Category — Software

What sorts of data do you have about your students? How do you get it? Do you have a tool that helps?
Probably for more than 100 years, teachers have been taking attendance by hand as the students walk in the door. They keep a handwritten homework log. They keep a grade book on paper, in excel, or with an online service. Is there one place you can go to find out all of the information you have on a student? Can you look at the student’s grades, homework completion, attendance, class participation, and behavior in one place? If such a tool exists, I’d love to be in possession of it. For most teachers all of this data exists in 20 different places, and sometimes in places where they don’t even have access to it!

Tons of people are trying to keep track of student data:

There are a plethora of different software companies that sell enterprise solutions for looking at students’ standardized test scores from year to year, looking at individual skills and a student’s strengths/weaknesses. This data is of critical importance (though I wish it wasn’t so reliant on standardized tests).

There are school-wide management programs that keep attendance, keep track of grades and parent contact information. They print out report cards to mail to parents and incident reports for bad behavior.

There are digital grade books for your classroom where you input the grades and all of the calculations are done for you. Teachers no longer have to take out their calculator at the end of the quarter to work out each kid’s grades. Students can often access their grades as well so then keep up with how well they are doing.

Why aren’t all of these things in the same place? Why can’t I find out all of the information on a particular student? I’m ready for the data to be integrated, available, and easy to work with.
I’m not an experienced programmer, but I’ve just started development on a solution. Next year, there’ll be bar code scanner at the door; students will scan in when they enter and leave class and when they go to the bathroom. Attendance will be automatic. I’ll have the time in the beginning of the period to set up for class. Bathroom frequency will be recorded, and students will be denied if they go every day…automatically. I’ll keep a homework log using the same digital system. Students who are missing assignments will receive automated text messages reminding them to get it done. And I will be able to sit down at my desk at the end of the day, and look at patterns and trends….

A lot of kids from Physics A were absent today…
John Smith just missed 3 homework assignments….
Dave has been going to the bathroom every day for a week….

The program will report on these issues, and automatically respond in pre-designated ways. And I’ll get a complete view of all of the data I take on each student.
I’m excited to remove the secretarial work from my job, and focus on teaching and learning. Sound interesting? What features might you include? Let me know in the comments.

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 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

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.

My previous post explained how data hungry I am. I want to know everything. This isn’t out of some psychological control issues. The reason I want it is so I can adapt my instruction accordingly. I don’t put so much time into analyzing the data and noticing that students don’t understand vectors or kinematics very well only to scold myself for teaching it poorly.
Rather, data can be used on the go in class or afterward to inform my next decision about what/how I will teach. This is not an incredibly new concept. In fact, using assessment to drive instruction is an essential topic taught in major teacher ed programs. This is essentially the same idea, except I’m referring to the assessment results as data. Why? Because once the results are computerized and made numerical, I feel like data is the best term. You don’t like that? Whatever.
In my first year of teaching, in the process of losing my mind, I struggled with my students to get them to go to my website. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them. It was so easy to go to kadinphysics.googlepages.com or another massive url I had when I was using a free wordpress blog page. Well the students didn’t think so. After watching the hits to my site jump from 0 to 2 on the nights before tests, I needed to figure out what I could do to make them more likely to go. I asked the students to complete a short survey at the end of a test that they took. Question 1) Did you use the study materials on my website when studying for the exam? 2) Did you find the study material helpful? 3) If you haven’t been to the website, why not? Sure enough only a few students said they went to the website, and 50% or so of the students who did not go said they “couldn’t remember address.”  Of course the school does not have an option to share a course website on their main page.

