Teaching and Learning in "Real Time" - the Document Camera in English

This is a reflection I wrote today for an action research project regarding the use of the document camera in English:

For this action research, I posited the question: “How does the use of the document camera affect student learning in the research paper process?” Throughout the study, I focused on scaffolding the students' learning with direct instruction, handouts, and especially through students modeling using the document camera. Last year, I had introduced the use of School Fusion slide shows and document posting on School Fusion to assist my students in the process of mastering MLA bibliographic formatting. While the students viewed the use of this web tool favorably, the slide show format on School Fusion visually displayed in a less clear ways than simply posting the slide show in PDF format. The students saw the blogging feature regarding topic commenting and sharing as primarily neutral. Again, the study was useful and informative to me as a teacher, but it lacked a dynamic quality in my view. Enter the classroom technology installation this fall! Immediately, I wanted to use the new presentation technology in a more dynamic and student-centered way. The document camera proved to be that dynamic tool that would allow my instructional style to meet its full potential.

When I design instruction, scaffolding the learning is my top priority. I will teach or review the learning in question with direct instruction including background knowledge, I will model or show past student models of the learning, and then students will do the assignment required. Later, I would photocopy a few student examples onto a transparency and show them to the students so we could use current, in-process work as models. When the document camera was installed in my room, I immediately saw how the document camera would replace my overhead projector - in fact, we could review student work in real-time, right on the spot. This gives immediacy to the work we do in class which was not present before. When it came to sharing topic brainstorms, for instance, students came up front, plopped their Writer's Notebooks down, and began to write in suggestions from their fellow students on their topical brainstorm webs. Most students were enthusiastic about getting the help, especially if they were at a standstill with ideas. Very few students refused to place their work up. Several students who didn't have the opportunity on a given day, even asked, "Can I be first tomorrow?" Surprisingly, several students who had turned in almost no work all year became engaged enough to place their work on the document camera. Clearly this was an opportunity for students to glean an accurate perception of themselves and others. I believe this allowed students who don't typically perform in class to see visually - "hey, I can do that," and lead to a 100% paper turn-in rate for the spring paper. Other factors are at play, of course, but I think seeing the ongoing development and models encouraged the low performing students to develop self-efficacy about completing the project while at the same time motivating all learners to "up their game" as they saw the work unfolding.

Before I started using the document camera, I visualized that students, with my guidance, would offer each other instant feedback, and that is what did happen. But another, more important outcome emerged: the students took over the feedback sessions. I stood or sat at the back of the room and participated, but frequently, the person at the doc camera ran his or her own feedback session. It didn't happen in every session, but I often was completely unnecessary except as a facilitator or moderator. This is when I realized the enormous potential of the document camera to build community in my classroom via peer interaction and learning. Yes, the document camera is an important tool for providing instant teacher feedback, but its potential to allow learners to take ownership and to provide feedback to each other is even more powerful. My scaffolding of the instruction is important and lays the groundwork for student academic success, but the students actually have a role in instructional scaffolding that I hadn't explored before.
In my doctoral work, I am researching motivation as it applies to situational learning factors, instructional factors, and student interest/engagement factors in the English Language Arts. Involving students in the learning process is a key factor in academic motivation and the document camera allows me to do that on an ongoing basis. Another aspect of motivation that is almost impossible for overloaded teachers to deliver is efficient feedback. No more waiting to find out if the students understand the learning - we simply stop and pop a few student models up on the doc camera, discuss, and immediately apply the feedback. In the coming years as I continue to teach with the document camera, I am going to include the "process check" model more fully so that students can get maximum feedback from me and my peers during the learning. To make this process more explicit, I am will integrate self-regulating exercises/feedback questions so that the students can learn to better monitor their work as they learn from each other. Students who engage in a self-regulated learning process in content-specific domains develop the meta-cognitive skills that contribute academic achievement. The document camera offers a huge potential to me as a teacher who wants her students to grow individually and as a community.

