Accessing Education Research... Online?

 Teachers must love learning, right? Why would someone attach themselves to the field of education unless they had some sort of passion for acquiring information, learning through connection, collecting cool facts, and/or building new ideas?

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Best Practice and the Peril of the Paywall

Even if we reject the premise above, it’s still true that educational best practices ask educators to follow the research and look for evidence-based strategies to help their students in the classroom. Buzzy listicles aimed at educators are assembled by education non-profits and teacher resource sites with the “most important” studies of the year. Unfortunately, even the best cited of these round ups will trip up curious readers when they reach a journal that demands a subscription to access their content. While some sites have emerges to house free-access studies, librarian researcher Margaret Phillips of the University of California Berkeley found in her 2019 study of educational research access that 65% of the sources she was exploring were kept behind a paywall. Her study is available to read in full at Sage Journals.

Sourcing Free Research: Know Thy Students

As ethical and economic debates over paywalls and research journal subscriptions, there are luckily reliable sources where educators can find consistent research reports with data about topics like technology use, educator opinion trends, and learning challenges facing different demographics. The Pew Research Center, Project Tomorrow, and Common Sense Media are some of these sources. 

While these statistics are not always as surprising or as flashy as the Next Best Thing in Education, knowing them can help educators think critically about the populations they serve and look for disconnects between the stories different numbers tell, especially as they relate to common assumptions.

Maybe you are an educator who thinks that your students are too connected to their phones. If you teach elementary-aged students like I do, you would be statistically less likely to have this problem. But if you currently teach high schoolers, you would be in good company with the 72% of high school teachers who think students being distracted by their cellphones in class is a major problem according to this 2023 data from the Pew Research Center. You might feel further vindicated by seeing that Project Tomorrow reported that 94% of high school students had a personal smartphone during the 2022-23 school year, as opposed to only 44% in 2010-2011 according to this 20 year data review.

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However if you shift perspective using these same two reports, you would see that teenagers might have different views on the same phone statistics. Seventy percent of 13 to 17-year olds surveyed by Pew said that the benefits of smartphones outweigh the harms. In this cohort, 45% felt that smartphones made it easier for students to do well in school. And Project Tomorrow’s report also found that smartphones were the preferred devices for high schoolers completing school work at home with 75% of respondents turning to a smartphone first support where only 21% were first accessing a school-provided Chromebook.

Does this mean that smartphones in class should automatically be okay? Of course not. But it does indicate that today’s teenagers see their smartphone as an invaluable tool and do not necessarily view it as a device unrelated to academics.

Looking at a slightly different tack, keeping abreast of technology trends for today’s youth can help teachers tap into ways to use student interest in lesson planning. Educators might look at Common Sense Media’s 2021 Report of Teen and Tween Media Use and notice the several data points indicating a love of video content: over 60% of teens and tweens get “a lot” of enjoyment out of watching online videos, they spend hours daily with tv and video content (teens: 3.16 hours, tweens: 2.40 hours), and YouTube was the platform the most respondents said they couldn’t live without (32% of those surveyed with the next highest sitting down at 20%). These numbers are particularly notable for their lack of novelty- “screen time” is frequently equated to just watching a video on a device and YouTube is hardly new for the students being surveyed as it launched in 2004 before most of the respondents were even born. But knowing this preference could lead an educator to find active, interesting ways to implement video content into their classes, working with instead of against their student's preference. (If that “active” sparked a memory, you might want to check out last week’s post about active learning strategies).

The Generational Guestimation

A significant portion of age-related research uses a system of “generations” to divide the population into groups of people born in a 15-20 year time span. Like many forms of social or academic categorizations and classifications (genre in media, personality type in psychology, etc.) the age grouping that occurs through generational definition can be useful, but also risks flattening perception and enhancing stereotypes. Some social scientists are against the use of generation categories at all (like these organizational psychologists) and others worry that generational bias is a prevalent form of ageism (like these gerontologists).

However an educator interprets the validity and usefulness of generational labels, it is important for them to be aware of how these categories can inform perspective. Professional educators in K-12 schools are nearly always of a different “generation” than their students and live in a world where reports both academic and sensational will use these labels. Maybe you remember when Millennials kept "killing" various industries.

