, though I'll miss some of the MM features.

Anyway, I've gotta go. Lots to do, etc. oh. Here's my video on adding voice and music to a movie maker project:

What do you want from me?(Teacher frustration and the administrative decree)

I was at the BER conference "Using Innovative Technology Projects to Strengthen Content Area Learning" and our first job was to talk to a stranger around us about their use of technology in the classroom. In our one-on-one chat, a K-8 teacher from the area told me, "I don't know what they want. They want us to use technology, but I don't know what they want us to do with it." And I think she hit the mark with that comment. When administrators encourage teachers to incorporate technology in the classroom, what do they mean? Do the administrators themselves even know? Are they expressing it clearly to the teachers?

There are obviously a million things that students and teachers can do with computers, most of them even legal. So when administrators aren't clear in their specifications for what constitutes a successful "technology integration", teachers can't easily design practices and lessons that ensure this is being done. Administrators who wish to effectively encourage these teachers to use more technology in the classroom must be clear about which of the following goals they are expecting to see met:

1. Engagement – Students are motivated and excited by the assignments they are given because the activities are hands-on, reactive, and immediate.
   
2. Just-in-Time instruction – in the quest to produce formative learning environments, technology allows teachers to intelligently collect data on student performance and to give those students challenges that meet their exact level of readiness at that moment.
   
3. Exploration – The internet and distance learning programs allow students to choose what to learn and provides nearly unlimited resources from around the world from which students can learn.
   
4. Communication – Technology can improve parent-student, parent-teacher, and student-student communication. Also, students' now have expanded outlets for communication with and publication to communities worldwide.
   
5. Management – Teachers can use technology to monitor and control student use of technology resources. Furthermore, detailed assessment reporting allows for more intelligent grouping of students in the class from one learning objective to the next.
   
6. Creative Expression – Students can express their understanding and interpretation of the key elements of a unit using a multitude of applications resulting in dynamic multi-media presentations.
   
7. Technology Literacy – Rather than using technology to teach or learn course content, technology can also be the objective. Students need to understand the terms, applications, browser functions, e-mail capabilities, HotKeys, etc. that make daily use of technology in the school and workplace efficient.
   

Inevitably, there are other goals as well. The fact that I missed a goal only emphasizes my point – evaluators have certain objectives in mind when they look at teachers' use of technology. When those objectives are not expressed clearly, then teachers are left on their own to establish learning objectives about technology use. They are stuck guessing what administrators want, and are often left frustrated when told they're "not doing enough".

Does Nothing Matter?

No, this isn't a nihilistic posting or philosophical musing. I was looking at a lot of the quarter stats on student performance, and there's a lot of good news - I can see strong growth in grammar and vocabulary, and the writing seems stronger but I haven't created any good technical standards for tabulating that kind of information yet. It will be done, but not yet. It's pretty straightforward to do this using ACT/ISAT style rubric based grading, but I'm just not quite there yet.

With all this good news, though, the problem is the "nothing" that I refer to in the title above. Statistically, there seems to be "no reliable relationship" between some of the class tools that we're using to improve performance and the actual changes in performance. So while everybody is improving, increased utilization of resources doesn't seem to correlate with greater improvement.

Here are the stats:

So, 1st q means first quarter, total is total grade, imp is improvement. The first number column is a correlation and the second is covariance. It looks like there is very little relibility between any of these relationships, except that improvement from pretest to post-test is more closely tied to quia practice quizzes than anything else, but at .252, it's not very compelling. I don't really understand the covariance, but my guess is the relationship between hits on sharepoint and overall performance and improvement is pretty small. Is it possible that it takes 171 hits to account for one point of improvement?

There are, or course, contingencies to account for this. For example, I force AR students to practice in ways that are optional for Regular English students, so many of the students with generally weaker scores or slower improvement are using the resources more often than average. I also have small samples and a couple of wild outliers. But perhaps what is most important is that I feel compelled to try some new interventions to compare against them.

Well, anyway. I've gotta go. I've got work to do. Also, starting now I've got to log time that I work with people. That's all for now.