In closing, the document camera allows me to make English more a class of "doing" than "learning about." While it is somewhat clichéd, I continually work toward having my students "do English" to become proficient in reading, writing, and speaking, just as players "play basketball" to become proficient in playing basketball. In future action research studies, I may focus specifically on ways to promote peer engagement and immediate feedback during specific learning as opposed to "the effect of the document camera" -- that is, I plan to focus more on what and how the students and I are learning using the document camera as opposed to studying the effect of the document camera as a tool.

New Classroom Technologies

This year, to change up the research paper presentations, I asked my action research partner Fran Prather to prepare a lesson introducing critical media literacy skills, especially with visual information,  as she introduced the concept of digital storytelling to my English IV classes. First, we administered  a survey to find out what experience our students have had with Powerpoint, PhotoStory, or Windows Movie Maker (or any other movie program). Then, Fran and the class discussed the good, bad, and the ugly about Powerpoint presentations, and launched a video featuring a comic ripping on bad Powerpoints. Hilarious! Then this outstanding lesson continued as Fran  displayed an image and discussed the elements of the image (in this case, a picture of a Hatian woman in despair).  In the key part of the lesson, Fran presented the use of digital storytellng as a means of presenting their research topics to their peers. We both noticed that the video storytelling clips immediately engaged the students' attention. In one class, a presentation about tobacco companies' global marketing strategies was mis-interpreted to be a message to "stop smoking". NOWHERE in the presentation did this message occur! W believed that those students had a schema for PSA's about tobacco that truncated their ability to critically review. Later in the day, both of the other classes completely "got" the message of the clip. Interesting. The second clip, about Cesar Chavez didn't have voice overs that directed the viewers' attention. We expected students to not understand the video because of their lack of background knowledge. A few thought the protests and speeches featured were taking place in Mexico, and many were unfamiliar with Chavez's farm strikes and the issues around it. To gauge the quality and effectiveness of these presentations, Fran had an assessment for the clips on back of the survey. Animated discussion ensued as we walked through the  students' assessments of the presentations. 

Fran taught the first two senior English classes, and then I tried the lesson myself with another class. The lesson was so well crafted and demonstrated, that I found it easy (and fun!) to teach. Fran had organized the lesson and the clips through an attractive and professional-looking SMART Notebook 10 presentation. Fran's instructional design and choice of content structured the lesson to move learners from what they know (how to read an image) to the new learning - creating and evaluating a digital story.

Fran's lesson and use of our new classroom technologies inspired me. On the day following her presentation, I taught myself Notebook 10 in order to create a presentation for a staff development session I was giving on Wednesday on precis writing.  I then downloaded and inserted video clips from Discovery Education and linked web sites and documents. 

Reflection - What We've Learned about Teaching Student Research

As Fran and I have collaborated on student learning and attitudes through my senior high school students' research process this winter and spring, we continue to "peel the onion" of our action research together, examining our own assumptions, the students' work itself, and the results of the student surveys. For clarity and efficiency, I will list some of these discoveries and further questions (in no particular order) that have come up during our discussions as we have reflected upon this experience:

