Grammar Rules

Posted by & filed under edtech101.

Cross-posted on the TFAnet EdTech 101 blog.

Teaching grammar was always a challenge for me. The holy grail of instruction models for many fellow ELA teachers in my DC Region cohort was “multisensory grammar,” a creative approach to teaching how to use the parts of speech that involved visual, kinesthetic, and narrative elements. But it was a significant management challenge because it required every student to have their own set of six colored markers and to use them to mark up worksheets with laser-like precision. If only there had been NoRedInk.

NoRedInk is an adaptive online application that uses students’ personal interests to teach grammer. As a former English teacher, and, before that, professional editor, I’ll admit to a strong bias towards a program that teaches proper use of semicolons. That said, if you’re an ELA teacher jealous that the math folks have been getting all the fun with sites like TenMarks, Manga High, and Virtual Nerd, your time has come.

The site was designed by high school english teacher Jeff Scheur and has been through the Imagine K12 accelerator program. (That’s the same incubator that helped other edtech hotshots like ClassDojo, Socrative, and Bloomboard.) So while multisensory grammer is still a brilliant approach if your management is sterling…

 

…NoRedInk will have your students getting their Biebers and commas in order in no time, and without dried-out markers.

Signup on the site is simple and in Teacher mode, you’ll need to first create a class, which like Edmodo sections, comes with it’s own unique code you can pass to students so they’ll see the right lessons when they login.

There are four major categories of assignments and assessments you can create: Apostrophes; Commonly Confused Words; Subject/Verb Agreement; Commas, Fragments, & Run-ons. Errors in the latter are a pet peeve, so I dove in with that.

Creating an assignment allows you to customize the number of questions and to schedule it. You can then select the sub-skills within the category, and the level of detail reveals a lot of educator experience baked into the application:

When students login, they’re prompted to select various personal interests in categories like sports, TV/Movies, and music. They can even enter their pet’s names or automatically import in their Facebook friend’s names. NoRedInk then generates questions using that cache of proper nouns. My interests included “Recent Presidents” and “The Hunger Games,” which generated questions like this:

When I made mistakes trying out my first comma-centric assignment in student mode, the adaptive tools helped me spot my errors:

And when I still didn’t have my semicolon in the right place, the coaching got more specific–and more colorful:

That kind of pointed, specific coaching is exactly why personalized learning tools like this could prove so powerful in your classroom. Explaining this point to one student is great, but explaining how to fix the same or a similar mistake to 25 kids in rapid succession would take up far too much class time. Moreover, with NoRedInk, once students have finished an assignment or quiz, mastery data is immediately accessible to the student and to the teacher:

Audrey Watters captured more of creator Scheur’s thinking in her recent write-up on Hack Education, including why the “fix-your-own-sentence approach” is more powerful than multiple-choice questions when it comes to grammer. Now back to editing.

 

Reading and Scheming: How Schema Theory, Cognitive Frameworks, and Background Knowledge Support Literacy Instruction

Posted by & filed under education, literacy.

As a plucky (read: obnoxious) middle schooler, I got frustrated easily trying to understand why others had such trouble operating technology. Once you’ve used one kind of digital watch, camera, or computer program, I always felt, it wasn’t that hard to get your bearings with a different model and figure out how different buttons, controls, or menus still allowed you to do what you wanted. If I’m being honest, this feeling continued into adulthood, but, you know, I learned some tact.

I even remember an instance when I must have been about 12 in which I decided that I wanted to record a TV show while out of the house. The solution? Teach myself how to perform that colloquially impossible task of “programming the VCR.” Honestly, it wasn’t that hard, and the obfuscating interface just reminded me of my nerdtacular wrist watch. But it solidified an adolescent presumtion that most technolophobia was overblown, if not nonsensical.

But here’s the thing: that presumtion was adolescent because I didn’t understand why it was so easy for me to make connections between how to operate various gadgets. Moreover, I didn’t understand exactly why the more I tinkered with LEGOs, ropes and pulleys, flying apparatae, and command-line interfaces, the easier it was to understand the next technology I started taking apart.