Several days later we spent time in class going over the results of the test and reviewing some concepts they struggled with.  For each question, I showed them the question, and then showed them the slide(s) from an earlier class where the topic was taught.  I showed them the availability of the slides on the course website,  and then showed them that the students who used the website were statistically much more likely to get the question right.  I didn’t let up, for an entire class period, I said over and over again, “if you had gone to the website….”  until the students were sick of me.  I also took their feedback and spent 20 bucks (much less than my XBOX Live subscription) getting hosting for mrkadin.com for 2 years (thanks dreamhost).  This url was much easier for them to remember at home, and on the night before the next test, the number of students visiting the site was not the measly 2 from the previous exam, but the massive 35ish unique hits out of 55 students in the course.  Listening to your students and asking them for feedback, looking at the survey results as data and analyzing the resulting statistics has incredibly value.

I’ll give another example.  My class has been lucky enough to be outfitted with an ARS (Audience Response System).  Essentially, my students each have a wireless clicker which is personally assigned to them.  During class, using the projector, I can ask a multiple choice question, and the students can buzz in, much like “ask the audience” on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire.  Not only do I get the aggregate data (in the form of a bar graph with the number of students who responded A, B, C, or D) but I also can view each student’s response at a later time.  There are several companies that produce these clickers (I_clicker, Turning Technologies, etc), I intend to blog on them more completely later.  Students have become totally accustomed to using these in class, and it is built into my everyday routine. At the end of some classes, I have the students play a quiz game where correct answers are awarded points. The students compete to win the game and earn street cred. Having these quizzes at the end of class provides me with a ton of data.
I can instantly see what the class understands. I can instantly see what the class struggles with. And I can also go back and check later on students who missed all or most of the questions and encourage them to work harder or come seek extra help with me after school. The next day’s lesson can include extra slides reviewing, reteaching, or reinforcing the topics that the game showed the students didn’t understand. The next day, the cycle repeats. The next test comes around, and I have no doubts as to what the students know or can do. The clickers have been telling me for the entire unit.
It’s one thing to seek out data. We all should be doing that too. But we have to USE the data. We have to adapt our teaching. We have to leave our planning malleable enough to move at the pace at which the students move. Weekly planners are completely impossible for me. I won’t know what I can accomplish tomorrow until the data shows me what we accomplished today. That’s the way it should be. The students decide what I teach next, not me. I just know where we’re going, though in the end of the day, it is them who decides how fast we get there.

I want DATA.  All the time.  Tons of it.

I don’t want my students to raise their hands anymore.  I want them to push a button on their desk that indicates to me they are interested in speaking.  Let the computer set up a speakers queue which I can adjust on the fly.  Let me examine how often each student volunteers and grade them on it.

I don’t want to take attendance anymore.  I want the student’s to wave a keycard by a reader near the door and have the computer deal with it.  Then I want to have the detentions instantly issued by an email to the detention proctor and a printout waiting for me at my printer on my desk to give to the student the next day.

I don’t want to have to plug my laptop into the wall in my classroom!  That’s just ridiculous.

I don’t want to grade multiple choice questions by hand.  I want a scantron machine that grades the tests and gives me data by content standard, by student, and by question.

I don’t want my students to have text books.  I want them to have computer information portals that don’t just make them walk through a sequence of pages, but let’s them explore as they wish through a virtual space with information, practice problems, and examples.  And I want the data on how long they read each thing, what their interests are, and how well they are doing when they practice.

I want ALL of this data in one place.  I want the entire school wired up.  And while classes are assuredly taught by people and not by videos or computers, and while the kids are still doing their work by hand, I want to know everything I possibly can about them, so it can inform my teaching.  I want to set up warnings and rules, so when a student didn’t raise her hand for 2 days, has been late to class, and missed a homework assignment, it doesn’t slip through my fingers.  The computer tells me to take her asside.  I want to be able to show a student who has been misbehaving how I marked down on the behavior log on my touch screen tablet that I carry with me while I teach that he has been rude and disruptive for the last 4 periods.  I want graphs, I want analysis, I want patterns, I want trends.

I want the data.  The systems are there.  Hook it up.

As a physics teacher, there are so many problems for the kids to solve that involve situations I can’t actually show them. For example, when two cars collide, the students have to sort of imagine what that looks like. I can’t actually slam two hummers into each other in the classroom. Well, ever since I started giving my lectures completely through PowerPoint I’ve been using animations in almost every slide.

