My Action Research Project! Whew!!

This has been a wonderfully enlightening journey, culminating in the conclusion of my Action Research Project. It is one of the most valuable processes out there to identify a problem area within my own classroom and directly address it in order to promote change. I have learned so much and will continue the process even after this class has concluded.

I struggled with the format with which to present my project, simply because of the complexity of it. I didn't want to cut it too short, yet I did not want to bore my audience with things that weren't interesting to them. Therefore, I decided to compile all of my information on a Google Site, that way, people may peruse it at their leisure, and view whatever they feel is interesting and relevant to them. I hope you all enjoy and I hope I have done justice to the project!

To view my completed project presentation, CLICK HERE!

I have a Class Website!! :-)

Please check out my ELA class website by clicking HERE! There are links to all the grade levels that I teach (grades 6, 7, and 8) as well as my Leadership class. 

Establishing a classroom site is a great opportunity for parents and the community to see what my students' are doing without having to physically come into my classroom! Technology is a great tool to help aide in communication between the community, parents, and teachers and strengthens the students' sense of accomplishment and pride in their work. I hope to promote improved quality of work by providing students with an authentic audience, beyond just the teacher (and the school). 

Thank you for taking the time to visit and please feel free to provide input at the bottom of the home page:

Creating Content Using Haiku Learning

How might you use Haiku Learning as a tool in your class or learning environment?

The thing I love about Haiku Learning is that it is several tools in one. The entire assignment (including online content, files, video, etc.) can be presented all in one place. Students can turn in their completed assignments via the dropbox on the assignment page by attaching a file, composing in the text box and I can provide feedback directly to the student on their turned in assignment. There is also a gradebook as well as an attendance feature where I can keep track of graded assignments as soon as they are done. 

Currently, I am using several different programs and sites to complete these same tasks: Edublogs for my 8th grade students' assignments, Edmodo for my 6th and 7th graders, Easy Grade Pro via edline.net for my grading and we, as a Hawaii DOE school, use Esis for our attendance. If I could streamline all of these different tools into one main LMS, my life as a teacher would be so much easier!

Click here to view my Haiku Learning "In-Class Assignments" page, with an assignment I did with my 8th graders. :-)

My PLN Connections

If you cannot view the popplet above, click here.

I used Popplet to create the visual of my Personal Learning Network! I also did this assignment with my 8th grade students and had them compare and contrast the ways they connect with they ways I do. They loved using popplet as a visual and had fun doing the assignment. :-)

Assessing What Students Know

How do you assess student learning in your classroom?  What might you do differently to prepare student for the next generation of assessments based on the readings, activities and resources explored?

The perspective about formative assessment presented in the article, "Formative Assessment and Next-Generation Assessment Systems: Are We Losing an Opportunity?" by Margaret Heritage is a refreshing one. Heritage cites a study conducted by Paul Black and Dylan William which concludes, "Student learning gains triggered by formative assessment were amongst the largest ever reported for educational interventions with the largest gains being realized by low achievers." 

Heritage also makes the claim that the current trend of benchmark assessment, frequently referred to as formative assessment, is in fact, a misnomer. These type of assessments are actually interim assessments, administered several times a year. They measure learning on a summative level, assessing all benchmarks, rather than a formative level, which should focus on specific learning targets. I was surprised by this because as a Hawaii school in restructuring, Lanai High & Elementary School receives services from Edison Learning who promotes the collection of data based on monthly benchmark testing. In my language arts class the students are evaluated each month according to the CCSS in reading and their results are broken down into skills areas in order to show areas of weakness that would ideally be focused on by the teachers in classroom instruction. However, as Heritage points out, formative assessment should be happening on an ongoing basis, "hour by hour, day by day, and week by week," not simply in a monthly benchmark assessment.

As a language arts teacher, I make an effort to assess student understanding before, during, and after a lesson. I usually do a diagnostic Q&A to find out what the students already know. I ask many comprehensive questions and encourage students to interact with each other during instruction. I also frequently review and allow students to reflect upon their work after a lesson. I do a lot more formative assessment than summative during the quarter. I administer only two vocabulary quizzes a quarter as well as a quarter final. However, in many instances, the quarter final is an essay that the students have been working on by engaging in scaffolding activities throughout the quarter. 

One of the biggest things that has shaped my curriculum for the last two years as we have moved completely into teaching CCSS is the focus on argument writing. I have created a middle school-friendly graphic organizer that helps students to include all aspects of the argument in their essay. As a middle school team, we have reviewed and agreed to use Edison Learning resources: the writing checklist as well as the writing rubric for argument essays. I have also gone through the process of recreating a performance assessment for my classes in order to help prepare them for the upcoming Smarter Balanced assessment in the 2014-2015 school year.

