Category — Tips

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 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.

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.

Judging by the number of cell phones that I have confiscated in school, text messaging has become the ultimate way for kids to communicate.  Recently, it has become popular in the media to bring up insanely huge cell phone bills from parents who don’t realize their kids are texting an ridiculous amount throughout the day (news coverage). It’s true, the kids are texting with each other all of the time. And it makes sense. It gives nervous teenagers a medium (just like facebook, myspace, youtube, etc) where they can create a character.  It creates another protective layer for them; it isn’t their real voices there, it’s just text.

Anyway, maybe some teachers find it inappropriate, but I think getting into this realm, and interacting with your students there is of incredible value, and can be completed without making holes in the invisible barrier between adult and student.

I send out my homework assignments via SMS (text message) every day to all of my students, and it takes about 3 minutes. Here’s how:

Every cell phone service provider has an email address for each cell phone that you can email, and the email will be transcribed into a text message and sent out. Here’s a couple of lists of providers and email addresses.

For example, I have a lovely iphone, which is of course on At&T. sending an email to 6175551212@txt.att.net (that’s not my real number ladies…sorry) will end up as a text message on my phone.

I asked the students for their numbers, their providers, and had their parents sign off (in case of SMS charges), and now I have a huge list of addresses that I copy and paste into an email, quickly type the homework in and send it off. It took an hour or two to do the initial set up work, but since then it’s been really easy.

I’ve been criticized for this technique by some , not only for breaking a barrier with students (just like some would think communicating with students on AIM is inappropriate), but also for babying the students. They say that the students need to be able to write down their homework and remember it without my help. They say that when the students go to college they won’t be receiving text messages from their professors each day. I agree. However, at college, the students these kids go up against will have laptops (hopefully they will too), and the professors will have course websites, Blackboard/WebCT, moodle, whatever. When all of my students have internet access at home, I’d happily post the daily homework assignments on my website for them to check.  For now, sending a text message performs a similar function.
In addition, and almost more importantly, the use of text messaging is a real connection to students’ lives. It’s no wonder that the students have been texting me back with questions about the homework when I would have never dreamed of receiving emails like them. It’s no harder for them to type an email, but somehow communicating on the same level as the students helps them to feel more comfortable asking questions or making requests. Not to mention, the students can communicate with me from their couches while watching TV.  Using SMS shows them that you are willing to communicate with them at their own level, and since emailing the text message doesn’t give them your actual cell phone number, you are still maintaining some formal distance.

Since I started doing this, their homework completion percentage is way up, the communication with me via email/SMS is up, and their content understanding (as far as I can tell) is up as well. I can’t understand why a teacher wouldn’t be in support of a 3 minute action each day that has those effects. txt me l8r if you disagree.

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.