Personalizing youth support, one text at a time
Posted: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:20:34 +0000
The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so, is acting as remote ally.

==Notes by Mica Pollock==

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Back on Nov 14, participants in the OneVille texting project at Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative middle and high schools, took the “stage” at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in our Digital Media and Learning Working Group, to share their past year of efforts to explore the potential of texting for supporting youth-teacher communication.

We discussed how texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. To Mo Robichaux, Next Wave teacher and texting pioneer, the practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day. Texting created “space for a more level relationship” in which students could discuss personal struggles and school goals, “that then go back like a rubber band, to a teacher-student relationship.”

Students and teachers together set ground rules for appropriate uses of text messaging in schools at the beginning of each year’s work. Almost everyone already had the ability to text; texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate.

At Berkman, texts like this prompted lively discussion of the support relationships texting could afford. As texting teacher Ted had said, “The language that the kids are using to thank and what they do verbally is surprising”:

Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

Often, we noticed, a text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation:

Teacher: Everything ok? 9:30 AM

Student: Ted? 10:39 AM

Teacher: Yup 11:02 AM

Student: Everythings alright I guess im gonna b in tm .. Is there anything I can do to put my grade up for your class 11:05 AM

Teacher: Be on time tomorrow, we’ll talk then.

Our next step: to work with partners at the Berkman Center to produce a teacher guide to the legal/privacy issues raised for those pioneering texting. This year, teachers, students, and OneVille texting pilot coordinator Uche Amaechi are continuing to test texting “teams.” They will wrap up that texting pilot at the end of this year or possibly, next fall, by sharing ¡Ahas! around the community to others wanting to explore texting for youth support and mentoring.

In other OneVille news: Healey bilingual parents and staff, with supporters Jedd Cohen and Ana Maria Nieto, continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network at the Healey School. They will also produce a parent-friendly “how to” guide to the puzzle pieces that work. Possibly, we will pilot and tweak our administrator and teacher dashboard views with principal and teachers.

We feel very privileged to have participated in these design innovations with the Somerville community.

==Eportfolios: Sparking New Conversations about What Students Can Do==
''Posted: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:53:35 +0000
''Notes by Mica Pollock

The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so is acting as remote ally.

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Last week, a group of student and teacher eportfolio researcher/designers from Somerville High School came to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, for a rousing share-out of their eportfolio project. After a year of participatory design work, eportfolios are seeding across the High School. Guests from Berkman’s Youth and Media Lab and other Working Group members from MIT, Tufts, and Emerson listened intently, as SHS young people and teachers shared their insights about the new communications about young people’s skills, talents and interests made possible when young people made and shared eportfolio entries.

SHS presenters described how over a year and a half of careful groundwork with the School Improvement Council and then critical participatory design research with dozens of students and teachers at SHS, SHS’s own students and teachers led a transition from the school’s prior portfolios to vibrant online “eportfolios” sharing students’ full range of learning products and accomplishments in and out of school, organized by 21st century skills rather than only in subject areas. From paper folders “locked in a cabinet,” student portfolios by spring 2011 included videos of students narrating their original poetry, solving math equations, and doing physics; interviews with teachers evaluating students’ negotiation skills, and videos of students’ efforts to learn to skateboard; photos and commentary on students’ original art and work experiences; and class assignments students found particularly valuable to their learning. As a student put it, an eportfolio allowed her to “show all of the sides of who I am, in one place,” to share “little cool things about me” as well as evidence of “being a good student.” Teacher Chris Glynn noted that if students entered his class at the beginning of the year with eportfolios communicating their skills and interests, learning would be “so much more individualized!”

Student researchers/eportfolio designers were chosen purposefully to demonstrate a full range of achievement levels and student backgrounds at SHS. As one student put it in the presentation, portfolios supported each student to show themselves as “exemplary,” by encouraging students to consider, document and post their best work done both inside and outside of school. “Every student can shine at this if they put in the time and effort,” a teacher said. “We are representative of the potential that everyone has,” a student agreed.

The energy to make eportfolios is spreading virally across the school, as teachers show each other how to use software and students who see others’ work get excited to post their own.

Now that the OneVille pilot phase of eportfolio design is over, students’ and teachers’ next plan is to make a Somerville High School eportfolio website created to support next schools exploring eportfolios!

==Let’s Spark Family-School Conversations about Student Data==
''Posted: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:08:31 +0000
''By Jedd Cohen, Seth Woodworth, and Josh Wairi

Getting “On the Same Page”: We can all see the data together, from any location

Update December 2011: this post was written this fall, when we expected to pilot the three dashboard views. Due to an undesired lag in final technological development, the “individual view” pilot has been delayed; we may do a small pilot of the “admin view” and “teacher view” this winter. Regardless, code has been created that pulls data out of Somerville’s Student Information System for quick viewing and can be put to use in any such “dashboard” project.

An idea common across Oneville’s projects has been: “A communication gap equals a gap in student service.” In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to share comprehensive student data, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, and how to communicate with schools about it.

Over the past two years in our “dashboard” project, we – local technologists, teachers, researchers — have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help make sure that key people can go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) for each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

Three resulting dashboard views are open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers to support each student’s success. Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. We’ve created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows each teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

'''Details: What do the dashboards look like?

The admin and teacher views appear in the form of a colorful chart that allows sorting by up to four columns at a time. Original design model: an Excel spreadsheet made for the Healey School by Greg Nadeau, local parent! Based on feedback from former principal Jason DeFalco, we added: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores, IEP status, and afterschool program name:

[[File:Dashboard.png]]

Based on conversations with new Healey Principal Purnima Vadhera, we’ll also add average attendance over the past several weeks, to compare to the current week’s attendance, and 504 status. We may still add MCAS score and growth, MAP writing score and growth, and DIBELS and MELA-O scores. The updated admin view also creates scatter plots and bar graphs to display the relation between demographics and other data, i.e., achievement or attendance.

