Category: Making Thinking Visible

Making Thinking Visible with Technology #pzmewinter15

I’m looking forward to speaking at today’s Project Zero Memphis Winter Workshop. Here are some of the resources that I’ll be sharing.

Visible Thinking includes methods for making students’ thinking visible through learning routines that are thinking rich. These routines encourage the development of a culture of thinking and can be used across all grade levels and content areas. With freely available technologies students can engage in Thinking Routines to provide evidence of their thinking and demonstrate their understanding of course content in multiple ways (images, audio, video, presentations, artwork, and more). The Making Thinking Visible with Technology (MTVT) project seeks to provide professional development, a database of lesson plans, and resources to help teachers to develop opportunities for students to make their thinking visible with technology.

Making Thinking Visible with Technology

Additional Resources

If you would like to investigate this further you can visit the full set of additional resources on my professional development wiki.

 

Developing Young Authors with Storybird #aaim14

StorybirdI’m enjoying being in Ft. Smith, Arkansas for the 2014 Arkansas Association of Instructional Media Conference. Below are my slides from the workshop that I facilitated yesterday. All the workshop materials and resources (including a video tutorial, additional examples, notes, etc.) are available on my wiki, Learning Telecollaboratively. The slides also include a link to a special download containing information for using Storybird in preparation for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessment.

Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories, presentations, reports, or tutorials you and your students make to share, read, and print. Storybird is a fun, collaborative website that can be integrated in all content areas and at all grade levels. It can be an effective resource for teaching parts of a story, the writing process, promoting creativity, and more. STEM and social studies teachers can use Storybird for engaging alternatives to traditional lessons, reports and presentations. Storybird also seamlessly keeps a portfolio of each student’s work.

Participants will be guided in setting up accounts and helped as they begin using Storybird.com’s tools and services. Participants will learn how to use the teacher-specific tools.

Making Thinking Visible: Parent Testimonials

Parent TestimonialIf you have been in one of my graduate classes, conference keynotes or presentations, or professional development workshops or institutes in the past three years then you have likely heard me promote the Teaching for Understanding (TFU) framework and the idea of making thinking visible. I likely shared evidence intended to encourage you to give the TFU framework and thinking routines strong consideration. I may have provided examples of student projects that demonstrated creativity, deep reflection, and provided “evidence” of thinking. I may have also shared interviews with some of the Project Zero faculty and researchers, video testimonies from teachers and students, photos and videos of lessons demonstrating thinking routines in action, photos and videos of schools and classrooms that are developing a culture of thinking, and a variety of resources to help you learn more and begin implementing all of this in your classroom. Thanks to Bemis Elementary School we now have video testimony of parents sharing their praise for visible thinking routines. These mothers describe how they regularly witness their children thinking deeply and pursuing their curiosities. I love that these moms are also familiar with the thinking routines and further promote thinking when their children are at home.

CASIE parent testimonial from Courtney Miarka on Vimeo.

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A Student’s Thoughts on Visible Thinking

Analogy: Thinking and PizzaThis young lady shares a few thoughts about visible thinking. She explains that “when you do Visible Thinking it helps you understand more and learn more than you thought you know.” I especially like the analogy she makes between thinking and pizza. I hadn’t heard that one before.

It’s great to see how much she values thinking and metacognition.

Thoughts on Visible Thinking from Bemis Elementary School on Vimeo.

Image Source: Wikipedia

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Learning with Web 2.0 and Social Media #idt7078

IDT 7078I’m very excited to be starting another learning adventure with graduate students here at The University of Memphis. For the next seven weeks I’ll be teaching IDT 7078: Seminar in Instructional Design and Technology. This semester’s topic is Learning with Web 2.0 and Social Media. Many of you may recall (because you were active participants) that I previously taught this course with a similar topic (Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0) in the Summers of 2008 and 2009. In both of these instances the students collaborated to publish the first two editions of the ebook Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0. Their exemplary work earned nominations for the international Edublog Awards (2008, 2009).

I also offered this course during Spring 2013 and the seminar topic was Learning with Web 2.0. It was the first time that I’d incorporated my work from Harvard, the idea of making thinking visible with technology, into a course. It pushed everyone’s ideas about thinking, learning, understanding, and technology. This experience as well as the work and research I’ve continued to do in the past year have resulted in the development of the class that starts today.

This semester’s class promises to be another outstanding experience for all of us. It has been designed utilizing some of the best practices and student feedback from the earlier offerings, and now incorporates many of the innovations in technology that have been developed in recent years. As we consider all the “cool” technologies and social media we will always keep the focus on their contributions to learning. These technologies can help us go a long ways in making thinking visible.

It’s going to be a different sort of experience and a wildly fun journey into learning. We invite you to join us!

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Sounds Good to Me: Learning and Digital Audio

Yesterday, at the Mississippi Educational Computing Association Conference, I had the opportunity to share ideas for integrating digital audio with teaching and learning. One of my doctoral students, Fair Josey, collaborated with me on this workshop. I’m sharing the workshop information and resources here in response to inquiries I received last night via Twitter and Facebook. I hope that you find this useful and invite you to share your ideas for using digital audio in the classroom and at home.

