I've created a 5th grade science lesson that uses Wordsift to teach what a habitat is and then specifically about grasslands and rain forests, while building student vocabulary. Please note that this lesson will be over a multi-day time period. The lesson starts with me running a Wordsift on a text that describes the word "habitat" for our topic; however, I will not disclose the topic name. I will display the results of the Tag Cloud for the class, and let them think about what they are seeing. I'll ask some questions to have them tell me why they think some words are bigger than others, how are the words ordered, what words they recognize and which ones are unfamiliar, and what words may go together and why. This initial thinking and exploring will prepare them for the next part, when they are put into teams of three to predict our lesson topic. When a team has its guess ready, I'll come check it to see if their answer is correct. If it is correct, then the next step is to create a definition of a habitat and provide an example. For those teams who are having difficulty, I'll have them select some words within the Tag Cloud they want more detail on. I'll use the Create Worksheet function and pull those words into it and drag images that match the words. More guidance will be offered if necessary. Once the teams are done, I will type the definitions into a PowerPoint presentation along with Google Images and applicable word diagrams from the Visual Thesaurus and we'll go through them as a class. I will finish this part by showing the full text on habitats that was used to create the Tag Cloud and have the students read to themselves. I'll address any remaining questions after they have read it.
The topic prediction followed by the team's sentence and example creation are in line with the prior knowledge component of learning theory. It allows me to understand what students know about a habitat before progressing into particular kinds of habitats. The students demonstrate their comprehension through the prediction, and apply that knowledge to create representative sentences and examples (Bloom's Taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension and application). This first level of the lesson also serves as an introduction to Wordsift and its capabilities, as the students observe me navigating and performing tasks within it. The site offers a brief video tour that walks a person through navigation, explaining and demonstrating the different functions. I will have the students watch this video before they get started on the second level.
The second level involves splitting the class, with half of the teams using Wordsift to learn about Grasslands and the other half to learn about Rain Forests. The work associated with this will result in the creation of a PowerPoint presentation, which I will use to assess student learning. To start, the teams will use text from National Geographic's website for their respective habitat to copy into Wordsift. By using this website, it provides a consistent and reliable resource. (http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/?source=NavEnvHab)
The teams will only copy the text below the habitat's picture on the site and stop at the Environmental Quizzes section. After the teams input the text and sift, they will select five Tag Cloud words they believe are significant and/or unfamiliar words, find a Google Image to represent each word's meaning, and use the Visual Thesaurus to pull word diagrams, noting any root words, synonyms and antonyms. The students will cut and paste this information into a PowerPoint page, and then add their own sentence for each of those words. These pages will be sent to me to review, correct and compile for use in the final project presentation document. This offers me another opportunity to examine what the teams understand. I can use this information to have them further explore Wordsift functionality or other tools to improve understanding for those still grappling with the vocabulary.
Level two continues with the teams using Wordsift functionality and the original text to learn and extract relevant information to create PowerPoint pages that illustrate the habitat studied and provide its key characteristics, seasonal changes, environmental or other threats, and examples of the types of animals and plants that inhabit it. The words they choose may not be in the Tag Cloud; however, they can and will use Google Images within Wordsift to find the images needed. Any words can be typed into the Google Images and Visual Thesaurus search boxes.
All PowerPoint presentations will be sent to me for review, and feedback will be given to the individual teams. I will compile and condense the slides down into one final presentation for each habitat, share the final version with the class and give each student a copy. A Venn diagram will be put on the overhead, and the students will be asked to populate it by collaboratively "shouting out" similarities and differences between the two habitats, incorporating what they learned. The last level is having each student write a brief paragraph stating his/her personal opinion about the need and value of preserving these habitats.
There will be implementation struggles with this lesson, including with the use Wordsift. Wordsift is relatively easy to navigate and straightforward; however, there are a couple areas that would require more thought and understanding. The first is with the Create Worksheet function. The students will need to know how to pull words and images into this area and/or remove them. The second is with with the Make Images Draggable function. For each new word's images, Make Images Draggable must be clicked. This results in a lot of images to the right that can be rather messy to sort through and inadvertently can get into your worksheet and have to be moved. This happened regularly to me. I will specifically mention these two functions and offer a verbal explanation as well as wallk around the room and watch the students doing these tasks so they can easily ask me questions or so I can see them struggle and offer assistance. Keep in mind, the students will have also had the short video which will help, but it does not really address the Make Images Draggable issue, so it'll be important for me to raise and address it. The students will need to know how to copy and paste into PowerPoint, and know how to use PowerPoint sufficiently for the tasks involved with this lesson. My intent is not to introduce Wordsift and PowerPoint at the same time. I would have introduced and had them use PowerPoint in earlier lessons, so they should have an understanding already that's sufficient for this project. Using Wordsift requires the students to have access to a computer for reasonable time periods. There could be system or other technical issues that cause delays. I found that Wordsift ran better on the Mac at school than on my PC using Internet Explorer as my browser. Under tips on the website, the makers suggest using Mozilla Firefox as the browser for a PC. I would want to make sure that student's have access to either of these to get as full a performance as possible.
There are trade-offs with using Wordsift to explore the vocabulary words rather than using a physical dictionary or thesaurus to look them up. First, the definitions within Wordsift may be more condensed, offering less explanation than the traditional resources, which may be less helpful to some students (particularly struggling students). Alternatively, for some students it may be helpful to have the more abbreviated and less formal style of definition. Second, a higher level of monitoring is required for using Wordsift, as students can type any word into the Google Images and Visual Thesaurus search boxes and get results very quickly. They could pull up inappropriate images or related words, which is off task, distracting and just plain wrong. Third, students may use Wordsift in the future for a summarized version without ever reading the full article. Wordsift is not meant to be used in replacement of a text, rather to support the understanding of the text.