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Knowing this it is important for educators to self-examine their own attitudes as they should whenever they explore new research. It can also be worth looking into what attitudes exist towards the age group of students you are working with. Australian research firm McCrindle (main site here) regularly visualizes their findings into snappy infographics like this one for Generation Alpha (a grouping that includes my current students), but also takes time to survey the perceptions of others towards those generations.

This research, linked here, shows that members of other generations view Generation Alpha as tech-savvy, entitled, and anxious. seventy-eight percent of surveyed Australians believed that Generation Alpha members were more digitally involved for their age ground than previous generations. The importance of these statistics lives in the fact that these descriptors are all based on things Generation Alpha is “perceived” or “believed” to be. Considering the latest members of this generation are still being born currently in 2024 according to some researchers, it’s worth considering how are our perceptions of them shaping their futures as much as any of the technology they are growing up alongside.

Breaking the Ice with Active Learning

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Learning is not a spectator sport. 

"Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write reflectively about it, relate to past experiences, and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves."

Arthur W. Chickering and Stephen C. Erhmann were not the first researchers to advocate for active learning, but the words from their 1996 AAHE (American Association for Higher Education) Bulletin article "Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as a Lever" (available here) have loomed large in discussions of the strategy. Breaking down this statement can help us analyze what active learning is, why it is useful, and look into how it can be applied in today's classrooms.

Students do not learn much just sitting in classes listening to teachers.

Learning about active learning necessitates understanding how it contrasts to the idea of passive learning. The lecture model, where a teacher verbally conveys knowledge to a listening audience, has a significant history linked here in the development of modern education. Some of this comes from this theory that human minds are blank slates; sometimes this is also described in educational terms as students being vessels into which knowledge needs to be poured. This knowledge might come from an instructor or a text, but it must be directly given to pupils for learning to occur.

They must talk about what they are learning, write reflectively about it, relate to past experiences, and apply it to their daily lives.

Active learning rejects the idea that simply having access to information creates ideal learning circumstances; instead students must be actively engaged with lessons in one or more ways for true learning to be achieved. Engagement might come in the form of discussion of materials, creating and consuming visual models, participating in hands-on demonstrations of concepts. In addition to doing things, in active learning it is key that students are thinking about what they are doing.
Active learnings is distinguished by being less about facts and more about concepts, teaching students how to learn rather than simply what to learn. Active learning also dovetails with multimodal learning (using different methods and delivery systems to introduce content) and collaborative learning (students working together on learning and sharing their insights with each other).

If you'd like to work on expanding your understanding of active learning the Illinois Open Publishing Network has you covered here. 
More of an audio/visual fan? This video from the Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences is a great overview.

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They must make what they learn part of themselves.

If a key part of active learning is being able to think about how to apply your acquired knowledge to real life circumstance, we must look at applying active learning strategies in the classroom. Earlier active learning research like Chickering and Erhmann's looked at applying active learning strategies at the university level, but the beauty of active learning is that there are myriad ways it can be incorporated for all ages. This extensive list features over 250 suggestions of active learning techniques for in-person and distance learning environments. We are going to take a look at just one of these suggestions and the many ways it can be implemented now.

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So... An Ice Breaker?

Many active learning strategies in the classroom are going to require collaboration and connection between classmates. That is why quality, active learning-based ice breakers are a great way to warm up a class. Research like this study demonstrates the positive effects of wisely selected ice breaker activities, promoting student engagement and motivation.

Ice breakers are games, conversations, or activities designed to introduce people to each other. The varieties we are going to look at today are the Human Scavenger Hunt and Human Bingo. Human Bingo is featured in the large list above, but also has a place on the more easily digestible list found here. For a specific experience with the activity check out this link.

I'm pairing these activities together because they both operate on the same principle: students tasked with finding classmates who fit into certain categories, for examples "someone who has a pet" or "someone who shares your favorite color". In the scavenger hunt variety of this activity, students are trying to find different peers for each of their categories. In the Bingo variety, students are specifically trying to complete categories that will get them a certain number of answers in a straight line, earning them a "Bingo!" 

