Final cohort presentation

Editor's Notes

• #5: Capturing and holding student's attention is one of the most difficult tasks for teachers.  Our brains are wired to pay attention to new things.  So if we teach the same way in class day after day, the energy students bring to class wanes. One of the ways to capture and hold student’s attention in the classroom is through the use of novelty. Anything that gets students out of a predictable way of learning will, most certainly, grab students’ attention. Jere Beard has already talked about one way to use novelty in the classroom – through the use of well-planned humor. Alyson Britt talked about using student-generated quiz games to introduce novelty in her teaching practice.
• #6: Capturing and holding student's attention is one of the most difficult tasks for teachers.  Our brains are wired to pay attention to new things.  So if we teach the same way in class day after day, the energy students bring to class wanes. One of the ways to capture and hold student’s attention in the classroom is through the use of novelty. Anything that gets students out of a predictable way of learning will, most certainly, grab students’ attention. Jere Beard has already talked about one way to use novelty in the classroom – through the use of well-planned humor. Alyson Britt talked about using student-generated quiz games to introduce novelty in her teaching practice.
• #7: We already know that our student’s brains are different. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and usingcomputers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. The use of these technologies means that the way students learn is different than our generation – attention spans decreasing, etc.I’d like to talk about two ways I’ve used novelty in the classroom to engage my students – Twitter, taking into consideration the Primacy-Recency Effect Anne-Sophie and Agnes talked about earlier, and student-generated test questions.
• #8: Primacy-Recency Effect states that there are two optimum learning episodes, or prime-times, during a class period. In between those prime-times is what is referred to as the down-time. The down-time can be used to show subject-related commercials, or can be used to take roll, hand back papers, go over tests, etc. A great way to use this period is to do formative assessment, checking how much our students are understanding the materials we’re covering. So I participated in an experiment Jill Gough started using Twitter.
• #9: At roughly the 20 minute mark during the class period, I stopped what I was doing and checked my students for understanding. Essentially, we asked, “What have you learned so far, what questions do you still have, and what would you like to know?” And we recorded student responses using Twitter.
• #10: In case you’re unfamiliar, this is what Twitter looks like. The timeline records “What’s Happening?”. In 140 characters or less. It is here that students’ responses were recorded. We kept track of the experiment with the hashtag “#20minwms.”
• #11: When I first introduced the experiment to my students, they expressed great interest in it, because many hadn’t used Twitter before. So the element of surprise was introduced – something new. And as you can see, and what I recorded – they saw what I was typing on the smartboard, they got excited. Because they got excited, they paid attention to what we were going over.
• #12: Here’s another one – we had a discussion about whether God was fair in His actions, whether He was just. During the 20 minute period, we sort of “debrief-ed” ensuring everyone had an opportunity to participate and ensuring all voices were heard. It was interesting, after everyone reflected in writing, to see what everyone’s thoughts were on the screen. It seemed everyone wanted to participate.
• #13: Again, here, I showed a video based on a biblical text. Here’s are some of the responses.
• #14: And here is one which, I thought most students would have known the answer to this question, since we covered it earlier in the semester and the beginning of the unit. But seems like there was some confusion, and this was an essential concept for my students to understand, so because I stopped at the down-time and asked the question, “What questions do you have?” I was able to see where areas of confusion lie and address them. And, students enjoyed seeing their questions on the smartboard, specifically on Twitter.By the way, Jill retweeted this – that means she thought it was valuable…
• #15: Lastly, here is an example of how the primacy-recency effect works…once students understood it, they felt okay saying what Hilliard said here…and to see it tweeted affirmed the findings of the primacy-recency effect. By the way, Hilliard actually tweeted this one himself on his cellphone – I did allow this.
• #16: Multiple intelligences – in class, students “hear” their questions – auditory – and they are addressed immediately; of course, visual learners “see” their questions and comments on screen, enabling greater retention of information; and if students, such as Hilliard, are allowed to tweet themselves, they are involved in “doing” – good for kinesthetic learners and their retention.Using novelty does not mean that the teacher needs to be a stand-up comic or the classroom a three-ring circus. It simply means using a varied teaching approach that involves more student activity along with lesson components that the students did not expect. Appropriately used, novelty can add new interest and fun to learning. (Sousa, 2001)And appropriately used means well-planned. There must be purpose for using social media tools like Twitter, but used intentionally, they can make a significant impact on student engagement in the classroom.
• #17: Another way to shake things up in the classroom and provide students with opportunities to learn in ways they wouldn’t have expected, thereby forcing the brain to pay attention, is by allowing the students to generate their own quiz or test questions.
• #18: Here are two examples. Not only did it provide the students an opportunity to participate in generating the assessment (I told them I would take the best questions), but it afforded me the chance to formatively assess. In other words, as I examined their questions, I could see how much they understood the concepts. In the example above…
• #19: Here are two examples. Not only did it provide the students an opportunity to participate in generating the assessment (I told them I would take the best questions), but it afforded me the chance to formatively assess. In other words, as I examined their questions, I could see how much they understood the concepts. In the example above…
• #20: Overall, the students didn’t expect the activity, so when it was introduced, the students paid attention. They were forced to examine what they’d learned in the past, having to engage in the material to ensuring their own understanding. And finally, it allowed we to see where there were gaps in understanding.
• #21: Overall, the students didn’t expect the activity, so when it was introduced, the students paid attention. They were forced to examine what they’d learned in the past, having to engage in the material to ensuring their own understanding. And finally, it allowed we to see where there were gaps in understanding.
• #23: According to Sousa, one way to describe these levels is to say that REMEMBERING and UNDERSTANDING are skills designed to acquire and understand information. APPLYING and ANALYZING are skills learned that change and transform information through deduction and inference. The skills at EVALUATE and CREATE generate new information by appraising, critiquing, and imagining. The upper levels of the taxonomy require critical thinking in order to analyze, contrast, criticize, and assess information. When teachers help learners use higher order thinking skills, learners make connections between past and new learning, create new pathways in the brain, strengthen existing pathways in the brain, and increases the likelihood that the new learning will be consolidated and stored for future retrieval.In fact, according to Sousa, many teachers recognize the need to do more activities that require elaborate thinking rather than just rote rehearsal. They admit that when they move up through higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy students demonstrate a much greater depth of understanding. However, they also admit that there are barriers to using this approach regularly because it takes more time. Yet, making the adjustment is worth the effort to see how a student can take a body of information and make it something that the student makes relevant themselves.