Using Survey Monkey in Your Classroom

In this course, we will explore various technological applications, and many examples we will examine are not directly related to the ELA classroom. Your challenge as a student is to consider the applications and examples and then adapt the technology for your own classroom context rather than letting the technology drive your curriculum.

Surveys are the first of many applications we will explore. They are a terrific means of gathering information on your students. You might collect information ranging from their needs to their attitudes about a topic or text you want to incorporate into your ELA curriculum. They are also a terrific means of engaging your students in Web 2.0 technologies and in gathering data for their own research. I always like when I see teachers trying to integrate technology in their teaching. Here one high school business education teacher tries using surveys to engage his marketing students collecting data for their own research projects. As daunting as it may feel, you can even use surveys to gather anonymous information from students about your own teaching — like a course (or lesson) evaluation. Some teachers like Juan O’Shea use Survey Monkey to do just this as part of their on going professional development.

Survey Monkey is a semi-free online survey collection tool. By semi-free, I mean that there are small surveys you can create with it by opening a free account; however, to create longer, more complex surveys, you have to subscribe to the service. Survey Monkey also collects and analyzes the data for you, saving you and your students some work in the process of gathering information for a variety of purposes.

To explore and practice with Survey Monkey let’s do the following:

1. Take the survey I created for this course
2. Create your own survey on anything you want (consider interesting things you might want to learn about your classmates and/or me — not necessarily “English” related). Include at least five items in your survey. Also, try using three different question formats to “play” with the options available. For example, try not only using a multiple choice question but maybe adding an open-ended question and a Likert Scale question.
3. Send the link to your survey to five classmates with whom I have grouped you on today’s class agenda and to me. To do this, copy the link by highlighting it and right clicking on it, then select “copy.” Through Vista, create an email message. Select the five classmates you are exchanging surveys with and me as recipients of your email. In the subject line of your email, write your last name and 3241 Survey (i.e., Dail 3241 Survey). In the body of the email, greet your classmates and me and kindly ask us to complete your survey. Then right click with your mouse and select paste; that should drop the link to your survey into the body of your email. Sign your name, and send the email. You need to do this to form the habit of writing a professional email with a greeting, directed content, and a closing. Develop these good technology habits now.
4. Once you receive emails from your five classmates, follow the links (you will likely have to copy and paste them into your browser and then hit enter) to their surveys and respond to them.
5. Once everyone you sent your survey to has responded to it, log back into Survey Monkey and select my surveys, then select the analyze results tab. Consider your results. What can you learn from this analysis? It may not be much in this informal survey, but how might such an analysis be useful to you as a teacher collecting information from you students, parents, and/or community? How might such an analysis be useful to you as a teacher collecting information on your own teaching? How might such an analysis be useful to your own students as they conduct their own research — research that is not always centered in the stacks of the library or the online search engine? Make some notes to share during our debriefing discussion.

 

Go Glog Yourself!

Glogster is an online poster application that has a lot of potential beyond social networking and scrapbooking! As a future teacher, you will be asked to consider those possibilities. While I offer some ways I have used Glogster below, I invite you to consider additional uses.

Here a student wiki not only explains what Glogster is but lists benefits it offers in terms of educational uses. ABC News talks about Glogster and how it connects education, technology, and visual media:

Want to try creating a glog? Check out this tutorial to assist you!

Glogs to Introduce People:

I created a glog to introduce myself to students this semester — to let them get to know me outside the classroom.

Glogs for Alternative Book Reports and Other Assignments:

Another glog I created, is an alternative book report for Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak. Something really bad has happened to Melinda Sordino just before she starts her freshman year of high school, but no one knows what it is because she isn’t talking about it. This ostracizes her from her peers and her family, and she could not feel more like a misfit in a place where everyone wants to fit in with others. Melinda finds refuge in a janitor’s closet at school and connects with the poetry of Maya Angelou. In fact, because she cannot stand the sight of herself, she covers the mirror in the janitor’s closet with a poster of Maya Angelou. She is plagued with the assignment of re-creating a tree for her art class, and no matter what she tries, she just can’t seem to get it right. Her best work of art all year has been a sculpture recreated from turkey bones left over from her family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Remember decorating your own locker in high school, trying to make just the right statement about who you are as you claim this tiny space for yourself? What might Melinda’s locker look like? My glog response to Speak shows what I think Melinda’s locker might look like.