Already we have two very different pacing examples of the same base game- one is more thorough and leisurely and another adds a layer of gamification. After the search concludes, some classes might revisit especially challenging or exciting categories or choose to have the Bingo winners present their winning line by introducing the people who helped them complete it. Additionally the categories can shift the tone of this exercise- light, breezy questions make for a great casual ice breaker but the activity could just as easily ask students to find different reactions to classroom material, exploring the diversity of opinion in an environment. But all forms of this activity get students talking to (or reading about) each other and making connections.

My Experience with Human Scavenger Hunts and Bingo

In proper active learning style, this activity is something I have directly connected to my life. I have actually been on both sides of a human scavenger hunt, as a student and as a teacher preparing one for my students.

My original secondary education was in person and the switch to online learning for graduate coursework sometimes make it difficult to feel connected, even though my courses really require me to be motivated and engaged. Perhaps my professor read this article about the importance of ice breaker in online courses before assigning us a human scavenger hunt. The first week of class often sees students being asked to post a short bio introducing themselves to their classmates. Without connecting names to faces, it can be difficult to retain anything from a quick read of these posts, but having to fill out the scavenger hunt helped build my understanding of the diversity of my classmates as well as seeing some things we had it common. It's not a panacea for the disconnect learners may feel online, but it is one way of making students actively learn about who they will be studying with over the internet.

I have also prepared a human scavenger hunt for the past two years for my first grade class. Instead of using it as an initial icebreaker, my co-teacher and I hand it out after our winter break to reacclimate our students to the classroom and each other. It is themed after finding classmates who did different activities over the break and helps us structure back-to-school conversations, which can be especially helpful in a school where a chunk of students take long, expensive vacations over any break and another segment markedly do not. It always gets the students up and moving, greeting every member of the class community and reestablishing the environment we try to promote in our space. After learning about the Bingo variety, I am also going to look for a way to integrate it into our plans some time this year. This site is what I'm going to use for that. Let me know if you'd give it a try!

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It's a Beautiful Day in the Digital Neighborhood

Our Places in the Digital Plane

At the turn of the century, folks could tell things were changing. The internet has survived the Y2K scare and now faced educating new generations who were growing up in an era of rapid technological advancement. It's within this context of educating these growing would-be techies that Mark Prensky first introduced the vernacular of "Digital Natives" and "Digital Immigrants". 

Are you from around here?

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It was 2001 when he first published this article explaining that for individuals born in the 1980s and later, digital technology was a part of their upbringing. In this was they were "native" to the modern world; generations before were "immigrants" who were learning the ways of computers and cellular phones after building a foundation in something different. While this terminology proved useful to exploring the shifts in how different groups interacted with technology, it also cast a wide net. Clumsy assumptions about who individually falls into which group based only on the broadest terminology can be especially difficult for youth of lower socioeconomic status as discussed here.

Will you be staying long?

In 2011, partially as a response to the flattening of the native and immigrant archetypes and the continued movement to digital integration, David White and Alison Le Cornu proposed a new typology for qualifying online existence: the visitor to resident spectrum. If you've only got a minute to catch up with these ends of the spectrum, you can check out this quick video by Leigh Ravenhill:

Video Source: Leigh Ravenhill on YouTube

If you prefer to read all about it, the core of the split is about how users interact with digitals tools and services. A visitor has a task they need to complete and will use the internet as a tool to get it done. A resident has gone online to find other individuals or a community to connect to or interact with. 
One of the most useful parts of this schema is it acknowledges the changeable nature of behavior: just as you could visit a place and decide eventually to move there for work, a user might find a platform they use to find answers to specific questions and then eventually become part of that platform's community, transferring from visitor to resident. Similarly a user of a social media network might go from daily post and check-ins to clicking over once every few months when they get a notification, much like a college student stopping back in to their old high school for a visit.
There is also the acknowledgement that an individual's online presence is not universal and may vary between systems and aspects of their life.
To help folks explore their own digital identity, White created this mapping exercise with open access tools to help individuals or groups compare their presence along the visitor to resident spectrum when considering the personal and industrial aspects of their lives.

My Map

Following the basics of the exercises linked to above, I created my own digital map below.