A bias with Wordsift is that the video content for a word is not readily displayed. This was done intentionally by the makers of Wordsift because results could produce distracting or offensive videos. A student would have to click on the arrow sign to the left of the word "videos" to have them appear. This video feature cannot be disabled within Wordsift; however, if a school blocks sites such as YouTube, then they won't come up. Another bias to be aware of is that the lists used to generate the sorting are based off lists from other resources that may have bias associated with them. For example, the subject lists (i.e.: math, science, etc) came from Robert Marzano's work, while the academic list came from work of Avril Coxhead. Any biases embedded in those resources would carry over to Wordsift.
In terms of limitations, I will note a few. Wordsift only provides automatic sorting by the categories it has listed (i.e.: Academic Word List, Math, etc.). It also only allows a single sort at a time. For example, you can select Social Studies for those words but cannot have it overlay the Science words on top. That could be both a limitation or a bias of this technology. The makers may have intentionally not allowed overlaying the sort options to keep this a more simple tool to maximize the learning experience, requiring more work on the user end to find and explore those relationships. The Tag Cloud is limited to the top 50 frequently found words in a text, based on the creators' view that frequency is a sound proxy for expected word difficulty. One cannot reduce or increase the number of words generated in the Tag Cloud.
Using pictures/images with vocabulary facilitates making connections, which in turn facilitates the learning process. Wordsift has a nice combination of Google Images and the Visual Thesaurus diagrams to support this, making vocabulary learning more concrete than simple use of a traditional dictionary, thesaurus or oral explanation. Learning is further supported through collaboration in this lesson. The students work in teams of three throughout most of the lesson, and there's class participation in the Venn diagram component.
This lesson meets ISTE Standard 2. The lesson was designed using contemporary tools, Wordsift and PowerPoint, to provide a rich learning experience. The tools within Wordsift provide verbal and pictorial resources to the student with the vocabulary. When used in combination with higher thinking tasks (i.e.: topic prediction, sentence and example creation, opinion paper), it maximizes learning. ISTE Standard 3 was met. There is collaboration between students and the teacher on this project, both in using Wordsift and in preparing and creating the group PowerPoint presentation. As the teacher, I'm modeling use of current technologies (Wordsift and PowerPoint) to students in combination with the lesson to communicate relevant information and ideas, and to give students ways to explore, analyze and synthesize information. ISTE 4 was met. This lesson on habitats recognizes the global societal issue regarding the preservation of such habitats as the rain forests and grasslands. It teaches about what these habitats are like and the animals/plants that live there. The students can learn and explore the threats of those environments, and then synthesize the information to reach their own conclusions about this global environmental issue. This lesson incorporates student tech standards 2, 4 and 6. The team structure provides for communication and collaboration. (2) Critical thinking, problem solving and decision making are present in the opinion piece. The students have to analyze and evaluate the facts and information that they found about the respective habitats, determine what the relevant information is to put into their PowerPoint pages, and draw conclusions to formulate and construct their opinion paper (Bloom Taxonomy: analysis, synthesis and evaluation). (4) This lesson promotes the understanding and use of the Wordsift technology to effectively learn vocabulary and assist with reading comprehension/literacy. The students select and use the different functionality within Wordsift, which exposes them to other technologies. For example, students use and explore Google Images as part of Wordsift. This lesson also requires them to also use their PowerPoint skills, making students use these technologies in combination to enhance learning and work product. (6)
My research paper is entitled eVoc Strategies: 10 Ways to Use Technology to Build Vocabulary by Bridget Dalton and Dana L. Grisham. (The Reading Teacher, 64(5), pp. 306-317, DOI:10:1598/RT.64.5.1.). http://crmsliteracy.wikispaces.com/file/view/10+Ways+to+Use+Technology+to+Build+Vocabulary.pdf
The article discusses the importance of vocabulary, factors contributing to learning vocabulary, and offers 10 strategies that use digital technology to help with vocabulary. Dalton and Grishman note the growing presence of technology and communication tools in the classroom, yet recognize that the successful use of such tools is unclear. They promote the use of technology to improve the learning of vocabulary and offer ten strategies. Please note that according to the authors, the 10 strategies, referred to as eVoc strategies, are not all backed by direct research evidence but are supported by effective vocabulary instruction research. I like that the authors did more than emphasize and support the idea of using technology, they actually provided real, usable suggestions to get teachers started.
I thought the authors did a nice job laying out the importance of vocabulary for reading comprehension and academic language development, providing the components for successful teaching of vocabulary, citing research-based support, then building their case for using technology to assist with vocabulary learning. Vocabulary learning should incorporate morphology, multiple contexts and learning strategies. Creating lively interest in words was highlighted as a key principle, and the ways to do it were through student expression and playing with words. All of these things make sense. What I particularly liked about this article was that the authors highlighted that the research was not new, but rather they encouraged teachers to take the known information and learning strategies and "apply these research-based recommendations in new ways, using digital tools, media, and the Internet" and then gave 10 ideas for teachers to try. I support getting teachers excited about thinking how to teach vocabulary in new and creative ways that are still in line with research; however, I wished they referred to digital technologies as a way of doing it versus implying it is "the" way to do it.
The eVoc in the title is meant to be short for evoking, and the ten strategies are meant to evoke the use of technology for teaching vocabulary. I think there are some interesting digital tools out there, including Wordsift, that can be used meaningfully in well thought out lesson plans that can enhance the learning of vocabulary. The authors did a nice job providing the background need for teaching vocabulary and research-based components/aspects for teaching vocabulary. As said previously, I like that they gave teachers some resources and ideas to use in the classroom to get them started; however, I think they could have done a better job emphasizing that these are merely resources and tools and it's how teachers use them in meaningful ways that matters.
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