Teaching with Technology - Reflecting on my triggering question (Module 2)

How can I effectively use technology such as computers, tablets, and even cell phones as a formative and summative assessment tool to evaluate students’ ELA skills, including comprehension of reading texts and specific writing abilities?

Getting feedback from and to my students has always been a challenge as an English teacher. When I teach students to write, I have to have them write, and assessing writing takes time. When I can work with a student one-on-one I can immediately see a student’s strengths and challenges, and I can provide feedback to that student that they can use to improve their writing. I have 136 students, however, and I can't give them all individual attention. For the last module I saw the effectiveness of using online collaboration tools as a means of giving students feedback. For this module I looked into the use of blogs and their potential for formative assessment. I believe this ties directly into ISTE Standard 2, which is Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessment.

Formative assessment during the process of writing a paper is limited as I run around the room, going from student asking question to student sitting there looking at her paper. The final paper takes me up to three weeks to grade, so any feedback is outdated and ineffective. A blog, however, would allow students to publish their work online and give me the opportunity to provide them some feedback that they could use to revise their work. Stover, Yearta, and Harris (2016) identify assessing reading comprehension as one of three major benefits of this kind of online interaction. In their case study, their teacher used a rubric with the class that guided her feedback to the students (p. 378). A focused rubric would allow me to concentrate my feedback on one particular skill, rather than grading holistically and overwhelming the student with information.

Another benefit the authors found was the teacher’s ability to differentiate instruction (p. 379). The teacher was able to provide “unique responses to scaffold and guide instruction within blog posts” (p. 379). The advantage here seems obvious. Any individual feedback is tailored to the student. Even with a focused rubric, I can give a student direction on his writing that ties to the skills I'm teaching.

I’m not the only one who can give feedback on a blog. Students now write papers for an audience of one - me. With a blog, their audience can grow. I can assign students to read classmates’ blogs and provide feedback based on the rubric. The idea of having an audience is an advantage noted in Matt Richtel’s New York Times article (2012). Richtel cites research that shows students “feel more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it” (Richtel, 2012). As teachers, our job is to engage our students, and if they're engaged with blogging, then why not do it?

My students live in the digital age, and I believe the appropriate use of blogs in their English class would help keep them engaged and see the value of their writing. At the same time, I have the ability to better my use of assessment and shape it to their needs, helping them develop into stronger and more effective writers.

References

Richtel, M. (2012, Jan. 20). Blogs vs. term papers. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Stover, K., Yearta, L., & Harris, C. (2016). Formative assessment in the digital age: blogging with third graders. The Reading Teacher. 69:4, 377-381. doi:10.1002/trtr.1420

Teaching With Technology - Reflection on my triggering question (Module 1)

How can I use Google Docs to provide more timely feedback to my students?

I fell in love with Google Docs last year when I collaborated with a colleague for the AP English Language course we both taught. I sensed early on the possibilities of using online collaboration in teaching, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the specifics, so this made sense as a triggering question. The question of providing feedback on writing has always vexed me, in part because of the difficulty of reading a full paper for a full class (or multiple classes) of students in a short enough amount of time to make a difference. For example, our school gives English teachers three weeks to finish grading essays and return grades to students. Any feedback is meaningless after that time; why do I even bother writing comments? Yet I need those full three weeks when 120 students turn in two- to three-page papers.

My ultimate goal for using Google Docs is to facilitate student learning, a critical component of ISTE Standard 1. I also feel that when students are given an opportunity to use old tools (word processing) in new ways (online and collaborative) that it will inspire creativity, which is the other key component of Standard 1. My research took me to an article by Denton (2012) in which he outlined several strategies discovered through his research for integrating cloud computing into the classroom. All of these strategies relied on the principles of constructivism and cooperative learning. The idea behind constructivism is that students learn based on their experiences, while cooperative learning involves interaction with other learners (Denton, 2012).

Two of Denton’s strategies that stood out for me were on student-constructed presentations and assisted writing. The idea behind student-constructed presentations is that multiple students would edit the same presentation through Google Slides, with each student being assigned a specific slide (p. 37). Students would receive guidance for content, then demonstrate their understanding of the subject matter by completing the assignment. My students recently completed an assignment that would have been perfect for this model. I had students create posters for the classroom on different rhetorical strategies writers use, with each poster containing the strategy, a definition, its function, and an example. This would have been ideal for Google Slides, as it would have allowed students access to the entire product as it was being produced, and give them a final product they could access outside of the classroom as a study guide. As it is, the posters look nice on my wall, but students can’t take them home.

On assisted writing, Denton (2012) encourages the use of Google Docs, which allows for collaboration necessary for cooperative learning. Students could share documents with other students and the instructor, eliminating the need to exchange papers and allowing all to see changes made over time (p. 38). If I had students use this model, then the feedback I gave them could be used immediately, not three weeks later. I would be grading formative drafts, not summative assignments, and my students would have a strong reason to read my comments, as they could be used in preparing a final draft for submission. My summative grading would then concentrate on the final changes, not the entire content of the paper.

This latter use, assisted writing, makes the most sense for my classroom, but it does raise a few questions, namely in the execution. Not all of my students have Google accounts; can I require them to get one? What about the few students who don’t have internet access at home? I can encourage them to use computers at school, but is that an equitable solution? My colleagues have already written about the need for training in digital citizenship; what will this entail for my students? How much instruction will I need to provide to establish the framework for this to be effective? I know the initial process won’t be easy, but how can I sustain this model once I begin? These questions don’t discourage me at all; rather, I’m excited about the prospect of using technology in this new way. Whatever challenges I face in implementing this model, I can see how effective it will be for both me and my students.

References

Denton, D.W. (2012). Enhancing instruction through constructivism, cooperative learning, and cloud computing. Tech Trends: Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning, 56(4), 34-41. doi:10.1007/s11528-012-0585-1