Integrating Technology into the Classroom for Student Engagment and Closing the Achievement Gap

This is part II of my little mini-series on differentiating instruction in mixed ability classrooms. For this post, I want to discuss another little trick I’ve developed for using review time effectively in classrooms with many different kinds of kids. Some kids are probably in need of no review. They’ve sat through lectures, completed activities and homework assignments, and it all soaked in. Other students, might need some re-teaching or reinforcement of a few key topics. Other students may require intensive and comprehensive review work so they can solidify most of the content to be tested. How can we satisfy all of these different learners in one room all at the same time?

This was a problem that I’ve been meaning to conquer for some time, and I think I’ve pretty much done it. My school has a rolling laptop cart with a dozen computers in it. I break the students into pairs, hopefully in couples of similar ability / needs. Each pair gets a computer and I have them plug in their headphones (I have a few pairs to loan, but most kids have ipods in their bags).

Each pair of students is given practice problems / conceptual questions and the answers / explanations are all available to them on mrkadin.com. Students can work on the type of problem they struggle with the most. If they can’t seem to figure out the projectile motion problems, they can try samples and watch videos explaining the trigonometry and kinematics.

If they are struggling to understand the way acceleration and velocity chance when an object is thrown up in the air…

I’ve never seen the students more engaged. I’ve blurred their faces to protect the students’ privacy. They are all working, either watching the screens or completing math problems.

Making the videos was really easy. First, you make power point slides that serve as the visuals for the video. Then you add an audio narration. See this post for tips on doing that. Then, I uploaded the slides to authorstream.com, a really great tool that converts narrated power point slides into embeddable flash videos. This makes the videos watchable by anyone with a web browser; no power point needed. Word up.

The importance of differentiation in a mixed ability classroom cannot be understated. Here’s some good readings on the topic. Not to provide advanced material for the quicker students to devour as well the time, energy, and practice for the slower students is to bias your teaching towards one group or the other. If you want to reach each kid, and keep both sides of the performance spectrum engaged, you have to have material that is engaging for each group.

I’ve added a few new tools to my differentiation tool-belt lately. I’ve been a big fan of adding tiers to the grading rubric for my projects. Tier one is the easiest to complete. To pass students need only show competency with the most basic skills. To earn a 95 (tier 2), students need to show they are making higher level connections, and conveying that understanding. And to earn higher than a 95%, if they reallllly want that extra “+” on that A, then they have to take on a very challenging extra piece. For example, my students recently completed a roller coaster design project. To earn a 65 (the lowest passing score at my school), the students had to design the roller coaster itself, and answer some basic questions along the way. To earn up to a 95, the students had to complete a proposal, where they explain how they designed it and provide evidence as to how it is the best design. And then, to get a 100, they had to do an entirely different design, of a “Turkish Twist” style ride, where the cylindrical ride spins, you get pinned to the wall, and the floor drops out. Completing this extra design involved calculus or good graphing calculator skills; it wasn’t for the feint of heart.

Making passing the project about showing the basic skills helped students who struggle with organizing large multi-faceted assignments from being too afraid to actually do it. Making an A worth more than the basic skills helped the middle of the road students to do some advanced thinking and to demonstrate it. Making the 100 a very difficult problem helped keep the super-fast students working for a long time, while I was able to provide assistance to the struggling students who needed it most.

Here’s a link to the project, for which I use mail merging to make the project’s numbers individualized for each student.

I recently was invited to speak at my school’s “Collaborative Inquiry Showcase” where teams of teachers show off some of their data-supported best practices / methods.

The talk was very successful. Several teachers have spoken to me since, having been inspired by some of the tech resources/tools I discussed. You can find the slides from the talk here. You’ll find that the videos won’t work (they don’t get passed with the power point file) and that some names/pictures have been removed to protect my co-workers’ and students’ privacy. If a security message comes up about macros in the power point, just allow them, I give you my personal assurance that the slides are malware free.