1. Nearly all students responded that they are glad the know the research process and that they were glad we broke it down into steps. The didn't say "how to write a research paper", but actually used the term "process". I explain to the students that the process is structured to ensure success in terms of the end product; but I also explain that I know they will create their own processes when they are assigned a research project or paper in college. We discuss having the skills to complete the research process and pacing the work. From a teacher perspective, that nearly 95% of the students responding that they value learning the process is an indication that one of our teaching goals was met. As a sidebar to the concept of process, there were points for recursivity in the process - that is when students were outlining or writing the rough drafts, they discovered a need for further research, for example. A way I might break this down more to ensure recursivity is to ask students to find one article or book that adds considerable information they don't have already and have them take notes on that article - and then reflect upon that activity.
2. Students frequently rated taking notecards as essential to determining the quality of the resources they selected. I gather for some of them, sources were de-selected based on their lack of usefulness. As one student suggested, possibly they should take note cards earlier in the process. From my perspective, that was the point of the two overview articles and Cornell note-taking assignment at the beginning of the process. Maybe one strategy we could consider in the future is having students take those Cornell note sheets for one article and transfer them to notecards with headings. The students see value in the note taking, I am guessing, because it helps them build a schema for their topics and to scaffold their new research into their cognitive networks related to these topics. The note cards build cognitive competence and are a concrete way for a student to really see a source. The "AH HA" that Fran and I had around this is that students may not evaluate sources well by skimming, or at least reading and note taking provides greater depth in terms in terms of truly knowing the value of a resource. This also suggests that some of the more digital methods of taking notes - such as the copying and pasting that students would no doubt rely on if they could might not yeild the same cognitive actions of selecting/de-selecting sources, not to mention that students (hypothesis) cognitive gains are not as strong as with writing and paraphrasing. Next year, when I have the class period dedicated to surfing the web at the very beginning of the project, I will have the students copy and paste "notes" into Word from one source. Then I will ask them to bring an overview article to class and have them take paraphrased note cards the next period, followed by a Cornell note taking assignment that night. I would have students write a comparison and reflection of these methods in their Writer's Notebook the following day when they could psycically compare/evaluate the three types of note taking. I think some very interesting
3. While students rated Fran's Web Evaluation and Blog Evaluation lessons highly, few of them rated the use of web sites and, especially blogs, very highly in terms of selecting resources. At first glance, Fran was disturbed by this apparent disconnect. I argue that the lessons were very valuable to the students because they helped students "de-select" many online resources as lacking in validity or quality in some way. So, in that way, the lessons served a very important purpose. Many students, inlcuding my AP Lit students commented on the value of these lessons as they weren't familiar with all the eval strategies Fran was teaching. In general, our students have no idea how to evaluate online information or what tools are available for that purpose.
4. Students prefer having choice of topics in the research process. Many mentioned this in the post-experience surveys. This is clearly motivating to students and elevates the positive emotional attitude toward the research. This is one of the rare opportunities they have had a chance to delve into an interest of their own in English.
5. For my action research, I posited the question: How can School Fusion (our online teacher 2.0-esque web pages) faciliate student learning in the research process? The student surveys indicated that the students found the online sbib card examples and handouts very usefull - most students ranked this a 5/5 on the survey. They were neutral in terms of the educative value of the two blog responses they did, but my sense during that period is that there might have been a positive affect established with the blogs because students were able to state what they saw as strengths and targets for improvement after the first semester research paper (voice their own reflections) and then, later, to read what everyone's topics were and to respond to at least two of those. If I were to do this survey again, I would ask a few affectively-oriented questions. Clearly the use of SchoolFusion to post models is an important new way of students learning to teach themselves.
6. Not an aspect of our action research, but one point that is important that became clear through the survey responses is this: The number one value - beyond all the steps and lessons we taught the students - is help from the teacher. This was written in the student reflections and indicated in the survey over and over. This means that students value the teacher interaction through the process; we know this generation learns socially, and to them, that means collaborating with a teacher or librarian as much as it does a peer. When I do this process again next year, I would like to set up quick-collaboration sessions with each student in the process - no more than five minutes each while they are taking notes. I also would like to follow up with another quick conference during the rough draft phase. I don't know how this will work with the numbers of students we will be teaching, but I think if I can have the librarian answering their research questions and circulating, that will help me focus on each individual student, at least briefly. Much more research needs to take place in terms of teacher as fellow learner/collaborator.
7. So much of how we teach now (ensuring all learners are on task, etc.) limits the developmental need that our students have to achieve some independence in and to take responsibility for their own learning. I want to do more in my teaching that models how a literary scholar might look at a poem or how a researcher might look at research or how an essayist might develop an essay, etc. and then turn over responsibility to the learners; if I can structure some small group collaboration more formally into the research process, the students can be responsible for each other. Creating stable social learning groups in the research process is another goal for the next time around. Students do this informally to some degree - we saw that in the fall survey in that students who do well tend to discuss their work with and get information from other students. The lowest achieving students are left out of that loop completely - and don't even know it. Again, fertile grounds for further research.
8. Working with Fran, my teacher librarian/collaborator increased my own learning exponentially throughout this process. We learned volumes beyond what we intended by continuous verbal reflection and discussion. Both of us read widely in literacy research and application literature and bring a richness to this discussion that isn't possible with every colleague. We are different enough in perspective that we can challenge each other as we reflect upon and refine our teaching and learning experience. My research this year would not nearly have been as productive for me or my students without a collaborator. (Besides, they loved it that we were researching them!)

