Are We Addicted?

Mrs. S is a language arts teacher who, for the first time, will be teaching her nations new writing curriculum. A key element of the curriculum is technical literacy; the ability to read and write technical documents. One of the standards, for example, is "The student will be able to integrate quantitative or technical analysis (e.g.,charts, research data) with qualitative analysis in print or digital text." At lunch in the teacher's room, she chats with Mr. T, a social studies teacher. Mr. T tells Mrs. S about an interesting discussion that they had in class about the perception that kids today are addicted to technology. The students in the class were in different camps as to the response. Some felt strongly that kids were, in fact, spending far too much time in front of screens of one sort or another. Others believed that this was overstating the situation and the habits of just a few addicted kids were being projected on a majority that was not so. Mrs. S decides to create a unit titled, "Are We Technology Addicted?"

A plan was formulated to structure the unit around original student research. The students formed interest groups around areas of technology they wished to investigate. One group's question was, "Do we spend too much time playing games?"

Another group wanted to know, "Is texting getting in the way of face to face communication?"

A third group asked, "Are violent video games leading to more tolerance for violence?"

One of the concerns that Mrs. S has coming into the project is with the collaborative skills of the students when working with technology. It seems that one or two students sort of took over the group to the exclusion of others. She had read in an article on teaming skills about something called "positive interdependence," a method for designing tasks so that part of the grade for each student depended upon the others. While her final project would be a Web report designed in GlogsterEDU, each student would also have to do an individual report. The final grade for the project would be a combination of the grade on their individual report, the grade on the overall group Glogster and the mean of the grades each of the team members received on their individual reports.

When each group had refined their research question, they turned to the online tool FluidSurveys to build their first draft of the survey. After entering the survey on a laptop, teams conducted "talk-alouds." They invited several students from their target grade levels to take the draft surveys and, as they respond to each question, they speak their thoughts so that the team can identify questions that are difficult to respond to or are misinterpreted by the respondents. The team members take notes on laptops in a Google Doc that will be used later to refine the survey.

After the refinement process, the students email teachers of the target grade levels with a Web address and a QR code (a custom bar code readable by most tablets and smartphones) to guide students to the survey. Using email reminders, they encourage their participants to complete the survey until they have a participation rate greater than 80%. In addition, team members fanned out across the campus during lunch and passing periods to interview students using their smartphones and tablets to gather quotes for the final report.

When finished, the students move the data from FluidSurvey to their laptops and, using a Google Docs spreadsheet, began to graph the data. Some of the findings were quite surprising. The team investigating violent video games, for example, was surprised at how few students actually played those games. The team investigating the use of social media sites discovered that students in their school actually preferred texting and emailing to Facebook posting by a wide margin.

Using their newly-honed technical writing skills, each of the individual team members, working in a word processor on their laptops, prepared a report summarizing these findings. This individual report would be used as part of the students final grade. In addition, the teams combined the findings of their reports into a visual report in GlogsterEDU. This report included graphs, text, audio and video from student interviews, and even screenshots illustrating the technologies included in the study. Team members worked together to review the individual findings and create a summary set of findings in the Glogster product. Mrs. S. is surprised at the creativity of many of the finished "Glogs," where students had illustrated the findings with illustrations, audio quotes and in some cases animations created with Web tools such as Go!Animate. More importantly, the quality of the student writing was excellent, with all students actively assisting their classmates. It would be tough to go back to her old style of teaching both for Mrs. S and for her students!

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