Image created by blog author

My Methods

• The represented programs and services are a snapshot of things I've accessed in the past two weeks. Some are newer habits and some a reflective of the time of year (back to school season and family travel)
• I specifically included programs or services where it was possible to be more of a resident or take part in a community. My tuning app sees regular use is not trying to get me to connect with friends or post anything.
• My professional axis is determined by two arenas- my teaching job and my graduate school workload.
• Square icons represent programs primarily accessed by a phone app whereas written out logos indicate much of my usage occurs through an internet browser. I labeled the app icons to make them more accessible to folks who are less familiar with any specific apps or at least this iteration of them.  You can read some interesting thoughts on app logo designs and redesigns here.
• Honorable mentions go to X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, and the Penny Arcade Forums. These were a strange thing to think about because I use them through an intermediary; in some cases I've been consuming content through them for many years, but it's always over my partner's shoulder. I know things I've suggested to them have been posted in these spaces, but there is still a notable distance, turning me into what I might call a tourist. This is opposed to tumblr, a service I am on the furthest end of the visitor spectrum with where I don't even have an account, but I still actively access it myself.

My Notes

I was pleased to see the gap between my personal and professional digital life as this is currently by design. Even for services that cross the divide I have built strong boundaries. For example, I use Gmail consistently for personal use, but I do not put my work email on my personal phone and rarely access it on my laptop despite Google Workspace being the heavily utilized at work. 
Similarly I put Google Drive on here an additional time to specifically note the Google account I share with my partner that we have been co-using for wedding planning.

I generally resist getting an app exclusively for shopping. The one notable exception to this is the app for my current grocery store which I use weekly to slowly build cash off deals. While it is most certainly collecting information about my habits, I don't use it for writing shopping lists or grocery planning and have almost never accessed it except for that weekly scan.

It was an interest trip through the past few years seeing which apps are no longer in the rotation. It makes sense that I am not firing up Kast currently, but during Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 it was seeing heavy use for group movie nights. I have fooled myself into thinking I will become meticulously organized with the right calendar system, only to abandon it for a paper planner weeks later.

Overall there is an interested distinction that exists for me when I compare my own internet residency to that of peers and see that where I am residing for connection, it is to maintain connections built originally through in person interactions. Facebook has little use to me anymore except for being the best way for my friends and I to share events. When a program wants me to "find friends", I have very specific parameters I set up for each service. This contrasts with the many folks I know who have joined communities where they knew some or even none of the contributors or who make a point to follow and then interact with creators. I will subscribe to a few YouTube channels, but you'll never catch me in the comments and I don't think I've ever sent a direct message (DM) through something like Instagram without having already talked to that individual first. I wondered as I mapped what my map would look like laid atop another users and where the scales of our axis's would align. 

My Machine & Me

Sometimes when I start to feel awash in the sea of new technology, I need to ground myself by remembering that I’ve enjoyed technology my whole life. Sometimes we find ourselves already on the other side of the biggest discoveries and living instead through the refinements and tweaks that came about. No one reading this was around pre-printing press or even before the typewriter revolutionized the printed word. My lifetime has seen great leaps in digital printing, but I still grew up with the printed word everywhere. (For a diversion from the main point, you can check out the history of printers at this link or this one).

Some History- Of Sewing Machines  and the Author

But I live in one of the growing numbers of American households without a printer of my own (like some of the folks in this article). What I do have is a sewing machine.

Sewing machines were a cornerstone of the industrial revolution which you can read more about here. Connecting that history to the modern sewing machine is something you can read about here. My grandmothers both owned sewing machines and my mother used hers to make my siblings and me every year’s Halloween costumes. As a preteen I learned to operate one myself and worked together with my mother to make my senior prom outfit. I also learned hand sewing and embroidery and those were the skills I brought to college when I left home and my mother’s classic Singer machine behind.

Cut to Christmas morning a few years later and I’m unwrapping my Brother CS600i.

