Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Another great session this week, this time with one of the co-authors of the Writing Next report: Steve Graham.

Here is an overview from the MSU LARC site:

Steve Graham, Vanderbilt University

Evidence-Based Practice in Writing – Drawing on Experimental, Qualitative, and Single Subject Design Research for Answers

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
11:30am – 1:00pm
Room 133F Erickson Hall, Michigan State University

This presentation will examine what we know about effective writing instruction, drawing on three recent reviews of the literature. One of the reviews (Writing Next) was a meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental writing intervention research. Another review was a meta-analysis of single-subject design writing intervention research. The third review was a meta-synthesis of qualitative research conducted with outstanding literacy teachers, designed to identify common practices across studies. Advantages and disadvantages to the use of evidence-based practices in writing will also be explored.

About the Speaker:

Steve Graham is the Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education and Literacy, a chair he shares with Karen R. Harris. His research interests include learning disabilities, writing instruction and writing development, and the development of self-regulation. Graham is the editor of Exceptional Children and the former editor of Contemporary Educational Psychology. He is the co-author of the Handbook of Writing Research, Handbook of Learning Disabilities, Writing Better, and Making the Writing Process Work. In 2001, Graham was elected a fellow of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities. He is the recipient of career research awards from the Council for Exceptional Children and Special Education Research Interest Group in the American Educational Research Association.

And, here are some notes from the session:

• Opening quote: “Kids know the most interesting things” - Mark Twain
  • “It hurt, the way your tongue hurts when you accidentally staple it to the wall.”
• Writing is nowhere in terms of the educational reform movement in this country
  • The things that drive the educational reform movement are reading and math
  • Now, STEM - science, technology, engineering/economics,math
  • Why is writing out in the cold?
    • This is not always bad, as it sometimes results in school practices that are not good
    • But, we need to make the case that writing is important
      • 1. One of the reasons that people are not paying attention to writing is that there is a general perception that we do not know how to teach writing. Policy makers want evidence, and they want particular kinds of evidence.
        • We do know that there are some things that work for all students 4-12 and younger
        • People don’t think that writing is important. So, we have to look at the effects of writing on content area learning. We make the case that writing can be helpful in terms of the STEM skills
        • Reading gets more play in the literacy discussion. We need to look at the effects of writing on reading. How does writing affect reading?
          2. What are the practices going on in elementary and secondary schools
          • Limitations: survey data that could be rosy, but the data is still not good
          • ELA teachers are doing less than one extended writing assignment a month
          • You don’t wan to go into policy making without good research to make recommendations

          3. Theoretical framework — from Patricia Alexander from moving from knowledge about discourse and enhancing motivation

• What are three primary resources we can draw from?
  • Professional writers
    • Unfortunately, the advice can be simplistic and only moves confident writers to expert writers; it doesn’t help other writers
  • Effective practices from experienced teachers
    • Talk to effective teachers or observe good teachers in practice and study them
      • Problem: if I go in looking for one thing, I will likely see it (difficult to separate the wheat from the shaft”
      • Problem: Donald Graves and the example that works. Yet, there are times when this doesn’t work.
      • Problem: generalizability. Evidence is often selective.
      • With scientific studies, we collect evidence, presents findings for all participants, replicability, strength of impact — all this leads to something that should be more trustworthy than insight and experience.
• This presentation, thus, will draw on three sources: experimental, single subject, and teacher practice
  • Other criteria:
    • Four replications
    • Converging evidence (the sun, the moon and the stars align)
    • Recommendations based on higher quality studies are superior
      • Process writing has very poor research, so you need to be cautious about this
      • The more studies, the merrier
  • Effect size:
    • .8 is large
    • .5 is moderate
    • .25 is small, but significant
  • Writing Next looks at overall quality of writing
    • Strategy instruction (planning, revising, editing, and regulating the writing process; 20 studies, .82 effect size (particularly helpful for kids who find writing difficult)
      • Don’t just PEE (post, explain, and expect) students need repeated modeling
      • For instance, the STOP strategy (Suspend judgment, Take a side, Organize ideas, Plan more as you go)
    • Teaching Summarization (systematic and explicit teaching of how to summarize texts); 4 studies, ? (missed it) effect size
      • Teach the six rules of summarization
    • Peer assistance (working together to plan draft and revise); 7 studies, .75 effect size
      • Needs to be a structured in a positive way — having students add questions marks and carats in their peers’ papers
    • Setting product goals (specific goals for the written product to be completed); 5 studies, .70 effect size
      • Need to tell students what you expect without limiting them
      • Product goals and revising
    • Word Processing (using word processing); 18 studies, .55 effect size
      • Some are short studies, but some are up to a year
      • Using the technology which is widely available is important, but it is used infrequently in schools or, when it is used, it is only used for final draft/publication
    • Sentence combining (constructing more complex sentences by combining shorter kernel sentences); 5 studies, .5 effect
      • Work on this together with students, then invite them to apply it back in their own writing
    • Process Approach (extended opportunities for writing, student ownership); 21 studies, . 32 effect size
      • Inviting students to engage in planning and revising is good
      • Bad news: the effect size is scattered all over the place
      • Receiving training from NWP is about a .46 effect, and is insignificant if you did not get that training
      • You can do this in a very poor way, and not get a good effect; this is compatible with a strategy approach that makes the writing more visible
    • Pre-Writing (have students engage in activities such as brainstorming; 5 studies, .32 effect
      • STOP strategy, for instance
    • Inquiry (old research); 5 studies, .32 effect
      • No pre-test done, so these studies may underestimate the effect size
        • Example: set a goal, analyze the data, look at specific strategies, and apply what you learned
          • A student in elementary school looking at conflict on the playground
    • Study of Models
      • Examines examples of specific writers and types of text; 6 studies, .25 effect
        • Model from good readings
    • Writing as a Tool for Learning (writing in the content areas); small but positive effect
      • 26 studies, but I think that it is more effective in science and math than ELA and social studies based on the effect sizes that we see
    • Grammar (explicit teaching of grammar); 11 studies, -.32 effect size
      • Quality of writing is not affected by grammar instruction
      • What this traditionally looks like is that you give a definition, example, and then is used in decontextualized works
      • If we expect it, but do not help students use grammar then it will likely not work
        • Take the kernel sentence: Dog bit mailman