The admin and teacher views look like charts, displaying the same types of data for many students. The individual view is organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs at the top of the page allow the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile.

The narrative structure, as well as many decisions about exactly what to display in this view, came out of numerous brainstorming meetings last spring with author and Healey teacher Josh Wairi. We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views in his class in the fall. The individual view presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments – each type of data on its own page accessible by tabs at the top. (Most of this data is in Somerville’s “student information system,” just more scattered; we wanted to get it easily all in one place for a teacher and family/providers to see.) We’ve also created an interactive online version of Somerville’s K-6 report card, which parents are used to getting on a static piece of paper. We plan to add each student’s yearbook photo and data on allotted support services. Next to each ‘chunk’ of student data, “comment/question” boxes provide a space for the parent or afterschool provider to comment on the data by entering text that gets sent to the homeroom teacher’s email:

[[File:Report Card.png]]

On the “Comments” page, the parent or afterschool provider can request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them. Parents can specify any new contact info and convenient meeting times. After receiving these comments, the homeroom teacher can forward any relevant parts to the appropriate subject area teachers. (Josh feels that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other teachers about families’ comments.)

The Parent Connectors will help to make the user interface available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole (and we’ll use the district’s own translation for the report card). For more ongoing translation (email messages sent to and from parents, parent-teacher conferences, the summary comments on the dashboard), we’re adding links to Google Translate and to the Parent Connector calendar for setting up meetings with interpreters.

Knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we’ve designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people use the tools will be up to them – but rather than have the tools just “display” data, we wanted the individual view, in particular, to also prompt and encourage communication about data.

Feedback and next steps:

We’ve asked for feedback on the tool throughout, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, “Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!” When asked whether the dashboard might feel like extra work, another parent articulated his/her vision of parent involvement: “Not extra – you have children, you spend time to communicate. The more time you spend, the better students do.” One English-speaking parent with three children at the school explained that the dashboard’s comment and scheduling features solved a long-standing problem for her: After being a Healey parent for 11 years, she has only ever had time to meet with each of her children’s core academic teachers during PTA nights, but never the specialty teachers, e.g., music, art, support room teachers. Our dashboard enables and encourages parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who will forward it to the specials teachers. Another parent was especially enthusiastic about online access: “I do everything on the computer now.” And another immigrant parent said he does “everything” on his smart phone!

In a recent meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the potential value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Online access to this data could also help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [family dashboard] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” helps when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” Clearly, no proverbial dogs will eat it once it’s online.

Students with IEPs and 504 plans sometimes need accommodations on the MCAS, and Purnima often spends “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers that students’ needs have been met. Our tool allows her to sort by IEP and 504 plans, so that all these students appear together, “so we don’t have moments when things fall through the cracks.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. Such team conversations could involve the school’s “student support team” – a standing group of educators that evaluates struggling students – or each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that it could allow him to present a single student’s data in one of these team meetings without revealing all the other students’ grades unnecessarily (a breach of confidentiality).

We hope that these dashboards could be useful enough to help ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators, and catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our dashboards, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh can always share back, move forward in small increments. Maybe teachers would just want to get on board with this!”

We face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. The same work schedules that make parent-teacher meetings hard also make it hard for some parents to coordinate their schedules with the computer labs at local libraries or in the housing projects where some families live.

We hope to work with the PTA this year to create basic computer and email training for Healey parents who need this support. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet. Several years from now, the proliferation of smartphones and iphones will likely shrink this challenge dramatically, making it easier than ever for partners to join the conversation about student data.

==Figuring out the infrastructure for interpretation and translation: The Parent Connector Project==
''Posted: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:25:10 +0000

'''A parent recording information for other parents on the "Healey Hotline"

''By Mica Pollock, Gina D’Haiti, Tona Delmonico, and Ana Maria Nieto, for the Parent Connectors

[[File:Mariasethlessblurryhotlinephoto.jpg]]

We had one of our Multilingual Coffee Hours with the principal on Friday, May 20, at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville. Over some Portuguese bread, and coffee supplied by the PTA, we shared some of what we’ve been doing and learning in our Parent Connector project, and brainstormed next steps. The Connector project is a parent-led effort (in partnership with the school administration) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) via a phone tree to immigrant parents who speak their language.

We see the Connectors as one component of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation in a multilingual school. There are other pieces. We’re prototyping a hotline (using open source software and the Twilio API) allowing volunteer Translators of the Month (also bilingual parents, and maybe, students) to verbally translate information all parents need to know (in Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish). Bilingual parents have noted that translating material into their languages verbally – so, speaking it on to a hotline — is easier than doing it word for word from paper to paper. So far, we have parents coming to speak into a computer (see photo!). We hope to hone the hotline so that translators can record to it from home.

We’re working on other components of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation: a Googledoc as one organized place where principal and others put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translation (over time, our hotline).

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but glitches certainly can block communication too. One example: because our Connector project started mid-year, we had no beginning of the year form for all parents, saying “do you want a Connector? Check here to release your number to them!” So, it took us weeks to work through the Parent Information Center (PIC) to get parents to release their numbers to other parents! (School staff had to figure out how to download a spreadsheet of language-specific numbers for PIC staff from X2, the district’s “student information system”; then the PIC staff had to make the calls home to get parents’ permission to release numbers to the Connectors; then, finally, Connectors got lists and could start calling.)