Growing Your Blog

A great example of blogging with students is Konrad Glogowski’s Blog of Proximal Development, which shares a variety of tips for blogging with students such as How to Grow a Blog and Towards Reflective BlogTalk.

Glogowski contends that blogs are essentially a sustained conversation between communities of thinkers and writers:

When we talk about blogging, most of us focus on writing. We tend to ignore the fact that a class blogging community provides teachers with a very valuable opportunity to use informal instructional conversations to engage our students as thinkers and writers. These conversations can help our students immerse themselves in the rich tapestries of voices that characterize blogging communities.

Blogs are perfect tools to encourage and assist students in cognitive engagement. Blogging is a process, a conversation. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the year, my students tend to see each blog entry as the equivalent of a well-composed paragraph response or even an essay. I admit, there is nothing wrong with producing well-written and well organized entries as long as the entry is not an end in itself, as long as the process of intellectual engagement does not end once the piece is posted. I want my students to understand that bloggers blog because they are on a journey, a quest, and that every entry is an opportunity to continue that journey.

Blogging and Professional Responsibility

Blogging is more than just online journaling and sharing your “inner-most thoughts” (When you consider the social and professional ramifications associated with Web 2.0 technology, who would want to do that anyway?). Consider Richardson’s examples of writing versus blogging on pages 30-31 of Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts.  Blogging allows you to become part of the conversation; it moves the locus of control from major media outlets to the average consumer, allowing you to become a producer of information as well! Now that is exciting to me because in a democratic society, shouldn’t we all have a voice and a platform for that voice?

With that voice, though, comes great social responsibility. Consider how many times you have visited You Tube and seen comments where people are posting any of the following: hateful things that have nothing to do with the posted video, declarations of love for the song used or the celebrity shown in the image, or comments filled with misspellings and grammatical errors. Seriously? I don’t know about you, but I certainly have trouble taking what those posters are saying seriously, thereby diminishing the potential impact of their voice in the Web 2.0 environment. Sister Salad has a great video about such wack comments!

You will have an opportunity to contribute to the professional conversation in the ELA field this semester by creating your own blog! You never know who will read it beyond this class either! Several semesters ago I created a book blog to share my reading with my ENGL 3391 students. I never imagined authors would read it and comment, but both Robert Lipsyte and Marc Aronson did! So seriously consider how you  professionally present yourself in this pervasive online environment; you never know who you will meet!

Storyboarding

A storyboard is a sketch or guide to help you shape your final story. It is a plan. However, your storyboard will address more than just the story. Because your final project is a multimedia presentation, you must consider visuals (pictures), sound, narration, motion, etc. when planning your digital journal. Here are some tips to consider when creating your storyboard:

1. Your story will not be linear. Try not to think about sharing it as first this happened, second was this, then third was this, and so on. Think about dividing your story into nonlinear parts such as:

• A lead slide, essentially addressing why this story is important in your development and thinking as an ELA teacher
• Profiles of the main person or people in the story
• The event or situation
• Any process or how something works
• Pros and cons
• The history of the event or situation
• Other related issues raised by the story

2. Divide the contents of the story among the media. Decide which aspects of the story will work best with which media.

• Which aspects work best in video or motion? Video or motion are good for depicting action and taking the reader to a place central to the story.
• Which aspects work best in still picture? Still photos are excellent for emphasizing strong emotion, for staying with an important point in the story, or for creating a particular mood.
• Does the audio work with video or motion or is it best combined with still photos? Good audio can enhance the story, but bad audio can really detract from it and make it seem worse than it is – a lot like the role of mechanics in writing a formal essay.
• What part of the story works best in graphics? Graphics go where the camera cannot. When used appropriately, graphics can be a story’s primary medium with still photos and/or video or motion playing a supporting role.
• What part of the story belongs in text and/or narration? Text can be used to describe the history of a story (sometimes in combination with photos); to describe a process (sometimes in combination with graphics); or to provide first-person accounts of an event. Think of text as something that is left over when you cannot convey the information with photos, video/motion, graphics, or audio.
• Make sure the information in each medium is complementary, not redundant.

