CSI Twitter- Crime Scene Investigation

CSI- Crime Scene Investigation at school!

Third graders find unidentified skeleton on school campus.

Unidentified skeleton found on school campus

What is one to do, when you find such a specimen on school grounds? Students across grade levels took a mini fieldtrip to the pond on campus to examine the skeleton. The BIG question for everyone, including teachers was: WHAT kind of animal was it? What an opportunity and teachable moment for students and teachers to collaborate in the investigation process and find out.

We had different approaches to the investigation:

Approach A:

• took photos of skeleton and xeroxed copies for students to take home and do research involving parents
• researched online for different images from animal skeletons to compare
• using parent veterinarian as resource
• got in touch with school librarian

Approach B:

• took photos of skeleton and e-mailed them to local Museum of Science and History, local zoo and Florida Fish & Wildlife Service
• e-mailed photos to local veterinarian.
• posted request for identification and research help on School Librarians listserve
• blogged about it on The Barefoot Librarian – Can you identify this Aninmal Skeleton?
• took the opportunity for lesson with 2nd & 3rd graders to talk about and demonstrate inquiry and research process
  • first stop library for reference interview
  • use books and online resources to narrow search
  • contact local experts
  • evaluate your sources. What makes an expert? (Animal lover versus Florida Fish & Wildlife Service Employee)

Approach C:

• took images of skeleton with iPhone
• uploaded to Twitpic, which sent  automatic tweet to  Twitter network

First set of images sent to Twitpic

Second set of images sent to Twitpic

Over the next three hours the “shout out” for help in identifying the skeleton received over 50 Twitter responses with

• links to resources to further investigate
• guesses on what it could be
• help to get experts involved
• questions to help further narrow the answers down
• advice where else to publish questions and take advantage of the power of social networking

Following the tweet

I uploaded the image to the ID-Please group on Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/idplease/

After a few hours, comments were left by other Flickr users

Note being left directly on image, identifying the three teeth being typical of a raccoon.

Another tip came and suggested to upload the image to a site called “idthis.org”

http://idthis.org/

The Twitter network also jumped in and retweeted (RT) the request for help onward to their network

Guesses and further questions what animal it could be flooded in

Suggestion of getting in touch with experts who could help our investigation along or expert’s guesses:

Links to more Resources:

I am amazed, again, at the power of the network. As the investigation spread across our school campus, so it did across the network. Having a support team, a flood of resources and experts at your fingertips (literally), it is truly an example how learning, research, has changed through the collaboration, connecting and communication tools of the social network era.

I am happy to report, that all three approaches of research came to the same conclusion.

Our skeleton seems to be a raccoon skeleton.

Our librarian has collected the specimen and is shipping it, as we speak, to the Florida Fish & Wildlife Services, who have offered to clean it up, give us a positive identification and ship it back to us.

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It is time for … Curriculum Mapping…

It is time to dust off the old spiral bound curriculum guide and take a good look at it. Can a document like this still serve the needs of our school today?

Licensed under Creative Commons by zeitengewimmel

Are there new ways to make this curriculum guide a tool that works with and for the teachers and our school?

I could already hear the moaning from teachers with comments such as:

• One more thing to do
• It will be painful
• More paperwork
• What for?
• Another thing, we as teachers, have to put endless hours into… only to have it collect dust on an administrator’s shelf.

There has to be a way to make this task relevant to teachers and effective in moving the school forward in the 21st century.

Charting a Course for Curriculum Mapping

I started looking at curriculum mapping research and resources that are available. As I am trying to wrap my brain around the concept of the why and how of curriculum mapping, several main points are crystallizing themselves out of this immensely big ocean of information.

A curriculum map is:

• an ongoing living, breathing document that is NEVER completed
• a way to document evidence of learning, what learning styles are they addressing, what level of thinking skills are they expecting of their students.
• a way for teachers to connect with their colleagues (one grade above/one grade below/across subject areas) and collaborate to create a student’s/class’/grade level’s/school’s learning map
• web based, making it accessible to everyone anytime and anywhere
• NOT a one time task to be completed and then left abandoned on a shelf
• NOT only about the content entered in the map but ALSO about the analysis of data, the review and interpretation of what that means and the change and adaptation for the future because of these findings.

Garbage in...Garbage out...

