Learning in Digital Environment

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!

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 2: Composition

Teaching composition in a world language is always challenging to organize and execute. In my experience, the best lesson series in supporting the development of strong composition skills consists in the following:

Students should have limited access to outside resources in composing their work. It’s too tempting, especially now, to use an AI translator.
Students should learn to avoid translating in their head from English to the target language. Instead, they should learn to “say what they can say, not what they want to say.”
Assessment should provide a clear and understandable measure of the value of the work product and a clear path to remediation for next time.

I started teaching in 1991 (I am now retired). Back then as a French teacher, the method for assessing student compositions involved marking off each clause, identifying each error, and checking whether the clause was comprehensible (to a native speaker accustomed to dealing with foreigners), appropriate (such that it built on the theme coherently; it “fit”) and had good form (no more than 1 error in grammar / conventions). This was abandoned in the later 1990’s for a rubric that was more consistent with other New York State Regents examinations of the time.

I think the only thing I like about the rubric assessment was that it considered the variety of vocabulary used. Otherwise, the rubric did not really satisfy what I wanted in an assessment for composition work and this rubric was far more subjective than I was comfortable with.

Teaching remotely, I wanted an app that met my criteria for supporting composition skills in the target language.

The first challenge was to limit the use of outside references. For this, I coded a sort of algorithmic surveillance AI that I called “proctor”. Proctor consists of a series of JavaScript functions that record when a student has resized a window, pasted text, “left” the page, or restarted the task. These actions are saved and reported to me when I assess the students’ work.

In the remote teaching situation that I enjoy at present, students do their compositions unsupervised for homework. The proctor allows me to curtail student access to other tabs because it announces in red text on the page whenever any of these “suspicious” actions occur. Although students may indeed use their phone separately on the side to confer, I can also check later in our debriefing by asking whether they know the leaning of one phrase or another.

The composition app for world languages allows me to present students a word bank. The word bank can be an antidote to mental translating because students can be taught to weave together meaning from words they have rather than get caught up on words they don’t.

The assessment process in the composition app works as follows. The instructor:

marks off the clauses for evaluation.
highlights each error.
assesses each clause for comprehensibility, appropriateness, and form.
assesses the whole composition for vocabulary “richness” (10% of the score).

This process lends itself well to debriefing because the errors can be studied directly and are readily observed.

A 21st Century Learning Space

The composition app is a 21st century learning space.

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. The composition app has space for a word bank to support composition from known lexical items.

Guardrails are there to protect us from error, safety features along the road at dangerous points to avoid a pitfall. The composition app includes an algorithmic AI to monitor student activity and discourage assistance that would not be appropriate.

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. The composition app is readily shared with the student and the assessment page is clear and easy to understand. When I debrief these, I paste the student composition into another screen and go over the relevant errors.

21st century learning spaces are a Swiss army knife. Such collections of applications serve many functions from the same core. The composition app saves the composition prompt in a database whose elements can be re-used.

21st century learning spaces are those where the teacher rules the roost and student privacy protection is a high priority. Locus of data control is with the teacher. The teacher can view the composition as it’s being composed and has ownership over the final product.

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 1: Rapport Building

Since September, I have had the distinct pleasure of working part-time for a company based in California that offers remote middle and high school credit-bearing courses in world languages. LanguageBird is perfect fit for a retired public school teacher and I am very contented working for them (not a paid promotion).

The pandemic placed we public school teachers in the position of teaching remotely, some for the first time. A lot of that went poorly in some places, but in other places it went pretty well. My work teaching remotely now has given me the chance to re-explore online teaching practice and the kinds of 21st century learning spaces that meet the needs of that situation.

Besides my work for LanguageBird, I also am enjoying teaching a remote French class for the public school district from which I retired last June. This is very different from LanguageBird in many ways and teaching in both contexts has provided a wealth of interesting experiences that I feel are instructive. In this series of posts, I would like to share my experiences and conclusions as well as the apps I am developing to support remote teaching.

In the public school remote teaching context, we had set it up as a daily synchronous class. This was informed by our pandemic experience that asynchronous courses are a bad idea for most adolescents. It is a small class of five, two for French III and three for college French, credited from a local community college who approved my application to work as adjunct for them in a high school. Each school day during period 2, I fire up a Google Meet and students log in. They are supervised by a language teacher (Spanish).

We (administration and I) were concerned that remote teaching made it difficult to maintain the kind of teacher-student rapport that was so necessary for learning. I suggested that I work in-person for a half day at the end of each marking period (ten weeks) to teach a class and meet with students individually so they can present their projects and practice French conversation. (The district is a 45-mile commute for me one-way, so going in-person for one daily class was not practical.)

