Making 3 Way or Student Led Conferences a Success With Google Docs

How many of you teachers out there have experienced this? It is mid year and time for your students to participate in a 3 way conference with their teacher and parents. Days before the conference, you help students reflect on their learning successes and areas needing improvement. Together, you come up with action plans for what each of you can do to encourage future growth and development in all subject areas. You help students identify pieces of work that show strengths, and a few weaknesses. Then, on the fateful day of the conferences, a student timidly enters with his parents and completely freezes up at the discussion table, forgetting about all of the ideas he has come up with in class and not using the evidence from binders and notebooks you have painstakingly helped him uncover to support assertions he makes about his own learning. You and parents end up having to lead the conference, subverting your institution's intentions to foster student independence and empowerment. All parties leave the table a bit unsatisfied and frustrated.

One tool that may help you circumvent this sort of scenario is the versatile, easy to use, Google Document. This year, I decided to use Google Docs, in conjunction with my school's subscription to Google Apps for Education, in order to break the 3 way conference deer-in-the-headlights conundrum!

As you most likely already know, the humble Google Document allows for multiple parties to share, view, edit, comment upon, and publish a written piece of work collaboratively. As such, you can use these documents, stored in your school's domain on Google servers, to create templates on which students respond to basic prompts about their learning in each subject. As students write, you as a teacher can make comments about their assertions, or chat with them in real time, urging them to go deeper into their reflection, or reminding them to link a pertinent document to every assertion.

Here's how I used Google Docs this year to help students actively participate in their own conferences.

First of all, months ago, I created folders with each student's name on my Google Drive. I then immediately shared these folders with their related students, using their recently activated Gmail addresses that quickly populate in the search bar of the share setting pane. after typing in a few letters of their name. (To increase transparency, I would also share these student folders with other teachers of these students, teaching assistants, and possibly parents). I trained students immediately after to always create documents for class within these folders, the reason being that anything created in a folder that I have shared with a student is automatically shared with both of us. Thus, if a student creates a slideshow, a document, or sheet in this shared folder, I can see it without having to log into Google as that student. Now, students do not always follow this step however, so I simultaneously trained students to always share documents with me using the share settings pane. One way or the other, I always get access to a student's work wherever I happen to be: at home, a coffee shop, the beach, etc.

Before beginning our reflective preparation for the conferences, I created a document template consisting of a table with rows pertaining to each of a student's subjects such as writing, reading, math, unit of inquiry, and social skills. Columns on this table had basic prompts like: "Things I do well", "Things I need to improve on", and "Action plan to make this improvement". I then made copies of this template which I renamed with each student's name before moving them using the "Move to..." feature to each of the student folders I had created.

I then taught students a short lesson both on how to find, use, and connect relevant documents, images, and movies to the template. After this, students spent about three lessons going through their work, writing reflections, and pasting relevant links into their own copy of the conference reflection template. Meanwhile, at every step, I had all copies of these documents open while students worked on netbooks or computers in the computer lab. During these lessons, I divided my time between working face to face with students to help them focus their reflections and find evidence to support claims, and using the "Comment" feature to add encouraging notes prompting students to dig deeper. Sometimes, I would also use chat to remind students of an important piece of writing or slideshow that they done from a few units before with a link to their own document.

During the conferences, the student and I would load these templates on different computers at the table. Students used their documents as cue cards in their discussions with parents and as bases from which to connect to examples of evidence that supported their own assertions. Parents could see comments I had made to students throughout their reflections. Students updated action plans based on input from parents, myself, and their own conclusions reached during the conference. In the future, ideally some parents could also open these templates on their own machines or pads during conferences (or at home after the conference) and add their own comments. In the end, after conferences, students, parents and I had a living document that can be referred to for the rest of year, or filed to chart a student's ongoing learning journey.

Parents enjoyed this neat, easy to use method of presenting learning. They consistently asked their own children, when reading linked documents and looking at the quality of utterances, "Did you write/do this yourself?" I felt this was an acknowledgement of the professionalism of my students' presentations, a professionalism that parents are more accustomed to seeing in the workplace rather than from their own children. I was proud for my students, as these documents and the displayed links helped them to really show their best learning for those who were most interested in it, their parents.

