The Schoenblog

Where do you go to find opportunities for learning?

That was the big question Dani Kennis and I had almost a year ago. We were at the start of our journey as connected educators, having attended a few local edcamps and conferences. We were on Twitter, starting to participate in online chats, and eager to bring back learning and innovative ideas to our classrooms. We spent hours sharing what we found, researching conferences, and making a long list of all of the learning opportunities available to us.

We started locally, with conferences we wanted to and likely could attend, but the list quickly grew to include some larger and regional events. The Google Sheet with this data grew and grew, and we shared it with a few friends, giving us our seemingly perfect guide to taking control of our own learning. With it, our dreams, aspirations, and potential for where we wanted to go and who we wanted to be as educators and professionals grew, too.

Maybe you can relate. Like Dani and I, you too are probably eager to take more control of your learning. Perhaps you have also seen or experienced the exponential benefits of connecting and learning together, and of personalized professional learning and building personal and professional learning networks. That was the experience Dani and I had and we quickly recognized the drive and passion in others. Then one day, Dani asked:

Is there a PD/Conference schedule or calendar anywhere for local conferences in NY/NJ? @wkrakower @AJBianco

— Dani Kennis (@kennisdani) April 10, 2015

This is the question that first led to the creation of The Education Calendar (#TheEduCal). We wanted a place to find, share, and promote great learning opportunities. We wanted to be able to build community and learn together. I’ve always told my students that all of us are smarter than one of us, and we wanted to make this a reality for our professional worlds through collaboration and crowdsourcing. After all, we don’t know every great event or conference in the world--but together we might.

Today I began my second year of implementing passion projects in my classroom. As I’ve become a more connected educator, I’ve grown more and more inspired by the innovative works of so many teachers who help students develop passions, explore 21st Century skills, and integrate problem and inquiry based learning. I started to consider 20% Time after reading Kevin Brookhouser’s The 20 Time Project and gave it a shot last spring. I had successes and challenges, and I learned a lot in the process.

Like many teachers this time of year, I’m struggling to prepare my students for their midterm. I want to them to practice and get meaningful feedback to prepare them to do better, but it’s a challenge to keep up with the workload. As an English teacher, meaningful feedback often means A LOT of reading and writing. One of my goals is always to do more with less and to let technology do the work for me when it can. This time, though, I used an easy and no-tech strategy to provide specific formative feedback to help my students improve.

Color Coded

Instead of providing words, sentences, and even paragraphs of feedback, I simply color coded my responses. With a few colored lines or dots, I told students everything they needed to know. Each color represented a piece of specific feedback with the first color on a page conveying the rubric score of the task and the rest communicating why. The colors were assigned at random and helped me give the feedback my students needed in seconds. See my notes below for my first draft:



I came up with this procedure on the fly, as my messy notes show. My goal was to respond to the work quickly so that every student left with 2-3 ideas towards revision and improvement. Students then discussed their work in groups or with me before moving forward to help add meaning.

Critical Thinking

This post is part 2 in my series #GAFE Impact Report, sharing data and analysis about student and teacher perceptions of the impact of Google Apps for Education. The results come from a 2014 survey I designed, implemented, and analyzed in my school. Be sure to check out Part 1: Overview & Infographic. Though limited to my school, I believe these results to be informative and representative of many schools in the early stages of GAFE integration. Please share your thoughts and feedback on these posts, the survey, or the findings in the comments or on Twitter.

Once the inspiration for this study hit, I knew what I needed to do. Ideas, questions, and complications circled through my mind for a few days. I listed my ideas, tried to put them in order, and to figure out what I was really looking for. Who did I want to survey? How? Where? Why? What was I going to do with the data? I had some answers to these questions and more ideas than I knew what to do with. Little did I know it at the time, but a lot of this process was what led me to my current doctoral studies. With the #GAFE Impact Report, I learned a lot of survey design, methodology, and data analysis, which helped focus my interests back towards further studies.

Luckily, I had some friends at work to bounce ideas off of and quickly made some decisions. I would create Google forms for all teachers and students. Students were easy; I could ask my English teacher colleagues to assign the survey, either in class or for homework. I decided to collect usernames in my domain so I could ensure unique responses from each students and let teachers know when their students had all completed it--although their responses remained private. For the teachers, I e-mailed a different Google form with a plea for their help. I explained my goals and purpose and asked that they complete the form over a two-week window. I then followed up in person with some departments, and after a lot of leg work had overall success. Although my administration okayed my work, it was important that I ask for honest feedback and data as a colleague and not as a forced or mandated survey from a supervisor.

The surveys took a while to design and finalize, and I’m pretty happy with the questions I asked, even now. By Thanksgiving or so, I was ready to roll out my baby.

Survey Design

Thankfully, my friend and mentor Tina has her PhD. She had the knowledge, experience, and insight into survey design, methodology, and motivating busy teachers to respond, which I sorely lacked. I didn’t need a doctoral-level project here, but I wanted to make sure that my study was fair, purposeful, and meaningful. She helped me decide on a mixed-methods approach, including both quantitative and quantitative questions.

The quantitative questions provided the hard data and were required. The qualitative ones asked for supporting responses, and some were optional. I wanted to make the survey easy for responders, with the hopes that this would give me more in depth responses. And it mostly worked. There were some topics, like the value of electronic feedback, that were important to me, but ultimately proved to be too much. I wanted to survey to be clear and focused, so I tried to connect everything back to the impact of Google Apps on Teaching and Learning.

Students

The students survey asked about when, how, and why they used GAFE, and about its impact on teaching, learning, engagement, etc. It took most students about 20 minutes to complete.

Find the student survey here.

Teachers

The teacher survey asked almost all of the same questions for the teacher's perspective but had an extra layer. All students at OHS had used Google to some degree, so all of their responses were valuable. But for teachers who had never really used GAFE in their teaching, some of the questions were designed to fail--or at least collect vague or incomplete data. I can’t expect a clear understanding of the impact of GAFE if a teacher hasn’t used it in his or her teaching.

Instead, I used the page branching feature in Google Forms to differentiate the questions. The first page is the same for all teachers and ends with the question: How often have you been able to use GAFE in your classroom this year? Teachers who answered always, often, or sometimes continued with an evaluation of its impact. Those who replied rarely or never followed with questions about why they hadn’t used it and what they would need to use it more.

Find the teacher survey here.