I was an English language arts, and social studies teacher for 20 years. The worst part of my job by far was evaluating essays. Even if we resist machine grading by AI for now, it will eventually be here to stay. And even if the AI grading isn’t perfect, we can work on our prompts to make it better and better. As a human grader/evaulator, despite my best intentions, I am certain that my essay evaluations were likely uneven. If I had 40 essays to mark, while they were hopefully fairly consistent. I’m sure there were still inconsistencies and I’m certain that I gave better feedback to some students than others.
Perhaps the most important thing to consider is that it takes a human a long time to grade 40 or 60 essays, especially if you aim to provide helpful feedback. If AI can provide reasonable and consistent and immediate feedback to our students as writers, I don’t think it is fair to ask them to wait for two weeks while a human marks a whole stack of essays to hand back at once.
Perhaps the human marks the final essay, or the final draft of the essay. In the in between, however, I think we need to consider teaching our students how to ethically use generative AI to access immediate and specific feedback about parts of their writing.
I know there are lots of other points to consider, but as a life-long English teacher, I believe AI is a path to a better way of assessing.
The past 2 or 3 years I’ve really tried to provide PD that teachers can do on their own time at their own pace to complement more traditional methods that we have going on in our district. Here are some methods that have worked well:
A collection of 8 PD Choice boards (I need to update Google Meet over the summer). Each board has combinations of articles, videos, infographics, etc.
A year-long PD Bingo: bit.ly/prsd8bingo . This year I also had a square each month that was worth $10 Amazon gift card… if teachers did that square in the month they got $10. This got some teachers playing that wouldn’t have otherwise.
And now that almost all of our students have 1:1 Chromebooks since COVID, a Chromebook Blitz Monthly Challenge bit.ly/prsd8chromebook … enticed with Amazon gift card draws for teachers (who need some Chromebook confidence!) and gift card prizes for full classes that entered. This was popular with a number of teachers – they’ve suggested another round next year that focuses on Chromebook Accessibility features or Google Drive or Google Search…
I spend a fair bit of my teacher/Instructional Coach time using Flipgrid to gather examples of teachers using protocols and strategies. In addition, I find that I’m always suggesting Flipgrid as a solution to just about everything! Checkout the links below for Flipgrid-related posts and ponderings of the past:
This post is connected to a PRSD8 book study with a group of colleagues from across the district. It is based on Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding written by Julie Stern, Krista Ferraro, and Juliet Mohnkern. Here is a link to the Padlet where the full conversation is happening.
While chapters 2 and 3 are full of tidy little strategies that seem to say to me, “You can do this!”, chapter 4 gets into the realm of needing to find that ‘just right’ conceptual question, at which point I get overwhelmed.
The part of the chapter that really struck me was the MIRROR on page 89 (Secondary):
“ many teachers worry about the amount of time that instruction for conceptual understanding takes, especially compared with traditional instruction. We used to think that the depth of study into a concept and corresponding topics inevitably meant that we had to spend more time with fewer topics, which was scary. But the better we got at teaching this way, we realized students learn more factual content because they actually remember what they’ve learned and are able to make insightful connections throughout the year demonstrating a depth of understanding.
Page 89 (Secondary)
The authors then talk about confronting the myth that if we cover the material (eg. tell students something or go over it in class), they will learn it. And I do agree that as a high-school teacher I have often, when students can’t seem to grasp or remember, fallen into the false thinking that the answer is just to better break it down step-by-step. This, of course, leads students to not be real learners but instead to become reliant on spoon-feeding. And perhaps because it looks like learning has happened when the pages look so well thought-out and put together in the students’ binders that we convince ourselves to carry on in this manner. Shifting direction and jumping (or falling) into the abyss of Concept-Based learning seems so uncertain and risky and messy.
Yet, as I am convinced that we really need to shift to teaching our kids to really think, instead of just regurgitate and recall long enough to spit back out for a test, we need to jump into that messy bog. Since I don’t currently have my own classroom, I have been fortunate to have this conversation around planning and implementing Concept- Based shifts with colleagues across the district. For some it is implementing the chapter 2 and 3 strategies (easier) but for other brave souls, it has been working together to try and implement a Concept- Based shift.
One such example has been with Ingrid Dekker’s grade 8 Social Studies class in Burdett. Our provincial grade 8 Social curriculum circles around the big concept of “World View”, which certainly does lend itself to conceptual framing. Although it has felt boggy and messy at many points, there have been some incredibly engaging conversations as we connect Japan to Russia to the Middle Ages – beliefs, customs, connections to the environment, political power… And then there is this somewhat related side project where we’ve been researching Man Made Wonders of the World for a writing and research project ~ and wouldn’t you know, there has been so much linking and cross-over because we’ve been asking precise questions (see image below) and having the big discussions, not just memorizing definition and gathering facts.