A key issue we’re trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). Which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

==Research Day: Exploring the Potential of Texting for Student-Teacher Communication==
''Posted: Fri, 06 May 2011 01:52:06 +0000
On Saturday, April 21 from 10-1, ten young people and two teachers from Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative high school and middle school, came to a classroom at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. They joined Uche, me, and four other graduate students from the Ed School in “Research Day.” Our goal: to analyze texts students and teachers have been sending each other since the winter, in OneVille’s pilot of texting as a channel for rapid youth support.

We’ve been talking to students and teachers all year as co-researchers, about their experiences testing texting. We’d analyzed specific texts before with Ted and Mo, our teacher participants. But this was our first time sitting together with young people analyzing actual data. Reading transcripts taken from Google Voice (with participants’ permission and anonymized for analysis), students were immediately perceptive about “patterns in the data.” We talked in small groups, and then we shared ideas across the room. My small group included Mo (our Next Wave, middle school teacher), Shelia, Obens, “Juan,” and “Dan” (pseudonyms for initial blogging purposes!).

What we talked about most was how texting can enhance student-teacher relationships and so, students’ engagement with school.

Reading the transcripts, the students noticed first that students and teachers were noticeably polite to each other, texting “thanks and you’re welcome” after texts about permission slips, reminders, and personal check-ins on grades or life.

“The kids haven’t been crossing boundaries in any way – no one has been inappropriate,” Mo said later. Students agreed, saying that with texting, you’d just “give the teacher the same respect you’d give them in school.”

Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring. And that students were grateful for it: “it shows you appreciate the person and you’re thankful they helped you out,” Shelia said. Mo added: “They appreciate (Ted, our Full Circle teacher) taking time out of his own private life to send these texts.” Obens said that texts from Ted had gotten him to school on time.

Wielding her highlighter, Shelia selected another text from Ted to a student as important evidence:

“you need to be in school way more my friend.” “I feel like it’s genuine concern,” she explained. “It shows connection,” Obens added. “It also shows courage.”

He pointed out that the teacher was “taking time to text people about stuff – taking time to get a person to school on time. That shows courage on the part of the teacher. Also on the student, by replying back.” Shelia agreed, adding, “It takes the courage to make that bond – from the teacher — and also for the student to participate in the bond.” Juan added, “Who would want to text a teacher – there’s a lot you could be doing at that time. A lot of people won’t do it – that they do it means they really care about what they are doing.” As evidence, he pointed out a text he himself had sent back to Ted: he had “put in the effort” with responses, like “fine” and “I’ll make it [to school] by 8:10.” “I sleep a lot – but I made it before 8:10. It did help. I was used to coming in around 8:30,” he explained.

Ted highlighted this same point later in the research day: student texts to teachers

“show a level of investment. Even if (the text is) not school related, the student is checking in, making that contact, when they don’t have to. It’s really important to understand – the value of doing things not only when you have to do things.”

Looking again at Ted’s text “you need to be in school way more my friend,” both Mo and Shelia noted that texts put students and teachers “on the same level.” Shelia pointed out Mo’s own text to a student as similarly important: “worried about you.” “It shows that she really cares,” Shelia explained. “You had a bad day yesterday” was pointed out as a particularly caring teacher “check-in.”

Mo then pointed out a student request for information that had happened via text: “hey do you think they’re gonna extend the add drop period?” In class, Obens explained, “I don’t feel like bothering (Ted) w/ those types of questions.“ With texting, relationship-building could continue after the classroom day:

“It definitely strengthens our face to face, day to day relationships,” Ted added. “When you’re texting you feel like you’re close to your teacher,” Obens summed up.

Relationship. Built and strengthened in this private backchannel between people who share a classroom, in a medium more comfortable to students of 2011. “Some people might feel more comfortable saying it via texting more than face to face — because in person you might feel shy, awkward and not know what to say back,” said a student from across the room.

We might chalk this up to a modern aversion to in-person communication: “I’d rather text my parents than call them,” a student added. But reading the actual texts, we saw certain communications that texting may particularly make possible. Joking. Banter. The quick check-ins of care that simply don’t happen in person during busy days.

“She’s making sure the kid doesn’t get in trouble – she asks him to call his mom and stuff,” Juan noted of another of Mo’s texts. “She couldn’t do this face to face b/c he wasn’t in school.”

Pointing out uses of humor in the texts, Juan made another point about how texting could add to student-teacher relationships: people could communicate even if a student was in a bad mood. A face-to-face conversation might end with the student “shouting” out of anger, unable to help it; with texting, you could “be mad” and still “send a funny text.” Another student elaborated relatedly from across the room: with texting, you could overcome the “intimidation” of possible “rejection” by the other person, by sending lighthearted texts across the private channel that did not have to be responded to immediately. Emotion was “easier to handle” via texts, another student said.

Students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; even to care. Obens summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year:

“it shows connection. It’s really helpful — it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on the schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Over and over that day, we talked about how texts showed not just “connection” but true caring, in both directions. Mo pointed out that one student had asked Ted “how was your weekend.” Students pointed out texts from Ted and Mo like “you made 1 day last week” (“I like the encouragement,” said one student) and “you’re a smart kid” (“That’s really nice because some kids might feel doubt and don’t get many compliments from people,” another student said.). Shelia pointed out that overall, the texts could build relationship and simultaneously, the motivation to try.

“You need to know [teachers] care in order to do stuff. Otherwise what’s the point in trying. If a person is ‘I’m here for you’ – you feel someone else cares, I should care too.”