The most interesting results that came from my work are related to targeted data-driven teaching. A few days before a major unit test, using the clickers, I was able to identify a set of 21 students who were struggling and in need of major assistance before the exam. During the course of few days preceding the test, I found time to pull aside 10 of the 21 students outside of class and to tell them I’m worried about their pre-test scores and to suggest to them some places where they could receive extra support (my after school help sessions, mrkadin.com, etc). Because of time restrictions and so I could have a control group, 11 students did not get this “intervention.” Students who were pulled aside scored 31% higher on the final test on average than their pre-test scores vs. the class average of 15%. The average increase for students who didn’t receive an “intervention” was 23%. This goes to show the power of dedicating my time to the students who I have identified as needing it most.

Across the business world and in other spheres, using data to drive decision making is the obvious strategy. Seeing the current state of things, and responding to that state, makes clear sense. It’s outrageous how many teachers are teaching the same lessons from 20 years ago, to an entirely different brand of students, with an entirely different set of needs. Using the data about how my students were doing allowed to me to respond to the current state of my class; I was able speak to the students who needed it most. And that simple human interaction and expression of worry helped those students to improve their scores by higher than any other group. Also, when selecting the students who I had time to speak to, I tried to speak to more students of color and more male students in order to address the clear achievement gap. Below you can see how the gap shrank from pre to post assessment.

We need this type of data in every classroom, and at the school and district level. Student performance on pre-tests and post-test, achievement gaps, attendance and behavior data, and we need time set aside for teachers to analyze it. While state tests provide some insight (though culturally biased) into how our students are doing, there is an opportunity to track our students’ performance at a much more fine-grained timescale. I consider the development of these data-driven systems and practices more important than most other educational reform efforts. And there’s a lot of money to be made in doing it right…

I’ve written here about how you can use Microsoft Word’s mail merge feature to create individualized assignments for your students. So when my students work on projects, they each get their own version of the problems, each with its own semi-randomly generated numbers. This helps to avoid cheating and helps to promote true collaboration between the students.

Today I turned that Idea around and streamlined the grading/commenting process on a recent student assignment. Instead of writing tons of notes on each student’s packet which they won’t be able to read because the margins are to small, and instead of spending 10 minutes per student with my calculator out doing the arithmetic for a complicated rubric, I created a giant grid in excel.

All of the students’ scores on each problem in the project packet were entered and then merged into the final rubric with a section for notes that I typed out at the end.

For me, this was great for 3 reasons. 1) Students can better understand my feedback because it is clear and typed. 2) It saved me a lot of time since I didn’t have to make 70 individual documents for the rubric. And 3) I got all of the grading data in one place. I noticed that a lot of students struggled with one aspect with the third problem in this assignment, and I never would have had any chance of noticing without having all of the data in excel!

I’ve written about what can be done with the kids’ cell phones here.  I was turned on to this site by my school’s technology integration specialist.

www.wiffiti.com (a terrible name that combines wifi and graffiti…i think) is a website that allows anyone to send a text message with some text to their number and have it displayed on the screen. Our class is studying projectile motion, so I had students text in examples from their experience outside of the class (outside hobbies, sports etc). Their examples were visualized in real time as the students text’ed them in. Here’s the results:

I intend to incorporate the students’ interests as they’ve texted them in into examples I use in class. This will help the students buy into the new topic.

I’m out sick today, but I could somehow sense the illness coming on yesterday.  Most days that the little angels are being looked after by a sub are a complete waste.  Every teacher knows it.  The sub can’t teach your content, and having the kids work independently under someone else’s watch rarely yields good results.

I, however, have had a large amount of success bringing myself to the classroom even when I’m not physically there through the sound of my voice and some other tools.

The first tool that I use is my LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen which I’ve blogged about before.  Essentially this pen creates videos of me doing practice problems for my physics and math classes.  I usually use it for showing example problems to study from before tests on www.mrkadin.com.

I also recorded narration to a power point presentation.  This processes is explained here.  It is fairly simple.  You just need the time to sit down and record it on the fly.  I sent links to the subtitutes and copies of the power points and they simply showed them in class.

You can take a quick listen to the presentation by downloading it here.  Note that the filesize is pretty large (>30MB) with all of the recorded sounds.

In my experience, the students watch diligently when I use these techniques.  It’s not interactive; the kids can’t ask me questions.  But, it doesn’t keep them a lot more engaged than 10 dittos to finish by the end of the period.