Image property of author

While still a beginner and budget friendly tool, this beauty was my first taste of a computerized sewing machine, with 60 programmable stitches. This has routinely proved beneficial as I tend to sew in bursts and then need to shelve the machine for a few months, so having clearly labeled, automatically set up options lets me dive back into more complicated projects right away.  There are many places you could go to get fantastic analyses of the quality of different machines like this article from Real Simple, this article from The Spruce, or this roundup from TechGearLab. But having the best machine has not been as important to me as simply having one.

Why This Tech Matters to Me

As I said above, I tend to sew in fits and starts, specifically because I’ve often used sewing to make personalized gifts for those I love. I started sewing regularly when my niblings were born and I created gifts for them to work through my guilt over being far away from them as they grew up. I also frequently craft costumes which started in my days in theater and have expanded out into making things for my partner and I as we celebrate our annual Halloween traditions, which have become a cornerstone of our memories together. It’s important for me to connect these feelings to my machine and recognize it as modern technology that makes those tasks easier and more enjoyable, giving me leeway to make mistakes and take greater chances. And sometimes I still forget about how far along my machine is in terms of modern tech incorporation just because it doesn’t have a touch screen. I used a borrowed 1960s machine about a year ago while my machine was being tuned and the differences were stark; I am so glad the project I was working on didn’t need a button hole or my timeline would have doubled. On my machine I plug in the number, put on the foot and attachments indicated and the machine guides me through the process.

Here are some of my sewing creations

All images in this slideshow are property of the author

Sewing the Future

Looking ahead, while I'm still very happy with my machine, it’s actually a device that I would consider upgrading before I’m forced to due to circumstance. This is usually not my style; I lived with my last phone having a broken camera lens for 14 months and taking photos is one of my favorite uses of my phone! But the gradual pacing of advancements with sewing machine technology makes it both exciting and comfortable to picture what I could do with a step up. I was recently able to play with a bernadette 38 whose info is here and I was absolutely thrilled by the options.  It’s a common crafter phenomenon to buy more tools than you have time for, so I’m not putting anything in my cart yet, but if the pattern scraps in my living room have anything to say about it, I’ll have my foot on a new pedal soon…

The bernadette 38
Image source: BerninaUSA

Finding "High Quality" Technological Integration- Evaluating Teaching With Tech

The data (and meta analysis of that data) is in: effective use of technology can better learning outcomes for students. You can read more about technologically supporting at-risk students by clicking this link or explore a literature review from the Nation Institute of Health regarding the use of information and communication technology in education at this link.
The positive reviews come with qualifiers about what kinds of programming provide positive results and actually support student achievement. So how is an educator to make sure their class's iPad time is actually stimulating learning or their Kahoot! session isn't just killing time? Let's dive into a great tool for lesson plan reflection and challenging program assumptions.

The Triple E Framework

The Triple E Framework is designed to help educators measure technology integration in their lessons along three prongs: engagement, enhancement, and extension. Created by Dr. Elizabeth Keren-Kolb of the University of Michigan's Marsal Family School of Education, the Triple E Framework aims to give K-12 educators guidance on how to integrate technology into their classrooms in research supported ways to support student learning goals. More information about the framework and a wealth of open source resources can be found at this link, but I'll also walk you through some more information here. 

Let's look at the first "E" in the trio: Engagement

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The goal with the engagement is to check if the use of a technology tool is promoting genuine focus on the task(s) at hand, encouraging self-motivation and an active role in learning. A student can seem "engaged" with a program because they are looking at and interacting with it, but if they are actually trying to rush through an activity to reach the point where they can change their avatar, the program is actually distracting them from their learning rather than empowering them. Another goal of actual engagement is fostering social interaction through co-use of an edtech program, allowing students to share the learning process with their peers and mentors.

An Engaged lesson might look like:

• Pairs or teams of students co-using devices to collaborate on assignments
• Working digitally with other classes using shared tools to instantly update group work
• Working on a coding assignment where the results are the reward
• Having students write and edit questions for gamified review, investing them in the learning goals
• An educator providing specific goals to help students focus while interacting with potentially distracting programs

The second "E" is Enhancement

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Enhancement looks to see what the use of technology can bring to a lesson or activity that would not be possible without that tech. Rather than using an app to practice and review previously covered skills, can an app help students deepen their understanding of a concept and apply it in new ways? Enhanced edtech usage follows modern educator practices by providing scaffolding for learners, customizing the amount of support they individually need and connecting with that earlier step by engaging them in their zone of proximal development (you can find more information on the zone of proximal development by clicking this link).