      Recommendations for Struggling Writers (teaching handwriting, spelling, and typing to struggling writers — teaching transcription skills towards automaticity), small positive effect

• Single Subject Design Recommendations
  • Explicitly teach students strategies to construct paragraph; strong positive impact
    • Showing parts of a paragraph to the point that students understand the goals of writing a paragraph
  • Explicitly teaching students how to capitalize, punctuate, etc. helped
  • Reinforce positive aspects of students writing — social praise, tangible reinforcement or both as a means to increasing specific writing behaviors (small positive effect)
    • Traditional means of grading papers doesn’t work — “we get more with honey than we do with vinegar”
    • Couldn’t draw the summary effect from this, however
    • Need to move the feedback beyond the specific paper and help the student move forward in his/her writing
  • Self-monitoring (students asked to count how many errors they made); might be effective for some struggling writers
• Individual Teachers
  • Study exceptional teachers and schools
    • Practice had to be applied by the majority of schools or teachers
    • 10 Practices that might make a differences (had to occur in four or more studies)
    • Dedicate time to writing and writing instruction, with writing occuring across the curriculum
      • Get kids in the game of writing
      • Increasing writing by itself is not enough, it also needs to be motivating and give kids tools to be effective
    • Involve students in various forms of writing over time
    • Treat writing as a process
    • Keep students engaged by involving them in thoughtful acticvities such as planning compositions
    • Vary individual, small, and large group instruction
    • Mode, explain, and provide guided assistance when teaching
      • Teachers need to relinquish control
    • Provide just enough supprt so that students can make progress or carry out writing tasks and processes, but encourage students to act in a self-regulated manner as much as possible
    • Be enthusiastic about writing and create a positive environment where students are constantly encouraged to try hard, believe that the skills and strategies that they are learning will help them write well
    • Set high expectations
    • Adapt writing assignments to meet the needs of students
• Caveats
  • We should not order these practices hierarchically in terms of one being more effective thananother
    • Instead we should order them in a way that we see them working well for us
  • The database is thin
  • Just because a practice has been studied, it does not mean that it will be effective for all teachers in all classrooms.
    • Pay attention and see if it works in your classroom, with your students
  • Little data on those students who are most at-risk: ELL, learning disabilities, struggling writers
  • Lack of data on maintenance and generalization
  • Don’t really know best how best to put all of these things together
    • Think about trying to integrate some of these ideas as part of an overall approach rather than try to fit it into an existing approach
  • Teachers’ views on acceptability of these practices will clearly influence their use — this will include the issue of domain specificity
    • If you don’t accept it as a reasonable practice for you in your classroom it will not work
  • Just because a practices is effective in a study or was used by an exceptional teacher does not mean that it will always work
• Questions
  • 6 traits
    • Most studies were pre- and post-tests with no control
    • Look at journal article on Writing Next
    • 6 plus 1 looked pretty good for what was there
  • In-Service
    • When we asked ELA, science, and social studies teachers about how well their program taught them to teach writing, 70% said it was inadequate
    • We also asked about in-service preparation — you personally, school, conferences — ELA said that 70% were adequate, but 30% were inadequate
    • Most science and other content teachers didn’t feel prepared to do so
    • Not doing it at pre-service level because most states do not require a course in teaching writing
  • We have been doing this work for nearly 25 years and we have not delivered our work in terms of learning strategies approach and outreach
    • We have a distribution problem — we are not providing what we know in pre-service and in-service ed
  • A lot of this is very complicated, so we did the best practice book to give something for teachers to look at
    • We need to have support materials showing teachers how to do this — if you can see it, you can do it

My Reflections

In thinking about Dr. Graham’s talk, there are a number of salient points that I want to consider. First, he went over the 11 strategies from Writing Next and, even though there is evidence to show that all these strategies are effective, it is the individual teacher that makes the difference in writing instruction.

Second, he talked about how students can use word processing to write and revise, and that is very effective for their growth as writers; however, most of the opportunities that students have to write with the computer only involve typing in a “final draft” of something else that has been written out beforehand.

Next, he talked about peer editing and how students must be scaffolded into the process of giving feedback; just having them give comments to one another is not enough as they must use the language of writing in that talk.

Finally, he talked about the writing process approach and having an authentic purpose and audience for students should happen more often than what it is. Typically, the audience is only within the classroom walls, and students don’t share beyond their friends. Yet, he described a project in his children’s school in which students shared their work more widely and that it could be a goal for many, although not all of our assignments.