I wholeheartedly agree with Sid de Haan who writes at De Haans’s Ed Tech Blog

I have one caution about curriculum mapping software: The old adage “garbage in, garbage out” still applies.  In order for curriculum mapping to be valuable, participating staff need to have a clear vision of what quality work is and be dedicated to doing the work necessary to complete it.

While searching about “Curriculum Mapping”, I found a very comprehensive site called Curriculum Designers by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. There is a wealth of resources to read, watch and download about the different phases of curriculum mapping.

Here are a few quotes and my summary from the video clip “Introduction to Curriculum Mapping”:

• “Mapping asks teachers to reveal what they are actually doing in real time operationally in the classroom over the course of a school year and share it electronically with all other members of their faculty. What is going on in the building? It is immediate, it is authentic…”
• “The reason of doing [c.m.]  is that we can make decisions about gaps, repetitions, standard alignment and students’ needs, and what century are we preparing students for?”
• Difference between guidelines and operation
• Have the history, know what to do next, improve the journey for those who follow, update your work
• Share and collaborate across schools, countries

At the beginning of the school year, we let faculty know that as a school community, we will be developing a web based curriculum map. In October we rolled out Google Apps out to teachers.

In the last few weeks, I started meeting with each teacher individually or in small groups to go over the online platform (Google Docs-Spreadsheet) we would be using to collaboratively work on the curriculum maps.

Google Docs Spreadsheet Curriculum Mapping Template

I also wanted to give them an overview of how we were envisioning the curriculum and some of the new terminology we were going to use.I put together an initial package that included

• Definition of Curriculum Mapping (from the Curriculum Mapping Planner by Heidi Hayes Jacobs & Ann Johnson)
• Curriculum, the two sided coin (from the Curriculum Mapping Planner by Heidi Hayes Jacobs & Ann Johnson)
  • Content
  • Analysis of the content
• Old curriculum terms vs New Curriculum Mapping Terminology (from the Curriculum Mapping Planner by Heidi Hayes Jacobs & Ann Johnson)
• Elements on Curriculum Maps (from the Curriculum Mapping Planner by Heidi Hayes Jacobs & Ann Johnson)
  • Essential Questions
  • Concept/Content
  • Skills
  • Assessments
  • Activities
  • (we added a Resources and Standards column)
• Several Examples of Curriculum Maps
• Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy Butterfly Graphic by by Learning Today
• Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy  by Andrew Churches from Educational Origami
• Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy Graphic  by Andrew Churches from Educational Origami
• Howard Gardner’s Learning Styles Graphic by Langwitches

A BLOOMing Butterfly- Revised Bloom's Taxonomy

licensed under CC by Learning Today

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

Andrew Churches from Educational Origami -

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

Andrew Churches from Educational Origami -

Howard Gardner's Learning Styles

Teachers were asked to do the following until the next professional development workshop in January:

• familiarize themselves with the terminology
• join the Curriculum Mapping group on our school’s Ning

Stay tuned how how curriculum mapping journey is progressing. If your private school has gone through the process, I would love to hear your ideas, thoughts and experiences.

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Moving to Digital Student Portfolios

by Kevin Yezbick

I remember sitting down in a tiny chair at a tiny table during parent-teacher conferences at my daughter’s Pre-School class. Her teacher pulled out a folder filled with papers: drawings my four year old had made, her first attempts in writing her name, a checklist of whether she knew how to tie her shoes, recite her address and phone number, sound out certain letters and count to twenty. I guess you would call that folder my daughter’s first academic portfolio. At the end of the school year, that folder was sent home and some of the items ended up in a scrapbook/keepsake album I kept for her.

14 years have passed since my daughter was in Pre-School. The days, that her teacher collected her work and discussed them with me have long gone. Once an assignment is handed in, a report or project presented, it usually disappears forever in some teacher’s bin or in the trash after the grade was received.

What about the work that was put into producing the assignment? What about reflection and evidence of learning from progress between previous work and current work?

Judith A. Arter states in Portfolios for Assessment and Instruction ( You can download the Full Text PDF version):

Portfolios are scarcely a new concept, but renewed interest, fueled by the portfolio’s perceived promise for both improving assessment and motivating and involving students in their own learning, has recently increased their visibility and use. The definition of a portfolio varies some, but there seems to be a general consensus that a portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that tells the story of student achievement or growth.