3. Now that you have broken your story down into elements, you need to reassemble it in to a rough storyboard. On a sheet of paper, sketch out what the lead slide will look like and the elements it will include. What is the essential point of the story? How does this connect to other elements in the story? What multimedia elements do you want to include on this slide for establishing visuals, audio, etc.?

4. Now do the same for the following slides in your story. Consider the same questions. Consider what the main element for each slide is and what other information should be included there. What multimedia elements best tell this aspect of the story?

What storyboarding should do for you is help to point out the holes in the story for your digital journal. It should also help you to identify the resources (time, equipment, assistance, etc.) that you will need to complete your digital journal or how you will have to modify your digital journal to adjust to your resources.

References
Stevens, Jane. A Story from Start to Finish. Knight Digital Media Center, 2007. Available online at
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/reporting/starttofinish/storyboarding/. Retrieved January 10,
2007.

Teachers Are the Center of Education: Writing, Learning and Leading During the Digital Age

As we begin composing our digital projects and considering the writing process as part of our work, I have asked you to consider how that might translate to engaging your own students in multimedia composition. In a recent article from the National Writing Project, teacher leader Joel Malley says, “When kids make a video about something, they know it a lot better than if they were writing a research paper.”

How does this article, “Teachers are the Center of Education: Writing, Learning and Leading During the Digital Age,” further inform your thinking on the value and composition of multimedia texts by your own students?

Tweet Tweet: Is Twitter Just for Social Networking?

Often we think of Twitter in conjunction with social networking. Almost daily on the morning news and radio shows, we hear reports of celebrity tweets. While it may not be the most obvious choice for education, I think this social media application has great possibilities for education as well. Yet, semester after semester when I mention this in class, a good number of students balk at the idea, particularly those who are already working in classrooms. Why is that? What are your initial reactions to the possibility of using Twitter in your own classroom?

Some of my ideas for using Twitter in the classroom include making connections with students and parents via short updates about class, via reminders for upcoming assignments or tests, etc. Twitter also offers a great way to stay connected with students, parents, and colleagues while you are at professional conferences. Students love to know what authors you have met; parents love to see you futhering your professional development; colleagues love to benefit from new ideas you are learning as well. The Innovative Educator offers Five Real Possibilities for using Twitter in education, some of which overlap with mine and some of which are in addition to mine.

In pondering this question, I have tried to stay abreast of innovative ways in which others are using Twitter in relation to educational topics, and some of these examples have further convinced me that it offers some real possibilities, especially where students’ responses to literature are concerned. Why not let students create a series of tweets from a novel’s characters as an Alternative Book Report (ABR)? In England, one television station committed to increasing its arts coverage started “Such Tweet Sorrow” as part of this campaign where Romeo and Juliet will be tweeted in conjunction with the Royal Shakespeare Company. NPR reports that people in Iran have grown increasingly more poetic in their tweets, with some citizens gaining recognition for their prose rather than the mundane content. In celebration of Bloomsday from James Joyce’s Ulysses, two professors tweeted. Blogger Ian Bogost, despite his hatred for Twitter, explains the significance of this experiment. Yet other blogs, such as The Village Voice, do not feel that Twitter improved the Bloomsday experience.

Regardless of your perspective, Twitter seems to be a polarizing piece of social media when it comes to people’s opinions. Some educators, for example, worry that students will appropriate Twitter as a means of cheating and getting ahead in courses. Yet other educators are embracing Twitter as a means of engaging students with concepts such as concise writing. What are your thoughts on the role of Twitter in the classroom? Is there a place for it, or should it not even be considered? Should some media remain social without educators and/or students appropriating it for other purposes? If it doesn’t belong, why not? If it does, what role might it play?

