Innovation Apps – Innovation Blog

Teaching Social Studies with Extended Primary Sources

One of my favorite lessons teaching any time period of social studies has always been working with extended length primary sources.

Students’ initial difficulty completing these tasks usually stemmed from habits I like to help them break. The first bad habit was to copy sections of the source text verbatim instead of paraphrasing. Another was the expectation that all the answers were in the source text. An important, if not vital, competency in studying primary sources is to be aware of the outside knowledge and possible biases that the reader them-self brings to the source. This task calls on students to bring prior knowledge to direct awareness.

My primary source analysis task is a short essay. The process is the same for every source no matter the time period or even the grade level. Students address the source type, purpose, and audience. They provide relevant historical context from their own knowledge. They summarize the source. They address reliability factors. For middle schoolers, these “essays” are really more like short compositions. My high schoolers came to compose more extended length essays. Here’s one you can have for nothing:

g9.1 Code of Hammurabi_FULL Download

Up to my retirement, I was teaching in a small, rural K-12 school where I had students for three or even four years. This was a great benefit for so many reasons, one of which was they became “skilled at the skills”. I integrated a lot of writing and reading in my courses.

The Important is Not Always in the Text Itself

Most elementary level reading comprehension tasks call on students to locate an answer in the text to prove they understand. Working with primary sources means understanding what was going on in the historical period that produced the document. Getting students to grasp this takes patience and perseverance. This task asks students to deduce how the audience was expected to react to the source, who the intended audience was, what was going on historically at the time, and factors affecting reliability of the source. None of this is in the document explicitly itself.

A Great Way to Teach Critical Thinking and Deduction

I cannot recommend this assignment strongly enough for my fellow social studies teachers out there. I assigned this right after I completed the content delivery in a unit. It lent itself to long-term retention of the historical content because students needed to apply this newly acquired knowledge to the text. It promotes reading comprehension. It stimulates discussion in class. Often, a student would have a question about the source or how to answer questions of bias and audience and reliability. It would make a great opportunity to pause and have a discussion about these things. These extended length primary sources offer much more to the learning process that the short 200-word snippets we find in textbooks and on state tests (think document-based essays and constructed-response tasks).

The Essay Prompt Assignment may be a Hard Sell to Teachers

I have not been very successful in promoting this method to many others. Very few of the essay versions sell at our TeachersPayTeachers store. I think I understand why. It takes time and consistency to teach reliability factors to students. Grading a hundred short essays every unit of study is a daunting proposition in light of everything else we have to do. More than one transfer student remarked that my social studies courses had a lot of writing. None regretted it. More than one said they learned to write in my class.

But I get it! So, I am developing an automated multiple-choice version of these assignments. Mind you, reader, I feel that doing this as a composition is a better practice, but I can also see how doing a multiple-choice version of this task can be very instructive. I invite you to download this free resource to try it out.

Primary Source Analysis: Code of Hammurabi, 1TK3-D3DC-A16143Z-437-JON [preview] — Use the passcode at our website here.

The Multiple-Choice Version

First of all, if you want to have your students write the essay version of this assignment, each prompt includes the same organizer to guide their writing.

I have carefully documented where I got the source using an easy-to-understand source citation system that I borrowed from genealogists. This citation is presented first and should prompt the student to consider factors affecting reliability.

The multiple-choice version is auto-corrected. You get a passcode that students use to access the online task at the Innovation website. Learn more about our passcodes from this short video:

The questions are categorized under “Observations” whose categories are intended audience, historical context, source summary, and reliability factors. The resource includes a text version of the questions in case you don’t feel the online auto-corrected version is best.

g9.1 QUESTIONS for Code of Hammurabi Download

Primary Source Analysis: Code of Hammurabi, 1TK3-D3DC-A16143Z-437-JON [preview] — Use the passcode at our website here.

Unlocking the Power of Our Passcodes

If you’ve purchased one of our products on TeachersPayTeachers, you may have received passcodes for online activities. These passcodes allow your students to access and complete exercises on our website, where their scores will be displayed. But there’s more you can do with these passcodes, especially if you’re a subscriber to our Innovation platform. Here’s how you can maximize their potential.