I love the resources provided on the edusources site. I am especially happy about finding more practice for performance assessments under the "Reading and Writing Project" link. These files will help me to recreate another performance assessment this year and give students even more practice before taking the assessment next year. The Smarter Balanced website also has a wealth of resources I can use to prepare students for the upcoming assessment, specifically a practice exam and sample questions addressing skills they will have to master. 

As I look back upon the shift from HCPS III to CCSS, I realize that assessment has also shifted from heavily summative based to almost exclusively formative based. As a teacher, I must say that the emphasis on performance tasks and student reflection really does account for higher student achievement and less students being left behind.

Flipping the Classroom

If you cannot view the video above, please click here!

Describe how flipping the classroom would support students learning the content in your specific context (school, community, content etc.).

My video highlights instruction on writing an introduction paragraph of an essay. Breaking down parts of an essay will create less confusion and eliminate the overwhelming feeling of tackling a huge task such as essay writing. Going through the steps of introduction writing and giving students options and examples will help students to write their own introduction paragraph independently. They can go through the video and examples as many times as needed to help them develop their own writing.

By composing their introduction at home, after viewing the video, students will then be prepared for the next step in the writing process. As a teacher, I will be able to assess which students need additional assistance with ideas and procedure and those that adequately grasp the information for the task can help others by peer editing and revising. The process of flipping the classroom to get the majority of the pre-writing done at home will give the students and I more time in class to strengthen their essay writing and perfect their technical writing skills. Students will be able to turn in a polished final draft, a truly authentic assessment of their writing.

Online Research Tools and Resources

List some similarities and differences between these three articles.
"Vacanti mouse"   
"Mouse with human ear"
"Artificial liver 'could be grown'"

(Venn Diagram made using Lucidchart)

Which site do you believe to most credible?  Why?  What would you do next to determine which is accurate?

By the amount and type of information presented, I would have to say the ABC Science article, "Mouse with human ear" is the most credible. First, the url suggests reliability with the suffix of the site address being ".net" versus ".com." In addition, the author, Dr. Karl S. Kruszelnicki has an extensive repertoire stemming from his 32-year media career. In contrast, the other articles are not specific in identifying their writers. The article from ABC Science also addresses the false interpretations of other media sources, including the misconceptions that the ear grown on the mouse was both of human origin and a product of genetic engineering. The progression of research presented in Dr. Karl's article also shows in-depth research and excellent text organization that thoroughly discusses the subject.

The next step in determining the accuracy of the articles would be to find additional articles that could either confirm or dispute the information presented in each of the articles represented here. For example, in the Wikipedia article "Vacanti mouse," by clicking on the reference article, "Transplantation of chondrocytes utilizing a polymer-cell construct to produce tissue-engineered cartilage in the shape of a human ear," additional research from the scholarly article (considered to be reliable) would confirm the information in both the Wikipedia and ABC Science articles.

Based on your own research and experience, discuss what you have learned in this activity about credible information and how you might teach your students to evaluate websites and other online resources.

One thing that I have learned in this class and will remember always is this: Teachers are no longer responsible to teach content (students can Google practically anything). Rather, teachers need to teach students how to sift through the atrocious amount of information on the internet in order to responsibly choose the most reliable, trustworthy information out there. According to Angela Bunyi in the article, "Identifying Reliable Sources and Citing Them," the important task of teaching students how to find reliable sources and trustworthy information should start when students are first introduced to the internet, as early as first grade.

One place to start is creating a checklist for assessing the reliability of an internet source based on certain criteria, such as presented in the article, "Criteria For Evaluating Web Sites." Students should have to go through the process of verifying information on each website they visit prior to using information from that source. Richard Byrne's article, "9 Resources for Website Evaluation Lessons," contains links to a wealth of information for both assessing internet source credibility as well as lesson plans to teach this skill to students of all ages. This is an excellent source to start to gather ideas for preparing students to become more savvy, well-informed users of technology. As I am a middle school language arts teacher myself, I will definitely be creating a checklist for students to use in every research project and essay they will create this year.

**After further research and assistance from a fellow classmate (thanks Noel!), I wanted to amend my statement about the reliability of ".net" sites. Pages using the ".net" suffix is really a "catch-all" site that needs to be thoroughly investigated for reliability.