Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Blogging for Authentic Learning and Assessment

Introduction:

For the past couple of months I have been implementing blogging in my science classroom. Part of this was out of my own interest in blogging and social media, and as a topic of research for implementing differentiated instruction in my current classroom setting. The goal of this post is to share my inquiry based research project. The dissemination of my research follows a month long implementation of blogging in the science classroom where students participating in creating authentic artifacts of learning and were assessed on these artifacts as an alternative to traditional summative assessments.

What is a Blog?


Defined, blogs are online journals where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Because of this, educators and students are embracing blogs as a means of publishing content, keeping a running record of content in a digital portfolio. When coupled with educational content, “Edublogs” serve as a venue for collaborating with others in a way that encourages reflection on the content, questioning, self-assessment, and higher order thinking. Students can share their blogs with both the teacher and other students to compare their knowledge and comprehension level of the material.

Why Should it be Included in Instructional Practice? 


Blogging is an excellent tool for the constructivist classroom as it follows a learner centered approach and provides reflection for the learner that can direct future progress. As an assessment tool, blogs can serve as a platform where students can test their understanding and mastery of a skill or content. Assessment can come from the traditional teacher to student form, or it can come in peer to peer evaluation. By offering each other alternative viewpoints, assistance in understanding, or conformation of ideas, students can gain a deeper, more meaningful connection with each other and the content. Both teacher and peer feedback can serve as formative assessment. Blogs can also serve the teacher with a means of self-assessing instructional methods and tailoring future instruction. Blogging can extend learning beyond the physical constraints of the classroom and the school day, allowing students the time to process the information, revisit, and revise their artifacts of learning.

Blogging can also create sustainable learning communities and can redesign the traditional approach to how coursework is delivered. Blogging can foster a learning environment with infinite collaboration and sustain learning beyond the school day and even after the course has ended. Using a common blog makes it possible for learners from different classes and even a different school to share resources, video, learning tools, articles, discussion, and lectures. According to Custin and Barakas (2010), using a Socratic approach in an online forum is less intimidating than when used in a face to face setting. Students are more comfortable and willing to answer in an online forum (blog) where thoughts can be meticulously developed without the constriction of time. The development of a complete answer or thought can be posted after a student has had sufficient time to reflect on the question, whereas the Socratic approach in a face to face setting often leads to reluctant, self-conscious, expression of thought. A kinder, gentler approach often employs the students as co-moderators in the Socratic Method.

Blogging supports the constructivist learning model. For example, blogging can be active, manipulative, intentional, and reflective. Blogging can stimulate prior knowledge, provide learning experiences with embedded links to resources, and include surveys and self- assessments. Blogging also can focus on authentic, relevant topics that are task-based or involve problem solving and will facilitate learning into new situations and allow students to elaborate on what they have learned. This real-world understanding may even lead students to create hypothetical questions and scenarios for other to reflect ad comment on.  When this occurs the learning becomes conversational, collaborative, and cooperative and ultimately a place where students want to communicate.

Blogging extends instructional time by providing students with a means for accessing information outside the school day.Teachers can benefit from the blogs by extending learning beyond the school day by providing links to instructional text and videos, embedding vodcast and podcast directly into a classroom blog, and introducing concepts through a Socratic approach. Additionally, teachers can use blogs to share professional knowledge and expertise, provide technical and professional support, and training to other teachers.
For more information, see the following articles:

How is Blogging Differentiated Instruction? 

 Perhaps a good way to answer this question is to look at the characteristics of Differentiated Instruction. According to Carol Ann Tomlinson, who is a renowned author of many books on the topic, there are several key building blocks that serve as a foundation for differentiated instruction. These are outlined and summarized here:

Knowing the Learner: Teachers need to know as much as possible about their students to teach them well, including learning styles and pace, multiple intelligences, personal qualities such as personality, temperament and motivation, personal interests, potential disabilities, health, family circumstances, and language preference. For my inquiry project and research Blogging provided a simple avenue for accomplishing this task. Students created an initial blog post earlier in the semester describing "WHO AM I". I provided students with a prompt for this assignment as well as an invitation to view my own teacher created post. See it here:


Quality Teacher: The teacher believes all students can learn, has the desire and capacity to differentiate curriculum and instruction, understands diversity and thinks about students developmentally, is a risk taker, is open to change and well-versed in best practices, is comfortable challenging the status quo, knows what doesn’t work, is able to withstand staff dissension that may arise.