How to Use Your Passcodes

Distribute to Students: Give the passcode to your students. They will enter it on the TestDrive page of the Innovation website to access the exercise. The system will display their scores upon completion.
Import into Your Dashboard:
- Log into Your Dashboard: Navigate to the upper right-hand corner of the Innovation website.
- Enter the Passcode: Paste the code into the provided field. Ensure you’ve copied it correctly.
- Import the Activity: Click “Import,” select the class for the activity, and confirm. The system will notify you of a successful import.
- Organize Your Activities: The new activity will appear at the top of your list. You can rearrange it by using the “Actions” > “Reorder” button and drag and drop it as needed.

Benefits of Importing Activities

Enhanced Monitoring: By importing activities into your Innovation account, you can track student progress more effectively. You’ll see who completed what, when, and how long they spent on each task.

Customization Options:

Edit Questions: Tailor the questions to better suit your teaching style or add cue points for enhanced engagement.
Add Resources: Upload PDFs, audio files, or other materials to create a richer learning experience.
Create New Questions: Use our question bank to generate new activities. The imported questions are saved in your database, categorized for easy access.

Creating Tests and Tutors

Instant Tests: Use the question bank to quickly assemble multiple-choice tests. Select the desired questions, and voilà – you have a ready-to-go test.

Tutoring Features: Set up practice sessions so students can rehearse before tackling the main exercise. This helps reinforce learning and builds confidence.

By subscribing to our Innovation platform, you gain these powerful tools to enhance your teaching experience. Import your activities, monitor student engagement, and customize content to meet your needs. We hope you’ll join us and unlock the full potential of your teaching resources.

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 4: Developing Conversation

Upon retiring from full-time public school teaching in 2023, I took part-time working teaching French remotely. Teaching via video conferencing turns out to be a terrific method and a very satisfying work!

Being also a web developer for a platform designed for remote teaching and in-class 1:1 designs, I was inspired by this work to begin developing a set of applications specifically for teaching world languages remotely.

I always loved improv and when teaching social studies or French in my career, my students and I enjoyed role play as a learning tool that was fun and meaningful. My practice was to incorporate many exercises to develop conversational proficiency using improv or semi-improvised “scaffold” dialogues.

The improv app at Innovation is now well developed. This app is available to subscribers only right now from the Language Console of the dashboard.

The teacher shares the screen in a remote teaching situation (or in-person, displays the screen in class). The first thing is to select the proficiency level. I use the CEFR descriptors.

A notice appears in red in the center advising students not to use AI while participating. This was sometimes an issue for me with some remote students, who quickly consulted Google translate instead of improvising their own contributions to our conversation. Teachers can remove this notice by clicking in.

Once the difficulty level is chosen, the teacher can select from the available conversation themes. These correspond to typical topics taught in world language classes that employ thematic units as the method. The reader will notice in the graphic that a scorecard appears on the right. The scoring method is that used in speaking tasks on New York State world language assessments and instructions are available at the click of a button.

Once the teacher has selected the theme, a set of possible dialogues appears.

Upon selecting the prompt, the conversation can begin. As the dialogue proceeds, the teacher can track the attempts and utterances in the scorecard on the right. They can award 2 points for utterances which are comprehensible, appropriate, and make no surprising errors for level. the can award 1 point for utterances that are not quite right for that student’s expected proficiency. The app automatically calculates the grade.

Now what I like to do is to use the large textarea in the center to provide useful words or phrases that the student asked for or needed during the dialogue.

List the expressions with their meaning separated by an equal sign. Here’s why: the Innovation flashcards app has been integrated so that we can study the phrases! Scroll down just a wee bit and you will find a small button called “Cards”. This will extract those phrases and arrange them into flash cards for study!

My practice is then to give students a copy of that list via email or in their lesson notes. They can themselves use Innovation’s Quick Flashcards app to generate their own drills for later.

The development of the improv app at Innovation has been a particularly exciting work. By incorporating elements of improvisation and conversation scaffolding, I’ve aimed to make language learning both engaging and effective for students in remote teaching contexts as well as for in-person learning. The app’s integration with other features such as proficiency level selection, themed dialogues, and real-time scoring ensures a comprehensive learning experience.

Introducing a New App: Ordered Lists

After a long hiatus while teaching social studies, I began a return to teaching French in 2018. I am a bit of a digital pack rat and was glad to find most of the teaching resources for French that I had developed in the 1990s still on an old hard drive. One of these is a unit for teaching a graphic novel called Astérix chez les bretons.

