Tag: Online Learning

What Can Help with PBL Distance Learning?

I have received some great inquiries since I wrote my last blogpost and I’ve spoken to many teachers who have ideas and questions about teaching online with PBL math. I thought I would share some of those ideas so that everyone can benefit from these great thoughts.

Collaboration

One of the aspects of the PBL classroom that can be missing or disappear altogether is the relational aspect of discussion or collaboration. It is difficult to have students interact, especially if your school has decided to not have synchronous classes (students in different time zones, allowing families to have their own schedules, etc.). Collaborating asynchronously is difficult, but can happen. Here are some tools where this is possible:

Voicethread:
See my last post – I think Voicethread is the best app for asynchronous collaboration. It does take time to set up, but once it is, students can post the problem they have a question on and students can asynchronously post a video, audio, text or drawing question in response to each others’ comments. The thread keeps the order of the comments and the teachers can put their two cents in when necessary as well.

Flipgrid:
Some teachers that I am working with are using Flipgrid to allow students to continue doing problem partial-solution presentations and then having other student post video responses. The responses are either in the form of feedback on the video or in the form of a question or clarification. Of course, this creates a great deal of work if you are going to watch all of these videos, so you must find a way to randomly watch videos every day so the students know that you will be looking at them.

Canvas Conferences:
You might want to check whatever LMS you have, but I now that Canvas has a wonderful feature called “conferences” where you can set up a video of you chatting (it even has a whiteboard where you can write) and students can type questions. This can be recorded and posted on canvas for students that cannot be there synchronously. I guess is the same as using Zoom, but it is nice because there is communciation through the LMS automatically for the students the time and they don’t have to log onto another app.

Explain Everything Whiteboard:
If you already have an account with Explain Everything, that allows you to make videos on your iPad (and I think on your laptop too), Explain Everything also has a web whiteboard where you can create an online lesson and invite people to watch as you talk. I have not used this before but iti’s kind of an interesting add-on.

Twiddla:
This Free Online Public whiteboard is pretty cool, but it does have pop-up adds. You can make it private in the room settings and you don’t have to sign-up for an account. Of course their goal is for you to sign up for an account, so I’m sure there’s some thing in there about getting you to join, but if you just need something in a pinch, I think this is pretty great for synchronous collaboration. You can also leave anything that was written up and have kids go in later and see what was there. So it somewhat works for asynchronous as well.

Zoom Breakout Rooms:
Boy, I wish I had bought stock in Zoom about six months ago. Zoom has become the most-used app, I believe for online and distance learning in the past three weeks. I hope you are all aware of the break-out rooms that you can do in Zoom, you can triage students by putting them in these break-out rooms in groups to work on topics or separate problems as well. Of course, this is also assuming you are using synchrous time for these classes, but it a really great way to have kids collaborating in smaller groups while you can jump in between the groups – sort of like in class.

“Lessons”

I know it seems weird to think about giving direct instruction during a PBL class, but I think at this time in a crisis, it is important to think about the stress, anxiety, isolation, and other emotions that these students are feeling. All of those feelings are exacerbated in a PBL classroom so whatever we can do to help ease any of those feelings without totally moving to a direct instruction or lecture based class I think is good for the students.

One thing I have done when I teach online, especially at the beginning of the year, is try to make small videos with an app like Educreations (which giving away free Pro Accounts right now) and Explain Everything, which I use a lot (and are also giving free accounts to closed schools). These are wonderful apps and I think easy to use. Here is a video below that is a quick tutorial on how to use Explain Everything on an iPad if it would help anyone.

When I make a video to help a student(s) move forward with a problem, I try to keep it the way I would motivate their thinking in class. If they are not seeing something that is holding them back from what is needed in the problem like visualizing moving from a cone to a sector as in this video:

Another thing that I think is important is to remind students of prior knowledge that they may not see and cannot benefit from the discussion and ability of other students in the class who may have that prior knowledge more accessible to them. This is a great advantage in the face-to-face classroom that many PBL teachers rely on, is that there is usually at least one student who can say “Oh, yeah, I remember doing that before” and can give a short recall of what that prior knowledge is. Online, it is more difficult for students to access that prior knowledge that might be needed. So another type of video I make for students is a recap of prior knowledge that they might need for problems that are coming up:

Now you might be saying, “I don’t have time to make all these videos, Carmel” and that may be true. You can feel free to search on YouTube, but what I’ve found is that many of the videos on YouTube are not what i want. They are either very much based on mneumonic devices or not the type of understanding I would want my students to have. So feel free to use any of mine or email me (cschettinophd@gmail.com and I will try to make a video for you if I have time and post it on my YouTube channel.