Reports from the substitutes are just now coming in by email.  The classes apparently “went pretty well” and “everyone was enraptured by the video.”  Ever had your kids enraptured with a substitute?

I like the idea of keeping all of my documents up in the internet could and getting at them from wherever I am.  Dropbox is the only solution I’ve seen that makes that possible.  Google docs is almost there, but doesn’t include all of the features I want to see yet.  Essentially what dropbox does is it keeps your documents in sync across multiple computers.  Whenever I save a word document at home, it is instantly uploaded (without clicking a thing) to the dropbox servers, and then pushed to my computer at work.  All of my documents at home, therefore, are the same as my documents at school (with about a 2 second lag time).

Ever have to drive home quickly because you forgot to email yourself something?  Not me, all the documents on all of my computers are the same.  Ever forget to print something out but not have it on the computer in the classroom?  Even if you only have one computer, all of your documents are stored on the dropbox website and you can download them on any computer.

This would be good for any business, but there are a few features that make it totally great.  First of all, all the files are transferred over SSL (nerd speak for a secure connection) which means that if you want to get a movie file or an .exe through your school’s restricting BS network (deep breaths Kadin…deep breaths), you are all good.  Even nicer, inside your dropbox folder, there is a separate sub-folder called “Public.”  You can get a url (a link) to any file you place in this directory.

You can use this link when you send documents to students.  Rather than sending attachments in emails, the students can simply click the link.  This is really helpful for class blogs that don’t have a space for uploading files.  The link that you get points towards the actual file on your computer as well, not a temporary copy of the file.  Thus, if you post a power point on your class blog (like I do, blog.mrkadin.com) and then later make a change to one of the slides on your computer, the students will get the most up to date version of the presentation when they click the link later on.  Booyah.

Seriously, this is an amazingly powerful tool and it works for PC/Mac and….Linux!  The cost:  Free.99

A website I recently encountered, text the mob, allows you to set up instant polls (much like the clickers I’ve blogged about here, and here). Students text their answers to a number given to you by the website, and you can watch a graph of student responses populate in real time. Pretty neat, and much less expensive than a set of clickers for your class. It is certainly not as feature-rich though.

Most schools don’t let the students use their cell phones in school. But I feel like within your own classroom (as many teachers do with ipods) you can have your students take out their phones, turn them on, send the text, and then turn them off. The whole thing would be quick, and would a minor disruption to the rules.

The ‘Mail Merge’ feature in Microsoft Word is designed to help people who are sending out massive mailings to individualize each letter.  For example, if you are sending out a letter to 250 customers, instead of saying “dear valued customer” as the opening, you can have 250 documents generated with “dear mr. smith” and “dear mr. jackson” and “dear ms. arnold” etc.  It is an incredibly powerful tool for administrative tasks, but more importantly, it can be used successfully in your classroom.  Here’s a short video explaining how to do it in excel 2007.

How is that useful in the classroom?  You can create multiple versions of the same assignment/project and use the mail merge to create individual assignments for each student.  For example, I recently completed a CSI project with my students where they were asked to use the physics topics we’ve been studying to solve a car accident mystery.

Each student received a packet with the crime scene information.  I used excel to randomly generate 80 different versions of the problem (check out this resource for using random numbers in excel).  The kids, of course, were amazed, and accused me (though I don’t think this is really an accusation) of being one of the biggest nerds alive.  We nerds are taking ownership of that term. What’s nice is that with Excel, I kept the random numbers and calculated all of the individual answers using excel formulas.  Each student was assigned a specific packet number (see image above) and I could use this number to look up their answers in Excel to check them when they were done.

Anyway, why the hell would anybody go through all of this trouble!?  Well, I’ve found there are a few reasons why this works for me.  First of all, showing students that you care about each one of them individually (even though I just used random numbers) always gets them to care more about the project.  Secondly, since each student has their own problem with their own answers, it forces them to ask me questions in a more general way, and to think things out more.  For example, a student can’t ask “what’s the convertible’s final velocity?”  because I don’t know the answer.  Instead they have to say, “I’m having trouble finding out what the convertible’s final velocity is.  How could I start?”  Which is a much more productive help request for the students to learn to solve problems on their own.  The most important advantage of doing this mail merge individualization is that it prevents cheating.  When I assign a big project like this, if all of the students have the same numbers, than anyone could just copy off of anyone else.  Thus, it would be difficult to allow the students to work together.  In this case, the students were encouraged to collaborate because help has to actually be help and not just copying.