I found in that trove of activities a reading comprehension task that I had forgotten about: the ordered list or chronology. After reading the text and doing the usual vocabulary and comprehension kinds of tasks, I presented students a set of sentences where the events were out of order. On the worksheet, they were to number them in correct order according to the text. This was a great way to reinforce not only the events in the story, but more importantly the vocabulary and reading skills I was working to support.

I am currently teaching French online and one of my classes has chosen this graphic novel for a unit of study. Since I am teaching remotely, I want digital 21st century learning spaces instead of PDF worksheets. And so out of necessity was born this new app at Innovation, the ordered list.

The ordered list is simple: students either drag and drop or use the buttons to arrange the text boxes in order. They can check their progress as they go and submit a score when done. I can see how this would have been very useful when I was teaching history!

This needed to be easy for the teacher to create. It’s a snap: the teacher merely pastes in the ordered list and clicks a button to generate the activity.

As added features, one can attach a PDF document, an audio file, and/or embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo. The student could be prompted to order the text boxes based on these sources.

The usual 21st century learning spaces features are integrated. Teachers will see in the audit when their students access the task and how long they spend on it. The proctor monitors access to the page and student attention. It’s easy to view the scores of grades are taken and to apply standardized scoring or any of the other Innovation features and functions.

Try it for yourself! Use this passcode to access a chronology task for the American Revolution at the Innovation TestDrive: 397Q-NMXL-A15625Z-9-JON

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 3: Vocabulary Building

The Importance of Interactivity

The key drawback to early efforts at distance learning was being kind of trapped behind that camera like a goldfish in a bowl. You could make all the signs and signals you wanted, but the world on the other side of the glass was beyond your ability to control.

Teaching remotely is not highly effective when it consists of essentially just holding up things to the camera for the student to experience. Activate the Zoom – Skype – Meet – Teams session, share your PDF, give verbal instructions… this is a weak instructional practice mainly because it is largely passive for the student.

If the teacher were in a real classroom, tutoring the student at an honest-to-goodness table, the learning materials could be manipulated in real life in ways that support the process. They can fold the paper to hide the answer, they can shuffle the flash cards, they can write and cross out and scribble and erase. The manipulation of the learning materials is important.

The apps at Innovation are designed to promote the kind of virtual interactivity that heightens the effectiveness of teaching remotely. To be a great learning experience, the remote session needs to be virtually interactive in the same effective way that in-person lessons are. This is a big part of what we mean by the “21st century learning space”.

Flashcards

Let’s take up the example of teaching vocabulary using flashcards. In real life, I would want to use a process whereby I selectively show the student a new word, rehearse the pronunciation in some meaningful way, then cue up the words to rehearse the meanings.

Using the passive approach, I could share a PDF through the video conference software and “go over” the list with the student.

Using the flashcard app at Innovation, I can interact so much more effectively. To begin, I can select the target vocabulary word to display.

I prompt the student to repeat the pronunciation, then click to reveal the meaning.

Once we are through the list, I can repeat the process, only this time I can save out those items the student forgot.

Now we are only drilling those items. We can talk about mnemonic devices, use the words in sentences, or just repeat and rehearse. Once the student has the words down pat for recognition, I click Reverse Cue-Response to prompt from English cue.

Integrated Flashcard App

The improvised conversation app and the scaffold dialogue app both have integrated flashcards. During an improvised conversation task, the student may need to ask me how to say some words as we run through the conversation the first time. I list them for them in the textarea below the prompt.

So long as I pair the new phrases with an equal sign and a meaning, the app can generate a flashcard system right underneath after our conversation.

We can rehearse now the new words and phrases before we perform the dialogue once again.

Interactivity is Key

Being able to interact virtually over remote teaching sessions in ways that are as effective as in-person is absolutely necessary to achieve a satisfying learning experience that maximizes our effective use of time. The flashcard app at Innovation facilitates this process of simple cue-response training that is so foundational in teaching language. It allows me to go beyond just sharing my screen to “go over” a PDF!

Managing Student Accounts at Innovation

In response to teacher requests over the years, there are a number of different ways to add student sub-accounts to your virtual classroom at Innovation.

Self-Registration

It’s best to just have students register themselves in your virtual classroom. There is a link provided on the Students tab in your teacher dashboard. The links are on the left.

One link is generic, allowing students to create sub-accounts using a password or using Google Sign-in.

One link is specific to Google Sign-in. Send this one if no one is using username-password. You can always switch later if you want.