Check out a link to a sample document from these conferences here:

Sample of Google Doc for 3 Way Conference Reflection

Training to Pass Google Apps for Education

Just passed the second of two Google Apps for Education tests I have devoted a couple hours a week cramming for. Tests are difficult, but make me aware of the structure and capabilities of Googles powerful tools.

Today played with tasks, chat, labels, reference codes...

Check out: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/

Or

http://edutraining.googleapps.com

Look for more information about tests here in the next few weeks!

New Uses for VoiceThreads in the New Year!

What is VoiceThread you might ask?

Simply put, according to its developers, VoiceThread is an application that allows you to simulate a real conversation online. Basically, you create a slideshow of one or more media artefacts. With these media artefacts, you can do a voice over online using your computer's microphone, a video using your webcam, or you can add text prompting viewers to make certain comments. Your audience then can make comments that surround your artefacts. Similarly to you the author, they can add these comments as recorded, videoed, or typed responses. They also have the potential to use a drawing tool to circle or draw over your media item to make certain points as they are making their comments! When future viewers watch your VoiceThread, what they see is a basic movie of your media items, your comments, and all the comments of people who discussed the item. They in turn can then add their own comments and add to the VoiceThread "discussion".

I must admit, I've used VoiceThread before, but have not been overly dedicated to it. I remember the first time a professor prompted my masters class to use VoiceThread about six or seven years ago. At the time, I recall long wait times for buffering, but remember thinking that it was a pretty cool idea to link images and documents to recordings of your voice. Historically low Internet download speeds in my countries of residence, however,  have always seemed to hinder my enjoyment of what should have been a quite useful application. Kids in my experience have generally found it frustrating when their machines have gotten stuck recording and listening to recordings. Also, I tended to only see this app as another tool with which one or two students could illustrate their understandings with an online, voiced over, slideshow.

It seems now though that my frustrations with VoiceThread were shortsighted. Checking into to its development two years after I last tried it, VoiceThread seems to have come of age. Now I find that Internet speeds are sufficient at my school in Cambodia to make it a powerful and versatile tool to record classroom discussions.

Just this week I used it to record my class' first ideas about immigration and push pull factors associated with it. I posted three pictures on a new VoiceThread of different sorts of human migration: one was of refugees fleeing a conflict zone; another showed airline passengers waiting to go through passport control; another showed economic refugees walking surreptitiously over broken barbed wire.
On each slide I wrote questions using the visual discovery method of introducing a topic. With the first slide, of war refugees, I asked students to respond to the prompt, "What do you see in this picture?" With the second slide, showing people in passport control, I asked, "What are people doing in this picture?" In the third picture, of economic refugees coming across barbed wire, I asked, "What makes this picture different from previous pictures?" When the VoiceThread was set up, and I had registered my students individually on VoiceThread, I sent the link to all my students through Gmail.

After this, I showed students around the data projector in my classroom how to use basic functions of VoiceThread on another example slide that I had created focused around one of my students' posters on a previously studied topic. I showed students how to open VoiceThread from their link, how to view my comments, how to type, record, and video comments and how to use the drawing tool. I then had students use school netbooks to log on to the immigration VoiceThread I had created. I then challenged all students to be the first to add to the comments around my first slide. If students had finished comments on each slide, I instructed them to then comment on other comments that their classmates were making! Students enjoyed the activity and stayed engaged by it. Afterwards, I had students sit on the carpet, and each student read his or her comments and we had further discussions about migration. I hope in the future to actually have microphones and webcams for them to use to add more complex responses or to help certain students contribute who might have difficulty with writing, typing, or English.

There I had it! My students had a great introduction to our central idea, and we have a record to refer to as we proceed through our inquiry. We could even go back and add to this conversation later. VoiceThread helped us to change a conversation we HAD as a class to one we are HAVING and WILL HAVE throughout the unit!

Please post other ideas you have for how to use this great tool on this blog through your comments.

Google Apps Contribute to the Audio-Sphere of Phnom Penh

Part of my reasoning for working on this blog is to help me understand and discuss how technology currently enhances life as I or we know it.

As such, I would like to write a series of articles on interesting uses for Google Apps in the realm of live music.