She divides the reasons of doing student portfolios into two categories:

1. Assessment:
   -keeping track of what students know and can do
2. Instruction.
   - promoting learning–students learn something from assembling the portfolio.

What caught my attention was the statement:

Portfolios are not folders of all the work a student does.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my thoughts about the change from traditional Paper-and-Binder teacher dossier to the  Digital Teaching Portfolios. A natural sequel to the post would be the move towards digital student portfolios from the collection of work in manila folders.

How can we set up an electronic hub to store and display student work? Looking at the statement above “Portfolios are not folders of all the work a student does.” this is not enough though. We need to find tools  that allow students to easily access, view, add, edit and share their work.

The reasons FOR doing a portfolio as mentioned above (assessment and instruction) have not changed just because we are going digital. I want to look at the reasons WHY we should look into digital portfolios and WHAT platforms are available to us.

I see the difference and advantage of going digital in:

• Media: Ability to include diverse media in addition to text and paper (think audio, video, collaborative work, etc). Media that students are comfortable and identify with.
• Accessibility: A digital portfolio can be made available for access for all of the student’s teachers, parents, administrators, college recruiters, potential employers and other involved professionals in their lives regardless of time and geographic location.
• Revisability: Easily editable and revisable. Being able to connect artifacts and documents as they are being created and added to previous ones.
• Communication: Facilitates discussion between students and those interested in their progress.
• Transparency: Shows what students are learning and their progress (Related and linked to Accessibility)
• Continuity & Portability: Students work and add  on to their portfolios from elementary through middle and high school giving an organized overview of their learning journey and accomplishments.
• “Creativity: New non-linear formats and the integration of various media types allow students many ways to creatively express their professional knowledge and skills” (from Digital Portfolios).
• Reflection: Able to include a wide range of personal as well as outside reflection and feedback from a variety of sources and media.
• Going Green: Less copies, less papers, space saver (Thanks @81teacher)
• Digital Literacy: Learning to work with a variety of media tools (digital expression- Thanks @glazaro), Information Management (Personal Cyber-Infrastructure- Thanks @tuchodi) and creating an academic  digital footprint.
• Durability: The digital portfolio can’t burn (Thanks @suzieswimz), be swept away by a hurricane or get lost in a pile of other paperwork.
• Productivity: Less papers to keep track of for teachers (Thanks @jmiscavish), able to use RSS to keep track of and organize students’ contribution

If you want to get started in using digital portfolios for your students, consider some of the following platforms.

Blog Platform

• Blogs are web based, allowing students to log in and edit or view their portfolio  from any internet connected computer.
• Can be used as a hub for their writing, links to documents they produced or to embed other media files such as presentations, images, video and audio.
• Are organized in reverse chronological order with the newest post being on top.
• Each post or article  can be categorized and tagged.
• Encourage comments by others
• Have customizable themes that allow creativity and personalization in design.
• Free blogs for students: blogger, edublogs, wordpress, 21classes

Wiki Platform

• Wiksi are web based, allowing students to log in and edit or view their portfolio  from any internet connected computer.
• Can be used as a hub for their writing, links to documents they produced or to embed other media files such as presentations, images, video and audio.
• Are easily editable websites. Students can create different pages that can be linked to each other and to external sites.
• Easy to revise and edit.
• Not as much customizable design and theme options as a blog, unless students have design code knowledge
• Free wikis: wikispaces, pbwiki

Google

• One google account allows students to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
• Each file is accessible on any internet connected computer and able to be shared with other viewers and/or collaborators.
• Files can be stored in personalized folders and are easily searchable for keywords.
• Google Sites: students can create their own websites. (Thanks @amyhopkins for example site.

VoiceThread

• VoiceThread allows you to upload images, videos and documents
• Students can add text or voice comment to each “slide” to reflect, analyze or narrate.
• Can be shared with other interested parties, who can be invited to leave comments as well.

More resources about Digital Student Portfolios:

• EssentialSchools.org Digital Portfolios
• Principal’s Thoughts on Digital Portfolios
• Chrissy Hellyer, teachingsagittarian, is breaking grounds with digital student portfolios in VoiceThread .

Please share digital student portfolio examples, platforms, ideas and YOUR thoughts on taking the plunge of going digital with your students’ portfolios.