Erin Scott

When it comes to language arts, the jury’s still out on the quality and effectiveness of the available software. Some schools are investing and experimenting with different products, with mixed results, while others are working with free available web 2.0 tools. Here are two case studies examining each approach.

THE SOFTWARE APPROACH

Firstline Schools, a public charter school company in New Orleans operating five schools, has aggressively pursued blended learning with hopes to help students who have fallen behind — especially after the devastating effects on schooling after Hurricane Katrina.

“We can’t imagine going back to a traditional model,” said Chris Liang-Vergara, director of instructional technology for personalized learning at Firstline. “It seems crazy with the amount of differentiation we need.”

Firstline uses Achieve3000 in some schools, a program that allows students to read a nonfiction

article everyday and answer questions related to it. But the program is dry, according to Liang-Vergara, and it can seem random and disconnected to the rest of what students are doing in class. He says he’s seen it used well, but usually by experienced teachers who are empowered to use it for the best kind of differentiation. If the teacher takes the time to search the Achieve300 database for nonfiction articles that are relevant to other class work, discusses them, and wraps them into the curriculum that works best. And the software does provide differentiation, increasing the difficulty of vocabulary and sentence structure as a reader progresses.

“When you show it to any experienced teacher, they get very excited because they think about how much time they’ll save and how much information can be at their fingertips,” said Liang-Vergara. It’s easier for the teacher to see what the student has learned and whether their reading comprehension skills are improving, while saving her grading time.

Overall, Liang-Vergara hasn’t seen the success in language arts blended learning that he’d hoped for and Firstline schools have scaled back the amount of time they use digital tools in English class. Liang-Vergara admitted that some schools have stopped using Achieve3000 partly because kids were quickly bored by it.

[RELATED: To Make Blended Learning Work, Teacher Try Different Tactics]

“The biggest issue I still see is that people are still trying to break it down when
it needs to be combined,” Liang-Vergara said. Learning to read and write requires many complimentary skills working in unison and offering a program that addresses just one skill doesn’t work as well to promote literacy as whole. Vocabulary in a text contributes to understanding meaning, literary structures give it depth, and non-fiction works about the subject matter help deepen understanding. These things can’t be parsed and require frequent back and forth with the teacher.

Still, Liang-Vergara says some software has proven more successful – like Vocab Journey, which puts words in context and uses pictures and gamification to make learning new words fun. Even putting a small portion of assessment online saves teachers time, a big factor in English classes where teachers have to grade writing. “English teachers spend so much time on assessment that it causes them not to assign much work because they know they’ll have to correct all of it,” said Liang-Vergara. Removing some of that burden with programs like Achieve3000 or Vocab Journey allows them more time for one-on-one instruction.

Liang-Vergara says software developers he’s spoken to at conferences aren’t as interested in working on innovations in language arts software as they are in math. He believes the whole market has a lot of growing to do.

THE WEB 2.0 APPROACH

For Catlin Tucker, a high school teacher in Winsor, Calif., her school has not focused on blended learning the way Firstline has, partly because the cost of software and infrastructure has been a barrier. Even if she had the choice, though, she would not use what she refers to as “canned content.” Instead, she started integrating technology naturally into her classroom on an experimental basis using free web tools.

Tucker started off by trying to improve her students’ communication skills both online and in-person by using the free online platform Collaborize Classroom, which offers more tools than an average discussion board. The online discussion, debate, and collaboration replaced homework, with assignments like posting a response to the discussion topic and responding to three peers. “It was interesting to see students who don’t engage verbally with their peers be super engaged in the online space,” Tucker said. Once those students found an online voice, she said they participated more in class discussions too.

She also realized that just because students have been exposed to technology at young ages and use it often doesn’t mean they know how to have an appropriate online discussion, a skill Tucker knows they need.

With the success of Collaborize Classroom, Tucker began to slowly integrate her classroom time with online spaces, making the transitions fluid with a clear focus on the learning goal, not the technology. She might start a discussion in class, extend it online, require collaboration through Google docs, deepen an understanding of the topic through a TED-Ed video, then pull it back into the classroom with extension activities.