The live music scene has exploded in Phnom Penh in recent years thanks to a perfect cocktail of music loving locals and expats, dedicated bands like the Cambodian Space Project, Krom, Psychotic Reactions, and the sometimes defunct Durian, websites like Leng Pleng, Live Music and DJ Gig Guide of Cambodia, and bars/bar owners/sound engineers who really care not only about getting crowds in and bopping but also about the talented musicians themselves. These would be people like Anthony at Equinox, David at Sharky's, Greg at Slur Bar, and Oscar at Oscar's Bar, all of whom need, share, encourage, and spotlight the local/transient talent.

Fortunately, I have had a chance to join in the sonic maelstrom with two rocking bands: the Fumes and Jaworski 7. There are a few things that unite my fellow players in both of these outfits: they possess a diverse array of mega talents; they create and express themselves in a variety of media; and they are all some of the busiest people, rightly so, that I have ever met.

This last trait creates interesting quandaries when it comes to getting and performing our best at gigs.

Here I'm assuming that most people think the following about how bands reach that sweet spot of standing under lights with amplified sounds and appreciative crowds: band members get together, party together, sometimes argue or fight with each other, occasionally pick up instruments, hang out at bars, and resultantly get asked to play at these wonderful gigs that we all enjoy bouncing around at.

While all these phenomenon, in my experiences, do happen in the course of a band's life, there are about a million other little details that must come together in order to get five grown adults to sit down (or stand up) and play nicely together for two to three hours a couple Fridays or Saturdays a month.

First of all, there are kids and families. Most band members got 'em and devote the majority of their time to 'em. Then of course, especially as expats in foreign lands, there is work. If you don't have it, and don't pay a good chunk of your attention to it, then you don't live here for long enough to play in a band (which anyway you look at it, for most of us is not a real way to support ourselves). Finally, especially being expats, this last minor competitor for time, the job, usually involves a good deal of travelling, sometimes to visit project sites, or to take 45 kids to Thailand on a field trip, or to hit that photo shoot in Bangkok which stretches on for two weeks, etc.

With all these demands for time, in our bands we have found the most practical tool to use to schedule practices, band meetings, and gigs has been Google Calendar.

Two years ago, when I was lucky enough to start playing with the Fumes, Darren, our bassist, came up with the idea of making a band scheduling device out of a Google Calendar. Using my own Google account, I created a new calendar, named it "The Fumes Calendar" and shared it with all bandmates. In order to see how to use this calendar, we all sat around once or twice putting our main events on it, such as days when one or more of us would not be around due to travels or work related issues or gigs which we had already scheduled. For a year, the Fumes Google Calendar proved useful as a point of focus for a group discussion, but agreements about time commitments for practices, gigs, and band planning meetings still tended to involve a complex mixture of emails, SMS, phone calls, and Facebook posts.

However, slowly but surely, each band member started to not only check the calendar, but to add little details related to his or her usually lack of availability on certain days. For instance, it became clear quite quickly, from perusing the calendar, that one band member could never practice on the final Wednesday of a month, due to a competing wine and cheese event at a local hotel. We could also see that sometime our Wednesday practices would not be available as a result of our practice space being needed for non band school related events. Color coding systems began to develop to alert band members to whether gigs were pending band members' agreement or whether they were confirmed events. While trying to plan tours of Sihanoukville, a distant beach town, we could see that teaching commitments of our school would not allow many of our teacher friends to accompany us and therefore we rescheduled to a more opportune time. When scheduling gigs in the din of various bars around time, I would usually pull out my smartphone, open up my calendar program that I had integrated with Google Calendar to check our availability with the needs of venue owners. When overseas friends tried to schedule trips to Phnom Penh around gigs in order to see us play, we would also share the calendar with them, albeit with read only privileges (an easily changeable option). Often during this stage of our calendar use, when someone had a scheduling hiccup, the standard response from the rest of the band was "Check the calendar!"

Eventually, the calendar proved useful in unforeseen ways when our guitarist began playing in a second band, Jaworski 7. He could crosscheck with our calendar before agreeing to gigs and practice times with them, or mark scheduled times he needed to be with the other band to avoid double jeopardy. When eventually, I began playing in this band as well, the calendar became indispensable and I shared it with all of the band members of Jaworski 7. Eventually, we renamed the calendar the Fumes and Jaworski 7 Gig Calendar and it is still our most valuable scheduling tool.

Like all tools, Google Calendar has been used by some of us musos more than others, but it has really made an almost impossible scheduling situation quite professional and easier. If your band or organisation's success depends on keeping track of and working within the confines of the personal schedules of many adults like us, I highly recommend adding it to your repertoire of usable applications.