Furthermore, Shelia added, texts kept that relationship around with you, for later viewing. “With a phone call, it’s out of your head,” Shelia explained. “With a text message it’s still there when you turn on your phone – it still reminds you. You have to delete it if you don’t want it – it’s there to remind you.”

We left sure that texting had “helped” with “connection” in these teachers’ classrooms but unsure how it might work in “a school of like 600,” as someone put it. Full Circle/Next Wave are particularly “personal” schools, some pointed out: “in other schools it’s less personal, you get five minutes with that teacher,” Shelia said. We left with a question: does that lack of “personal” face to face attention in other schools make something like texting more likely to help, or less?

“Have good conversations,” Juan advised others considering texting with students. “Like don’t just talk about school. Also talk about how your day’s going, stuff like that. Don’t just keep it about school.” Ted finished our Research Day with more overall advice: “It’s up to both people to enhance the texting relationship. If the student is just responding “ok” or “yes” or “no,” that doesn’t allow the texting relationship to develop and to go towards communications that aren’t just ‘be on time.’”

==The Little Things Revisited: The Importance of Connectedness==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:18:03 +0000
In the last blog post I talked about the importance of the low-level support communications between teachers and students at the Oneville site. I posted a few short excerpts in which a teacher was texting students before school in an effort to motivate otherwise disinclined students to come school that day. Such communications, while low level, were nevertheless important because they had an immediate impact– the student in question ultimately came to school–but they also had the simultaneous effect, as the teachers and students told us and I’ll detail below, of strengthening the relationship between teachers and students.

Both parties (students and teachers) maintain that the strengthening of the non-academic aspects of their relationships is essential to supporting and nurturing the academic relationship and communication. When discussing the ‘low level’ nature of some of the conversations with the two teachers, they both claimed that these conversations were important and essential because they helped them build stronger relationships with the students. This strengthening occurred, they maintained, because they got to see the students in a different light than they would normally during the school day through conventional methods. One teachers noted that “the language that the kids are using to thank (them) through texting” is significantly different than what the students use in verbal communication, and that “the difference is surprising. It’s refreshing to know that (the students) have that capability”.

Students also found the texting communications useful in building relationships with their teachers. One student, who admitted to not responding regularly to texts from his teacher still found them useful” “I find it helpful, but I just don’t want to text back”. Moreover, the students suggested that he’d engage with the teacher more over text if “maybe during the weekend (he’d) hear from the teacher about how his weekend is going”. He wanted to learn more about the teacher outside of school. He’d like that, he claimed because “if (they) talk about outside (of school) stuff, (our) relationship will grow even stronger”.

This sense of connectedness described by teachers and students jibes with much of motivational literature that highlights relatedness–a sense of being connected to a larger group–alongside autonomy and a sense of competence, as an essential component of motivation. If we are to be successful in motivating the students not just to come to school, but to become actively involved in their schooling and education, then we, as the supporting community, must acknowledge and respond to their (identified) needs. These low level communications may not be sufficient for helping the students become successful in school and life, but as teachers and students have expressed, they are necessary.

==The Little Things==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:07:20 +0000
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter the most in education: the moments that create and nurture relationships. When I first started with the Oneville Project, I believed that using the medium of texting would allow teachers, students, family members, and other stakeholders involved in the students’ lives to engage in crucial, in depth, involved, and sustained conversations about big picture issues affecting the students’ lives. The sky was the limit, I believed. The texting medium would allow students to get more one on one support from teachers than they would have otherwise received from a distracted teacher, in a crowded classroom, during a busy school day. Students would seek and receive the help they needed from their teachers at a time and place of their own choosing. In some ways, this has all turned out to be true: Mo and Ted, teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave who wanted to see how texting could support their communications with students and students’ supporters, have been texting when and from where they can; students are responding in kind. Communications that couldn’t happen before are happening now. But in many ways, these communications are about things that to an outsider, might seem “small.”

In these early stages of our texting pilot at Somerville site, we’re finding that teachers and students are regularly using texting for what might seem low level interactions — such as nudging students to get up and come to school, in real time:

7:01am TEACHER: Hey (STUDENT), rise and shine!!

7:08 am TEACHER: Hey, you getting up!!

7:36 am STUDENT: You up

7:39 am STUDENT: I made a pancake =D lol

7:41 Eww wait it came out nasty

== ==

7:27 am TEACHER: Hey, I’m late

7:27 am TEACHER: Time to get up!!

7:27 am TEACHER: Got a nice flatbread for you!!

7:28 am STUDENT: Ok, I’m up

In these two exchanges we see the teacher prodding and then coaxing the student to get up and come to school. This is not a reminder sent the week or the night before, but a real time push to action; the first and second exchanges are within a 40 and one-minute time frame, respectively. The text based communication modality allows the teacher to reach through her phone and into the students’ house. And in both situations it seems to have worked! Another student recently told one of our research assistants – HGSE students themselves starting to text with students as college mentors – that he was coming to school more often because of these texts. Could the same exchange have happened over the phone? Possibly. Would it have happened? Unlikely. The student would have most likely silenced the phone. But texts are extremely insistent. The only quick way to stop them from coming in is to turn off the phone–which is akin to cutting of an appendage to most students. They could always ignore the phone and not read the message, but how long can/will a teenager ignore their portal to the world?

Although we’re seeing the beginning of larger forward looking conversations – reminder statements about homework, supportive statements about motivation and students’ intelligence — a more startling and significant finding so far is that little communications about little things — like pancakes — could be important to building a relationship, possibly the ultimate need of good teaching. More pragmatically, a teacher can have no impact, and the student no learning, if the student doesn’t show up to school. And while there are sometimes complex and intractable reasons why a student does not show up for school–problems at home, bullying, (arguably) more appealing and remunerative options – sometimes, smaller and more manageable causes are at the root of frequent tardiness and absences. Sometimes the students are just too tired – or too alone — to get out of bed.

