Tag: Science

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Visualizing Data and Text – A Comparison Learning Strategy that Works

Comparing is the most powerful instructional strategy you can use in the classroom. But it's the person who does the comparing that's learning. Therefore, we must ask students to develop the comparison, not just learn and repeat the model that we present to them. (Remember, asking a student to fill out a Venn diagram that you created, is just a graphic form of information filing). After they have designed their comparison, students should also be asked to share what they learned.  A major component of 21st century literacy is finding meaningful ways to share information with others.

Many Eyes is a great new website that gives teachers and students a chance to easily use sophisticated graphic tools to analyze data and create interactive displays. Those who register at the site can use 16 visualization types to present data. My favorite visualization is the "Wordle," which enables you to see how frequently words appear in uploaded text, or see the relationship between a column of words and a column of numbers. You can tweak your word "clouds" with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Why not have your students use Wordle to analyze a selection of non-fiction text to uncover the main ideas and key vocabulary of the piece? Or they could compare text from different sources. Want your students to more fully understand your course content? Let them use Many Eyes to visualize and discover patterns as a catalyst for discussion and collective insights about information, text, and data. As they say at Many Eyes, "Finding the right way view your data is as much an art as a science. The visualizations provided on Many Eyes range from the ordinary to the experimental."

Here's a few examples of the same data in three different Wordle visualizations that analyze the frequency of words in 30 school district mission / vision statements. 

Click on images to enlarge.

Wordle1

The original data and was uploaded to Many Eyes by PPreuss and used to create the visualization above.  I modified the existing online data set mission / vision statement words with the Wordle tools to represent the same data in different layouts and styles. In this second version (below)  I limited the analysis to the top 100 words.

Wordle4

Here's a third representation of the same source data that analyzes 2-word clusters and displays their frequency in alphabetical layout. Below is  a screen shot of the Tag Cloud, but in its original form at Many Eyes, when I click on any of the word clusters,  a pop-up shows the context of how the cluster is used in different sentences from the source mission / vision statements.

Wow! Looks like we educators have a lot on our plates. Personally I think we might want to admit our mission / vision may simply be  "Trying Hard Not To Become Obsolete."

Wordle3

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Engage Students with the Wonder of Science Inquiry

Brian Greene is a professor of physics at Columbia and the author of “The Elegant Universe.” In a June 1, 2008 NY Times Op-Ed essay Put a Little Science in Your Life, makes an eloquent argument for engaging students with the wonder of scientific discovery. He argues that the recitation of facts and technicalities often prevents student from connecting with the motivational power of inquiry.

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

… As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work — we begin life as little scientists. But most of us quickly lose our intrinsic scientific passion. And it’s a profound loss.

…Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this drama. We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living.  

More 100KB pdf

As I have often argued, educators need resources and training to craft a rigorous learning environment where students can function as 21st century professionals – critical thinkers who can effectively collaborate to gather, evaluate, analyze and share information. We can reconnect students with their innate drive to thoughtfully explore the world around them.

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Rigor, Relevance and Technology

New technologies have put students in charge of the information they access, store, analyze and share.  To paraphrase David Warlick, “Literacy in the 21st century will mean the ability to find information, decode it, critically evaluate it, organize it into personal digital libraries and find meaningful ways to share it with others.”

Next week, I’ll be returning to Pottsgrove School District outside of Philadelphia to work with high school science, social studies and special education teachers on strategies for utilizing technology to incorporate more rigor and relevance into their classrooms. I’ll be joined by the Chris Shaffer, the principal of Pottsgrove High School. Together we’ll demonstrate strategies and technology resources and then give teachers time to work on integrating the strategies into upcoming lessons. Later in the school year we plan to reconvene the group to assess the impact on classroom instruction and student engagement.

Chris will be sharing a variety of websites that provide teachers and students with Web 2.0 tools to transform the learning environment. They include: www.Del.icio.us.com, www.Nettrekker.com, www.Unitedstreaming.com, www.Fantasycongress.com, www.Moodle.com.  I believe that rigor and relevance improves when students have an opportunity to read, think, write and publish for an authentic audience and purpose. I’ll be showing the Pottsgrove audience three approaches that give students a chance to share their learning with others.

Judy Kinz, a very innovative technology specialist, has developed “Virtual Books,” a clever PowerPoint template that simulates the turning pages of a book. I used it to make demo PowerPoints for the Pottsgrove social studies and science teachers. Here’s a sample. Don’t focus on the content – it’s the look of the template that’s the point. homefront-virtual-book (1.9MB PPT)  In partnership with a paper engineer, I’ll soon be launching FlipNLearn, an innovative learning foldable that student design and print on school printers using specialty paper. Presentation notes: Pottsgrove-10-08-07 (1 MB PDF)

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Engage Student Thinking with a Response System

Teachers everywhere strive to make classes more engaging –learning environments where students can reflect and share their thinking. This year, a pilot project in Oregon’s Klamath County School District is using TurningPoint student response systems to help teachers achieve that goal.

