What Kids Think about Sharing their Writing

This week I had my students share their writing assignments with each other over the Internet. Our purpose was to improve the quality of our writing through peer editing. I created a document library on our SharePoint website for the class, and taught the kids how to check documents in and out of the website. This is not unlike what the teachers at our school do for our report cards. Here is the result of a survey I asked the kids to take. It was an anonymous survey, and 39 of 57 students answered:




The results may be a bit hard to see, but if you enlarge the image you can read the results of the 3 questions I asked the kids.

97% of the students in my class who responded to a short survey feel that using a SharePoint document library to share their work for peer editing improved the quality of their own written work.

About half of them feel it improved the length of their written work.

97% of them feel that they had something to offer their peers in the form of editing advice that would make a measureable improvement in their work “some of the time” to “almost all of the time.”

I also felt that interest was high during the days we were editing each others' work, and that behaviour problems were virtually non-existent. I feel that the students were interested and engaged in their work.

When I showed these results to one class' homeroom teacher, she said "Ok, but now where do we get a class set of computers for my class?" While I admit we don't have the class of computers on wheels, I think we know that kids enjoy and benefit from peer editing, and that perhaps other classes will book our second computer lab 1 period a day, for a week. Perhaps a teacher will assign it as a homework project. Like that old baseball movie says "If you build it, they will come."

Paying Kids to Think Makes them Dumber!

Do you pay your kids to go to school? Of course you do! We pay our kids in grades. This I think creates a problem though. According to Dan Pink's presentation at TED on motivation, a number of universities (London School of Economics for one) a "Pay for Performance Plan" actually decreases performance on tasks that involve creative problem solving. The only time the "carrot and stick" model of motivation increases student performance is when a person is only given very simple tasks where very little creative thinking is involved. I guess in this case it is only a matter of a person deciding how much effort to put in, as effort is the only ingredient required for success.



But is effort the be all end all for improving student performance? No. Instead I think we need to focus on improving student performance with more intrinsic rewards when teaching upper level thinking.

1.) Autononmy - the feeling that "I am in charge of my learning". But, our job as teachers might then be to find a way to prove that kids need to look after their own education.

2.) Mastery - self esteem doesn't come from people patting you on the back. It comes from applying yourself to a difficult task and being successful. Mastery is a form of reward.

3.) Purpose - the ultimate job of the 21st century teacher. My latest focus - connecting what students are learning to their lives in such a way that the student uses the knowledge TODAY. And, to use this knowledge for something that serves a higher purpose than ourselves.

Keep talking about the intrinsic rewards of learning to your students. It's a tough sell at first, but its the only currency worth paying them.

Comparing Schools to Each Other

We wouldn't do it to our students, so why would New York school board officials do it to their schools. In today's New York Times , Jennifer Medina writes about how the school boards have given high grades to 97 percent of elementary schools. This has led to the school board changing the way they evaluate schools so that there will always be a certain amount of schools getting an "A" and a certain amount of schools getting an "F". We don't evaluate our students by comparing them to each other, why do this to schools?

I the article, Medina said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief accountability officer is quoted in an interview as saying “We want to be able to really show how much value a school is actually adding.” This just sounds like marketing-language. The term "value-added" reminds me of how companies include "valuable trial software" on a USB drive. Like I really want to pay for a product that has trial software I didn't ask for!

There is a real danger in running schools like a business. There is only a finite amount of money to go around, but to say you will hand out funding like bonuses get handed out at Christmas to the top sales people does not create incentives. It creates more "have" and "have-not" schools.

I don't have a solution to improving performance in schools other than keep giving teachers at the grassroots levels what they need. Also, quit trying to measure the value of an individual school by test scores. The tests change frequently. What value a school adds to a community cannot be measured in its entirety on paper. Changing the hearts and minds of children for the better cannot be measured by a single score.

The big questions we should keep asking ourselves are "Are we giving kids the tools to be successful tomorrow?" and "What are the variety of ways we can measure success in preparing our youth for the future?"

Use It Today - Electricity

My impression of how some kids view school is that they can't make use of what they are learning in school in their every day lives. They feel that it is only going to be useful in the future, and then only for some of the students, not all of them. My lesson today focussed on how you can apply knowledge you learn each day in class, but it is up to you to look for the opportunity to use it.

Here is a short clip on where I wish I had applied what I knew about electricity, which I teach in my Grade 9 Science summer school course:



Could've saved myself a few bucks! Rats.

Using MS Word to Prove You Learned Something

The kids in my class have been writing about a "hoax" animal that they created using a graphics program to mash two animals together. They have brainstormed ideas about their animal "mashup", researched facts about both animals, did a little creative graphics work with photos obtained by searching CreativeCommons.org. But now it's time to improve our writing skills.

The kids wrote a 1 page article about their hoax animal. They then put it in a document library on my classroom website. This allowed them to share and and comment each other's articles using the "comment" feature in MS Word. But how can they show they have learned from their peer? By creating another copy of their document, making changes, and using the "highlight tool" to show what changes they made.

1.) Open their file with peer comments on it.
2.) Use "Save As" to create another file - lets tag the ending of this file with the word "Edited" at the end of your file name . For example "The Turcan - edited" This creates a second copy of the file.
3.) Read the commments your peers have made on your work, and make changes to improve your writing.
4.) Highlight those changes with the highlight tool.




In my mind this is a very tangible way to show proof that you have made improvements to your writing, and isn't that what school's about?

Notetaking is like Texting

This is a video I made about a question an ESL student asked me today "How do you write notes?" Her question was really, how is notetaking different from writing full sentences? I came up with an analogy she understood - by using her cell phone!

Screwdrivers in Education

If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail! When it comes to adults learning about computers in their everyday life and in their jobs, people get to a point when they don't think they can learn any more. I think its all about the academic tools in your tool belt.

To not invest time in our own learning is like trying to replace all the screws in car engine with another kind of screw just so you can use the screwdriver you have in your tool belt. Sometimes a lack of learning costs you more time than you realize.

There is a learning curve with new programs, just like there is a learning curve to new jobs or new ways of solving problems. There is a cost in time and effort. But there is also the PERCIEVED learning curve, and often this is what is most daunting.

A colleague came to me with a task they would like to accomplish on the computer to do a presentation and create an activity for their students. There were many options to solve the problem, and I tried to figure out what this teacher already had for "tools in the toolbelt". Then I showed her a few new features to a program she already knew how to use to create documents and presentations.

As teachers must take this approach to being life long learners. Push yourself and your colleagues along just a little bit. Don't avoid learning something new for the sake of avoiding a little effort or time; you do have time to invest, just like we all have money to invest. Invest wisely and invest often.