Notes from Margaret Hedstrom’s “The Future of Networked Knowledge”

Overview Announcement:

Dr. Hedstrom is an archivist who is on the faculty of the School of Information at U of M. Her research interest is digital information. She has done some interesting cross cultural empirical research on user response to various methods of archiving digital files. (e.g. “The Old Version Flickers More:” Digital Preservation from the User Perspective. American Archivist http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/dig-pres_users-perspective.pdf) Not just ease of use but also reliability of stored electronic files.

She is also a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. (Their report available at http://er.lib.msu.edu/item.cfm?item=050123)

Notes from the session:

• Intro
  • Recent feature story from NYT on archiving digital materials
  • We are trying to build networks, facilities, and human capital that takes advantage of the burgeoning world of digital information
  • There are archival questions in every discipline, problems that we encounter in humanities and social sciences, as well as other sciences
  • Today’s talk will be to reflect back on the ACLS Commission’s thoughts on infrastructure for education and the humanities
  • What is the vision and potential of this, as well as the challenges that we experience on a daily basis and others that we can anticipate; then discuss some paths that we can use to move towards this vision
• The Vision
  • The potential for cyber infrastructure allows for transformative research that were not possible for people to address in the past as well as open scholarship
    • This is the big goal for research cyber infrastrucure
  • Looking from the humanities and social science perspective at a report from science and engineering report on cyber infrastructure
    • What could we do if we had massive amounts of digital data, easy-to-use analytical tools, and networks of repositories, and well-trained people to use it?
  • There must be money out there for the scientists, and the humanists could ride on their coat tails, right? Well… it turns out that when you talk to scientists there are problems with funding for research, and competition is intense, too.
    • Many of us from outside of these science communities think that they are networked and forward-thinking, but there are many questions about what makes legitimate science, peer review, qualifications of researchers, etc.
• More thoughts on the vision
  • What do we mean by infrastructure?
    • It is about the protocols for moving data, for sure
    • But, it is also about the people who know how to approach these new resources
      • Archivists who are getting data into shape so others can use it
        • There is a lot of technical work in adding metadata that goes unnoticed and, consequently, is different from what has been done in the physical world
      • To take advantage of this potential, we need to learn how to teach and research in different ways, and these are the bigger stumbling blocks that we need to get over
• There are new ways of addressing research that are happening in a parallel with a move towards interdisciplinarity
  • How do you take ideas that have been historically separated by institutional boundaries that are now coming back together again in a digital convergence?
  • How does an interest in cyber-enabled learning happen in conjunction with this? Is there a dissastisfaction with the compartmentalized visions of scholarship?
  • A goal for cyber infrastructure shifts your way of thinking about research and looking at problems that allows for a new way to think about problems.
• What would “big” humanities (transformative research) mean?
  • Because of the way that humanities research has been done in the past (single investigator, deep problem, specific set of data resources) — the problems have been scaled down to fit within the scope of work for one human being.
  • Now, we can scale the work across a team of people and apply knowledge to much bigger questions
  • Changing the culture is partly a generational change and partly thinking about not trying to convince those who do not want to change their ideas.
  • Some of the big issues with the humanities is that the early attempts to do quantitative research didn’t fit in with the paradigm of what people were trying to look at.
    • What has happened since then is that the kind of resources available to, say, historians, are richer and more vast.
      • You can get census data, yes, but you can also get images, primary texts, and other items more easily
    • UM and Google’s library project — how does a historian go about mining that data?
• Resistance
  • You can enable other kinds of cyber science, but don’t take away from my current budget.
  • Is the work empirical? Does it have rigorous tests of validity? What happens when you triangulate it with other kinds of research?
• Openness in Scholarship
  • Open in both the sense that it is making contributions to research as well as have access to the results
    • The raw materials for the research (documents, data, and even people) are networked and widely accessible
      • In this area, she gives librarians lots of credit for moving forward in this area
      • There are formidable monetary and intellectual property issues to overcome here, though
    • Research becomes much more collaborative
      • It doesn’t mean that the idea of the lone investigator goes out the window
      • Expertise is shared, however, and scholarship is open to new audiences and perspectives
        • Universities have done a disservice by trying to have “quality” through exclusivity
        • What is the line between a free-for-all and a very rich dialogue about the research questions we are trying to pursue?
      • Also, could we engage younger people with a degree of fun? Have we dismissed something that people might find engaging by dismissing it as frivolous?

Challenges

• Where do you start with all of this?
  • There is a complex set of interdependent variables here.
    • How do we do research without a critical mass of resources and tools?
  • There have been some areas in the humanities where things have changed.
    • For instance, in the classics, you find many early adopters because the primary resources are finite (there are only so many original Greek texts) and you can get it online; it is the base of data that everyone draws there conclusions from the ancient world
    • On the other hand, what happens when you look at 20th century history and the endless amounts of content that are out there?
    • What happens when all the volumes in the world are digitized? Of all the primary sources out there, we only have so much money to digitize though…
      • What do we bring out that is trapped?
    • Within the disciplines, there is lots of room for advice from scholars on this
      • Someday, can we help make decisions about what is important in the field and what needs to be digitized?
      • Can we help develop the analytical tools to look at the data?
        • Can we do massive text mining?
        • Visualizations?
      • What about stimulating the demand for this new kind of scholarship?
        • Who wants to take a risk as a young scholar when it could fall flat on deaf ears or it could be the greatest thing since sliced bread?
        • Is there an in-between space that we can translate the goals of that vision on a reasonable scale?
      • Where does the money come from?
        • Most of the physical infrastructure in this country came in the early part of this century. The point is that we do no, as a country, invest in maintaining infrastructure. Universities do a little better at this, but there is more to do to mobilize these resources.