Assessment

So it is clear that giving tests with distance learning if very difficult. Parents are not really going to sit and proctor written tests or quizzes especially if they are working from home. The idea of test integrity is also quite difficult with different age groups that you are all working with. Many students are extremely trustworthy and some schools have honor codes which kids would probably adhere to even when at home. However, the stress of being online now with a new way of learning, would be enough to make any student crack under the pressure. So here are some of the ideas that you can use to be more formative in your assessment and then perhaps a bit summative as well.

LMS Quizzes:
Many of the LMSs that schools use already have built in systems for making quick quizzes (Canvas, Schoology, Moodle, just to name a few). If one of your colleagues makes a quiz, it is very easy to share them among members of the same LMS. These quick quizzes can be open notebook and you can have 3 or 4 a week with only 3-4 questions, just to see how the students are keeping up with material. They could count towards a grade or not, but this is a wonderful way to check in. They can also be used as exit or entrance tickets.

Socrative App:
When I was still in the classroom I used this app many times in order to have a quick quiz that was open notebook and gives students real-time feedback about whether they answered a question correctly or not. You can take the time to make your quizzes or you can use the many quizzes that are already in their data base at the Socrative Quiz Shop and use those.

Summary of Topic Arcs:
I believe that writing is the best way for students to show their understanding of a topic, but writing online is very difficult. So it does make sense for students to make videos of themselves. I think a good summative assessment is for the teacher to assign to 2-3 students one of the topic arcs that has just been discussed in the recent 2-3 weeks. Students should work together synchronous or asynchronous (make a google doc perhaps) to :

  1. review and research the problems that move through that arc
  2. describe in the video how they understand those problems building up their understanding
  3. each student needs to reflect on one or two problems each and talk about how that problem is connected to the overarching theme.
  4. Use paper, a whiteboard or a virtual whiteboard to explain the problems and their understanding

The way these are graded should be up to the teacher, but what I would suggest is a collaborative grading system:

  • the 2-3 student group would get a grade based on a rubric for their own video
  • the whole class will get a single grade for the set of videos as a whole based on some basic requirements (deadlines, time limit, etc.)
  • individual students will get a grade for one feedback/question video posted for one other group’s summary video – again with a rubric so that it is clear what you are looking for
  • I will try to post some sample rubrics for this that I have used in the past

I do believe that a combination of these types of assessments will help students stress less about their grades before the end of the school year and will also help you see how much they have retained in terms of material. There is also daily contributions and completion of work that should be recorded, but I don’t think I need to tell teachers that!

I wish you all luck with this new venture and would love to hear any other ideas and your experiences with teaching PBL online.

Why I disagree with Mr. Kahn

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I have to say that I am not usually a controversial blogger – I’ll just put that out there right away.  However, I am so frustrated with the conversations, blog posts and articles that are zipping around the blogosphere about online learning, MOOCs and Khan Academy that I have to say something about it as a teacher, teacher educator and responsible learner, myself, about education theory.  I have taught online classes, taken online classes, used open source materials for my classes and definitely promote the idea of equal “world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”  However, I have yet to see how that quality education occurs online and especially the way that it is promoted in Salman Khan’s book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined.

Now let’s just put something else out there right away – it might be that I am frustrated by the fact that he has no background experience in education (which he admits – “I had no teacher training”) and I am offended that he is speaking out of turn speaking as if he does.  For example, he says “There’s an old saying that ‘life is school.’”  Hmmm, I wonder who said that? And I’m not sure that’s really the right saying.  Or it could be that he is attacking the very discipline that I am working so hard to change – mathematics.  I totally agree that there is a lot that is wrong with the way mathematics is taught in the U.S.  But NOT going all “rogue” and working against the people who have already done some research on the subject and know a little about which they talk, might be a good place to start.  There are many things that Mr. Kahn discusses in his book that he seems to purport as novel ideas like Mastery Learning, Flipping the Classroom, etc. that are not his ideas.  So let’s pretend that the fact that he wrote a book of concepts that seem to be a compilation of educational reform ideas that have been around for a while is not what really annoys me.