Quality Curriculum: Curriculum needs to be interesting to students and relevant to their lives, appropriately challenging and complex, thought provoking, focused on concepts and principles and not just facts; focused on quality, not quantity; stress depth of learning, not just coverage. Blogging provides the opportunity to enrich curriculum and make it more relevant. In my research and implementation, I spent a great deal of time thinking about and creating artifacts that my students would enjoy doing and be motivated to complete. The activities in the classroom also needed to be carefully designed to give students the appropriate background knowledge and scaffolding to complete blogging artifacts. Motivation drives the success of both classroom learning and blogging. Students who are motivated to write tend to spend more time and effort on the writing process. Spending more time on the writing process helps ensure that reflection and analytical thinking skills are at work. To achieve this through blogging, I attempted to generate inspiring writing prompts and assignments that are authentic and meaningful. You can see examples of these here:

Classroom Learning Environment: The ideal learning environment includes a balanced student population, appropriate grade and program placement, priority seating based on student needs, has a reasonable class size, practices positive discipline, arranges furniture to promote group work, use flexible grouping, and has adequate teaching supplies. While my own classroom provides several unique challenges to this building block of differentiation, blogging is something that can be done anytime and anywhere. Students can blog from home, the library, and at local fast food restaurants. Emerging technologies such as cell phones, ipads, and Kindles have enabled students’ experiences at school and at home to converge. I am fortunate to have technology for each student in my class, however, even in the most technologically challenged environments, allowing students to use their own devices can make an inadequate learning environment an ideal environment.
A study done by the Herman Miller Company (2011) on adaptable spaces and their impact on learning identified four key constructs that affect student learning; Basic Human Need, Teaching, Learning, and Engagement.
Herman Miller Link: http://goo.gl/BC2fKJ

Flexible Teaching and Learning Time Resources: Includes team teaching, block scheduling, tutoring and remediation within school, before and after-school programs. Teachers who currently use differentiated approaches to build units and lessons around essential understandings often lack sufficient time to properly scaffold and tier instructional content and assignments. Some students may require additional time to master concepts, while others may need additional support that parents are unable to provide at home due to a lack of content knowledge or insufficient mastery of the language. A certain percentage of students may need to be challenged with extension activities to enrich their science experience. Blogging can provide a means for supporting all levels of learners and extend academic instruction and provide teachers with the necessary time they need to provide reinforcement strategies introduce new or additional topics, review important class concepts, review for tests, and enrichment. Blogs provide a means of extending the instructional impact of teachers in a way that is popular with the young audience already immersed in social networking.


Instructional Delivery and Best Practices: Includes flexible grouping, cooperative learning, learning stations and centers, web quests, tiered assignments, individual choice, and collaboration.  Students may be better visual, auditory, kinesthetic, social, logical, verbal, or solitary learners. Classroom blogging can be differentiated to meet the needs of all students. With a blog, the assignment possibilities are endless.Students can reflect through a journal (solitary), write about evidence of science in their life (logical), create a podcast and upload it to the blog (verbal and auditory), or post graphs or pictures of science in the real world (visual). Blogging can be be “cooperative, collaborative, and conversational, providing students with opportunities to interact with each other to clarify and share ideas, and reflect on understanding and learning by posting comments to each other's blog.

Assessment, Evaluation and Grading: Includes portfolios, observations, skills checklists, oral and written reports, demonstrations, performances, work samples, models, graphic organizers and posters, quizzes and tests, and standardized tests. Blogging can be used in learner self-assessment, teacher formative and summative assessment, and as a comprehensive assessment in the form of a digital portfolio. According to Lee and Allen, Blogs as an Online Assessment Tool, Blogs enable learning from self-reflection, from others, and provokes complex thinking skills and strategies. Students have the opportunity to put into writing their own thoughts and beliefs, review other postings and responses to a subject matter, and are then able to compare their level or knowledge or approach to their peers.
A rubric for assessing student blogs can be found here:

Conclusion:

For my inquiry based research project I propose the question “How can I build a learning community and assess student achievement through the use of student created blogs?” Through the use of student created blogs, I created authentic learning activities that exposed and celebrated the talents of my students, built confidence in the student voice, encouraged mastery of content knowledge, and helped my students create and evaluate media content. My research supports the notion that creative authorship of student blogs can allow students to produce high quality exhibits of learning that go beyond just answers to questions on a standardized test. Self-published content by students provided autonomy in their own learning and provided options and choice for those students who struggle with traditional assessment. In addition, blogging allowed students to develop electronic portfolios for storing visual and written content and have their own voice in the content itself. Blogging helped build a sense of community among the learners in my class through peer to peer interaction, and shared task assignment. Students also practiced self-assessment, and had the opportunity to review each other’s post and responses to posts, compare their knowledge and comprehension of the subject matter, and share in the use of technology tools they employed to execute the assigned task.
As a teacher, blogging provides a means of extending the instruction beyond the school day. The number of student blogs that showed high achievement and commitment to the task of creating artifacts of learning demonstrates the potential of blogs to extend learning and is worth considering their regular use in future units of study.

The following links provide access to examples of student blogs with permission. Feel free to explore the archives of student blogs, including the "Who am I" post from September.














Friday, October 10, 2014

Cellular Energy Projects


Here are some examples of Artifact 4: Cellular Energy. Students were asked to represent how Photosynthesis and Respiration are complementary processes.
Check out this one:

Macromolecules "Burger masterpiece" sample project


Milkshake:
-Carbohydrates
  (Sugars) Energy
-Lipids (Fats) Energy,
  Storage, Insulation,
  Protection

Fries:
-Carbohydrates
  (Starches) Energy
-Lipids (Oils) Energy,
  Storage, Insulation,
  Protection





Burger:
 Bun:
   -Carbohydrates (Starches)
   Energy
 Lettuce/Vegetables:
   -Carbohydrates (Cellulose,
   Sugars) Energy
 Meat:
   -Protein Structures, Carry
   Out Tasks
   -Lipids (Oils)  Energy,
   Storage, Insulation,
   Protection


ANATOMY

OF A BURGER
AND FRENCH FRIES
AND A MILKSHAKE

  CARBS

Carbohydrates
are the body’s
major source
of energy. They
are comprised
mainly of simple
sugars, which
when eaten,
break down
through Cellular
Respiration to form ATP.




LIPIDS

Lipids help in the storing of energy, and provide insulation for animals living in colder environments. If you eat too much of them, or the wrong kinds, they become not-so-helpful.
The McDoubleChoco-Milkshake-cynthia-selahblue-cynti19-24762132-566-848.jpg
  SUGARS
Sugars can come
in three main
forms: monosacc-
harides, disacc-
harides, and poly- saccharides.
There are lots of
things that fall
under the cate-
gory of sugar,
two of which
being carbs and
starches.

 PROTEINS

Proteins allow
hemoglobin to be carried throughout the body, and makeup hair, fingernails, and eyelashes. They’re essential to life.

  GLASS

Glass is not an
edible subst-
ance, and the
consumption of
it is generally
frowned upon.

 PLASTIC

Much like
glass, plastic
is also inedible,
and it’s consu-
mption is equally frowned upon.  
4615french_fries.jpg
CARDBOARD

Much like the two aforemen-
tioned things
(glass and plastic), we do
not eat cardboard.
Though it is a
good source of
fiber, our enzymes cannot digest it.

 STARCH

A subset of sugar, starch is broken down into glucose, and is eventually turned into ATP. The body uses this energy to function.

STEPHEN T. FRENCH, 2014


Another student Example:
http://17andrewmoomaw.edu.glogster.com/burger-masterpiece/

A project done in Gooogle Draw

Artifact Assessment

This semester I am trying to get my students to create products of learning in addition to evaluating them with the typical standardized test. "Authentic assessment" is becoming a more common in education in response to the last 10-15 year focus on standardized curriculums. With the digital age and the advent of Web 2.0 tools, students have a variety of ways to express themselves creatively. My students are creating their own digital portfolios using blogs. My ambition is that they have a digital running record of artifacts throughout the year that they can reflect on and review in preparation for the EOC exam. The posts on here will highlight student examples.

Samples:
Sample of the Properties of Water:

Student sample