Summary of Creative use of Tablets Course

What did I learn during this course? I guess that the major impact of this course was the fact that I started to think differently about using tablets in the classroom. Especially I learned about collaboration and personalized learning, which I probably try to implement on next semester.

Thanks for European Schoolnet Academy for well organized MOOC and thanks of hundreds of colleagues, who were very active on social media and course forum during the course. I have to admit that I wasn't active at all in this respect. I concentrated on unsocial media, namely this blog.

For the reviewers of my learning diary I have to give many thanks, for giving such encouraging feedback. Positive feedback feels good especially after a hard work. I try to remember this better, when I go to my classroom next time.

My Lesson Plan [Module 4]

Learning Design for Political parties

You can find my lesson plan also from Learning Designer. Follow this link.

Context

Topic: Political parties and party politics

Total learning time: 75

Number of students: 25

Description: This is a lesson plan for civics class on uppers secondary / high school level.

Aims

The main aims of this lesson are to understand some ideologies behind the main political parties and to learn to formulate point of views concerning political questions. Also there is an aim to learn to find differences between parties. Students work in groups and they need to form political parties and describe the goals and the opinions of these parties in a wiki page or in a blog. Also they have to comment on each other’s wiki pages or blogs. Writing and commenting is done with tablets.

Outcomes

Knowledge(Knowledge): Students learn some basic knowledge about parties and political ideologies.

Comprehension(Comprehension): Studens learn to understand different kinds of political goals and reasons behind those goals.

Application(Application): Students learn to apply political ideology on some key questions in ongoing social debate.

Evaluation(Evaluation): Students learn to evaluate different kinds of political views.

1. Instructions for the lesson

Read Watch Listen 5 minutes 

Teacher will give the instructions for the lesson. First students have to create a fictional political party based on some main political ideology, which had developed during 19th and 20th centuries. For example conservative, liberal, socialist, nationalist or green party. Party can also be some sort of populist movement. Then they have to introduce their parties on a wiki page or a blog and comment each other’s pages. In the end there will either be a discussion or an argument and a Kahoot quiz.

2. Creating a political party

Collaborate 20 minutes 

Students have to do some inquiry concerning the ideology they have chosen. They do this with tablets. Then they have to form a political party. Setting up the party includes creating a party program, choosing a leader and making up a name for the party. The most important thing is the party program. It should some way reflect the ideology behind the party. Teacher may give some key question in which students have to answer in their party program.

Investigate 

Students familiarize themselves with political ideologies on which their party should base on.

3. Writing a wiki-page or a blog, and commenting other group's texts

Produce 20 minutes 

Students will write a description of their party to a wiki page or a blog. Students can use whatever platform they want, but easy option is to use ready-made wiki or blog sites in Moodle. Students may use pictures or videos if they wish and these can be embedded to their own wiki page. The most important thing is to write down some key goals and thoughts how they think that the society should be developed. These goals and opinions should reflect the political ideology which the students have chosen. When they are ready with their own wiki or blog, they can start to comment on each other’s works. This commenting has to be made from the group’s political perspective. Students write their comments with tablets to other group’s pages.

Collaborate 

Writing, producing and commenting is made together.

4. Short discussion or an argument, if there is enough time for it

Discuss 20 minutes

Students will introduce their parties and their goals to each other. There can be a short argument about some key questions if there is enough time.

5. Summing up with Kahoot! 

Practice 10 minutes 

In the end of the lesson we will play a Kahoot quiz with tablets (www.kahoot.it). This can alternatively be a Socrative quiz. The quiz is about existing political parties and their goals and ideologies. Students can play the Kahoot quiz in teams or pairs, because then they have to discuss and negotiate how they are going to answer each question.

Personalized Learning [Module 4]

One thing I learned during this module is the fact that I could personalize learning much more on my lessons. I have some materials in Moodle already, but I am not sure if those are in proper use. I think I should think about some good assignments and lesson plans where students can set their own goals, design their own learning tracks and do the self assessment in the end. I have to think about this more.