I’d note that this isn’t specific to science and math, since excel can work with text instead of numbers.  In fact, in this most recent CSI project there was a line about whether or not it was raining the night of the accident which was different for different students.

Try it out, you might find it helpful and the students will appreciate it.  Here’s some additional resources on mail merges, and the actual CSI project that I assign with names changed because they are teachers from my school.

CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION WORD DOC You can see what the project looks like with the mail merge fields in it. The packet is accompanied by a separate packet which scaffolds the students through a solution process.

Formatting Numbers – Word can sometimes act kind of funky when merging numbers and it can give you like pi*10^7 decimals when you want 1. This will help you to format the numbers after merging.

Some blogging in the edu-blogo-sphere and the physics-blog-sphere I’ve run into lately has led me to finally get around to writing about my clickers.

I mentioned them briefly in a previous post about recording student data. Essentially, the clickers are small hand held devices that function as “ask the audience” devices a la “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” Each student has their own clicker assigned to them, which in turn allows me to see each of their responses, and even grade the students on them. The particular brand which I have, Turning Technologies incorporates directly into power point.

It seems like a simple and fun addition to the classroom, which helps to engage the students at a higher level than the average “raise your hand” poll. And this is true. The students do enjoy using the clickers. Also, the software includes several different ways to create competitive games, with leader boards and horse races galore.

I’ve never seen kids be more excited to solve for the final velocity of a falling object before! However, the clickers have a great deal of value beyond student engagement. They present an incredible assortment of data to the instructor. After teaching a new topic, the clickers can instantly show me how well the students understood it through a series of multiple choice questions on the new concept. At the end of class, a brief set of review questions can show me the small set of students that is way behind and not understanding the new material. This helps me to pick out students to encourage them to work harder, come for extra help etc. The software also generates reports which separates the statistics by any subgroup you wish to define. For example, you can check how various demographic groups perform with respect to each other.

Teachers are always surprised when test day comes around and the students under-perform. With a system like this, I am always in the know about what students know and what they are able to do long before the big cumulative assessment comes around. The students, as well, are always given timely, private, and clear feedback, since the slide instantly shows whether or not they got the correct answer, and I, immediately afterward, explain why the right answer was the correct choice.

The technology itself is impressive, but how it fits in with my course’s routines, and how it plots the course of my teaching is what makes it so revolutionary. When the students walk in, they grab their clickers from a numbered shoe bag like this

…without the shoes of course. The students take a seat and start working on the “Do Now.” After the kids have quieted down and I’ve finished setting up whatever is needed for the period, I explain our objectives for class. Then we typically jump straight into a clicker quiz, reviewing the topics we’ve been working on lately for three reasons. First, it helps remind the students what we’ve been doing and it puts their minds in the right place. Second, it helps me to see what is clear, and what is not for the students from the previous day’s topics. Third, it gives me an opportunity to re-teach key points that the students MUST come away with.
Once the students have completed that, we get into the content of the day’s lessons, and I will pause several time throughout the lesson to ask additional clicker questions. This is different from asking thought provoking questions in class. Every student has to answer. Every student has to think. Once class nears the end, I will again ask several clicker questions to see what students have down, and what I need to re-emphasize in the next class.
My handwriting is terrible, and I have no artistic ability. Teaching physics is hard enough; the kids can’t deal with the board being a sloppy mess of scribbles. Thus I am confined to power point. A major criticism of teaching through the projector is that the class is not interactive enough. If the kids don’t get something, it is hard for teachers to respond and to improvise. With the clickers, this problem is partially fixed by letting me know immediately what the students are struggling with.  I can address the issue orally immediately, and turn back to previous slides if necessary.  I don’t have to wait until the next test. The very next day, I can have slides specifically geared towards the concept that the students aren’t getting as well. The feedback (both from me to the students and from the students to me) is invaluable.

The often overlooked data in looking at the success of these tools is what students think about them. Informally, almost all of the students LOVE the clickers. Some formal survey data is coming soon.