The Blog Evaluation Lesson

Last week, my colleague, teacher librarian Fran Prather, taught my students to evaluate blogs; the lesson was illuminating for us all. Our students especially enjoyed learning that both Fran and myself have blogs and that we are blogging about them! Working through the lesson with three classes brought three issues to bear:

1. Most of the blogs students would find through Google are blocked arbitrarily by our district's internet filter. Fortunately, some of the web sites they used for research contained blogs within the site, and those we could access. This filtering keeps students from accessing most blogs at school which is a problem for our students without home access. For those students, I set up some time that I could work with them one on one through my unfiltered access. How can we teach digital literacy with such arbitrary road blocks?
2. There really ARE reasons students would want to include information/content from blogs. I, for example, enjoy reading Sharon Begley's Newsweek blog on neuroscience/psychology topics, and I consider her a viable source of that type of information. As Fran pointed out, students could use public blog postings as "primary source" material. Indeed, many of the students accessed appropriate blogs for their topics of research.
3. Both Fran and I learned that blogs are indexed; I would like to learn more about how those indexing sites really worked. She and I will need to investigate the art and science of blogging more thoroughly so that we can share this, along with our other research strategies with our colleauges.

During the course of our current research unit, the web evaluation and the blog evaluation lessons have generated greater "digital literacy" among our students - which is apparent in their discussions about their resources and in their selection of web content for research. The addition of these two lessons to the senior research paper instruction have been powerful, and I will include them next year.

Research While Researching?

Last Friday, I watched a student taking notes onto notecards from a database article he had printed out. He also had the internet up and was googling people and information from the article on which he was taking notes. I watched him for a few moments, thinking that this is best of both worlds - students researching from database resources and using the internet to further research or understand the information he was reading. Fantastic! I will probably explicitly teach this as a strategy on our next paper. Here's the new issue, though: As I watched him, I noticed that he began to take notes from the Internet source right off the screen, but writing the notes into the note cards that were linked by a code to the database article he was reading. I told him that taking notes from the internet source was fine (after he evaluated it), but that he would need to link that notecard to a bibliography source of the web site from which he was taking the notes. So, while it was inspiring to watch a student further educate himself, I am finding another level of instruction about this proces is needed.

Podcasting and Vodcasting

As part of our action research project and our site and ASU work, Fran and I have been focusing on reading strategies in the research process, digital literacy, and the research process itself. I have mentioned my frustration with students' neediness and inability to think through content and process for themselves (remember, the ARE seniors). I feel compelled to explore other means for breaking down and communicating some of the steps. When I read in Richardson's book about video and podcasting, I came up with the idea of creating short mini-lessons that students can watch including video of setting up the research paper literally with Word with an instructional voice over. In addition, I might add a podcast for the students for "the final checklist" prior to turning the paper in. Finally, I am very interested in what would happen if I offered teacher feedback on the papers in the form of a podcast narrative. This is unteneable to take on with all my students, but I will try it with two smaller classes or a subset of students. As I work through my thoughts on this, I am refining my action reserach to the question: What will happen if I introduce instructional materials and teacher feedback through vodcast and podcast format to the students? Will it improve their process? Will the feedback mean more? Will students retain and transfer the feedback as they apply it to the next research project in the winter?

Magazine Awareness

During the current research project, I noticed that many of our students are unaware of the weekly news magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. When I used Time magazine in a written example, some students thought I meant "the time" in the bib format, which they found confusing. This lack of awareness stunned me, but it did given me a good idea for the next research paper in the winter. I am going to display a bundle of these magazines in hard copy in the room and create an assignment in which the students work in small groups or pairs to deconstruct the organization of these magazines. After I discussed this with Fran, she found a good link from Harvard about differentiating general magazines from journals which I will use next times as well. As long as I have been doing this, I find I need to re-examine my assumptions about existing knowledge - especially about print!