For personalized learning I have used several different materials which I have uploaded to Moodle learning environment. Students can choose which materials they use, when they study some subject. For instance there is PowerPoint-slides embedded from Slideshare or slides in pdf. There is also embedded Youtube videos (CrashCourse or Khan Academy or some videos in Finnish language), links, texts and timelines. I have embedded some examples of timelines earlier to this blog. The main problem with videos is the fact that they are usually in English. Some of my students can manage with that easily, but there is also many of those, who struggle a lot when they watch these videos.

Below is one good online material, which can be used in personalized learning in history. I have embedded these on my Moodle history courses. With GeaCron application students can easily investigate how state boarders change through history.

I use Google Forms in self assessment and collecting feedback on my courses. I sometimes try to ask students's preferences of learning through these Google Forms questionnaires. I have also linked some learning style tests, which are available in web, to my Moodle courses and then I have sometimes encouraged my students to do these tests.

Overall it's pretty useless for me to try to collect information about students's learning styles. We have five period in our school year and student groups change after every six week period. So there is not much use to try to understand their personal propensities, because there is not enough time to apply this information.

But on the other hand I think that it is much more important for students to understand themselves, what is the best way for them to learn. That's why I try to encourage them to reflect and think about their learning and for example try some learning tests which are available in the internet.

Flipping the Classroom in a Dream World and in the Real One [Module 4]

There is a given starting point in this flipped classroom thinking, which is the idea that students are automatically motivated to study at home or somewhere outside the classroom. They are thought to be interested and willing to inquire the given subject. I have to admit that I struggle a bit with this kind of view. I've seen so many students who don’t bother to watch any kind of video no matter how interestingly it may look to me. And they don’t read texts or listen audio materials which I have carefully uploaded to the web for them. I think that this starting point - that students are always motivated to learn - should be problematized a bit. Why should we suggest this in the first place? Is there any basis or evidence for this kind of presumption? And another question is the limited time. Some students just don’t have time enough for all the homework at their spare time.

In some cases this will work, some students are motivated to do this, but the major problem is with those student who doesn't work at home. And if I build my whole teaching on this supposition that knowledge is absorbed from the web at home and then in school we just apply this knowledge and practice skills, quite many students will simply drop off since they don’t have any glue what we are talking about on my lessons. The very idea that we should practice skills and apply knowledge together at school is excellent, but the supposition that students will do all the needed work outside the classroom just like that is far too idealistic.

Of course there are some ways to motivate the students to work outside the lessons. We just should bare in mind that the motivation won't pump up automatically with each and every student. So after all I am in favor of flipped classroom and I have tried to develop this kind of teaching practices.

I teach history and civics and in my subjects thinking is done with concepts. Concepts are a kind of tools which we need in order to think properly and if you don’t master the needed concepts it would be the same thing as try to build a house without any tools. Concepts have to be learned, memorized, practiced, and applied and we don’t have enough time to do all this at school. Therefore it would be wise to take over these tools at home and learn to apply those with other students at school - for instance through discussions, group work and arguments. This has been my teaching philosophy for last years and there is some similarities with the idea of flipped classroom.

I have tried to apply this philosophy with assignments, texts, timelines and videos which I have uploaded to Moodle learning environment. The idea is that students will read the textbook at home and work with simple assignments, or they watch a video from Youtube and make these assignments. I have used assignments in order to take care that students will get some sort of basic understanding of the given subject. At the classroom I've tried to to encourage the students to discuss and argue with each other and implement some critical thinking and analysis. At least sometimes and for some part I have succeeded, but there is still far too many students who won’t participate and who don’t bother to strain their brains.