For example, her vocabulary lessons — one of the few areas where she still found herself lecturing, and a necessary part of any English class — have been transformed. She now starts out by having students look at words in context and predict what they mean. Then they go home and watch Tucker’s video lecture. When they come back to class, they use mobile devices to find synonyms and antonyms, then go home and incorporate them into poems or stories. They share their work online, the class votes and the winner gets to read aloud in class. Suddenly vocabulary, a traditionally dull aspect of English class has some spice and students find a personal connection to the words they’re using.

[RELATED: How Teachers Mix Online Math With Classroom Instruction]

Tucker doesn’t teach in a wealthy school district where every student has access to a smartphone and a home computer. But if there’s one phone for every three to four students, the activity can still work. And, she doesn’t allow home computer access to become an excuse not to participate – instead she connects her students to free online resources in town.

This blended teaching style has completely changed Tucker’s classroom. “So much of my creative energy was being drained by managing the paper load,” Tucker said. “Now I read their online discussions, I see how they’re engaging in that space, but I’m not the only one giving feedback; they’re getting it from their peers too.” And while teaching this way doesn’t make her job easier, she’s more engaged too. “This is so much more creative, inventive and exciting,” she said. “As a teacher I am so much more energized.”

And she’s assigning more work than ever before. “Everything that happens online requires that they’re reading and writing as well as thinking critically, so all these different skills are being developed,” said Tucker. For her, blended learning is a good way to get away from collecting and disseminating information, instead helping students discover it on their own.

Lenny Gonzales

The onslaught of information from the wired world can be overwhelming to anyone — even the savviest online audiences. But rather than completely shut out the digital world, the smarter solution is to learn how to manage it, says author Howard Rheingold.

In his book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold outlines the potential merits of the vast digital landscape, and offers ideas on how to lasso the unwieldy aspects and use it for good.

In a recent conversation on the Forum talk program, Rheingold stresses the importance of intention when it comes to managing digital noise. Knowing that every click will likely to lead to a chunk of time spent on what follows will help people decide if that’s worthwhile. Every click counts.

“I think [there's] this matter of meta-cognition, of knowing where you’re putting your attention,” he told Michael Krasny on Forum. “You need to make decisions. ‘Am I going to click on that link? Am I going to maybe open a tab for it on my browser and look at it later? Am I going to bookmark it to look at it much later or am I going to ignore it?’ You need to make those decisions consciously and I think most of us make them unconsciously… We wouldn’t have so many cute cat videos if people didn’t click on impulse.”

Rheingold advises all of us to create a specific plan when we’re online, and to follow through.

“You have to make [decisions] in the context of what you intend to get done for the day. Write down, with good old right-brain pencil and paper, three things you want to get done [online] today, and just two or three words each, and put that in the periphery of your vision,” he said. “And when your gaze falls upon it, simply ask yourself ‘Is what I’m doing now going to get me to where I need to be by the end of the day?’ I’m not asking you to admonish yourself or to make any changes to your routine, I’m only asking you to add a little layer of awareness.”

This exercise in self-control can be honed over time with tools like meditation, Rheingold writes in a chapter called “Attention!”

“Mindfuless in all its forms and applications certainly is an end in itself, but practicing mindfulness in regard to online attention serves a specific strategic goal,” he writes. “Your goal and mine in this context is not just the control but also the management of attention.”

Rheingold is not alone in his ideas about how meditation can help focus attention when online. Researcher David Levy recently provided evidence on how learning how to meditate can train the mind to focus. (Read How Meditating Helps With Multitasking). In his study, Levy said those who learned how to meditate were able to keep on task better than those who didn’t. “They realized they didn’t have to respond to everything right away, not everything is urgent,” Levy said. “They felt more in control, less tense, less afraid.”