Workshop Description

Enable students to make their thinking visible through the use of digital audio. Learn how recorded tutorials and messages, storycasts, book trailers, audio chatting and commenting, teacher recorded feedback, and more can enable students to engage with course content inside and outside the classroom and better equip parents to help with homework. Several freely available websites and apps will be demonstrated. Strategies for designing lessons and practical tips for implementation will be shared. Connections to special education, foreign language, and ELL classrooms will also be made.

You can view the workshop slides – which include video tutorials, links to examples of student projects, and more – by clicking on the image below. All the workshop materials and resources are available on my wiki, Learning Telecollaboratively.

Learning with Digital Audio

2nd Graders Remember Dr. King

Here are some resources and ideas to help everyone learn about the life and important contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King.

You can learn a lot from simply watching this video developed by (I think) a 2nd grade class (Please help me find the original source so that I can properly cite and acknowledge their outstanding work.).

EdTech Ideas

You and your students could also make your thinking visible using technologies such as: Google Slides or Prezi, Storybird, ToonDoo or Pixton, Blubbr, Pinterest or Learnist in combination with AudioBoo or  Soundcloud, Glogster, Dipity, VoiceThread, SlideCast, Zentation, or GoAnimate or PowToon.

Photo Album

Here are a few of my photos from what was then the recently finished Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Google Glass in the Classroom

Glass in the Class

The following is a collection of resources for those seeking to learn more about using Google Glass in educational settings. There are some exciting potential uses and some issues that require serious consideration as the evolution of wearable technology evolves.

Seeing the Classroom through Google Glass

Margaret Powers writes, “As a reflective educator, your goal is to be constantly documenting and learning in the classroom. With Google Glass, that process can be much easier.”

Full Article

A First Look at How Educators Are Really Using Google Glass

“While educators may be impressed by augmented reality features from at-a-glance navigation to spoken Google search-and-response, they frequently save their best praise for Glass’ eye-level video-capture function.”

Full Article

Google Glass: Making Learning Visible with Wearable Technology

“Google Glass provides the educator a means for “making learning visible” (MLV), and can assist with the “observation and documentation in deepening and extending children’s and adults’ learning” that the Project Zero researches from Harvard and Reggio Emilia, who developed MLV, identified as key to effective teaching. The paradox of MLV is that documenting one’s process within the workflow must itself be invisible if it is to be seamless and not “get in the way” of the actual work.” Stacey Goodman provides a nice overview of the technology and presents some potential classroom uses.

Full Article

Reflections on Using Google Glass

Ben is “a special education teacher, and as of late there have been a ton of examples of Glass helping people with disabilities.  If you just look at theGoogle Glass Google+ community you can read about them there. Truly amazing things will come of Glass for people with disabilities.” Ben Hommerding reflects on his experiences with Glass in a series of three blog posts.

Reflection 1, Reflection 2, and Reflection 3

Additional Reading

Innovative Learning Solution’s early ideas about Google Glass.

Cecil College uses latest Google technology in classroom

Is Google Glass Suitable for Schools?

Related News

Image Source: garysking.wordpress.com

Making Mathematics Visible

Math ConnectionsAs a math teacher I would sometimes hear students ask, “When are we going to use this in real life.” I worked hard to provide students with practical experiences and tangible answers to this question as I think doing so helps with transference and engagement. I relied on feedback from my father (an architect, contractor, and farmer) and my friends that work in the areas of engineering, accounting/finance/sales, and healthcare for ideas and real-world examples that I could use in my classroom. I think the students and I would have also enjoyed having examples similar to the ones included in the following video. Amazing!

BEAUTY OF MATHEMATICS from PARACHUTES.TV on Vimeo.

Image Source: alibris.com

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Making Thinking Visible with Technology at #TNLEAD

Workshop Description

Visible Thinking from Project Zero at Harvard University includes methods for making students’ thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to the teacher. Visible Thinking makes extensive use of learning routines that are thinking rich. Thinking Routines are mini-strategies that extend and deepen students’ thinking and become part of the fabric of everyday classroom life. These routines encourage the development of a culture of thinking and can be used across all grade levels and content areas.

Workshop participants will learn to develop opportunities for students to make their thinking visible with technology. With freely available technologies students can engage in Thinking Routines and provide evidence of their thinking and demonstrate their understanding of course content in multiple ways (images, audio, video, presentations, artwork, and more). When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it becomes clear that school is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas. Teachers benefit when they can see students’ thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered. Teachers can then address these challenges and extend students’ thinking by starting from where they are.

Strategies for designing lessons and practical tips for implementation will be shared.

Introduction

The content of this professional development workshop builds on the research and work of Project Zero at Harvard University. Participants will be introduced to Making Thinking Visible and the use of the Visible Thinking Routines. This is a research-based approach to integrating the development of students’ thinking with content learning across subject areas and grade levels. Before we begin focusing on technology integration, it is important that we have a framework of understanding for these topics as we will build on them later.

  • Making Thinking Visible – Visible Thinking is a broad and flexible framework for enriching classroom learning in the content areas and fostering students’ intellectual development at the same time
  • Visible Thinking Routines – Thinking routines are short, easy-to-learn mini-strategies that extend and deepen students’ thinking and become part of the fabric of everyday classroom life.

Workshop Resources

You can view the workshop slides by clicking below. The handouts, resources, and in depth information are also available.

Making Thinking Visible with Technology

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