Of course the example above raises many obvious questions that are fundamental to anyone exploring uses of social media in education today. 1) What about boundaries–the teacher reaching across settings, into the student’s home? What boundaries of privacy and trust need to be in place for such communications to be okay? 2) Do teachers really have time to do this one on one check up on students? 3) How often should such “wake up calls” occur, before they become demotivating or infantilizing? We’re exploring all of this with students and teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, and we’ll address these questions in future posts.

''Posted: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:15:10 +0000
'''OneVille’s mission is to facilitate collaboration in young people’s success by co-creating communication solutions linking the people in young people’s lives.

'''ePortfolio Reflection from Mike M.
''Posted: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:03:45 +0000
I started using online portfolios for my AP class last year. When I became part of the ePortfolio project at SHS, I saw what could be done with a ePortfolio and I decided to go farther. What started as a simple online file cabinet for students to store lab reports, became a place for students to reflect and help each other. It also became a place for me to share not only paper solutions and documents, but video to help students work through issues.

It then went further to include how-to videos for other new teachers on how to use lab equipment, and video tutorials for any students on how to use technology like Excel, and some of our digital lab analysis software.

I plan I adding a lot more, and turning my ePortfolio site into a place to share information with my students and fellow teachers. I think having the students make their own sites to post images, labs, reflections etc was invaluable and definitely added to their experience.

In the future I hope something can be put into place that will allow all freshman to develop an ePortfolio that they can utilize throughout their high school career to not only store examples of their best work, but help them organize and prepare for college or jobs, share things they are proud of with their teachers, family and fellow students and express themselves in a way that is actually valuable to their education and become a better human being, as opposed to something limited like twitter or facebook which well, we kind of know what those things are most useful for.

Check out my ePortfolio site at https://sites.google.com/site/somervillephysics/and my official site at http://mrmaloney.com

==Communicating the Whole Student – and Teacher==
''Posted: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 02:44:10 +0000

[[File:EportfolioCrewMarch20113-300x225.jpg]]

''Innovations by the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team, above

''Notes from the audience, by Mica Pollock

Last night, the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team gave a presentation of their work developing ePortfolios since October 2011. Up in front of an audience of nearly 30 from the superintendent’s office, school committee, school improvement council and community, 11 young people and 6 teachers shared how they went about creating their online portfolios and what they learned about themselves in the process.

Somerville High School has a paper portfolio tradition that has been, as one teacher put it, “a cumbersome collection of paper four times a year.” On Monday night, students and teachers discussed the ability to show themselves and their skill sets in multimedia – to colleges, employers, and one another.

As one student put it, the ePortfolio shows “a more accurate portrait of myself.” I was struck by this very thing overall: the rare chance for a student or a teacher, in school, to show other people one’s full self — and the ability of ePortfolios to make this a normal thing.

Zoe showed her mathematics equations, and her participation in the Boston Children’s Chorus opera. Sergio demonstrated his award-winning children’s book, and a gear shift he made by hand in the shop for his own car.

Astrid pointed out that ePortfolios allowed students to get closer to teachers they didn’t know as well; “it allows you to see the background of a student, and you can express yourself.” Clicking through videos on a school SmartBoard, she demonstrated the digital story of a poem she wrote in El Salvador from a hammock, on her iPod; it was the first time presenting her work this publicly, she said, as she had always been shy about sharing her poems.

A teacher, Mr Glynn, noted that he himself had approached the project from the perspective of a learner: what would a teacher need to know to help all students use wiki spaces and google sites? Students using the media had become more critical and self-reflective about their learning, he said, and were taking more control and ownership of it. ePortfolios also had the potential to show both growth and continuity in student skills over time. “These are so much more alive than the paper version of our portfolio,” he said. And his other conclusion about the technology itself: “a freshman in high school can definitely figure this out.”

Doug, a student, pointed out that ePortfolios let students interact with their teachers online, and “get critique” from peers; “students are always in search of some constructive criticism,” he added, pointing out as well that “Somerville High has a diversity of cultures; media and technology cross those boundaries.” As he clicked to some of his essays, a teacher called out that he was an excellent writer and an audience member commented on his large vocabulary; “there are some things that you can’t see that you can show on your ePortfolio,” he finished modestly.

Rocky showed his programming efforts in Java, next to his wacky chicken graphics; online images he had posted demonstrated both his lifelong curiosity about how food gets made (bubble tea was one example) and a long line of successful Somerville report cards. “EPortfolios are to show your improvement over life,” he finished.

Samantha, who said with a smile that “I hate technology,” showed herself as an award-winning dancer, an avocation she said she wanted to combine with a medical career; the ability to “show colleges what you can do,” rather than “just show people a piece of paper on yourself,” made tech “worth the struggle.”

Susan Olsen, a teacher, spoke of engaging a full range of students in the project, students both struggling and already succeeding academically. Mr. Maloney wowed the audience by showing his class website for AP Physics, which he had redone for the project using “the free tools the kids are using.” He showed us how he could communicate ways of solving physics equations online to students; he also was making and posting videos online that communicate to other teachers how to create physics equipment for a low cost. He also participated in blog community discussions sharing ahas with physics teachers across the world. “I didn’t collect one piece of paper this year from my students except for tests,” he said, and students were online regularly commenting on each others’ assignments.