        How do we build an ethos of openness and the public good, when the culture and legal structure locks data up and attaches ownership to them?

• Social and cultural challenges
  • Institutional Roles
    • Incentives and rewards for scholars who take the risk to do research in these new ways
    • There are challenges to the ways of doing this work
      • Conservative, traditional modes of funding
      • Finding others to collaborate with
      • Tenure and what counts as legitimate contributions to scholarship
    • These are all ways of thinking in institutions that are deeply held and may not be antithetical to these newer notions, but certainly don’t jive with them either
      • Everyone’s work will change as a consequence of this shift
    • The role of the brick and mortar university will still attract students from a variety of backgrounds and these interactions will not go away
      • But, what is it that distinguishes one place from another, especially with this notion of openness?
      • What are universities doing to attract faculty?
      • What physical resources does the university have (librar, facilities)?
        • What happens when anyone can get access to these materials? What is the value added by the institution?
      • One of the questions also becomes whether or not we are willing to do something different as well as what we were doing before?
        • Can we teach as much and do elaborate research projects?
          • In libraries, for instance, if we are out there cataloging every web page like we do every book, then there are certain things we can and can not do with every resource.

• Conceptual Challenges

• If we want to draw a variety of perspectives into looking at the problems, then how do we maintain scientific rigor and have inclusion at the same time?
  • The wisdom of crowds argument
  • What if everyone in the crowd is wrong?
  • How far can we push this from opinion to educated judgment
  • Universities that have resources as compared to those who do not
  • Digital ivory tower

• How do we convince skeptics of the potential without solid evidence?
• Avoiding the “trust me” syndrome and making a case for how to spend money

Where to start?

• Starting in the schools, doing things in a connected way is good, but they are doing things on a superficial level and we have not done a good job of packaging this information
  • For instance, American Memory Project from LOC

• Getting info from 19th century and putting it out there for people to gobble up

• Getting the next generation of scholars being more insistent on this kind of work
• Encourage the convinced to talk to those who “don’t get it”
  • Don’t want to be dismissive, but there are some who need to at least not stand in the way for others to bring this work forward
  • There are those who place lots of value in traditional kinds of work and we need to convince them that there are ways to do otherwise
• Look at pockets of innovation and support that work rather than spread things too thin
  • There are things that people are doing, but don’t contribute to the infrastructure
• We can stop doing some things if they don’t seem important
  • The world won’t come to an end if the pre-prints don’t come to the mailbox
• Some kinds of work that might seem frivolous might come to be valuable in the end
  • The gaming metaphor and how there is something profound there
  • If you can learn by doing something with a game, we need to embrace that kind of shift in thinking

My Reflections

As I prepare materials for CMU’s online repository, CONDOR, I have been considering many of these same issues. What “counts” for me in terms of creating blog posts, wikis for my class, opening up content that has been published in “locked” journals? I want to be a young scholar who pushes these issues in my department, college, and university, yet I want tenure, too. I think that I am striking a good balance in doing the types of scholarship that is considered as legitimate by my colleagues and publishing in these types of open forums, yet there are still the nagging concerns that my work will not be understood. So, I continue with the both/and philosophy (publish in books and peer reviewed journals as well as in digital formats such as blogs, podcasts, and other forums).

Certainly, these will be issues that I wrestle with for years to come, if not my entire career, so hearing her talk today helped me see my concerns in a larger educational context.

The second in a series of workshops from NWPM colleagues at MRA 2008, these are notes from Portland Middle School teachers Amanda and Garth Cornwell’s session on “Partnering Students, Parents, and Teachers Through Technology.”

• Begin with questions from the audience:
  • How to get younger students to access technology on their own?
  • How do parents react, what do they want?
• Our Hopes
  • To demonstrate daily uses of technology that serve a variety of purposes
  • To aid students, parents, and colleagues in realizing the technology of potential
  • To equip students with the skills that they will need
  • Michael Wesch vide: “A Vision of Students Today“
• Our Plan
  • To share the tech tools that we use with students and parents
  • To discuss why it is important to integrate technology when we feel like we are “giving up” time for content
  • To discuss how flexibility is the key, because teaching with technology always yields surprises
• Students
  • Shared Drive
    • Create hotlists in word that students can click to for computer lab assignments
  • District Digital Dropbox
    • Track changes in word sometimes works with middle school students
  • Wikis
    • Amanda’s Class Wiki
  • Nicenet
    • Classroom discussion forums
    • Good for access at home and school, because it is all online and doesn’t require a specific word processor (files lost, incompatible formats, etc)
    • Watching for IM language and asking students to express themselves more clearly
  • Google Docs
  • Podcasting
    • Buy inexpensive MP3 recorders
• Parents
  • Blogs and Edline
  • Lack of participation and interest in training sessions
  • Considering teaming up with local libraries
  • Be persistent and specific
• Teachers
  • Open yourself up to learning with your students
• Our learning
  • Small, simple steps can be beneficial
  • Honor the time of the student, parent, or teacher coming to learn
  • Listen to input from students
• Lessons and Student Work
  • Book discussions

Here are notes from my Crossroads Writing Project colleagues, Lavon Jonson and Sonja Mack: “Blogging — Maximizing Writer’s Notebooks with a 21st Century Dimension.”