Import Student Roster from Google Classroom

If you are integrating Innovation tasks into your Google Classroom, you can import the rosters.

Adding Students Manually

Teachers can just add students manually using the Add Student app. The app will create a unique username from the student’s first and last names. You can optionally assign students to a class. More about enrollment below…

Adding Students via Spreadsheet

Teachers can upload a spreadsheet of student data and let Innovation create the accounts from there. Teachers who do this must use the XLSX template provided.

class_roster_template Download

Expiration Dates on Student Accounts: Commercial Licenses versus Free Licenses

Teachers who have a commercial license to Innovation can manage expiration dates on student accounts. This is useful, for example, if you are working for a tutoring service and you are charging students to access your virtual classroom for a certain period of time.

Teachers with Free Licenses do not have expiration dates on student accounts and need to manage them manually.

When a new student is added for commercial accounts, it is by default created for two days at first. Teachers need to add time. Manage student account expiration dates in Students :: Student Account Expiry.

How Students Access Innovation

There are three ways students can log in to Innovation:

Google Sign-in
PIN + Virtual Room Number
Virtual room number + username + password

Google Sign-in

If you are using Google classroom and plan to integrate Innovation tasks into that platform, this is your best choice. Students will already have Google accounts and they can sign in without remembering an extra password.

Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) are for students under 13 because students must be 13 or older to use the Google Signin or username-password methods. But you can use this for any of your students. Teachers need to activate the PIN system and can optionally allow access this way only from certain IP addresses. For example, I have set this up so that my students could only use the PIN from my school.

Username + Password

The traditional way to log in also still exists at Innovation. Students need to know your virtual classroom number, their username assigned on account creation, and a password. The teacher controls the passwords.

The Quick Login Link

If a student cannot log in because they have forgotten their password, you cans end them a quick login link. This link will automatically log students in without a password, Google authentication, or PIN. It only works once and the link is only good for two hours.

Manage Course Enrollment

Teachers can now restrict access for students to certain courses in their virtual classroom at Innovation. By default, enrollment is “open”, meaning students can freely access any course.

For teachers who need to restrict access by students to a certain course, there is an app to manage enrollment. Access the app from Students :: Student Accounts Management :: Manage Course Enrollment. From here, follow instructions to restrict enrollment and then assign students to a class.

Commercial licensees will find this useful if they are charging for access to a course and need to prevent free access to courses for which students have not paid.

21st Century Learning Spaces: Asynchronous Discussion Forum

My first experience with asynchronous discussion forums came in courses I was taking myself online through Empire State College a number of years ago. Many readers will recognize the assignment: given a prompt, students are to post their response and then reply to the responses of a number of other students in the class. Typically, there was a deadline by which these discussions had to take place. I liked the exercise and I found it useful to address the course material.

I would invite the reader to read my earlier post on synchronous chat, which presents some of the research on online discussion and chat.

Promoters of asynchronous discussion forums point out rightly that this task brings greater participation than face-to-face class discussions do. Whereas in the latter situation, participation may be dominated by an extroverted few or limited in other ways, the online forum brings everybody in. Asynchronous discussion leave time for research and reflection that is not practical in the face-to-face class. There are some practical considerations for students at the middle and high school level that are not usually issues at the college level.

My Experience

I used asynchronous form discussions in my middle and high school social studies classes for a decade. This occurred in each unit of student. In my context, students were assigned a persuasive prompt to which they were expected to take a position and post two supporting reasons. Next, they were assigned to present the opposing view to another student (even if it did not match their actual personal views), and finally they were to defend their original position in reply to the student who was assigned to present the opposing view to themselves.

Seventh and eight graders needed training right off the bat, naturally. Accustomed to social media, their early contributions were vapid and full of emojis and “txt” language. It was important to remind them that this was a formal enterprise and that standard English conventions held. It was often difficult to get them to elaborate their ideas toward the 200-word goal set for their opening post.

I was working in a small, rural school where I would have the students from grades seven through ten, so I could see their work develop over the years.

By end of 9th grade, posts became more sophisticated

I found it to be a good practice to offer the highest marks to those who provided evidence and cited a source. I coded a citation generator right in the forum app to encourage this.

Grading the Posts

Scoring these can be labor intensive for no other reason than the layout of the forum itself. The page is designed for reading and responding, but this does not work well for scoring because there is too much scrolling and searching necessary to view posts and replies.

