Observation at Holy Cross #3

Diane has changed her classroom around and it looks great. The students took part in the redesigning of it. One of my suggestions was to move the shelving away from the wall and point it into the classroom, take everything off the top of it and students can use it as a place to work. It looked like it was working pretty well to me.








Students are still using the Pic Collage app and have become rather adept at using it for lots of different reasons. One of the tasks today was to retell the story of the Prodigal son and then publish it so it looks like a board game. A couple of boys did a lot of problem solving, made their own squares and came up with this result.

I showed some students how they could put down their ideas quickly into a Graphic Organiser. I made it in Inspiration 9.1 on the computer and then exported to Inspiration Maps, I added it as a download to my recount page on my Graphic Organiser wiki, so the students went to that page in Safari, clicked the download and then tapped on 'Open in Inspiration'. There are still a couple bugs in Inspiration Maps (which are going to be addressed in the next update). When you download a map from a website or Dropbox, make sure once it is open that you tap the Home button before making any changes to it. Then re-open it from the home page. If you don't when you have added all your thoughts and tap the home button, the map will completely disappear. Also you can't make the boxes bigger, so if they are going to write a lot they may need to insert a new symbol and reconnect it. But as I said before, these issues are going to be fixed. The students did enjoy writing up their ideas like this and the scaffolding they got from the hints at the side.











Sarah has started her management system for writing, where she has set her expectations, students have a timeline and they have to show where they are on the timeline by moving their name.

Students and Researching

I came across the following infographic from Education Database Online Blog about students using technology to research.



A lot of the points I agree with. Students in primary and intermediate schools all use Google and Wikipedia for researching. Most of the researching I see is of a poor standard

• students ask questions in the search engine
• students don't know what key words are
• a lot of what is found is regurgitated in a PowerPoint or a Keynote with words students obviously don't know the meaning of
• it is all lower end thinking, there is no new knowledge or meaning

What I don't agree with is that Technology is making it harder for students to research. In my travels my observations are is that teachers do not teach research skills, they assume that students know how to research. Researching is considered Googling! The statement that the amount of information is overwhelming is due to the poor research skills that turns up millions of results. Another statement that it is harder for students to find credible sources is also down to teaching students how to recognise from URLs what looks like credible sites, and then searching the page itself to see if it is a reputable site.
Is the internet distracting? Are devices and their apps distracting? Yes they are! So now we have to teach self control to students, and reinforce on task behaviour.
I disagree with 'technology is damaging students' attention spans'... if anything it is improving it. In the last two weeks I have been in six different schools. My observations were of engaged, interested students who were learning. All of the schools were using devices to differing levels, all have had to discuss with students about appropriate use of devices and apps. Several teachers have told me that in particular several of their boys who were not doing well in traditional classrooms have been turned around with using devices.
I believe that technology is making it easier to research if you have the skills. Devices and apps like Evernote that allow you to store, cite and organise information needs to be taught to teachers and students alike. Google runs a free online PowerSearching Course which all teachers should do.

Let's teach the basic research skills! The following links are to a Higher Order Thinking Resource wiki that I am developing, that makes use of Graphic Organisers to scaffold student learning

• Writing good questions or another one that I use for writing Non-Googleable Questions
• finding Keywords
• using Ctrl F and a keyword on a page
• storing information with citation in Evernote or Notability
• rephrasing, rewriting information in own words

Fact or Opinon: Evaluating Websites

Children have difficulty evaluating information from websites for relevancy and accuracy.
In a previous blog posting 'Helping children to become better researchers' I talked about how to create the research question and find keywords. But what happens when they click on Google and find all those 'hits' about that topic? If their keywords are really good, generally the quality of their hits will be pretty good as well...but how do they really know? They don't! Unless they have been taught how to critically evaluate a website. This latest blog post from Langwitches titled 'Don't believe everything you see online' provides many useful links to websites and helpful hints on how to develop 'critical evaluation' tools.
I like to use a Graphic Organiser with guiding questions where students can evaluate their answers and decide if the website is creditable or not.

Helping children to become better researchers

To teach children how to become competent researchers requires several stages. I like to use Inspiration (or Kidspiration) Graphic Organisers to guide them in this task. Once they have some knowledge of the topic at hand teachers generally set them an activity where they have to come up with a question to research about. Most children find this difficult.

That is why I use this Graphic Organiser 'What do we know about?' Students fill in what they know about the topic. I then ask them to choose one of the ideas that they would like to know more about. They then choose one of the ideas and turn that into a question.




The nouns or verbs in the question are likely to be their search words.


The next step is to go to Google or any other search engine http://delicious.com/sharpjacqui/searchengines enter in the search words. Click on a website. Generally most of the websites they will choose will have a lot of text which can be quite daunting to read. This is when I introduce my trick of Ctrl F (Command - F for Macs). This brings up the 'Find' box,
type in one of the key words, if that word is on the page it will be highlighted, ask the child to read the sentence the word is highlighted in, refer them back to their research question and ask them if it answers their question, if not they click on the Next and that will highlight the next instance of that word, again they read that sentence. "Does it answer the research question?" If so the children highlight just that sentence, copy and paste into a Word document. They continue in this way until they have enough information that answers their research question.

The next Graphic Organiser is the 'Finding Information on the Internet'.
Children type in

• What the Question is
• What the keywords are
• the search engine they are going to use
  
• the criteria for the websites they will use
• the links to the websites

Under the Recording they can hyperlink the picture of the Word icon/symbol to the file they have created with all the copied material from websites. Under New Information is the link to the PowerPoint (or Keynote, or Photo Story, or MovieMaker or iMovie file) that contains the presentation they have made using the information they have found. Finally under Evaluation they type in their final thoughts about their research. This is great model for teachers and students alike. The teacher has a full assessment of the progress and procedures the child went through for their research. They can see what the question was, the key words used, the Internet sites used and then they can compare the 'Word' file with the final presentation to see if the child was able to make sense of the information they found and turn it into their own. Students are showing accountability for their learning by referencing the sites they have visited and demonstrating how they have turned their new knowledge into new information.
For this to work well and for students to become independent researchers this format needs to be repeated often. It can work well for novel studies, topic research, and as a starting point for several writing genres such as procedural, argument and explanation.