GUIDING KIDS ONLINE BEHAVIOR

As the digital landscape continues to shift under our feet, it’s that much more important for parents to be aware of the subtleties of having an online identity and life. Though the media portrays the Web as a “den of frivolity,” Rheingold writes that it also presents an appropriate place for young people to experiment with their identity. “What they are learning is not altogether detrimental to themselves and the society they are going to build when they come of age,” he writes.

At the same time, kids needs to be aware that their online lives will leave indefinite footprints.

“Kids need to be told before they get online that nowadays everything that you put online is going to be there forever, it’s going to be searchable, it can be connected to your name, it can be reproduced, and it can be spread around the world,” he said. “Kids have always done dumb things and they’ve always kind of said snarky things about each other and they’ve always had their best friends. They’ve never had them reproduced forever, search-ibly and reproduce-ibly and able to be broadcast everywhere. You need to know some of these things before you dip your toe in.”

And though the media is rife with stories of online bullying — with good reason, as it is a common phenomenon — the development of audio and video chats like Skype and FaceTime on Apple devices may help to ameliorate online attacks.

“There’s something about face to face that can’t be duplicated online. But a great deal of that signaling can be duplicated with audio and video,” Rheingold said. “So I think we’re getting a richer form of communication than we used to have. Here’s a research question for some sociologist: Are people going to flame each other when we have universal audio and video or is that an artifact of the text-only world?”

- Additional reporting by Amanda Stupi

Flickr: Zawezome

By Jennifer Roland

Teens are savvier than we might give them credit for when it comes to knowing their privacy boundaries on social networking sites. According to a recent Pew Internet study, 62% of teens surveyed said their posts can only be seen by friends, and 19% said that their profile is “partially private so that friends of friends or their networks can see some version of their profile.”

Still, digital citizenship entails more than just protecting oneself. Incidents of cyberbullying and harassment continue to occur regularly, and some states are taking drastic measures to stop kids from harmful behavior like sexting — in South Carolina, kids age 12 to 17 who “transmit sexually explicit photos” may be fined $100 if a bill is passed.

Somewhere between kids’ intuitive social savvy and their online behavior lies an opportunity for both parents and educators to teach responsible digital citizenship, and there are plenty of organizations dedicated to this task alone. Define the Line, a project of McGill University in Canada, was recently awarded a digital citizenship grant by Facebook to help further its work in creating materials to open dialogue about finding the line where joking crosses into negative or criminal behavior. The site includes videos and scenarios designed to enhance discussion of real-world digital topics.

Common Sense Media recently launched a free digital citizenship curriculum categorized by age. The curriculum includes both paper-based and digital activities and teaches online safety and Internet research skills in combination with ethics. CyberWise offers resources to help adults be more tech savvy so they can understand the power of the tools their kids are using and do a better job of helping their kids make smart choices online. And the Department of Education’s Netcetera handbook is another resource for parents that schools distribute.

PRACTICING GOOD CITIZENSHIP

Educators have lots of options in modeling good digital citizenship with projects they can embark upon with students. Organizations like iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) are dedicated to connecting teachers and students across the globe to collaborate on educational projects. More than 2 million students and 40,000 educators are involved in iEARN projects. And teachers are taking on global projects on their own, too. Technology specialist Shannon McClintock Miller connects her students with classrooms in distant locations via Skype and even put on a co-production of Romeo and Juliet with students from other classes. (Take a look at her workshop at the recent Florida Educational Technology Conference and check out the slides and videos.)

Miller’s school also participates in She’s the First, a non-profit dedicated to helping girls in developing countries become better educated. Students raised funds to send a girl named Neema in Tanzania to school, and interacted with her through videos and the Kisa Project Web site. Students spoke at assemblies, held bake sales, and worked with the community to raise more than $1,000 so far to support the organization and to send Neema to school.

There are also countless examples of students embarking on their own digital projects, kids like Emily from Kansas, a fourth-grader who produces an educational blog called Sciencegirlem and gets feedback from other kids and adults all over the world.