David showed a video of his persistent skateboarding, and his sketches of animals and plants. His teacher Michelle Li pointed out that ePortfolios could personalize learning more effectively with students like David, and, that these could be accessed “any time, from anywhere.” (She showed us how her website also linked to the Somerville Public Schools calendar and daily bulletin, and to X2, the student information system, so students could check up on their grades.) Her “vision”: to have each student make an eportfolio that she could link to her own class website. This would allow her, her students, and even her students’ parents to have “meaningful conversations with kids.” (Another student, Sonam, has already been presenting his ePortfolio efforts to her class, and now lots of kids want to make ePortfolios!)

Mr. Petriv, a computer hardware teacher, had made the leap from his typical “shrink-wrapped programs with a manual” to experimenting with various free software for the project. He showed us pictures of the lilies he loved, the beetles that he hated, and his expertise in home repair, then talked about the potential for ePortfolios to show both the “filing cabinet” of all student work and the “best work” for graduation or career.

Sonam, an avid video game enthusiast, showed how he learned computer programming through an application called Scratch and created his own game.

Vanessa showed a physics video and online diary. “I lost my (paper) portfolio folder in sophomore year and nobody ever said anything,” Vanessa added, to laughs from the group. “If I had gotten this when I was a freshman, I could have linked to it on the common college application. . . .We are the new tech generation. Kids will lie to you and tell you they can’t make a website, but they can; we all have Facebook!”

Kamilla closed the evening with a photo of a chemistry class in Brazil, her paper drawings of flowers, her experiments with hair dyes, her hand-designed dresses from Brazil, and her dreams of being a chemical engineer.

The whole teacher, the whole student. The library glowed with pictures of lilies, of skateboards, next to drawings of physics and algebra equations and Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution plans; photos of hand-designed dresses posted next to dreams of becoming chemical engineers, next to poems written in hammocks. Students and teachers themselves, up in front, flowed back and forth between describing all parts of themselves, with equal interest; a love of chemistry and blue hair. When, in school, do we get to communicate who we actually are and what we can actually do? And what might happen if we did this all the time?

'''[[http://oneville.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ePortfolioFinalPresentationProgramMarch2011.pdfePortfolio Final Presentation]] '''

Oneville Blog

2012-07-23T00:30:18Z

Amaechi:

Personalizing youth support, one text at a time
Posted: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:20:34 +0000
The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so, is acting as remote ally.

==Notes by Mica Pollock==

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Back on Nov 14, participants in the OneVille texting project at Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative middle and high schools, took the “stage” at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in our Digital Media and Learning Working Group, to share their past year of efforts to explore the potential of texting for supporting youth-teacher communication.

We discussed how texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. To Mo Robichaux, Next Wave teacher and texting pioneer, the practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day. Texting created “space for a more level relationship” in which students could discuss personal struggles and school goals, “that then go back like a rubber band, to a teacher-student relationship.”

Students and teachers together set ground rules for appropriate uses of text messaging in schools at the beginning of each year’s work. Almost everyone already had the ability to text; texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate.

At Berkman, texts like this prompted lively discussion of the support relationships texting could afford. As texting teacher Ted had said, “The language that the kids are using to thank and what they do verbally is surprising”:

Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

Often, we noticed, a text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation:

Teacher: Everything ok? 9:30 AM

Student: Ted? 10:39 AM

Teacher: Yup 11:02 AM

Student: Everythings alright I guess im gonna b in tm .. Is there anything I can do to put my grade up for your class 11:05 AM

Teacher: Be on time tomorrow, we’ll talk then.

Our next step: to work with partners at the Berkman Center to produce a teacher guide to the legal/privacy issues raised for those pioneering texting. This year, teachers, students, and OneVille texting pilot coordinator Uche Amaechi are continuing to test texting “teams.” They will wrap up that texting pilot at the end of this year or possibly, next fall, by sharing ¡Ahas! around the community to others wanting to explore texting for youth support and mentoring.

In other OneVille news: Healey bilingual parents and staff, with supporters Jedd Cohen and Ana Maria Nieto, continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network at the Healey School. They will also produce a parent-friendly “how to” guide to the puzzle pieces that work. Possibly, we will pilot and tweak our administrator and teacher dashboard views with principal and teachers.

We feel very privileged to have participated in these design innovations with the Somerville community.

==Eportfolios: Sparking New Conversations about What Students Can Do==
''Posted: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:53:35 +0000
''Notes by Mica Pollock

The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so is acting as remote ally.

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Last week, a group of student and teacher eportfolio researcher/designers from Somerville High School came to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, for a rousing share-out of their eportfolio project. After a year of participatory design work, eportfolios are seeding across the High School. Guests from Berkman’s Youth and Media Lab and other Working Group members from MIT, Tufts, and Emerson listened intently, as SHS young people and teachers shared their insights about the new communications about young people’s skills, talents and interests made possible when young people made and shared eportfolio entries.

SHS presenters described how over a year and a half of careful groundwork with the School Improvement Council and then critical participatory design research with dozens of students and teachers at SHS, SHS’s own students and teachers led a transition from the school’s prior portfolios to vibrant online “eportfolios” sharing students’ full range of learning products and accomplishments in and out of school, organized by 21st century skills rather than only in subject areas. From paper folders “locked in a cabinet,” student portfolios by spring 2011 included videos of students narrating their original poetry, solving math equations, and doing physics; interviews with teachers evaluating students’ negotiation skills, and videos of students’ efforts to learn to skateboard; photos and commentary on students’ original art and work experiences; and class assignments students found particularly valuable to their learning. As a student put it, an eportfolio allowed her to “show all of the sides of who I am, in one place,” to share “little cool things about me” as well as evidence of “being a good student.” Teacher Chris Glynn noted that if students entered his class at the beginning of the year with eportfolios communicating their skills and interests, learning would be “so much more individualized!”