At LanguageBird, we only teach one-on-one lessons. I find this extremely useful, so from start I modified my public school lesson plans such that I would only teach whole-group for the first 15 minutes and then each student would have an individual “tutorial” with me for the balance of the time. This turned out to be a fantastic idea and I am guessing the students like it too.

During the pandemic in my district, we had two days to launch into teaching by video-conference (Here is a post on my experience teaching during the pandemic). My current students, many of whom were then in my sixth grade social studies class back in 2020, had a mostly negative experience learning online in general. I felt strongly motivated to demonstrate from the start of the school year that this remote learning experience would not be like that. The first upgrade I made to what I was doing in 2020 was to focus on individual lessons over group lessons.

I think of positive rapport as being a trusting sense of mutual goodwill between an instructor and a pupil. Building a positive rapport with students is extremely important. I had the sense that this was possible only to a very limited degree in remote learning. However, I now stand corrected. In remote instruction over video-conferencing, it is necessary to favor one-on-one teaching situations.

Fostering positive rapport extends not to just being present to interact one-on-one. It is also built on online software applications that foster efficient and readily accessible learning interactions for delivery, practice, evaluation, and debriefing.

Next post: teaching composition to world language students remotely.

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).

Innovation Pass Codes

Innovation passcodes can be purchased at online marketplaces for teachers. These are very handy in two ways:

Gives Access to a Task in Mr. Jones’ Virtual Classroom

You can give your students the passcode to use at InnovationAssessments.com/TestDrive. This lets them complete the task without logging in or the teacher having to register.

To record the score or other results of the task, have the student take a screenshot, save the page, or let you see.

Import the Task into your own Innovation Virtual Classroom

Teachers can use the passcode to import the task into their own classroom. The advantage of this is that the questions are added to your categorized test question bank. Now you can re-use the questions to generate a number of different tests and activities. You can edit the questions and reorganize them.

Being a subscriber also lets you save student work and run analysis tools on it such as the grade-curving app. It lets you generate “Live Sessions” where you project questions on the board and students respond on their own devices.

So, yes, we are trying to encourage you to become an Innovation subscriber! We think you’ll love using this site as much as we do. I taught my courses exclusively out of this site for almost ten years.

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So here was my experience doing remote teaching in the pandemic…

I have been procrastinating writing this post. Probably because, like many of the readers who taught online during the pandemic, this is not exactly a fond memory. However, I have two reasons to move this task to the top of my to-do list. Firstly, I am aware that it has already been three years and I don’t want to forget anything important. Secondly, I will be teaching a course online next year and I want that to be a highly successful enterprise. I think there must be lessons to learn on reflection from teaching secondary level students online.

Pre-pandemic Experiments in Remote Teaching

My first foray into teaching online was a pilot online class I taught in 2016-2017. It was called Virtual United Nations. My school was a small, rural Adirondack district with limited offerings outside the core subjects and remediation. I was active on the technology committee and we found distance learning, as it was envisioned in the 1990s, was not going to work for us.

I had four students in the pilot course. It was an asynchronous course, the final project of which was participation in a regional high school United Nations simulation. For me personally, this course had the dual purpose of satisfying a graduate course requirement in digital teaching and learning through Empire State College. My paper is attached below.

V-MUN Download

Pandemic Remote Teaching for Me

At the time the pandemic hit, I was teaching social studies for grades 6-10 and a French class for grade 6. Schools in New York State closed 13 March 2020, supposedly for two weeks. I did not set foot in the school building again until September.

Like most schools in the region, our students all had Chromebooks. We scrambled to send middle and high school students home with these and chargers. Our plan evolved somewhat from its start, but eventually we settled on mostly synchronous remote classes that followed the same daily schedule as our regular day. At the end of each week, we were required to submit a summary of the week in our remote classes, including what we covered, student and teacher morale, and participation rates. I was able to search my email sent box to save copies of my reports from 13 March to 12 June 2020.

Lessons Learned

Here are some highlights of what I learned about online teaching from my weekly summaries in 2020:

24 Apr I prefer delivering prerecorded video lessons to the live video. I think the live video sessions may turn out to be more PR than substance for a lot of reasons. I like them, but we’ll see. I embed my prerecorded video sessions with questions.
01 May It makes me feel happy to interact on video with [students]. I am still just learning how to conduct video classes. This week, I make them show their faces and I call on them to respond.
8 May Sadly, my little Zoom “working together” idea did not work – no one showed. The streaming lessons are the highlight of my week because I get to see the kids, but I only get 6-8 now whereas I was getting the majority the first week.
08 May Education for people under ~17 needs to be a social, in-person experience and the governor’s “re-imagined” education might fail to see that. We are still primates, after all, and education requires the physical presence of teachers until upper high school.
15 May Participation in live streaming classes is very poor even with a reward system. I only get 3-6 kids out of classes of 20. These are among the highlights of my week, though. I put together nice presentations and I like seeing them.
15 May I got good participation in a survey asking successful online learners to share their secrets.
15 May I probably did not need to shorten 8th and 9th grade curriculum as much as I did.
15 May I have found breaking the tasks down to smaller steps so there is some small thing to do each day a highly effective practice for remote learning.
12 June Breaking tasks down into daily 25-30 minute bits works great and I’ll do that in-building now too
12 June “Remote learning” is NOT “homeschooling” and I worry that we burden parents too much.
12 June I think about 40% of my students need to be in school with a person teaching them.

The paper “Successful Students Share Their Secret for Online Learning” is linked below. This was an extended survey of 21 (out of 87 total students on my roster that year) of my most successful students in remote learning during the pandemic. You can see for yourself the good advice they shared and some interesting survey results that may not be very surprising.

Secret-for-Online-Learning Download

Participation

Overall, participation actually remained fairly stable, especially in grades nine and ten. I did a study in May of task completion rates of my freshmen and sophomores since 2017 and found only little changed in the pandemic. This was very surprising, since subjectively, it felt like it was a real struggle to get work in. I gave little assignments and took a grade a day. That’s how I teach in-person too, actually. The paper linked below, “Task Completion Study”, also includes a fairly comprehensive description of how I taught online. Many of those practices I retained when we returned to in-person and we had Chromebooks in class.

Task_Completion_Study Download

Remote Learning Conditions

The curriculum and assignment length were modified under remote learning. Assignments were decreased in size and duration. I avoided assigning multi-day tasks because many people just wait until the last minute to do it all, to poor effect. Students were also getting graded on “lectures” now, which consisted of 12-15 minute video tutorials embedded with questions. Some of the few multi-session tasks I normally assign in class, I now broke up into smaller assignments. The unit reading task, normally four pages to read and process, was reduced to three . In consequence of the setup of remote learning assignments, I did not complete the curriculum in grade nine to the point in history that I usually do and I moved some topics to the second part of the course to come in grade ten. I actually had more teaching time for grade ten under remote learning because, with Regents exams cancelled, I now had twelve extra lessons since I did not have to stop teaching and do review. There were on average 45 assignments across grades nine and ten in these courses over the date range. The 15% jump in the number of assignments under remote learning is because the tasks were broken down into more numerous, smaller steps. This cannot be interpreted as an increase in workload.

Resources in my online courses were curated through my own website, InnovationAssessments.com. Assignments were organized and posted at Planbook.com. Students were expected to complete one social studies assignment each school day. Courses were mostly asynchronous, save for a 30-minute live streaming lesson once a week which was optional and non-graded (there was a reward system built in for attendees). Video tutorials with multiple-choice questions ran 12-20 minutes, averaging around 14 minutes. Students were invited to attempt these twice for a higher grade. Textbook reading tasks consisted of either three- or four- page reading selection to process or multiple-choice comprehension questions. Each unit has an essay on a primary source where one session was reading and outlining the important points and one session was to compose the essay. There were a number of multiple-choice and matching quizzes which usually take about five minutes exclusive of pre-study time (students can rehearse the questions and answers in advance of some of these, so it’s very easy). Other assignment types follow similar patterns. In my opinion, a good estimate of the time commitment for the average student would be about 25 minutes a day on social studies in grades nine and ten under remote learning for the date range. I charge a late fee of ten points per day late just as in regular school and if students contact me with good reason or if students work to catch up a lot of work in a short time span, I always waive these late points.

Morale: Theirs and Mine

The short story on student morale as near as I could detect it was that it was always good. None of my weekly summaries reported adverse student morale. However, as the year progressed, some students dropped out of participation so I can only report on the students who were still involved.

My own morale story is more complex. In my memory of the events, it is all negative. But reading the contemporaneous notes of 2020, I see that it started out just fine. On 20 March, I actually wrote “My week went great. I absolutely love working from home. If I could, I would switch to just doing this.” Ugh. By my last entry on 12 June, I wrote “I endured the most serious aversion to teaching I ever experienced. This is not because it was online. I can teach online just fine. The reasons were complex… no room here… but I am getting better and look to the summer and next school year with a sense of optimism and hope.”