I'm leaving you with a playlist of Jaworski 7 at various gigs we have been a part of!

Jaworski 7 Play list

PADI Training = Sound Instructional Practices

This is not me (yet)....

I'm now into my second official day of PADI (Professional Association of Dive Instructors) training with the Scuba Nation outfit, based on Serendipity Beach in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. (Actually, working from 9AM until about 6PM yesterday enabled me to finish two days worth of training in one, so today I'm chilling out a little bit working on PD, walking, reading, studying Khmai, and doing chins and benchpress in the gym.)

I must say that I'm very impressed with the quality of the educational experience I've had with this PADI program so far. I hold it on par with outdoor education programs I have attended, weightlifting lessons I have learned from Mr. Nick Hinde, and the incredibly useful and practical Motorcycle Safety Course offered by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation of the United States (see below for the link) - a course which I credit as one of the main inspirations for going into teaching.

PADI has obviously created courses with a keen insight into how people learn. Based on my experiences with my instructor yesterday, it also seems to me that when learning to be dive instructors, PADI associates appropriate ways of motivating students, teaching skills developmentally, and assessing learning and readiness of students.

Learning Styles PADI has considered

In addition, PADI courses also seem to have been designed around the idea that people have various learning styles and ways of accessing, and internalising information. All materials and necessary skills are presented a variety of times in ways that give visual, aural, verbal, physical, and logical learners equal chances to access information. For example, students are expected to read a well organised dive manual containing numbered lists, pictures, clear headings, subheadings, glossaries, and tables of contents (for logical/ visual/ verbal/ solitary learners), watch a video containing this information more succinctly (for visual/ aural/ solitary learners), participate in discussions of the curriculum (for aural learners), complete hours of practical skill applications and performance based assessments in a confined dive space and in open water (for social/ aural/ physical learners), and complete calculations using Recreational Dive Planners and dive plan graphic representations (for logical learners).

My experience with this course has not only caused me to remark on the skill of instruction however. I also cannot help but think again about my own learning and the concepts I have been successful at learning in my own life. A few truisms come to mind:

a) I am most likely to successfully learn skills that combine thinking and physical actions and that have an almost immediate application to enjoyable activities;
b) I am most likely to successfully learn ANYTHING (PD, language, a new sport, etc.) on a holiday, when my mind, my time, and my emotional states are my own. Thus, my affective filter is at its lowest ebb and I can be the most open-minded to new ideas.

These are important considerations, if not always easily applicable, for my own Grade 4/5 classroom back in busy Phnom Penh.

Coming up next time, how to become a regularly gigging musician with the help of Google!

Link to PADI website

Link to Motorcycle Safety Foundation (USA) homepage

Interested in a reputable and professional diving center in Cambodia? Click here!

New Beginnings for 2014

Welcome to Lost and Found in Southeast Asia. 

Lost = a state of being in which any object, idea, place, or person that was once available to our concrete and conscious self has temporarily or permanently ceased to be available.

Found = a state of being in which we have discovered, or rediscovered, objects, places, ideas, or people and are able to use and appreciate these references in the course of navigating through our lives.

Lost and found = a place to go where one can reunite with people or things that have, for whatever reason, been displaced. Alternatively, a safe place to go when one has been separated from relations, where one can hope to reconnect with trusted others in a short period of time. Finally, sometimes, a place to go and get new stuff that no one else has claimed for whatever reason.

Southeast Asia: a region of the world generally consisting of countries to the east of Bangladesh, south of China, and north of Australia. In terms of culture, this geographic area, despite its countries frequently being labeled as "quite homogenous" and "conservative", has been inevitably altered and modified by an influx of ideas and migrants, and an often open minded approach to life taken by its inhabitants.

With this blog, I hope to be able to communicate new ideas with colleagues and friends, especially regarding education, technology, and the experiences of lifelong learners. As such, at various times of the year roughly corresponding to school breaks, this blog will sometimes appear to be a travelogue. At other times, it may read like an unfolding piece of action research detailing a new teaching technique, or a language learning idea. Most likely, like life, this blog will from time to time lose focus, only to find it again at some unspecified later date.

Anyways, enjoy and I hope you derive some benefit and a chuckle from time to time as I make my thinking visible.