Student researchers/eportfolio designers were chosen purposefully to demonstrate a full range of achievement levels and student backgrounds at SHS. As one student put it in the presentation, portfolios supported each student to show themselves as “exemplary,” by encouraging students to consider, document and post their best work done both inside and outside of school. “Every student can shine at this if they put in the time and effort,” a teacher said. “We are representative of the potential that everyone has,” a student agreed.

The energy to make eportfolios is spreading virally across the school, as teachers show each other how to use software and students who see others’ work get excited to post their own.

Now that the OneVille pilot phase of eportfolio design is over, students’ and teachers’ next plan is to make a Somerville High School eportfolio website created to support next schools exploring eportfolios!

==Let’s Spark Family-School Conversations about Student Data==
''Posted: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:08:31 +0000
''By Jedd Cohen, Seth Woodworth, and Josh Wairi

Getting “On the Same Page”: We can all see the data together, from any location

Update December 2011: this post was written this fall, when we expected to pilot the three dashboard views. Due to an undesired lag in final technological development, the “individual view” pilot has been delayed; we may do a small pilot of the “admin view” and “teacher view” this winter. Regardless, code has been created that pulls data out of Somerville’s Student Information System for quick viewing and can be put to use in any such “dashboard” project.

An idea common across Oneville’s projects has been: “A communication gap equals a gap in student service.” In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to share comprehensive student data, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, and how to communicate with schools about it.

Over the past two years in our “dashboard” project, we – local technologists, teachers, researchers — have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help make sure that key people can go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) for each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

Three resulting dashboard views are open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers to support each student’s success. Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. We’ve created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows each teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

'''Details: What do the dashboards look like?

The admin and teacher views appear in the form of a colorful chart that allows sorting by up to four columns at a time. Original design model: an Excel spreadsheet made for the Healey School by Greg Nadeau, local parent! Based on feedback from former principal Jason DeFalco, we added: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores, IEP status, and afterschool program name:

[[File:Dashboard.png]]

Based on conversations with new Healey Principal Purnima Vadhera, we’ll also add average attendance over the past several weeks, to compare to the current week’s attendance, and 504 status. We may still add MCAS score and growth, MAP writing score and growth, and DIBELS and MELA-O scores. The updated admin view also creates scatter plots and bar graphs to display the relation between demographics and other data, i.e., achievement or attendance.

The admin and teacher views look like charts, displaying the same types of data for many students. The individual view is organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs at the top of the page allow the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile.

The narrative structure, as well as many decisions about exactly what to display in this view, came out of numerous brainstorming meetings last spring with author and Healey teacher Josh Wairi. We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views in his class in the fall. The individual view presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments – each type of data on its own page accessible by tabs at the top. (Most of this data is in Somerville’s “student information system,” just more scattered; we wanted to get it easily all in one place for a teacher and family/providers to see.) We’ve also created an interactive online version of Somerville’s K-6 report card, which parents are used to getting on a static piece of paper. We plan to add each student’s yearbook photo and data on allotted support services. Next to each ‘chunk’ of student data, “comment/question” boxes provide a space for the parent or afterschool provider to comment on the data by entering text that gets sent to the homeroom teacher’s email:

[[File:Report Card.png]]

On the “Comments” page, the parent or afterschool provider can request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them. Parents can specify any new contact info and convenient meeting times. After receiving these comments, the homeroom teacher can forward any relevant parts to the appropriate subject area teachers. (Josh feels that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other teachers about families’ comments.)

The Parent Connectors will help to make the user interface available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole (and we’ll use the district’s own translation for the report card). For more ongoing translation (email messages sent to and from parents, parent-teacher conferences, the summary comments on the dashboard), we’re adding links to Google Translate and to the Parent Connector calendar for setting up meetings with interpreters.

Knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we’ve designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people use the tools will be up to them – but rather than have the tools just “display” data, we wanted the individual view, in particular, to also prompt and encourage communication about data.

Feedback and next steps:

We’ve asked for feedback on the tool throughout, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, “Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!” When asked whether the dashboard might feel like extra work, another parent articulated his/her vision of parent involvement: “Not extra – you have children, you spend time to communicate. The more time you spend, the better students do.” One English-speaking parent with three children at the school explained that the dashboard’s comment and scheduling features solved a long-standing problem for her: After being a Healey parent for 11 years, she has only ever had time to meet with each of her children’s core academic teachers during PTA nights, but never the specialty teachers, e.g., music, art, support room teachers. Our dashboard enables and encourages parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who will forward it to the specials teachers. Another parent was especially enthusiastic about online access: “I do everything on the computer now.” And another immigrant parent said he does “everything” on his smart phone!

In a recent meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the potential value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Online access to this data could also help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [family dashboard] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” helps when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” Clearly, no proverbial dogs will eat it once it’s online.

Students with IEPs and 504 plans sometimes need accommodations on the MCAS, and Purnima often spends “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers that students’ needs have been met. Our tool allows her to sort by IEP and 504 plans, so that all these students appear together, “so we don’t have moments when things fall through the cracks.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. Such team conversations could involve the school’s “student support team” – a standing group of educators that evaluates struggling students – or each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that it could allow him to present a single student’s data in one of these team meetings without revealing all the other students’ grades unnecessarily (a breach of confidentiality).

We hope that these dashboards could be useful enough to help ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators, and catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our dashboards, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh can always share back, move forward in small increments. Maybe teachers would just want to get on board with this!”