Some Group Work Examples [Module 3]

On my Finnish history course students had to create fictional headlines for newspapers. We were studuing a period in Finnish history in which people were dividing into two parts. After this development Finland ended up in a civil war (1918). Before the civil war broke out there were some economic and political problems which drove people apart. There were the upper class people who owned the lands and production facilities and then there were the working class people. On the lessons students were divided into these groups and they had to write  newspaper headlines to Padlet wall from their perspective. You can see results below, from embedded Padlet walls.
The right wing newspaper was called "The Fatherland":

Created with Padlet

The left wing newspaper was called "The Proletarian".

Created with Padlet

Assessing Group Work [Module 3]

This module made me think closer about the assessment of group works. I have always found it difficult, but I think I found some ideas from the videos and also got affirmation for my own thoughts. I think that the assessment should both guide learners to wanted direction and at the same time be fair, just and objective. And by just and objective I mean that every learning process should be measured in the same way and with same scale so that the grades can be comparable. It's not easy to combine these two goals ("guiding and grading") to same assessment method.

The assessment should be made clear for the students so that they know how they are expected to work both as individuals and as a group. In collaborative learning teacher have to decide whether he/she is going to assess the process of learning, the collaboration, the outcome or all of these. Is the focus of assessment going to be in increasing of knowledge, in collaboration skills or in development of other kinds of skills? I think that the assessment should be formative and it should focus at least partly on the learning process.

It would be ideal to assess the development of skills, but its so difficult area itself to evaluate, let alone assessing it as part of group work. So it’s probably better to try to improve students’ skills through discussion or other methods instead of assessing those.

Here are some aspects that are useful for a teacher to think about while planning the group work assessment

• How should I assess the learning process and how the outcome?
• How I can assess the development of skills?
• What about increasing knowledge? Should I put weight on this?
• How about the effort of an individual? How can I take it into account?
• How should I evaluate the collaboration of whole group?

Teacher should make decision where is going to be the most weight of the assessment. Teacher should not take only one perspective into account (for instance the outcome), but there should be some sort of understanding on which areas the main focus is. Only this way students may have clear instructions how their work will be assessed and where their main focus should lie.

What it comes to group work usually I have assessed the following 

• individual effort and output
• group output
• the working and learning process
• collaboration

Useful methods of assessment

• assessment criteria set by teacher
• self assessment
• discussions
• peer review 

I have sometimes used a kind of peer review as part of assessing group work. In this model one group will assess the work of another group and this will have impact on the final grade. One can always build a combination of peer review, self assessment and teachers grading. A certain percentage of grade will be formed on the bases of self assessment and peer review and rest of it is up to teacher. For instance Moodle Workshop supports this kind of assessment. (Take a closer look at the Moodle Workshop with this video. Workshop is not originally developed for group work but it can be applied to it.)

Facing the Challenges of Collaborative Work [Module 3]

I find clear instructions and learning goals an important factor in successful group work. The task should also be easily divisible so that every member in the group may have a meaningful job to work with.

When we are working in groups, I try to observe the collaboration of each group and I give support and guidance and try to motivate if necessary. I try to keep each group member on track.

Finally I use assessment in order to keep every student focused in the group work. For example my student work with different kinds of problem-based tasks during the economics course and they write their reports or views or suggestions to a group’s own wiki page in Moodle (learning environment). During the course I guide and observe students’ work and in the end of the course I assess this “wiki work” of each group. This assessment will be part of their course grade. (And if I want, I can check each group members writing activity from Moodles logs.)

But so far on every course there has always been some freeloaders who try to work as little as possible and probably this will be the case in the future as well.

Forming Groups [Module 3]

I work on upper secondary education (same as high school) and we have five periods in a school year and students are studying for six weeks on each course. In my classroom students are sitting in groups (four on each) and I let them pretty much decide with whom they are working with.

Usually I don’t know my students well enough in order to form certain kinds of groups. For instance it would be pretty difficult to take different kinds of learning styles or skills into account. So what comes to forming the groups I let the students decide.