So how do you effectively deliver Professional Development in a school district that is geographically larger than countries like Albania, or Haiti or Rwanda?
Attending even a local PD offering is a costly venture that can quickly deplete available PD funds in our district: supposing the PD session does not even have a registration fee, by the time the teacher pays for a substitute teacher and perhaps claims mileage (from 200 km away, or 400 km round trip) there is not much yearly PD stipend left. Not to mention the time the teacher has to invest ahead of time in planning for a substitute and then perhaps in re-teaching concepts the next day. With all of these factors to consider, teachers in our district often may pass up PD events that they are interested in attending.
Fortunately, modern technology affords many solutions to overcome the PD time and distance woes. As instructional coaches, we have considered a few different ways to leverage technology for delivering PD:
after school 45-minute video hangouts
asynchronous district wide book studies
traditional PD with remote teachers joining the rest of the group through Video Conference tools
Facebook or Twitter chats around a topic
Although we’ve done some of those, our newest launch is something called PRSD8 Personal PD Bingo. I’ve been investigating models of PD bingo for sometime and we finally have released a version for our teachers to partake in.
Who? PD Bingo is for all PRSD8 teachers and administrators. In fact, it would be great if administrators piggy-backed their own school-wide bingo challenges onto this bingo. (eg. a free lunch for the first person at our school to complete 3 squares, etc).
What? Each square on the bingo board has a different task to complete. These tasks relate to our district goals and changing technologies. Many teachers who are inherently learners will already be doing some of the “squares” and will simply have to submit or attach their artifacts. Check out the board here or video over view here.
When? Bingo is open until approximately June 20, 2020. At that time, players will be awarded or credited with the highest level that they have reached. Our plan is to have random mid-month prize draws (Edu books, for any players who have posted to a bingo square within that month.
How? There are 3 ways of playing. On paper, by “making a copy” in Google Sheets and attaching artifacts/links, or by joining our PD Google Classroom and attaching artifacts there.
Several “artifacts” consist of posting some type of learning or reflection on digital platforms such as Flipgrid or Padlet. A few of the tasks involve putting work and/or ideas out there on Twitter.
Why? Our hope is that we can recognize colleagues for the personal PD that they already do. In addition, we are hoping that this is a way that we can connect district colleagues to each other and share the learning that is happening. For example, if you post a video about a good #Edubook that you’ve read, others can listen to your video when they go to post theirs. Even though this digital sharing might be uncomfortable for some, we still think these are important elements of our PD experience:
We want to encourage sharing of learning or cross-pollination between our teachers
This PD opportunity is meant to “stretch” teachers a bit, should they CHOOSE to play
We want our teachers to recognize and celebrate their learning with each other
As we approach a new provincial curriculum in the next year or two, we hope this opportunity will help to build networks between grade level and subject area specialists across the miles
Success Criteria?
We have a small gaggle of teachers who are off and playing with gusto. My worry is that we will only attract the people who are already learners to this game. Although this could still be successful if we created a cool community of PRSD8 learners, our hope is that the reluctant learners will also play. In order for that to happen we need:
support from principals
support from district administrators – it would be helpful if they presented it to principals as a valuable way to move our district goals forward
Just before school started in our district we hosted a full day PD session on creating BreakoutEDU games and investigating all of the great tools that are available for creating Breakout games with and for students at www.BreakoutEDU.com.
Our collaboratively created Christmas-themed Breakout
Of course, PD learning is “stickier” if participants are able to create and “do” as part of their learning. We spent several hours at our session working in small teams to contribute puzzles to what was to eventually be a collaborative Christmas Breakout game.
Here is a link to the ultimate product, with some tinkering, that all participants will have access to. Please give it a try! If you have the BreakoutEDU app, you can scan the image to access the game.
We created in Google Slides, and for some this was the first time they had worked collaboratively on a document like this. Here is our working document. The plan was that these images could be used for either physical or digital games. This was such a great way to slide in some Google Slides tips:
setting slides to “Custom” page size of 8.5″ x 11″ for easy printing
saving (downloading) single slides as a .png or .jpg file
using “Version History”
setting “expiry” for editing privileges in the share settings
using the “outside of the slide” to hold answer keys and other notes
all sorts of tricks for working with images – my favourite is Control +D for any easy duplicate of any image or slide
At the end of our work period, some teachers were dismayed at how little it seemed they had accomplished. Creating clever puzzles and formatting them for sharing is hard work! Fortunately, most attendees will have access to the Premium Platform account at Breakout EDU where they can take advantage of the hard work of others and use the games that have been posted there. In addition, they can use their Platform access to modify our collaborative creation in any way they see fit.
What I learned today... 