Social Media and Professional Learning Networks

I started off thinking this week's engagement would be a good way for me to dig deeper into the twitter universe. I wanted to use the lens of our  objectives to examine my past behaviors and experiences.

While I have used twitter on occasion, most of my following was done in the initial rush when I created my account a few years back. I wanted to revisit my strategies to see whether they are really supportive of building and maintaining a more active and productive PLN.

Somewhere toward the end of the week, I pivoted to incorporate Diigo into my thinking. The slides here and the video, below, articulate my thought processes as I try to connect twitter and Diigo to my next steps as a learner and a teacher. I believe these two roles are closely aligned, for my professional learning can help me to develop models for effective student research processes and products.

Blending Our Teaching and Learning

Once again, I've chosen to create some slides to share and a screen recording where I present those slides.

I feel like this assignment came at a really good point in the course for me. It's helping me to consolidate my thinking and to reflect on the different practices I've been putting into place.

As I considered how to make recommendations to other teachers, I was glad to have the rich resources I've been building in weeks 1 to 6 of this TTC course. Creating my slides for this week's presentation, I was frequently jumping back to earlier products to make use of images, examples, or arguments I had developed previously.

This video is something I would actually share with some of my colleagues who are looking to optimize their use of our school's technology tools and to modify their pedagogy for our 1:1 laptop environment.

Differentiation and Learning Styles

Using the survey results now consider your current blended/online course. What do you do to support different learning styles in a blended/online course?

I administered the suggested edutopia survey to my students. The image below shows one student's results, which are framed by the 8 intelligences put forward by Howard Gardner. The full results for the entire class can be seen here.

While most of my students' activities take place in the classroom, I am experimenting with many blended tools that allow them to access support materials at their own pace and to make individual decisions about how best to use their class time. 

Generally, I try to provide students with models to guide assignments, written instructions, and screencast demos. Together, we compile a range of multi-media texts that support our shared inquiry.

These survey results provide me with insight about my students, but I would not say that I plan differently for them based on my findings. When I discuss data like this with students, I frame it as one tool they can use to help them understand themselves and their individual learning processes. My goal is to build their metacognitive, self-regulatory, and self-advocacy skills. We talk about how a single survey is not definitive. The scores are not as important as how they interpret them and choose to use them. To help them make sense of surveys like these, I ask them to reflect in small groups: 

• What did you think as you looked at your results? 
• Were you surprised in any way? 
• To what extent are your responses or preferences influenced by your surroundings or your prior experiences?

I don't want them to shy away from certain activities. I do want them to be aware of how their current strengths and preferences might shape their perceptions and influence their learning. I hope they will make informed decisions about how to approach learning tasks. I ask them to monitor their engagement and make choices that will build their motivation. With many of their projects, their first job is to choose a topic which they are excited to read about. As much as possible, I give them options for how to demonstrate their analysis and present their conclusions for my evaluation.

Describe and explain how with two of the below you support differentiated learning in your online/blended course?

Activities and Tasks

While I do not design different activities for different learning styles, I do try to provide students with multiple entry points into any learning experience. No matter what their styles, strengths, preferences, or intelligences... I want them to be able to make maximal use of their background knowledge and interests. I almost never ask questions or pose problems with a limited number of "correct" answers.

For reasons I will explain in more depth in the screencast, below, I tend to talk about "individualizing" instruction in my classroom rather than "differentiating". I started my teaching career in special education. I am always wary that attempts to classify students into a limited number of categories will lead to differentiated expectations.  As a literacy teacher, my primary responsibility is to cultivate critical reading, writing, and discussion skills. 

Class activities ask students to make their thinking transparent to an audience. It is not always easy for adolescents to organize and express their most complex thinking in writing, so we develop and "rehearse" our thinking in class discussions, in impromptu screencasts, and through critical examination of a range of multimedia texts. I want students' initial texts (whether a sentence, and outline, or a quick video) to be quick. These are rapid prototypes that allow for multiple subsequent iterations. If students invest too much time and effort in producing a first written draft, I find they are resistant to feedback and often don't want to revise their thinking in a substantial way.

Assignments and Assessments

Observers of my classroom or viewers of my blended assignments might notice that all students are guided through the same stages toward completion of the same assessment. However, those looking for differentiated methods are often happy with what they see. 

When educators talk about differentiated learning, they are often referring to differentiated means of presentation (targeting students' various receptive skills). I will follow-up with individuals and offer a supplementary explanation and personalized support, but my initial presentation is meant to be more of a one-size-fits-all affair. Once students have a vision of the target, they are able to decide on a preferred learning path and to choose how best to communicate/demonstrate their learning. Although I present the same instructions to everyone, students create products that are highly personalized. In this way, it is the students' productive/expressive actions which are differentiated more than my presentation.

Student choice is my most powerful teaching tool. If my students can capitalize on their interests and background knowledge while making choices about how to respond to academic challenges, they are more likely to be deeply engaged, to challenge their own thinking, and to sustain their effort in the creation of products that make them proud. An engaged learner is looking to make meaning and to integrate it with existing schema.