Beyond The Classroom [Module 2]

One of the 2nd modules assignments was to make up at least one idea for content, which could be created with students and would have a wider purpose or meaning. Immediately some questions pop up into my mind: Purpose for what and for whom? What kind of meaning? Should this content have wider purpose in students’ lives or wider meaning in society perhaps?

I got few suggestions here. One is idea which we could implement on my entrepreneurship course. Previously on this course we have planned and produced some marketing events with local enterprises. We could do this kind of project and create a blog or social media site - for instance in Facebook - on which we could advertise this event. This site or blog could be shared through social media and this would serve learning goals and have a wider purpose as well. This site should include pictures, videos, stories and links to sites of the interest groups involved.

Another idea was writing and creating a critique of a museum exhibition. Sometimes we visit museums on my optional history courses and students could write about exhibition as part of course performance. And again the critique could include photos and videos along with text and it should be implemented in the way that it can be read in the Internet.

Content Created with iPad: Morfo & Puppet Pals [module 2]

The first video is an instruction video to my students and I have described there, how to use Morfo application. The second one is a student work about Cuban Crisis made with Puppet Pals app. It includes interviews of Fidel Castro, JFK and First Secretary Khrushchev. Both videos are in Finnish, unfortunately.

Content Created with Tablet: Google Sheet & Timeline JS [module 2]

Timeline JS is very handy tool for creating timelines. I teach history and for my purposes making a timeline suits very well. Right below you can see a timeline made by my student. She made it with iPad on a course called World Cultures and it describes the interaction between Europeans and other cultures from Early Modern period forward. The following is a Finnish history timeline, which I made myself for a Finnish history course. Unfortunately both are in Finnish, but I hope you can see the structure of this kind of timeline from these examples.

If you wish to make this kind of timeline, you need to make a spreadsheet with Google Sheets and then publish it with Timeline JS. You can find instructions from Timeline JS webpage.

The Learning Scenarios [Module 2.1]

I understood learning scenario as a certain kind of model, which you can apply on different subjects and age groups. It´s a sort of pedagogical pattern which one can reshape in order to make it fit in one’s own purposes. My own scenarios are not so sophisticated as the model introduced in the video, but those basically include the same phrases

My typical scenario includes some sort of warm up or general discussion about subject (dreaming) and then students have to do some output which they will share to each other (phases explore, map, make and show). For example students will produce a mind map and post it to Moodle forum and then they can comment each other’s works. While students are creating the output - for instance mentioned mind map - I usually observe and conduct the students’ work. So there is a kind of “ask” and “remake” phases included as well.

Apps and Platforms [module 1.5]

Edmodo was introduced in course module 1. I have downloaded the app and made an account, but I've never used it with students. I find Moodle and Google’s applications very useful and I’ve been working with those. In Moodle there is plenty of opportunities to create different kinds of assignments It also provides many possibilities for assessment and it enables peer review as well. Basically it includes all the functions that Edmodo does and a whole lot more, but of course it is far more complicated to use.

I have used Google Forms in order to gather feedback from students and for creating self evaluation sheets for them. For these purposes Google Forms is one of the best tools. Google Docs is useful for creating and sharing. In Google Docs I can both comment students’ works and see what kind of feedback they have been giving to each other.

Rethinking My Role as a Teacher [module 1.4]

From quite early on I realized that I can’t carry on the business as usual. Up until the moment our first student group got their iPads I had been encouraging my students to discuss and share ideas about the issues at hand. I wanted them to practice the art of thinking and challenge each other and teacher as much as they cloud. And every now and then we managed to create some good discussions in my class - at least at Finnish scale. But not anymore. Things had changed and I wasn't sure whether it the change I wanted.

I had been in favor of using tablets in classroom, but sometimes you should be careful with your wishes - as Oscar Wilde put it - those may come true! After introducing these deceitful devices in my class the student seemed to become more passive and less willing to take part on our common discussions. It should have been another way around!