What really gets my goat, if I seem to have his idea right, is that he is advocating for “a free world-class education, for anyone anywhere” but I’m not really seeing how this is going to happen.  He advocates for the use of the Khan Academy for mastery learning in the classroom (in a school system) where the students watch the videos and then come to class and do “projects” with each other in the “one room schoolhouse.”  I actually agree that this is a wonderful learning scenario that promotes creativity, independence in learning and individualized lessons for students of all ability levels.  Besides the huge government and system-wide testing restrictions that are currently in place and teachers’ current use of assessment, it would be very difficult (but not impossible) to change this system.  Kahn very naively writes a 5-page chapter on Tests and Testing, which again is nothing new, on the evils of standardized testing and why they don’t really tell you anything about students’ knowledge.  His “one room schoolhouse” is an idealistic utopia of learning for someone who has never been in the classroom and dealt with classroom management, assessment, review or planning of these open-ended projects.  I do believe that a great deal of teacher training would need to be reformed and reviewed in order for something like this to happen and before any school thinks of moving to a model like this they should think wisely about the ways in which teachers are ready to handle the change of the classroom culture and how they are ready to deal with it.  Students will still have questions about the material and will all be at different places in the content and the projects, which will probably demand more planning from the teachers (which again, is not a reason not to flip the classroom, but a necessity of which to be aware). I found what he put forth as the ideal classroom short-sighted and with many limitations.

Secondly, what about the “anyone, anywhere” Idea? Even if children in third-world countries have access to internet-ready computer to watch these videos, where are the teachers and schools to have them do the “world-class” learning with these group projects?  Where is their utopian learning environment?  I am confused about how watching videos online is giving them a “world-class” education (although I could see how it was free if Mr. Gates donated a bunch of computers and Internet access, etc.).  Mr. Kahn also realized that “teaching is a …skill – in fact, an art that is creative, intuitive, and highly personal…[which] had the very real potential to empower someone I cared about.”  Yes, Mr. Kahn, that’s what teaching is all about.  Teaching is about, as you said, “genuinely [sharing  your] thinking and express[ing] it in a conversational style, as if I was speaking to an equal who was fundamentally smart but just didn’t fully understand the material at hand.”  How is that supposed to happen for someone sitting alone watching a video?

In the NY Times article, The Trouble with Online Learning, Mark Edmunson wrote:

“Learning at its best is a collective enterprise, something we’ve known since Socrates. You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will. Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.”

This is the heart of Relational Pedagogy, that the interhuman connection between people is what constructs knowledge and the trust, authority, and value of perspective that is shared and given to each other is just as important as the content that is exchanged – most especially in mathematics, it’s just taking us a lot longer to figure this out, Mr. Kahn.

To Kahn or not to Kahn in PBL

Recently there have been some discussions going around the Internet concerning Kahn Academy and other Internet-based “teaching tools” and their applicability or acceptability in terms of pedagogically sound classroom use. You can check out Dan Meyer’s blog or tweets about the MTT2k project, which I find pretty amusing actually, or Kate Nowak’s blog entry where she stated “Enduring learning requires productive struggle and time to noodle out unfamiliar problems, posed by a teacher who knows what you’re ready for, and can provide expert scaffolding. Lecture-only instruction focused on mastering procedures is an impoverished substitute for doing mathematics, and it doesn’t matter if that lecture is in person or in a video.” To that, I, of course, say, “here, here.” I spent some time going over the Kahn Academy website this past spring when my son was having some trouble studying for his science final exam and he was looking for some review materials and I actually thought it was something of a helpful resource for him. However, I’m not quite sure that it would’ve been a helpful way for him to have learned about genetics the first time around.

On the website, Kahn Academy has a great mission of having open-source curriculum for everyone, everywhere, which I am wholeheartedly in favor of. I believe that education needs to be the great equalizer and one of the best ways to do that is to actually allow everyone equal access to the same quality of education. However, they also seem to take pride in the fact that there are now “5th graders relentlessly tackling college-level math to earn Khan Academy badges” perhaps at the detriment of their understanding or even at the skills that they should be learning at their grade level (and I am definitely not against kids exploring interesting advanced topics or even discussing non-Euclidean geometry before they get to college, for example). So it’s important for there to be balance, as I always say, between content and process.

So overall, I would say, I have no problem with Kahn Academy’s (or any online institution of learning’s) pronouncements that they are helping to “spread the wealth” of education, but I do wonder about the quality of the instruction. They have some very, very smart people working there with very good goals about making education accessible, with which I totally agree and for that I commend them. However, there are lots of theories of education – both online and face-to-face that need to be considered in order to claim that any actual learning (whatever definition of that you are also claiming) is actually happening.

Before educators who are within F2F classrooms move to using online tools to “flip” classrooms in order to substitute for other methods of instruction and claim to be using Project-based or Problem-Based Learning, I encourage everyone to really explore the pedagogical methods of that online tool. Is it congruent to what you would do in the classroom? Does it actually help facilitate the type of learning you would want your students to experience? Does it ask the questions or help with the explorations that you would want them to grapple with themselves? Do they get to the confident explanation and security in the knowledge that they would in a discussion? If not, look for something else. Or even better, ask the questions or pose the problems yourself or get the students to ask each other.