The scoring app makes it easy for the teacher to view the rubric, the student’s posts, and their replies to others in one place. Analysis tools lets the teacher see how many posts, when they were made, and even the readability level of the contributions.

Practical Issues

The main problem I encountered in this assignment was that students would forget to complete it at first. I resolved this by assigning it in class and giving time. For example, on the first day I would present the prompt and instruct students to post their positions that class period before continuing with the day’s other work. The following day, students would have time to post their replies and finally a third day they would post their defense.

Another issue that came up was getting everyone the needed number of replies. Some posts would attract more replies than others. Some students needed a reply so they could offer defense. The solution was to modify the assignment and declare that, once one has posted, one is obliged to offer the opposing view to the person above in the forum feed.

Interestingly, these assignments also led to face-to-face spontaneous class discussions, sometimes with me and sometimes with a group. Although this may have been somewhat distracting for students in the class working on other things, we found some compromise time to allow these spontaneous interactions to proceed without disrupting the other work much. These were golden opportunities, conversations of enormous educational benefit that are so hard to artificially initiate and encourage.

I came to regard the discussion each unit as a sort of group persuasive writing effort. I included training in grade eight in persuasive writing and logical fallacies. The discussion app here at Innovation has a feature which allows readers to flag posts as committing a logical fallacy.

The Innovation Discussion Forum App is a 21st Century Learning Space

Guardrails: The app lets the teacher monitor all conversations and to delete problematic ones.
Training Wheels: The teacher can attach a grading rubric and sample posts. I used to post first under a pseudonym to whom the first student could reply. Additionally, weaker students can peruse the posts of stronger students in an effort to get a clear picture of the kinds of opinions that can be had on the issue.
Debriefing: Debriefing is easily achieved by projecting the discussion screen on the from board. Students posts in this task are not anonymous.
Assessment and Feedback: The scoring app is very efficient and highly developed from years of use. The teacher can view all pf the student’s posts and replies without having to scroll across the entire platform. Analysis tools reveal the readability of the text, how much they wrote, how analytical it is.
Swiss Army Knife: The discussion app lends itself well to more in-depth persuasive writing assignments such as an essay.
Locus of Data Control: The student chat submissions are stored on a server licensed to the teacher’s control. Commercial apps such as FaceBook and Twitter may be less dedicated to the kinds of privacy and control exigencies of education.

Ideas in Closing

Asynchronous discussions are great – my students and I enjoyed these tasks. It is my view that higher level thinking demanded by persuasion and debate (Bloom’s evaluation level of the cognitive domain) really enhance long-term memory of the content. I cannot emphasize enough the value of these kinds of higher-order task. Working in a 21st century learning space promotes the participation of everybody.

21st Century Learning Spaces: Guardrails and Training Wheels

When digital natives, native to the world of online commerce, gaming, and entertainment (digital commercial spaces), come to the 21st century learning space, they bring with them customs from their native shores that are maladaptive. Guardrails are features of software applications that prevent students from engaging in counterproductive activity. Training wheels are app functions that assist students to meet their objectives by coaching, scaffolding, and offering interim assessment of progress.

Focusing Attention

For one thing, the native of yonder shore is accustomed to dividing their attention continuously from one phenomenon to the next. They call it “multi-tasking”, but we know in our land that this is a myth. On social media, advertisers call out to them like hawkers in a busy marketplace. In video games, the constant drive toward increased and sustained stimulation calls their attention elsewhere each moment. Even passive entertainment programs (what we used to call “TV shows”) change scene every few bewildering seconds. Notifications and popups clamor for attention at frequent intervals. Often in place with multiple devices (phone and laptop), the native of digital commercial space is drawn from one virtual event to the next … text from a friend … notification of en email message … ads offering discounts on the item recently searched …

Distractability is the principle maladaptive trait for the 21st century learning space. An unwillingness to ignore and delay some stimuli in favor of sustained attention to one task is the first transformation the native of digital commercial space needs to make. The mechanism of learning, of activity in the working memory that leads to encoding into long-term memory, is not well served by constant interruptions. Studies in cognitive load reinforce the idea that, while varying from individual to individual, there are limits to what can be held in working memory and that overload means information loss.