The problems were not really connected to online teaching…

When on 12 June 2020 I wrote “The reasons were complex… no room here… ” I was alluding to a collection of things that were aggravating in the extreme. This only got worse in the coming school year. The things that made working in my district an aggravating and unpleasant experience are largely beyond the scope of this article, but these things, they were born of the pandemic. My school district imposed actions, directives, and policies which ranged from the insufferable to the outrageous. This trend gradually broke my working relationship with my district and inspired me to hasten my retirement and to request part-time work in my last year. Though I was not one of the 16% of the faculty who resigned or retired early that year in my district, I was aiming to get out as soon as feasible.

Innovations

The pandemic fostered a large number of innovations for my teaching in a digital environment. One issue of note, which I would like to address in a separate post, is the issue of online testing. Is it possible to offer valid, reliable assessments in a remote teaching situation? I am convinced that this will improve in the coming decade, but there is a lot that can be done now.

A few of the innovations that were inspired by the pandemic remote learning situation involved devising ways to give good online tests. My district subscribed to a service called “GoGuardian”, which allows me to view and control student screens. I cannot emphasize enough how important this was. But at my own site, I developed a number of useful apps. One was a parent proctoring system. Parents needed to enter a code to let students take a test. Another was a sort of AI proctor I developed in JavaScript that tracked student activity online while they worked.

I wrote a short paper on this experience. It is linked below. With the help of my colleague in the math department, we established that an examination of student scores on online tests showed no real change from performance in the classroom, thus supporting with this small study the idea that secure online testing is possible.

I am reminded now of a student who was taking one of my “credit by examination” tests. While he was writing his essay, I was able to watch his screen and my own app would prevent him from leaving the test web page in order to look something up (to cheat). I watched him type sentences I knew were not likely his — I discovered he was using his phone. Easy catch. I typed in his sentences into Google search and quickly located the web page he was copying from on his phone. It was easy to award no credit for the task and provide the very websites in rationale where he cheated.

Testing-Security-under-Remote-Teaching Download

Teaching in the pandemic for me was an adverse experience, though not for the reasons one might think. I believe it would be a good effort toward justifying the adversity if some lessons can be gleaned from my patient endurance.

What do you think about listening to music while studying?

In the minutes of my school’s Board of Education from a meeting in the early 1980s, I remember seeing a discussion about the dangerous effects on students of listening to loud “rock music” in headphones. If only they knew how technology would advance! In my last year before retirement, technological advances had become such that many of my students walked around all day with a tiny device like a hearing aid in one ear. Long hair could hide them in classrooms where they were banned. Many young people spend the day serenaded by their favorite playlists and having their texts read to them. Like many of you, I wonder if this is good.

In 2015, cell phones were starting to become ubiquitous in my small, rural school. Students wanted to plug in and listen to music while they worked. I indulged this at first to see what would happen and I ended up banning the practice. But some of my high performing students were convincing in their pleas to listen to their tunes. I was curious enough to read up on the research.

Naturally, the answer is not simple. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. There are so many variables to consider that are missed if one only phrases the question “will listening to music help studying?”.

I settled on this policy for my classroom: I would grant a student a “license” to listen to music during working times in class provided that (1) they read and summarized adequately my own research paper on listening to music while doing school work and (2) that they maintained a class average of at least 85.

music-and-cognitive-load Download

I wrote that paper on listening to music while studying while listening to music. I admit it. While I am working, I like to listen to music. If I am doing labor like painting a room or stacking wood, I like the 90s pop/rock playlists on Pandora. When I am doing academic work, I sometimes play something classical. Any of my former students reading this will no doubt roll their eyes because I probably did not allow their tunes during the lesson.

Typically, the weaker student with attention-focusing problems suffers from music during academic work. They engage with the lyrics of the song and the beat of the music in a way that adds cognitive load to their school assignment and impedes working memory. More than once I saw a kid air jamming guitar while summarizing a text on some world revolution. They interrupt their work to skip a song they don’t like, to choose a different playlist, or to search for the song they just realized would be great to hear right now. *Insert eye-roll here*

But some other students do seem to perform better on tasks and to focus better with the music on. In fact, so do I.

You can manage badges and permits for your class at Innovation Assessments.

We know now from mountains of research that human beings cannot truly multi-task. I would suggest that, in situations where music is not helpful for study, it is better sometimes a separate task that takes a student’s attention away from the one they probably don’t want to do anyway. In the paper, I suggested that it was a question of cognitive load.

For the student who benefits from this, the music becomes a part of the task just like a fiddler’s bowing is part of the overall task of fiddling with the left hand fingers on strings.

A problem I was never able to resolve was this: I wanted to create some test to see who would benefit from music and who would not. I actually had very few students ever apply for the license to listen to music in class. They were intimidated by reading that paper, I suppose.

In the end, I guess the question was not resolved satisfactorily. I still banned music. Some kids still sneaked it in. It didn’t matter much. Hopefully, one day someone clever will develop a test to see who benefits and does not.