• Background
  • Bringing blogging into the traditional process of using a writers notebook
  • Writing with your students encourages them to write (Graves, etc.)
• Blog Growth
  • In April 2007, 70 million blogs, 90% by teenagers
  • In four years the growth has been phenomenal
• Rationale for use in the classroom
  • Blogging in English Class (on Teacher Tube)
  • At first, it was different, but then students described how it was interesting
• Why use blogging in the classroom?
  • To share items from writer’s notebook (used to share it in a circle on the floor, now we do it on blogs)
  • Edublogs forums (support video)
• Blogs to check out
  • Sonja’s Class
  • Lavon’s Reflections
  • Elementary Classroom Blog
  • Blog about Movies
  • HS English Blog
  • Blog about blogs and education

  What we’ve noticed from our students

• All students are able to contribute
• Comments are more heartfelt

Notes from Randy Bomer’s keynote at MRA 2008:

“Writing Transformations: How New Literacies and New Times Invite Us to Rethink Composition”

• Literacy is changing, literacy as design
• Obstacles: accountability measures and deficit thinking
  • If we are constantly trying to fill in gaps, we are not moving into the future. Looking at education from a deficit model results in damaging education.
  • You cannot move toward the future from a deficit model
• Spotting deficit thinking
  • “these kids”
  • “s/h/they have no language/culture/experience
  • “culture of poverty”
  • finger-wagging to parents
    • Varieties in deficit thinking
      • Individual ability/genetics
      • Culture
      • Poverty
      • Language
      • Mass and popular culture
  • Examples
    • Paying kids in NYC for grades to “compete” with what they could earn on the street
    • Motives for teaching that see children as coming from deficient lives
    • See the book: The Evolution of Deficit Thinking edited by Richard Valencia
  • New literacies are not just about machines.
    • Texts call attention to how they are made, how they work materially, and why
    • Thinking about the design of text and interaction with it
    • Spencer Schaffner’s “five paragraph essay” picture (can’t find image online yet, here is his blog)
    • Habits of minds and material
  • Design
    • Example 1
    • Bill Harvey Music
  • Design as a literacy practice
    • Two phases of the writing process:
      • Generating writing in the notebook — used design as a way of thinking about content
      • Publishing — used design as a way to think about how to publish their work
    • Examples of student work
      • Map of the zoo with narrative annotations
      • Story that was drawn out into a graphic novel/comic page, and by drawing was able to add more detail
        • Bomer claimed that the students wrote more on the days that they drew, and students generated more by working in two modalities
      • Brought in pictures and used cropping Ls
      • Transferred pictures that were cropped and focused in on small components
        • Mother’s image from one image
        • Necklace from another
      • Texts in new literacies may be single pieces that are loosely joined
      • Making Journals by Hand by Jason Thompson or Memory Keepsakes or Artists Journal Sketches by Lynne Perella
      • Design Decisions
        • What pathways are the readers going to take?
          • Box, journal, notecards

Rather than see these children and what they could do from a deficit model, we enabled them to produce texts that mattered to them and developed new literacy practices.

Reflections:

As Bomer talked, I appreciated his perspective on new literacies as “avoiding the deficit” model of thinking. This adds a new twist to the discussions of new literacies that I have been reading about recently, both because it honors the socio-cultural perspective that NLS has developed over time and also addresses issues about about accountability and assessment by hitting it head on by using the research on deficit thinking to support the idea that approaching literacy in reductive ways really contributes to poor literacy practices.

These are the final three sessions that I will attend at SITE before heading home. I have notes on the keynote and follow-up conversation from this morning that I still need to clean-up and process (as well as a podcast for my presentation from a few days ago). I will get that all done later, as I need to catch a plane. So long, Las Vegas!
Technology Use Among Pre-Service Teachers: Implications for Instructions
Stephen Jenkins, Elizabeth Downs, and Terry Diamanduros, Georgia Southern University

• Not much information know about pre-service teachers and use of technology
  • Lots of info on teen use from Pew Internet
• Research Question
  • What is technology use for undergraduate pre-service teachers? for daily use, technology vs. F2F, and for communication
• Tech Ownership
  • Computer: 96%
  • Cell phone: 99%
  • Landline: 28%
  • iPod/MP3: 60%
• Daily Use
  • Cell phone talking: about 2 hours
  • Texting: about an hour
  • Academics: about an hour
  • Facebook: about an hour
  • Internet searching: about an hour
  • iPod: 45 minutes
  • Email: 45 minutes
• Face-to-Face
  • Family: One hour
  • Friends: Fours hours
  • Classmates: About two hours
  • Work: About two hours
• Audiences:
  • Generally prefer phone
• Purposes:
  • Phone primarily used for quick and serious conversations
  • Private conversations happen F2F
• Discussion
  • Course development
    • Even though they are familiar with many technologies, they may not be ready to integrate them into assignments

Evaluating the Implementation of the ISTE NETS and Performance Indicators in Teacher Education
Andrew Hunt and Jennifer Hune, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

• Research Questions
  • How do faculty perceptions of their intended curriculum compare with student perceptions of their received curriculum on integration of technology into restructured courses?
• Findings
  • We discovered that students were doing most of the things we were expecting them to do, but may not have realized that they were doing it
  • We as instructors have a different interpretation of what it means to have a computer problem
  • With intentional focus, we are able to make sure that we cover all the technologies and that the pre-service teachers understand that we are doing so

Teachers’ Belief Change in a Pedagogical Laboratory
Yuxin Ma, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

