Digging in to Diigo: Research and Annotation on the Go (2)
Unearthing the Details: The School and Students (I and II)
As with all things in life, the learning activities need to be framed, they need to be placed within the larger framework or perspective of the school, the class and the students themselves. For my student-teaching I was in a small school district in the Roanoke Valley/New River Valley area, Peaceful City Schools. The district has three elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. The district is generally considered one of the best in the area, with high testing scores and academic achievement. The high school employs the International Baccalaureate (IB) program rather than the Advanced Placement (AP) program. Unsurprisingly, the district considers itself primarily middle-class, however given the number of families in the area who are connected with one of the local colleges or universities; I would argue that it is a stratified middle class, with some on the very high end of this socio-economic scale, and others on the low in. It is a school district like many in this area, with relatively low diversity, and considerably less diversity than some of the sister districts in the area.
I was placed at the sole middle school, Thomas Jackson Middle School (TJMS). TJMS used to be the actual high school for the district, until the built a new school. All the classrooms have use of a Mimio short-throw projector. The Mimio is very like its sister short-throws, SmartBoard and Promethean – both used by other districts in the area – however the key difference here is that the Mimio does not require a special board. It uses the whiteboard as the screen and employs a simple device attached to the whiteboard to monitor and record information projected. While some of the elementary schools have SmartBoard projectors, they are not available in all the schools. And the high school relies upon moveable carts for projecting. In addition, TJMS had wireless devices and dongles which allow teachers to use their laptops in anywhere in the room and not be tied to the front of the room with the Mimio short-throw. This may be changing as the district is discovering problems with this wireless technology. All instructors are provided with a school-approved laptop, which they use to connect to the Mimio, record attendance and grades, and employ a Google-based email system.
While Peaceful City Schools does not have a one-to-one laptop initiative they do have a ready to use computer lab and a series of Computer on Wheel (COW) carts. These COW carts can be checked out by any teacher and used in the classroom. The carts themselves range from five year old Dell or Gateway laptops to newer Dell netbooks, but during this semester they have been in especially high demand as teachers, especially Language Arts instructors, use them for SOL preparation. The school itself has a few support staff, at least two full-time individuals whose sole responsibility is the maintenance of the computers as well as a resource for teachers. In addition there are a couple of part-time individuals who were more of the hands-on maintenance of the COW cart computers, and there were any number of issues that required assistance. At the beginning of their time in the school, students were assigned a specific ID number and password. This number and password served as their login to any of the computers on campus, be they laptops from the COW carts or desktops in the computer lab. This information also allowed them to access the Google Apps based system, which the district used. So students could create their own email address, but most importantly could access Google Docs, for all their word processing needs.
While at TJMS I was assigned to work with Mr Longstreet. Mr Longstreet has been teaching with PCS for nearly thirty-years, the first decade or so teaching high school history, but the last two decades he has been teaching Civics & Economics (CE) to 7th graders. For 6th and 7th grade, TJMS employs a team approach to the core classes. The same 80 some students are assigned to four different teachers – Language Arts, Science, Math and Social Studies. This allows for some collaboration between teachers, and creates a strong network of support for individual students. This year the school adopted a new CE textbook from Pearson, so this was the first time many of these teachers, including Mr Longstreet, had been using the book. The book was designed specifically with the Virginia Standards of Learning in mind, so the text connected information to different SOLs. The majority of the SOLs had been covered by Mr Longstreet by the time I took over the class in late February. After some thought and scheduling issues worked out, we determined that it would be best if, during my nine weeks of student-teaching, I instruct students in SOL CE.9, CE.10 and CE.11. In essence I was covering public policy, the judicial system and doing an introduction to economics. This would leave CE.12 and CE.13 for Mr Longstreet to cover after I left.
Mr Longstreet was very much a low-technology person when it came to the classroom. He would occasionally use the Mimio, but it was primarily a way to project information on a screen. And while he had used the COW carts in the past, they were more often used by either the Language Arts instructor, Mr Lee, or the Math teacher, Mr Grant. During my time at TJMS I learned from one of the technology people that very few of the instructors on the 7th grade wing, including my own Cooperating Teacher (CT), Mr Longstreet, employed technology in the classroom. The major thing Mr Longstreet did use was a website called Bloust.com. This was his Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), for lack of a better term. Students could check his site every day for information about lessons, upcoming due dates, missed assignments and the like. The use of Bloust.com was bit contention, according to Mr Longstreet, as some of the students did not and still do not have access to the Internet at home. However, given the fact that students could use computers at the public library or come in to the school in the morning to use the computer lab mitigated some of his concerns. This was though an important hint at the possible level of familiarity some students had with technology in general, and Web 2.0 tools in particular.
This naturally leads me to consider the students themselves. I ended up designing a series of activities and lessons using Diigo. Each class was responsible for completing these assignments however, for the sake of this project I would like to focus solely upon one of my classes, 3rd period. This is the first period of the day where I am actually teaching. For Mr Longstreet 1st and 2nd period are planning periods, one period for individual lesson planning and the second for team lesson planning. These are also when students have gym/health and exploratory classes, including band and choir. For better or worse, 3rd period ended up as my guinea pig classroom as all of the lessons I had planned were first tried on them, and then subtle adjustments were made throughout the day to improve the lessons. The main reason I want to look specifically at these 20 students is because of the diversity in the classroom. While I have noted there is relatively little cultural diversity in the district writ large, there certainly other types of diversity in the classroom, and this class was perhaps the most diverse with regard to interests and academic abilities. Several of the high achieving academic students could be found in 3rd period, alongside a number of students with Individual Education Portfolios (IEPs). Because 2/5 of the students in the class have an IEP this was also the only class where an Instructional Assistant, Mrs Lincoln, was in the classroom.
During the course of my student-teaching I discovered a number of things about this particular class. They were certainly diverse in their technological abilities, some students were able to easily follow my instructions as I walked them through various websites and introduced them to new tools like Diigo, and others constantly struggled with these things. When students struggled it became incredibly difficult for me to keep the class moving along, as they were either unable to or unwilling to get assistance from their fellow students. Oftentimes in the early part of my nine-weeks I or Mrs Lincoln would be called upon to assist students. After a couple days of this frustration I made it a rule to get help from a classmate first and this seemed to work; it also empowered some students who understood to show off their abilities.
However, by and large trying a new technological tool in the classroom was difficult because students were not terribly good at self-starting, and those that were got distracted or bored while I assisted others. When I did employ Google Docs during my second week, it also became apparent how little exposure they had received to Google Docs and other Web 2.0 tools because I ended up have to walk students through account creation. While this may reflect more on other teachers, it does indicate the general lack of knowledge and awareness of some of these, at least what I would consider, basic tools found on the Internet. Outside of technology, this class was also quite diverse in its academic interests, with many preferring Language Arts or Science over Math and Social Studies. Then of course there is the diversity in their home lives and hobbies. Several of these students were involved in soccer or track, only a few expressed strong interest in music, but most had either one sibling or several and the majority seemed to be in two-parent families, although there were a couple students whose parents were divorced and at least one student who was in foster care. It was this type of general diversity I found most appealing and felt would give me an accurate gauge of how Diigo might influence and affect their studying and/or researching skills.
Unorthodox History 
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