Earlier this year, I learned about schema theory, which explaines why the more you know about something, the more you can learn about it and concepts related to it.

The remainder of this post is a blogified version of a presentation I made for an online grad class on the processes and methods of childhood literacy acquisition. The focus, then, is on how schema theory applies to reading nonfiction. But the theory is powerful enough that it’s something I think (metacognitively) about on a weekly basis. I find it useful for thinking about how to work with students in middle school, but also to think about why, in certain instances, it might make less sense for me to get frustrated at the gap between my own technology literacy and that of others, and might make more sense for me to help the people around me build their own schema for “programming a VCR.” If you’d rather just see the slides, here’s a pdf.

Introducing Schemata: What does this sentence mean?

“Drew scored on Pedroia’s one-out sacrifice in the third, his hundredth RBI of the year.”

dustin pedroia

For a given reader, this sentence may be decodable, but without appropriate background knowledge, the reader will lack a schema to comprehend the information. Let’s break it down:

“Drew scored on Pedroia’s one-out sacrifice in the third, his hundredth RBI of the year.”

Drew & Pedroia
  • These are baseball players.
“one-out sacrifice in the third”
  • This means there was one out in the third inning, and Pedroia hit a “sacrifice fly,” meaning he hit the ball & it got caught, but Drew had time to reach home base.
“his hundredth RBI of the year”
  • RBI means “Runs Batted In,” a count of the runs Pedroia has helped others score. One hundred in a year indicates a successful hitter.

Schema & Absorption Rate

In order to understand a selection like this, you must use knowledge that you bring to the text in order to gain new information from the text (Gunning, 2011, p. 308). Having an appropriate schema for organizing new knowledge determines how much information you can absorb (Lemov, 2011, p80).

Two readers with different amounts of background knowledge in a baseball schema will absorb very different amounts of information:

Readers coming to the text with a baseball schema will learn new information about the players Drew and Pedroia, particularly about Pedroia’s skill scoring runs for his team.

Readers coming to the text without a schema for baseball will not learn any new information. They will likely be confused.

Schema Theory

Developed by educational psychologist R. C. Anderson, schema theory posits that comprehending a text requires activating an existing schema or creating a new schema that organizes the information. The schema is a framework that a reader uses to comprehend new information by sorting it into appropriate categories or pockets (Gunning 2011, p308).

A schema can be general: Animals

  • what an animal looks like
  • where an animal lives
  • what an animal eats
  • how an animal behaves
Or a it can be specific: Siamese cat
  • short, light hair with dark faces
  • lives in houses with humans
  • eats cat food
  • lounges, might hunt small rodents

Background Knowledge Makes You Smarter

With more background knowledge, a reader can understand text at a higher level of comprehension. As a result, readers can then amass more background knowledge. More reading equals more schemata, which means more comprehension, which enables more reading, and the cycle repeats.

A Schema As a Script

Anderson likens schema activation to outlining a script & fitting specific story elements into the appropriate “slots.” Gunning offers this example for the story of a character buying a bicycle, which activates a reader’s “buying-and-selling” schema:

“The student fills in the buyer and seller slots with the characters’ names. The bicycle is placed in the merchandise slot. The story says that the buyer got a good deal, so that is placed in the bargaining slot. The story may not say how the character paid for the bike—cash, check, credit card, or an IOU—but the reader may infer that it was with cash because in her or his buying-and-selling schema, goods are purchased with cash” (Gunning 2011, p308).

Schemata for Nonfiction

While the narrative-focused schema in the bicycle example is fairly straightforward, children develop schemata for expository of non-fiction text more slowly than for stories (Gunning, 2011, p368).