• Motivation of the Study
  • How do we affect teachers’ beliefs about the use of technology in teaching
  • Our focus: A combination of vicarious learning experiences and hands-on technology integration field experiences
  • Beliefs will change after exposure and field experience using technology; have a defining moment
• Research Questions
  • Does the pedagogical lab experience affect their beliefs about technology use?
  • What and how does it change their beliefs?
• Pedagogical Laboratory Experience
  • 4 week experience, mostly in university classroom
  • Watch video case study, experience model lesson
  • Look at a model lesson plan to modify
  • On two consecutive Saturdays, we bring in kids and have two pre-service teachers work with two children for a total of six hours
  • Critical incident technique to focus on an “aha” moment
• Data Sources
  • Teachers’ Beliefs Regarding Technology Use Survey (TBTUS)
    • Student centered learning
    • Self-efficacy for technology integration
    • Perceived value of computers
  • Teacher perception survey
  • Reflective journals
  • Follow-up interviews
• Results
  • Does the pedagogical lab use affect teacher candidates’ beliefs regarding technology use?
    • Reinforced non-learner centered belief — why?
  • Why and how does the pedagogical lab experience affect change?
    • Insignificant findings in TBTUS
    • Beliefs did change, but not measured by TBTUS
      • Value of technology in engaging students
      • Challenges in technology integration
      • Issues involved in student-centered learning — teacher wanting to keep control
      • Classroom management
      • Understanding learners
• Conclusion
  • TBTUS may not be sensitive to the changes in our program (22 hours of experience with only six hours of teaching)
  • The belief changes are different
• Future Directions
  • Provide longer treatment
  • Develop more sensitive measures
  • Train candidates on how to address various issues in student-centered learning

Reflective Digital Media in Teacher Education
Timo Portimojarvi, University of Tampere, Finland

• Developing curriculum of teacher education
  • Cultural view of curriculum and profession
    • Historical, cultural, and political objectives
    • Teachers are social and cultural actors
    • The development of the curriculum is a practice-based research process
  • Three-level curriculum model
    • Personal level - autobiographical and individual process of developing a personal and professional identity
      • Experiential life world
        • Streams of situations, feelings, actions and ideas
        • In Te, experiences in teaching practices, studies, and personal life
      • Rich multimodal documentation
        • Record of situations, experiences, and moods collected easily and quickly without critical selection
        • Basis for reflection on action (or already reflection in action)
      • Personal mobile devices
        • cellular phones for imaging, recording, and making notes (”lifeblog”)
        • Blog-based digital portfolio
    • Group level - social processes of becoming a member of the profession
      • Conceptual and practical life world
        • Practices, requirements, and cultures of the community
      • Combining and considering information
        • Dialog with peers and proportioning individual and shared new conceptions with formal requirements and personal prior knowledge
      • Shared virtual spaces
        • Group blogs and an aggregated entity of the personal blog
        • Wiki-based collaborative document creation
    • Public level - skills and attitiudes in participating in public discourses
      • Discourse of teacher profession
        • Developing curriculum and the working culture of the school
        • Connection to larger networks of colleagues, parents, and other partners
      • Producing, reproducing, and publishing formal information
        • Outlines, plans, and statements for the future
        • Reflection for action, done for preparation of future moments in various contexts, based on re-interpretation of earlier reflections
      • Public forums of participation
        • Open forums, blogs, wikis, and other environments
        • Skills for participating and the use of tools learned in teacher education
• Reflective learning in teacher profession and education
  • Teacher as reflective practitioner
    • inquiry-based approach to his or her own work
    • critical reflection as a tool for ongoing personal and professional development (revising curriculum, improving their work environmenent, professionalizing teaching, developing policy)
  • Teacher education (reflective action in 3×3 levels)
    • Refection on, in, and for action
    • Reflection about content, process, and permises
• Enhancing documentation and reflections with digital media
  • Student journals or portfolios
    • Often used in higher education context
    • Can promote reflection in many ways through varying strategies and devices
  • Digital media supporting learning and reflection — new tools for:
    • Recognition and awareness
    • Documentation
    • Sharing
    • Discussion and dialog
    • Presenting
• Framework for reflective media in teacher education
  • Aspects of the study
    • Type of media
    • Forms of activity
    • Focus of reflection
    • Digital media skills
    • Relation with information
  • Levels of study
    • Individual
    • Group
    • Public
• Results of implementing this framework will be shared in the future

Technology-rich Teacher Education: Faculty Concerns During Involvement in a Technology-Rich Cohort of Teacher Candidates
Loretta Donovan and Tim Green, Cal State-Fullerton, USA

Can We Model Wiki Use in Technology Courses to Help Teachers Use Wikis in Their Classrooms
Swapna Kumar, Boston University

• Project Steps
  • Began by looking at wikis — invited them to find three wikis used in education
  • Looked at good and bad wiki designs using Wikispaces or PBWiki
  • Dicussion on the challenges, questions, usefulness
    • Activities that the wiki is useful for
      • Reconsidered projects that they had students do in collaboration previously
        • Brainstorming
    • Instructions for using it
    • Grading of wiki work
    • Boundaries for students
  • Individual use of wikis
    • Teachers developed an activity for an element of their curriculum
      • Teachers say that students are writing better: more explicit in detail and more careful in language
• Follow-Up Study
  • Gather data from how teachers used wikis in thier classrooms and student reactions

The Mash-Up of Web 2.0 Technologies: The Future of Podcasting and Social Networking
Brad Reamsbottom and Calvin Toth, University of Lethbridge, Canada