21st century learning spaces include guardrails to help focus attention and train executive functioning. There are a variety of ways to do this. Third party apps that force students to share their screens with the teacher and which limit the number of browser or window tabs that can be opened are key. Apps should react to loss of focus, such as a multiple-choice test that locks up if a student opens another browser window or one which reports this activity to the teacher. Video monitoring software can track when a student starts, pauses, and stops an embedded video for study.

Academic Honesty

Academic honesty is a new dialect that natives of the commercial world need to learn to speak. In that environment, liberal copy-paste and derivative creation is almost de rigueur. The 21st century learning space provides some guardrails and training wheels. For guardrails, there are apps that check for plagiarism and app features such as recording and reporting on student paste and right clicks in working space.

Evaluating source material is more important in the 21st century learning space than in commercial country. For training wheels, there are apps that guide students in the customary features of a reliable source and that automatically check for errors. Citation generators teach the standard format of source citation in various disciplines.

Coaching and Tutoring by an Algorithmic AI

Studying sometimes means learning information, studying facts, old-fashioned memorization. In 21st century learning spaces, apps for this purpose have features that allow the student to limit the number of items to learn at a time. They also manage the items being studied such that things the student has already learned are hidden away from view so that energy is focused on what has not yet been learned.

The algorithmic AI in the tutor app at Innovation trains students in keywords to remember. The app discards questions students get right so they only work on those they do not yet know.

Composing longer text responses can benefit from coaching. For example, the algorithmic AI at Innovation can be easily trained to provide students immediate feedback on the composition of a summary or an outline. This is an important example of training wheels that supports skill development. The AI can detect copy-paste from an article as well, so as to provide a guardrail against plagiarism.

The algorithmic AI can coach students on composing a summary and estimate the grade they would earn on the work as it progresses.

Accountability: Tracking Activity

In the traditional physical classroom, we can track students’ activities and refocus when students are misdirected. Once we enter the digital world, it is important that 21st century learning spaces permit teachers to maintain the same level supervision. Such spaces need to include extensive auditing capabilities to see when students log in, start a task, finish a task, score on an assessment, how long they spent on the task, and so forth.

Sample fragment of an audit at Innovation showing student activity.

Screenshot of an audit showing student activity at Innovation. These reports can be shared directly with parents.

Support Staff

21st century learning spaces facilitate support staff participation. Software features should easily allow teaching assistants and parents to access selected student’s on-task audits, assignments, scores, and so forth. Proctors for tests in separate location would benefit from access codes allowing them to easily support student learning and testing security.

At Innovation, teachers can let teaching assistants and parents access coursework and student information.

Special Education

Individual education plans (IEPs) offer students the equal opportunity afforded by testing modifications. A 21st century learning space will have these modification options built right in.

Innovation has a number of features to support program and testing modifications:

Feature that allows a proctor to unlock and monitor tests
Automated extended time on tests
Option to attach an alternative, lower-level reading assignment to standard tasks

At Innovation, teachers can set testing accommodations like extended time for individual students in compliance with IEPs.

Guardrails and Training Wheels

21st century learning spaces stand in contrast to commercial digital spaces in providing the support systems that middle and high school students need developmentally. If your experience is like mine, you will find the classroom learning environment much tamed and more effective with these elements in place. Trying to apply apps designed for a commercial environment (sales, games, social media) leads to a wild west effect in classrooms where learning opportunities are lost to distractions.

21st Century Learning Spaces: The Paradigm

The premise of the 21st century learning space concept is that co-opting software applications and devices that were designed for entertainment, socializing, or commerce is a less-than-perfect model for education. The promise of technology for education is realized when the app design meets the needs of an educational community. Five interrelated characteristics of the 21st century learning space that I propose are:

Training Wheels
Guardrails
Debriefing Kit
Swiss Army Knife
Locus of Data Control

Training Wheels

The development of generative AI and lesser algorithmic AI both offer opportunities to aid the instructor in one of the core strategies of teaching: break it down into manageable pieces to master the goal. 21st century learning spaces could include coaching on spelling, grammar, and even content.

Computer software opens the door to more efficient content management. Teachers curating their classroom resources online have organizational tools that exceed old fashioned binders and notebooks. Addressing the needs of students with disabilities is a key efficiency of 21st century learning spaces: presenting modified texts and assignments becomes more manageable.

Training wheels are temporary assistive devices for young people learning new things. They are a modification to the program that is usually temporary; a scaffolding that brings students upward in the zone of proximal development.

Students have the tools they need to manage their own learning experiences.