Fiction Nonfiction
  • organization is typically a story with beginning, middle, and end
  • students usually have lot sof experience with stories in different formats
  • linear & predictable: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution
  • greater variety of organizational patterns
  • students usually have limited experience hearing & reading nonfiction
  • not necessarily linear; hardto predict what will happen next

Text Features as a Schema for Nonfiction

One useful schema for helping students comprehend nonfiction is the framework for text features that support the content of the text. Text features can include italic and bold print for important words, charts and graphs for statistics, or labels that describe illustrations. Some other basic text features and their purpose include:

By fitting the information in a nonfiction article into a schema for text features, a student can better identify important information, visualize what he or she is reading about, and retain the organized information. Check out this example, which I used for several lessons in my class last year:

Title: “Pro Athletes’ Salaries Aren’t Overly Exorbitant”
Image: Baseball player signing autographs
Caption: Explains that autographs are being signed at 75th All-Star Game.
Byline: Mark Singletary

Schemata Everywhere

With an understanding of schema theory, a literacy teacher can:

  • Ask what types of schemata a student will need to comprehend a given text
  • Support student comprehension of a text by activating an existing schema or building background knowledge
  • Help students build their own background knowledge and reading confidence by helping them acquire new schemata
  • Practice metacognition by paying attention to his or her own use of a schema when comprehending new information

Sources

Gunning, T. (2011). Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students (Kindle Edition). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Lemov, Doug. (2011). Uncommon Schools Reading Workshop. [Presentation]. Talk presented at New York Education Department. New York, NY. Retrieved from http://engageny.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Doug-Lemov-11-29-11.pdf

SIL International. (1999). Schema theory of learning. LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0. Retrieved from http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/literacy/ImplementALiteracyProgram/SchemaTheoryOfLearning.htm

Social Tables Turns Seating Charts Into a Classroom Party

Posted by & filed under edtech101.

A seating chart, like the constitution, is a living document. It’s open to reconsideration, negotiation, and revision. And now, as a TFA corps member, you have free access to Social Tables, a new tool to help you maintain and update the seating charts that are a crucial element of your classrooms management plan. Get started by visiting this special link: https://www.socialtables.com/tfa

Above is a screen cap of a corner of the math lab at my current school, which I was able to create in under 5 minutes. That’s approximately the amount of time it took me last year just to generate the ugly, illegible template I used for seating charts in MS Word. Word, as you can guess, was not designed by event planners with maintainance of dynamic seating sharts in mind. Social Tables, on the other hand, is a great example of a tool built for one industry (event planning), that also shines in the classroom.

Here’s how I went from zero to 60 seats in just a few clicks:

  1. Visit https://www.socialtables.com/tfa and sign up using your email. (Use your email instead of the Facebook login option–it won’t ensure you get a full account, and it will likely prevent you from accessing the tool on your school network.)
  1. Create an event. I went with “Meeting” instead of “Gala,” but you’re the teacher leader in your own room.
  2. Upload your student rosters. The system accepts Excel/CSV files easily.
  3. Generate and arrange tables. This part is a lot of fun because you can make tables in lots of sizes, angle them across the floor, and then move them to mimic what’s in your real classrooms, or to experiment with configurations you don’t want to spend the sweat on just yet.
  4. Assign stuents to tables through either a drop-down menu on the “guest list” or with a drag-and-drop interface that lets you put kids exactly where you want them. You can also “chain” students together that should get seated as a pair or group.
  5. Share the results with co-teachers or team members. You can see (but not edit) my first classroom right here.

Jin-Soo Huh Wants Technology In Your Classroom Today

Posted by & filed under edtech101.

Jin-Soo Huh (DC ‘09) is an ed-tech evangelist. During his three years teaching 6th-grade math in Prince George’s County, Maryland, he led the charge to integrate iPads into classroom instruction. He pulled colleague after colleague into using Edmodo, shaped new tools for his school to run faster on Google Apps, and built relationships with emerging ed-tech startups.

He is now an Instructional Technology Specialist and 9th-grade Math Teacher at John McDonogh High School, part of the Future Is Now charter network, in New Orleans, LA. I recently spoke with Jin-Soo as his first school year as an ed-tech leader in NOLA was getting underway.

What is one ed tech tool can you not live without?

If you’re in a 1:1 program with iPads, tablets, or laptops, I feel that Edmodo is so valuable for teachers. And it’s cool for students because it’s like Facebook for schools.