• Podcasting: Subscription-based audio and video available for students
• Where are students accessing podcasts?
  • News
  • Entertainment
    • Current TV
  • Education
    • iTunesU
  • Social Networks
    • Digg
• Students prefer social networks
  • We went there, and they don’t want us there
• Why did we forget about other places besides social networks
  • It takes more time to create a blog, podcast, vidcast
  • It needs to be entertaining (not just a lecture on YouTube)
  • News has to entertain and make minds inquire
  • iTunes U requires lots of setup
• Podcast Problem Solving
  • Create synamic content — students don’t want to hear more lecture
  • Make it available using the tools that they use
    • Viddler
      • Video-based website that allows dynamic commenting and blog integration
      • Acts as an informant and supporting resource
    • JumpCut
      • Online video editing tool; import video, photos, and audio and edit them into a creative and fun presentation
    • TokBox
      • Web-based video conferencing
      • Send video email and make video calls
      • Video emails can be embedded on blogs
      • Blogs can hold extra resources to support the podcast
    • YouTube
  • Let your students make it viral
    • If it is attractive to them, they will repurpose it and repost it in their blogs
• Remember the Rules
  • Keep it fun and creative
  • Don’t lecture
  • Don’t limit yourself
  • Share it, don’t force it
  • Create inquiring minds
  • Imagery and sound
  • Tag it

A Digital Storytelling Implementation Experience with Early Childhood Students
Aslihan Kocaman-Karoglu, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

• What is digital storytelling?
  • Story telling as an ancient tradition; digital storytelling integrates visual, interactive, and reiterative with constructive ideas
  • “combining the art of telling stories with some mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video…” B. Robin, 2006
• Purpose of the Study
  • Outlines application of DS in pre-school and effects discovered on students’ learning (age 6)
  • Fall 2007, two pre-school classrooms with 28 students and 2 teachers total
• Stories in pre-school
  • Great way of communication in classrooms
  • Teacher tells story, students “dial in” on the words
  • May use music and interaction
• Story for this study
  • Story of the first president of the Turkish Republic
  • Used historical photo graphs, his recorded speech, songs he liked, etc.
• Procedure
  • Pre-knowledge from students
  • Data gathered through classroom observation, teacher interviews, assessment of students’ drawings
  • Students drew a picture of the story and explained the drawings
• Results
  • Students had a good understanding of the subject from the digital story
    • Although their drawings were simple, they were able to retell what they saw in the story
    • Only 3 of the 28 students couldn’t explain the main idea from the story
  • Teachers felt that the content was more understandable, were willing to create stories, agreed that it helped get across more content in a limited time, felt that they didn’t have time or technical knowledge

Implementation of Digital Storytelling in the Classroom by Teachers Trained in a Digital Storytelling Workshop
Bulent Dogan and Bernard Robin, University of Houston, USA

• Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling Site
• Used to teach content, empower students, teach writing, meet technology standards
• Little structured research on digital storytelling
• Purpose of study
  • To document teachers use of digital storytelling right after the workshop
  • If they used DS in the classroom, in what ways were they used? What purposes did teachers have?
  • If they were not used, why not?
• Results
  • 78% were unaware of DS before the workshop
  • After the workshop, half did not use DS in their classrooms
    • Almost all the teachers said that they would want to use it,
    • • For students
        • Video yearbook
        • History project
        • Description of field trips
        • Social and science investigation
      • For teachers
        • As alternative to power point
        • Used to present content
  • Impacts on students
    • Helped students understand presentation skills
    • Increase in motivation and 21st century skills
  • Impacts on teachers
    • Barriers: Time, access to hardware
    • Technical support was not as much a problem
  • Other results
    • Affected teaching style
    • Shared DS with other teachers and family members
    • Easy to use and make
    • “Director’s chair” effect
• Resources
  • Allen Levine’s 50 Ways to Tell Digital Stories

Thinking Creatively: Teachers as Designers of Technology, Pedagogy, and Content (TPACK)
Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler, Michigan State University