21st century learning spaces incorporate a system of badges and rewards as well as provide visualization of students’ progress and achievements.

Guardrails

Young people are easily distracted, especially since their main use of digital devices as been entertainment. 21st century learning spaces have guardrails to limit distractions and develop executive functioning. Examples of such features include extensive logging of online activity in the learning space, a system of scoring and accountability, a “proctor” feature that tracks student interaction with the content.

Plagiarism has never been easier than in the digital realm. Guardrail features of educational apps help prevent academic dishonesty by making it harder to go undetected.

Moderated social engagement apps reinforce learning through shared experiences, discussions, and study groups with confidence that inappropriate content is avoided.

Guardrails are there to protect us from error, safety features along the road at dangerous points to avoid a pitfall.

Debriefing Kit

In a learning community, it is helpful to study our errors to learn from them. This is especially useful in teaching writing, but it has applications to all subjects. Anonymity is very important: if we’re going to display student errors for analysis, everyone must be confident and assured that no one will be humiliated.

Learning analytics available to teacher in the 21st century learning spaces provide detailed information about student progress to inform lesson plans and follow up.

Creating debriefing lessons is time consuming. For example, when I taught social studies I would display anonymous passages from student essays to work on form or content in a whole class activity. When I taught French, I found it very useful to display selected sentences from compositions for correction or improvement.

21st century learning spaces lend themselves to debriefing: they are designed such that the anonymous presentation of teacher-selected student work is easily generated for debriefing.

Swiss Army Knife

Saved data exists in database tables in the digital world. 21st century learning spaces should leverage this flexibility to facilitate lesson planning in multiple modes. Multiple-choice questions can be short answer questions, test questions can be Jeopardy review games, notes taken on lecture can inspire questions for discussion, and so forth. All this should be easy and fast.

21st century learning spaces are a Swiss army knife. Such collections of applications serve many functions from the same core.

Locus of Data Control

When you post to FaceBook, Twitter, or any other public commercial platform, where is your data? If you use FaceBook to moderate a class discussion, what control do you, the teacher, have over your students’ contributions?

21st century learning spaces are those where the teacher rules the roost and student privacy protection is a high priority. In this paradigm, student work is licensed to the teacher’s control for a specified period, after which it is auto-deleted. Inappropriate content posted by students can be edited, hidden, retained for investigation by authorities, or deleted per the instructor’s decisions.

In the commercial domain, data is the valuable commodity used by tech companies. Our data. It is important that student work and teacher’s intellectual property are in safe digital locations and under the teacher’s control.

21st Century Learning Spaces: Synchronous Chat

When I was developing an app for synchronous chat, my eighth, ninth, and tenth graders were only too happy to be my beta-testers. It was in the last month before I was to retire and so I wanted to make good use of my time remaining, especially preparing students for the conversation part of the regional world language examination in French. The chat app arose out of the desire for an effective method for students to communicate in the lesson in a paired situation, in a 21st century learning space.

Synchronous Online Discussion in a Co-located Classroom Setting

A number of advantages to blending online discussion tools in the classroom present themselves. In peer face-to-face interactions, “student differences in social status, verbal abilities and personality traits cannot guarantee equal participation rates (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). High-status, high-ability and extrovert peers may often dominate the discussion and group decision making” (Barron, 2003, Caspi et al., 2006, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). Online discussion tools can reduce these factors and present a more egalitarian framework for participation.

Having students in the same room communicating with each other on a chat system may seem odd at first glance, but in addition to the benefits noted above, there are some practical benefits especially for the secondary level. The presence of an adult will ensure more on-task behavior and more appropriate behavior (no “flaming”, for example). Students may not all have equal access to home internet services such an an asynchronous model would demand. Furthermore, the synchronous model greatly ensures that the task will get done. Asynchronous assignments often fall down to procrastination, a typical foible of the adolescent. A literature review by Asterhan and Eisenmann reveal that “[c]ommunication in synchronous discussion environment is closer to spoken conversation and therefore likely to be more engaging and animating than asynchronous conferencing (McAlister, Ravenscroft, & Scanlon, 2004, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). Students have also been found to be more active and produce more contributions in synchronous, than in asynchronous environments (Cress, Kimmerle, & Hesse, 2009, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann).”

When used during the class period, synchronous chat is a small part of a larger lesson which includes scaffolding, participation, and debriefing.