For teachers who are wary of technology, it doesn’t change the delivery of a lesson, because you can still put a quiz online or an exit ticket or upload worksheets as pdfs.

But for those teachers, it immediately show the benfits of technology when they realize, “So wait, I don’t need to grade all these things?” It also lets students share instant feedback and has personal learning network tools for teachers built right into the platform. It’s a “gateway program” that lets teachers move to truly transformational teaching using technology.

What is a significant instructional breakthrough or student achievement gain that an ed tech tool has helped you achieve?

It’s definitely been Socrative. The ability to deliver good checks for understanding is a skill that teachers try to master for years and years and years. Trying to figure out the pulse of a classroom and stragegically poll the room or call out students to see if they know what you’ve taught, using accoutability sticks–there are so many techniques teachers have tried.

But with Socrative, you can instantly see exactly who gets it and who doesn’t get it and how well they got it. That changed my teaching. I saw a noticable increase in mastered objectives immediately because my CFUs weren’t necessarily weak, but they were not perfect. Before Socrative, I wasn’t able to go around and get every single student to respond. With it, I could adjust course immediately. You’re able to see exactly what level of understanding students have.

You’ve been given free reign at your school to design a technology-enable curriculum. Where did you begin?

I have been given “free reign,” but one constraint is the device. We’re becoming an iPad school, and I’m happy with that because that’s what my background is in.

Right now, it’s about figuring out where the teachers are. Some are scared using email. There are others who were born with a computer and play with computers and know lots of tricks. We have a diverse group of teachers in terms of technological ability. When we know where the teachers are with technology, we can decide how we can integrate it into their teaching. But before that, we have to get buy-in from teachers, and that’s something we’re still working on, because a lot of teachers aren’t necessarily choosing for the technology to happen to them. So it’s a lot of talking about why its so important to know technology and to be competent in technology.

Another part of this new beginning it has been talking to other people in ed tech and asking, “What do you use?” It’s also been a lot of talking to companies and saying, “Show us your product.”

What is an example of a tech tool that you’ve reached out to a company for and that you’re going to use at your school?

EverFi is a free product that we’re going to use to teach financial literacy. Our school is focused on two ideas this year: technology and entreprenuership. EverFi has lessons on financial planning and how to use a credit card. I worked with our business teacher here to get a demo from the company and we went for it.

I’d actually forgotten what it’s like to be in a school where teachers don’t know what tools are out there. Last year, my school had 1:1 iPads for all students, and by the end of the year, even those teachers who were scared of technology–they all knew what Edmodo and Socrative were. It’s fun to now be in a place where teachers are eager to find new tools and are then stunned to find out that these products are already out there, and can make our lives easier.

How are you using these tools in your math classes?

We’re doing a lot of project-based learning this year. As much as possible, we want the kids to demonstrate their skills on projects as summatives assessments and to learn new material through the course of projects.

I think the iPad really facilitates that. First, the Internet is right there. But I think the thing that really separates the iPad from other devices like a laptop is the portability and the camera. It makes it so easy to document things.

I also think they’re great for students to publish and share their work instantly through photo collages, ShowMe videos, or iBook Author books. In math class, it’s no longer solving a problem and sharing it with the class. A teacher can post your video to a blog and some other students around the world can watch that video to see what they think about it. That drives students to do better because it’s no longer just the teacher looking at it or even just their peers, but it’s the world community that could look at it. Will it be the bext viral hit? Probably not. But that’s a “cool” factor.

Most of the marketing around the iPad presents it as an entertainment device for books, videos, music, and Angry Birds. What we’re going to to work hard on with teachers and students is to show them that it’s not just an entertainment device. It’s something you can use in the classroom to enhance learning.

What kind of tool do you wish someone else would build?

I think the holy grail that everyone is still looking for is the integrated dashboard. Especially now, with so many startups, it would be amazing if there was one program that could pull data from every program I’m using and put it in one place. This would allow teachers to use whatever program they want.