I thought that using tablets would make my students more active and that they would be somehow initiative in finding new ways to learn. But instead of having a group of active learners I ended up having passive consumers of social media and entertainment - if I may exaggerate a bit. I really had to find some new ways to activate my students. Interesting topics and provocative questions were simply not enough anymore since too many of my students found the attractions of the internet far too tempting. On her video Diana Bannister mentioned rules as one solution for this problem. Yes we can discuss about the principles together and try to engage students to the proper use of tablets, but I am afraid that in my case it is not enough. Upper secondary education is optional and students in this age should start to guide themselves. I can't always be there defining boundaries, they should start to do it themselves. I think that the key is new kind of practices in the classroom and a whole new way of assessing students learning.

I've been constantly asking my students through questionnaires how we should use iPads in the classroom. The most common answer is “making notes” and “to look for information”. Really? You've got a quite expensive notebook there if the only thing you going with it is making notes! Yes they are very skillful what comes to iPad games and entertainment. And at the same time they don’t seem to have any kind of idea how to use these tablets for educational purposes or how to use those as a tool for thinking! But I cannot blame them. How could they know better? Nobody taught them these things and I guess it’s now my job to fill this gap.

What do I need to consider at a classroom level when using tablets? I've been thinking about this question nearly two years and I think I've proceeded a bit, but not much. Let me put here some of the questions I have noticed to be important:

• How to find meaningful tasks or projects which would advance the learning?
• How to create collaborative learning?
• How to assess the learning with tablets?
• How to exercise thinking skills (or 21st century skills / competences) with tablets?

But we don’t have to be alone with these questions, 'cause there is many useful networks. For me the facebook groups were indispensable in finding good practices of using iPads in the classroom. But those groups can be pretty discouraging as well, since they seem to be full of techno-pedagogical superhumans with no leisure time or family. Besides the help of the social media I I've tried to take part as many in-service training events as I could. That is the reason why I wanted to join this mooc, I’m eager to learn more.

And one more thing. Here I have one outcome of our projects (the only one in English):

Yes we've got iPads, but... [Module 1.3]

As I have mentioned we have been lucky enough to have iPads provided for every student. But to be honest we didn't implement this technological renewal as well as we could have done. I think we didn't got enough updating education for teachers and it took some time until we could understand the possibilities which came along with the new technology. For me personally the new technology wasn't any problem, the pedagogy was. This kind of tablet-pedagogy was pretty new for all of us and it didn't matter how well one could handle all the apps and technological contraptions if there was no change in pedagogical practices. I guess I wasn't the only one who didn't quite know how to plan lessons which could fully benefit these new possibilities.

So, what do I need to consider at whole-school level when using tablets?
I think it would be wise to choose beforehand some applications, a learning environment and some cloud service which would be used in the whole school. Then teachers should be introduced with these and made familiar with the pedagogical opportunities included in these applications and platforms. Then I would provide enough time for teachers to share their good and sometimes not so good practices so that they could encourage each other.

There is rarely enough time to plan and think your everyday pedagogy in the middle of these occupied school routines. So how could one ever have the needed time to carefully plan this kind of major pedagogical shift? I guess we just have to prioritize. Definitely one of the key things is to create time and space to think how to teach and learn with tablets. Because it can't be the same old thing with a fancy new toy.

Advantages of Using Tablets in Education [Module 1.2]

Using tablets as part of learning makes it possible to practice many important skills. Amount of knowledge is increasing all the time and we can only absorb a tiny part of it. So I am convinced that now and increasingly in the future we have to concentrate on teaching children different kinds of skills rather than pieces of information. With tablets we can learn thinking skills, collaboration skills, technical skills etc. Of course one can exercise these skills without tablets as well, but tablets offer many helpful ways to do this.

In short I think that tablets as a part of new kind of pedagogy will enable the following:

• Collaborative learning
• Personalized learning
• Critical thinking
• Learning by doing

I assume that we'll get back to these issues later on this course.