Early synchronous chat software such as reviewed in the study by Asterhan and Eisenmann had some practical limitations for class discussion. Instant messaging or threaded discussion boards both work on precedence by chronology, which makes conversations difficult to follow and so may actually defeat the purpose of the exercise. Some teachers have attempted to use FaceBook or Twitter to facilitate class discussions. These platforms were designed to satisfy a commercial interest.

A 21st century learning space paradigm provides the necessary structure (guardrails and training wheels) to maximize quality participation frequency while eliminating concerns about privacy and advertising.

How it Works

The chat app works like this: the teacher opens a chat session and displays the host control dashboard on the large screen. Next, students join the session from their devices and once everyone is onboard, the teacher explains the assignment. The teacher then clicks the control to generate random partners and then to enable the chat session. A timer can optionally be set. Students engage in a real time discussion to carry out the task for the allotted time. During this session, the teacher can display the current chats going on (anonymously, of course) and offer any coaching that would be useful. At the conclusion of the time, the host closes the chat session and can debrief by displaying the chats and offering comment. The chats are anonymous: unless students introduce themselves in live session, they do not know necessarily who their partner is. The pairs are organized by “city”, a nickname generated by the app to identify them from a list of world capitals.

The first issue that developed was that they enjoyed it (not necessarily a problem but…). It caused a lot of “real” chatter in class as students chuckled about funny things others had said or trying to find out who their partner was. Older students who were more serious about their studies also were motivated to communicate outside the chat session to strategize in real time addressing their assignment. My tenth graders were assigned to use the chat as a writing exercise, such that they answered the prompt by collaboratively composing a paragraph. When a class is engaged in this activity, they need to be trained to maintain a mostly silent room, focused on the task and not the distractions.

A second issue that arose in the early version of the app was that students would forget the prompt or instructions. It was easy to modify the app to allow the teacher to attach “accessories”: text, video embed, and/or a PDF document with the assignment and rubric displayed. Now students could refresh their understanding of the assignment by clicking a button.

Sometimes a student would leave the chat window to another browser tab to look something up. For situations where is is not allowed, I modified to app to include a “proctor” that records right in the app when a student leaves the window and when they paste in text.

Research on this sort of application support the practice of including assessment in the activity (Gilbert and Dabbagh, 2005, as cited in Balaji & Chakrabati, 2010). Students are aware of the rubric and are graded, which has an enhancing effect on their performance as they are often more mindful of their progress. Using the timer, which displays in the front of the room from the teacher’s host screen is also helpful. If one is pressed for time, one is less likely to be off-task without knowing it.

In keeping with the paradigm of the 21st century learning space, the app lends itself well to assessment and debriefing. The assessment screen makes it easy to assess student work on a built-in rubric.

Students can see their scores and comments.

I developed this in the context of teaching French, but its application to other subjects is clear. For example, a social studies lesson could include a document or video segment for students to analyze or a short discussion on a topic from lecture.

The chat application is designed as a 21st century learning space .

Guardrails: The proctor for the chat app reports on text paste-ins and leaving the browser tab.
Training Wheels: The optional accessories can provide the scaffold support for the discussion. The optional timer supports on-task behavior.
Debriefing: In debriefing mode, anonymized student contributions to chat can be displayed for analysis and discussion.
Assessment and Feedback: In scoring mode, an efficient system of evaluation saves time and offers students significant feedback.
Swiss Army Knife: The chat can be viewed in discussion mode, where other features can be applied such as identifying logical fallacies and replying to the posts of students other than one’s assigned partner. In forum mode, the teacher can participate.
Locus of Data Control: The student chat submissions are stored on a server licensed to the teacher’s control. Commercial apps such as FaceBook and Twitter may be less dedicated to the kinds of privacy and control exigencies of education.

Synchronous chat turned out to be a hit in my French class. It provided a solid and effective tool for engaging everyone in the lesson and made me feel like my time was well spent. In the next academic year (2023-24), I will be teaching an online synchronous college level French course. Look for posts next fall where I share how the new app went over in that class.

References

Aderibigbe, Semiyu Adejare, Can online discussions facilitate deep learning for students inGeneral Education?

C.S.C. Asterhan and T. Eisenmann, Introducing synchronous e-discussion tools in co-located classrooms: A study on the experiences of ‘active’ and ‘silent’ secondary school students, Computers in Human Behavior (2011).