I have used a TurningPoint response system in my workshops for two years, and with the right questions, I’ve used it transform to a 300-seat auditorium into a “Socratic seminar.” The team at Klamath County attended a few of my workshops and decided to bring the technology back into their classrooms. They’ve asked me to serve as a project advisor to help teachers learn to utilize the system to create greater rigor and relevance for their students. The district is providing ten teachers with presentation stations which include a 30-seat TurningPoint Student Response Systems.

This past week I helped kick off the year-long pilot with a full day introduction to the systems and its full instructional power. I was joined by Mike Venrose of TurningTechnologies. Together we trained the teachers in creating TurningPoint presentations, and using a variety of programs tools to create interactive lessons for their students.

I asked the teachers to share some of their ideas for using TurningPoint.

Krista Nieraeth: 7 – 12 Science and 7th Grade Math
My goal for using TP is to keep all of the students on their toes so I don’t lose any to cognitive wanderings during class.  I want to have the ability to make the lessons fresh and exciting at all times and to ensure that all of my students have the ability to participate in the discussion!!!

Scott Preston: 6th grade teacher – all subjects
I want to get all students actively participating in discussions, thinking deeper than yes/no.

Niki Kuykendall: 6th Grade – inclusive
I hope to introduce my students to this system on day one.  I plan to incorporate this into daily lessons in Math or Language Arts.  I want to use this for discussion prompting for reading, pre-assessment for Math and Spelling.  Review games occasionally.  I also would be open to letting my students create a PPT and then add in the TurningPoint questions to present to the class.  I will have some tests that will be done using the remotes, the ease for putting into the grade book is an incentive!

I’ll be headed back to Klamath Falls next month to help teachers to reflect on their progress and set new goals for use in the classroom. I’ll post some observations to share with readers. For more information on the pilot contact project coordinator – Michelle Smith, Klamath County Schools Staff Development Coordinator.

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NCLB Narrows the Curriculum?

nclb logo
nclb logo

Periodically I think about the ironies of NCLB. Today, coincidence put a face on it. It started when I read an article from the Contra Costa Times, a SF Bay-area newspaper. “Schools Pile On English, Math Classes” details how NCLB can impact the curriculum. Middle and high school students pulled out of social studies, science, art, music, and electives to make room for additional classes in remedial reading and math. I understand that literacy and numeracy are necessary foundations, but shouldn’t they be imbedded into content of the very courses that are being cut? (For more on that point visit my website Content Reading Strategies That Work )

As the article noted,

Jason Ebner used to teach history at Antioch Middle School. That was before it became a thing of the past. Six years ago, he said, the campus began requiring two math classes for low-performing students. The following year they doubled up English courses. Social studies and science fell by the wayside. The practice has come back to haunt Ebner, who now teaches sophomore world history at Antioch High School. His students, robbed of history in junior high, increasingly come in without knowledge of the Renaissance period.  more

Today I also received a invitation from a local art-house cinema. One of my former high school students would be visiting Rochester for a special screening of his Sundance-award-winning film. I was one of three teachers he wanted to invite as “special guests who he felt contributed to his film-making career.”  I had lost track of him after graduation, but with some Googling I found that he was now working as a Brooklyn-based writer / director and teaching a class in the Dramatic Writing program at SUNY Purchase. If my memory serves me right, back in the late 70’s he was a student in my Media Studies class – a high school social studies elective that focused on the impact of the media on society – remember Marshall McLuhan?

I put the newspaper article and the invitation together and wondered about the direction some schools may take to reach NCLB’s goal of 100% proficiency by 2014. Will NCLB force a generation of students into the routine world of test prep? Will scores of innovative teachers will drop out of the profession?

While NCLB began with the admirable goal of narrowing demographic performance gaps and putting an end to sorting kids on the “bell curve,”  it may be doing just the opposite. Many low performing students are now banished from courses they might actually look forward to and sent to 90-minute blocks of remediation.  Ironically these low performing student tend to be from the very demographic groups that were falling behind in the performance gap. As if it isn’t enough of challenge to be poor, now you’re also shut out of art and music classes.

The “remediated” students may someday be “proficient” on standardized tests, but must that improvement come from the sacrifice of “soft skills” like teamwork, presentation and problem solving that they could have developed in project-based learning? As more courses are eliminated, will teachers be pushed aside in favor of computerized tutorial programs? Who’s going into education these days? My guess is – fewer creative teachers and more corporate service providers.

I wonder if someday a teacher will be thanked by a former student for helping their school to achieve “adequate yearly progress?”