• Three points to the refrain
  • Teaching with technology is a wicked problem
  • Wicked problems need creative solutions
  • Teachers want to create solutions
• Teaching
  • It is messy: Teaching is always “about something” — the content
  • Yet every discipline is messy, too — the canon, phonics vs whole language
  • PCK from Shulman — content and teaching need to be transformed together
  • Learning to Think by Janet Donald
  • But, where is technology? — Too much for teachers to keep up with rapid change
  • Instead, we argue for developing a thoughtful and playful attitude towards dealing with the new media ecology
  • Take, for instance, the iPhone
    • Lots of software, highly unstable, opaque
  • Yet, information technology changes everything
    • Technology and content — the move from orality to writing (Plato “writing will implant forgetfulness)
    • Victor Hugo — the book will destroy the cathedral because people don’t have to go to a place to get knowledge
    • Technology changes practice and societies
  • Pedagogy and technology
    • Combine Google with open courseware and one laptop per child, and we are looking at a fundamental shift in learning and human culture
    • We teach using Moodle, but we worry about the “I agree” phenomenon where students do not put in their own ideas
    • Moodle prevents you from seeing other postings before you post your own
    • Teaching two sections of the same course — one in Moodle, one in Facebook — studying how this changes the social and educational discourse
  • Context: pedagogy, technology, and content work in a context
    • One laptop per child compared to a computer lab children visit once a week
    • Firewalls
  • To sum up — it is complicated with different contexts and no stopping rule
    • Solutions are not right or wrong, but good or bad that are unique and context dependent (and generate new problems)
    • Teaching with technology is wicked and typical solutions don’t work
• Creative solutions
  • How do we survive in a context of change?
  • Trindadian guppy — flexible reproductive strategy with fewer babies in good times, lots of babies in bad times
  • In a world characterized by change, the best idea is to have lots of creative ideas for the new media ecology
    • What is creative?
      • I know it when I see it; easy to recognize, hard to define
      • Fantastic social innovation with educational payoff in the future — microcredit loans
      • Getting my son interested in reading by doing the March Madness brackets — he reads the newspaper every morning
  • What is creative
    • It is novel and unique in a useful way
    • It is effective
    • It is whole — complete and elegant
  • When you think about wicked problems, you need to have a “new” (novel, effective, and whole) idea
    • What does creativity have to do with it? A variation on a theme
      • Rubik’s Cube examples; tweaked to “Double Maze” by Scott Kim
    • We live in a new media ecology where standard approaches do not work
  • What are teachers and teacher educators to do?
• Teachers are designers of the total PACKage
  • We have technology, pedagogy, and content with overlaps
  • It is at the center of these three that we have technological pedagogical content knowledge
  • TPACK (also stands for “total package”)
    • What does it do?
      • Opens new possibilities (such as Moodle and the “I agree” problem)
      • Is it NEW (novel, effective, and whole)
    • 3rd graders understanding maps
      • Mapquest, KidPix, Satellite, Virtual Trips
    • A possibility — sand creatures (the walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds)
    • The walls between technology and content only exist in our mind, if we are willing to play
  • Typically, pedagogy, content, and technology are separate (or, at least, technology is separate)
    • Like learning to play jazz one note as a time
    • Need an integrated, interdisciplinary, creative approach
    • Glenn Gould ‘- Implicit in electronic culture is the idea that multiple layers are a part of the creative process
  • Play a game where you mashup different ideas of content, pedagogy, and technology
• Outro
  • Where do educators live? In a box, or in the middle of technology, content, and knowledge

Reflections
Punya and Matt continue to push me to think about how I think and talk about technology. Next week, when I return to teach ENG 315, we are talking about multiliteracies in the classroom, and I think that I will use TPACK to frame the discussion. Thinking about pedagogy (the writing workshop model), content (the expectations for K-8 writers), and technology (based on the Michigan content standards for technology). I need to come up with some ideas for scenarios, I think, to really prompt my students’ thinking about technology use. For now, I will keep mulling this over as I prepare yo deliver my presentation on Project WRITE.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: The Use of Digital Photography to Enhance Literacy Development in Young Children
Lauren Cummins, Regina Rees, and Kelly Bacroft, Youngstown State University

• What do we know about literacy development?
  • Young children are natural storytellers, and they “write” stories through pictures
  • Children use pictures to help them remember about their story and be able to tell their story in more vivid language
  • Students write more when they are motivated
• What do we know about digital imagery?
  • Images provide a motivating “hook” for students to get into writing
  • Photography lets children speak with pictures
  • Visual “think alouds” can helps students support the writing process
  • Learn content
• Will the use of digital imagery to write a story increase a child’s amount of words produced and effective use of story elements?
  • Five day workshop, 1.5 hours per day
  • Urban elementary school
  • Thirteen third graders
• Workshop outline
  • Day 1: Elements of an effective story
  • Day 2: Learning to use the cameras
  • Day 3: Choose images and storyboard
  • Day 4: Creating final story
  • Day 5: Story celebration
• Results
  • Pre-writing sample from same prompt as compared to post showed increase in many students’ scores
    • For instance, 42 words in original story up to 107 in sample story shared here
    • Lowest increase was at least 67% and an average of 233%
  • Reflections:
    • Children tended to focus on telling about the pictures and needed more experience in storytelling with the pictures
    • Storyboards helped with the story elements
    • Most of the children took pictures of their families and this changed the story prompt for some
• Implications
  • Children can improve their literacy skills through the use of digital imagery
  • This is especially true for urban children
  • Writing prompts need to be related to children’s read world experiences
  • Students are interested and motivated

Social Networking in PreK-6: What Are Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Other Online Communities All About?
Nancy Yost, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

• Social networks
  • Profiles
  • Network
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Personal Journals
  • Connecting with families and friends
• 8.2 million 3-17 year olds were expected to visit virtual worlds in a month (eMarketer research group)
  • Where are young children going?
  • Why should we be interested? For instance, 10 million Peguin Club members.
  • They give kids a context for using social networking and instant messaging
  • Maybe we need to look at how these sites are used and figure out what’s there and how, perhaps, they can support ISTE standards and classroom connections
• Content Analysis for Social Networking
  • Access
  • Parental Controal
  • Safety information
  • Ages for which the site is designed
  • Types of interactions allowed
  • ISTE standards addressed
  • Content standards adressed
  • User friendly?
• Webkinz
  • Purchase a stuffed animal and get access code (then you get a one-year subscription to the website) and get to look at all the merchandise you can get virtually and for your stuffed figure
  • Parental controls to keep informed, page on safety information
  • Club house that has structured chat and they tried to have an open chat, but they closed it
  • Academic/content games in the Webkinz world
• ISTE Standards
  • 1: Creativity and Innovation
  • 4: Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving, and Decision Making
  • 5: Digital Citizenship
• What’s next
  • Overview of all sites, with recommendations for educational uses
  • What opportunities might we be missing by not using social networking sites in our classrooms?