Note that the chopiness is a result of the screen cast video and not the actual animation, it is pretty smooth.

Setting up an animation like this is actually really simple. It’s as easy as making lines of text appear one after the other in PowerPoint. I’m using 2007, but if you have an older version of power points, check this out. It’s essentially the same thing.

In PowerPoint, click on the picture/object that you want to animate to select it. Then click on the “Animations” ribbon near the top of your screen.

This ribbon is mostly focused on the transitions between slides, but if you click on the “Custom Animation” button, you can animate individual objects.

A new panel should appear on the right side of the screen for custom animations. Make sure your object is still selected and click on the “Add Effect” button in the custom animations panel.

Here you can animate the object in multiple ways. It can spin, grow/shrink, appear/disappear, etc. You can click on “Motion Paths” to make the object move on the screen. There are several options here. You can make it move right, left, up down. If you select these you can adjust the object’s motion path by clicking and dragging on the ends of the motion arrow that appears on the slide.

You can also make your own custom path. With the custom path, you can draw out the exact path that you want the object to move.

If you want to change the time it takes for this object to complete the path, or change whether it starts smoothly by accelerating from rest or just jumps straight into flying around the screen, you can make adjustments to the animations by right clicking it in the custom animation panel and selecting “Effect Options.”

Take a look at the final star power point here

Using these animations, no matter what topic or class you are teaching, can help in a myriad of ways. Students can be considerably more engaged if they aren’t just looking at a bunch of words on the screen. Not to mention in topics like science and math, students can gain better understandings of physical or spatial topics if they can construct their learning from a physical reality, something they can actually see. It also opens the door for a little humor in the classroom. I’ll often pantomime pulling a rope from the side of the screen as an object slides across it. I’ll even blow from one side of the screen loudly, pretending that my breath is pushing the object along. The kids love it.

In sitting down to decide what to post about for the first ever blog post, the choice was easy.  This particular technological tool has been the most valuable addition to my teaching practice.  The LiveScribe Pulse Pen is a lot more than a regular ink pen.  The pen uses a tiny IR camera that picks up on almost invisible minuscule dots on the pages of the company’s special notebooks to record what you write.  Thus, all of your notes, or whatever it is you chose to write in the notebook are not only produced in ink as usual, but are also transferred onto your computer in digital form.  The software comes with handwriting recognition so that you can search your notes by keyword.

That technology alone would not be that impressive.  Getting a digital copy of your notes is as simple as scanning in your notebook pages, a minor inconvenience, but no big deal.  However, also included on the smart pen is a small microphone that records audio as you write.  Beautiful!  Videos of the writing, tied in with the audio can be viewed on your computer.  In addition, you can upload these videos to their website, where you can embed them in your class website or blog.

Students love this resource. Before tests, when they get lost on a particular type of problem, they can actually have Mr. Kadin walk them through it! Not to mention, if you are lucky enough to have a projector in your classroom, when you are out of school, the students can get a full (though not interactive) lecture from you. You don’t have to waste the day by having them watch a movie and answer questions. Or you can use it to explain the homework problems as you walk around and check who’s completed them, a valuable time saving strategy. Admittedly, this is not a free or even cheap option (mine cost 150 bucks, but I think the cost has gone down some), but it’s value is so high, that I thought I’d share it with you anyway. It’s not something that schools are talking about, but is it something they should be? Maybe just one for the school or teachers who will be absent, or just to bring in to your teaching every once in a while. Even if you don’t have the pen, check out the website for other teachers teaching similar content. It might be helpful for your students.

I think the pen is mostly marketed towards students, who can take notes and link the teacher’s lecture audio to the notes themselves. The product, I believe, is most valuable the other way. Teachers can teach, re-teach, or reinforce their work for any kid who has an internet connection at home. For those who don’t, hopefully there is a computer in the school where the kids can take a look when studying.