An Enhanced lesson might:

• Have students explore sources in highly visual (virtual reality, image galleries, interactive maps) or auditory ways (recorded lectures, videos, or music; sound mixing tools)
• Use genuine student discovered sources instead of teacher-produced examples to ground exercises in actual circumstances
• Provide many online sourcing options and ask students to use critical thinking to select the best ones for the project at hand
• Allow students to present their work in multi media formats, stretching their creativity and demonstrating what they are learning beyond using only words
• Differentiate software features to support and challenge students as individual learners 

The final "E" we'll look at is Extension

Image Source: tripleeframework.com

Extension in this framework is all about connection: keeping students connected to their learning outside of the classroom, connecting their lesson to their everyday lives, and connecting the skills they are building to skills they can use today and in the future.

An Extended lesson might:

• Use apps that are available in school and virtually so students can work at their own pace
• Teach digital citizenship guidelines and draw connections between different types of online interactions
• Connect students with individuals with different backgrounds through video or text so they can share their perspectives and life experiences
• Have students take photos of things in their life that connect to the lesson goals and share those photos with their class 

Helping educators apply the Triple E Framework is a rubric for assessing lesson plans (available in digital form here or in a printable PDF version here) guided by each of the three E's. With three categories under each subsection, scoring becomes an easy matter of adding together between 0 and 18 points. A lesson that is very likely integrating technology to meet learning goals will score 13-18,  lesson that might be missing a key integration category scores a 7-12, and a lesson that is not adequately integrating technology in service of lesson goals scores a 6 or below. A strong focus is also placed on how good pedagogical practices can make adequate tools good and good tools great, offering suggestions of instructional strategies that can grow engagement, enhancement, and extension. Overall the Triple E Framework is dedicated to living up to its slogan: "Learning First, Technology Second".

Evaluating My Own Lessons

When I started my career in education, I worked with some of the youngest learners for whom technology use often boils down to "screen time", something which is heavily frowned upon in day care and preschool setting; the most recent guidelines as of Autumn 2023 from Illinois Department of Children and Family Services regarding day cares are found on page 44 of this PDF link. There is growing recognition that not all time in front of screens is created equally, but I have encountered many family who are squeamish about their young child's time with technology.

Currently my first graders get most of their explicit technology integration twice weekly in the school's excellent project-based library classes; a quick overview of projects they've done in this program in past years in reference to the Triple E rubric leads me to conclude most projects would easily be scoring 15-18. However in my own room our use of technology is considerably more limited. While I mostly consider this age appropriate given our curriculum's overall goal; looking at my own scores on the rubric makes it clear that there are often times when technology is not so much integrated as deployed for teacher convenience.

For examples, one of the regular times my students use their school issued iPads is during our weekly "book shopping" period. my teaching partner and I pull a few students at a time to refresh their individual book bags with 8-10 new books and the rest of the class plays on a reading app called Raz-Kids. This activity is solitary and while it seemingly engages may students, their eagerness to go to the "Star Zone" for prizes at the end of the time belies where the gamification fails to actually promote connection. Overall this use of technology would score around a 4 on the Triple E rubric and I am definitely considering trying to wean off of our reliance on this time.

However one of the things I love about this framework is that analysis is for a single activity and not a condemnation of my class's entire process. When looking at another activity we've done in past years with a pattern blocks application, that lesson plan scores an 11. While that is not a top tier score, it does show that a range of integration already exists and by pinpointing the more successful aspects (this app lets students expand beyond the physical materials we have in the room, there is a co-working element, the program is taught explicitly with an "I do, we do, you do" structure), I can see not only the room for improvement, but what is working in the class that could be spread to other programs. 

The teaching strategies connection in this framework is also particularly helpful to my growth as an educator. Because of my role in my school, I am often not at liberty to make decisions about what programs my students will be using, so finding better ways to integrate the ones we have is extremely valuable for me. This back to school season it's time to learn something new.

Image Source: Tenor