Revising Blogs: Posting for Audience and Linking to Communities

Revision is a separate task from editing (wherein spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors are sought out and fixed). On a literal level, when we ask students to revise, we are really asking them to re-vision their work, to look at their writing with new eyes.

How do we accomplish this? More often than not, it requires that we take time to set aside our writing–tuck it away for a period of time (an hour? a day? a week?) and then come back and look again, considering if we have met our writing goals.

We’ve talked about blogs as publishing platforms intended for audience interaction, but have we composed our posts with the audience experience in mind? Hyperlinks and other embedded media are not simply meant to clarify unfamiliar terms (although they can and are often used in this way) but instead are tools to connect our writing to that of a larger community.

Ways to connect to the thinking/writing online community:

• Who else is writing about my topic? Are there published print or online texts that resonate with my topic? Have I linked to these and/or quoted them in my post?
• What keywords (categories and tags) can I use to label my post so that other people can find it?
• Are there engaging and relevant images that I can insert into my post, and attribute properly to their author?

Revising for an audience: some key questions to consider

• Are there implicit questions, assumptions that are behind my post?
  For example:  When writing about our “Ideal Classroom” there is the implicit assumption (for those who did not explicitly mention the reality of the classrooms they face) that our classrooms are less than ideal. What questions would have prompted you to write about this topic, if it wasn’t assigned? Behind this exploration, I see questions that reach to the core of our being teachers– How does this disconnect between your “ideal” and your reality, affect your love for, dedication to, enjoyment of teaching? How realistic is your “ideal”?
• What motivates me to write about this topic? Have I made this clear?
  For example: Why (besides being assigned this topic) would you, as a current classroom teacher, want to explore this topic? What is your purpose in sharing your vision of the “ideal” classroom? Did you write out this “ideal” vision to escape reality or to redefine it, to entertain yourself and your reader, to be critical of the reality that teachers face in today’s classroom? Are you optimistic, resigned, angry, determined to change? What do you hope your reader will do with this information?
• Do I use strategies of audience engagement such as rhetorical questioning and emotional appeals? Did I employ other techniques of engaging writing, such as anecdote, sensory detail, dialogue, action and other “show don’t tell” strategies?
• Have I selected the most engaging point of view for my post? Would the narrative elements of my topic be more interesting in present, past, or future tense? Would shifts in point of view–first person, second person, third person, omniscient–make my post more engaging?
• Have I considered the feelings, assumptions, questions and backgrounds of my reader? Are they represented in my post in a way that invites or inspires readers to comment?
• Do I have an appropriate length and format? A good rule of thumb is to work your first draft down to about 500-800 words. Any longer, and you run the risk of losing the attention of your reader, especially if you have not already done an excellent job of crafting and engaging post. Delete weak, unnecessary, or off-topic post text so that your post is as concise, clear, and readable as possible. Make sure your paragraphs are focused, tight, and connected?

Social Networking: Considering Possibilities and Responsible Uses

There is a lot of controversy about social networking both on a personal level for teachers and as a teaching tool. As with anything, there are pros and cons to each of these perspectives. As teachers, you need to critically examine these pros and cons as well as the media itself to decide where you position yourself within this professional conversation.

To Friend or Not to Friend?

In an article from August 10, 2010, The Chicago Tribune discusses setting parameters for what schools define as appropriate “rules” for teachers “friending” students online.

Good Pedagogy or Not Worth Our While?

What are some of the potential benefits of social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace for education? Consider both the students’ and the teacher’s perspectives.

Let’s look at how social networking is being used as an educational resource:

• English Teachers’ Companion Ning

• US News and World Report: Tweeting Your Way to Better Grades

Let’s look at some recent accounts of social networking (and in one case, texting) and discuss them:

• Poetry from Iran, One Tweet at a Time

• Social Networks: Work Literacy

• ABC News: On Bloomsday: Ulysses Meets Twitter

• Newsweek: The Death of English (LOL)

Are there legitimate ways to appropriate social networking technologies to affect change? If you consider designing a unit that has social justice learning outcomes, how might you encourage students to integrate social networking as part of their learning process? How might students use social networking sites to demonstrate understanding of characters and other aspects of literary works?