We face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. The same work schedules that make parent-teacher meetings hard also make it hard for some parents to coordinate their schedules with the computer labs at local libraries or in the housing projects where some families live.

We hope to work with the PTA this year to create basic computer and email training for Healey parents who need this support. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet. Several years from now, the proliferation of smartphones and iphones will likely shrink this challenge dramatically, making it easier than ever for partners to join the conversation about student data.

==Figuring out the infrastructure for interpretation and translation: The Parent Connector Project==
''Posted: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:25:10 +0000

'''A parent recording information for other parents on the "Healey Hotline"

''By Mica Pollock, Gina D’Haiti, Tona Delmonico, and Ana Maria Nieto, for the Parent Connectors

[[File:Mariasethlessblurryhotlinephoto.jpg]]

We had one of our Multilingual Coffee Hours with the principal on Friday, May 20, at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville. Over some Portuguese bread, and coffee supplied by the PTA, we shared some of what we’ve been doing and learning in our Parent Connector project, and brainstormed next steps. The Connector project is a parent-led effort (in partnership with the school administration) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) via a phone tree to immigrant parents who speak their language.

We see the Connectors as one component of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation in a multilingual school. There are other pieces. We’re prototyping a hotline (using open source software and the Twilio API) allowing volunteer Translators of the Month (also bilingual parents, and maybe, students) to verbally translate information all parents need to know (in Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish). Bilingual parents have noted that translating material into their languages verbally – so, speaking it on to a hotline — is easier than doing it word for word from paper to paper. So far, we have parents coming to speak into a computer (see photo!). We hope to hone the hotline so that translators can record to it from home.

We’re working on other components of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation: a Googledoc as one organized place where principal and others put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translation (over time, our hotline).

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but glitches certainly can block communication too. One example: because our Connector project started mid-year, we had no beginning of the year form for all parents, saying “do you want a Connector? Check here to release your number to them!” So, it took us weeks to work through the Parent Information Center (PIC) to get parents to release their numbers to other parents! (School staff had to figure out how to download a spreadsheet of language-specific numbers for PIC staff from X2, the district’s “student information system”; then the PIC staff had to make the calls home to get parents’ permission to release numbers to the Connectors; then, finally, Connectors got lists and could start calling.)

A key issue we’re trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). Which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

==Research Day: Exploring the Potential of Texting for Student-Teacher Communication==
''Posted: Fri, 06 May 2011 01:52:06 +0000
On Saturday, April 21 from 10-1, ten young people and two teachers from Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative high school and middle school, came to a classroom at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. They joined Uche, me, and four other graduate students from the Ed School in “Research Day.” Our goal: to analyze texts students and teachers have been sending each other since the winter, in OneVille’s pilot of texting as a channel for rapid youth support.

We’ve been talking to students and teachers all year as co-researchers, about their experiences testing texting. We’d analyzed specific texts before with Ted and Mo, our teacher participants. But this was our first time sitting together with young people analyzing actual data. Reading transcripts taken from Google Voice (with participants’ permission and anonymized for analysis), students were immediately perceptive about “patterns in the data.” We talked in small groups, and then we shared ideas across the room. My small group included Mo (our Next Wave, middle school teacher), Shelia, Obens, “Juan,” and “Dan” (pseudonyms for initial blogging purposes!).

What we talked about most was how texting can enhance student-teacher relationships and so, students’ engagement with school.

Reading the transcripts, the students noticed first that students and teachers were noticeably polite to each other, texting “thanks and you’re welcome” after texts about permission slips, reminders, and personal check-ins on grades or life.

“The kids haven’t been crossing boundaries in any way – no one has been inappropriate,” Mo said later. Students agreed, saying that with texting, you’d just “give the teacher the same respect you’d give them in school.”

Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring. And that students were grateful for it: “it shows you appreciate the person and you’re thankful they helped you out,” Shelia said. Mo added: “They appreciate (Ted, our Full Circle teacher) taking time out of his own private life to send these texts.” Obens said that texts from Ted had gotten him to school on time.

Wielding her highlighter, Shelia selected another text from Ted to a student as important evidence:

“you need to be in school way more my friend.” “I feel like it’s genuine concern,” she explained. “It shows connection,” Obens added. “It also shows courage.”

He pointed out that the teacher was “taking time to text people about stuff – taking time to get a person to school on time. That shows courage on the part of the teacher. Also on the student, by replying back.” Shelia agreed, adding, “It takes the courage to make that bond – from the teacher — and also for the student to participate in the bond.” Juan added, “Who would want to text a teacher – there’s a lot you could be doing at that time. A lot of people won’t do it – that they do it means they really care about what they are doing.” As evidence, he pointed out a text he himself had sent back to Ted: he had “put in the effort” with responses, like “fine” and “I’ll make it [to school] by 8:10.” “I sleep a lot – but I made it before 8:10. It did help. I was used to coming in around 8:30,” he explained.

Ted highlighted this same point later in the research day: student texts to teachers

“show a level of investment. Even if (the text is) not school related, the student is checking in, making that contact, when they don’t have to. It’s really important to understand – the value of doing things not only when you have to do things.”

Looking again at Ted’s text “you need to be in school way more my friend,” both Mo and Shelia noted that texts put students and teachers “on the same level.” Shelia pointed out Mo’s own text to a student as similarly important: “worried about you.” “It shows that she really cares,” Shelia explained. “You had a bad day yesterday” was pointed out as a particularly caring teacher “check-in.”

Mo then pointed out a student request for information that had happened via text: “hey do you think they’re gonna extend the add drop period?” In class, Obens explained, “I don’t feel like bothering (Ted) w/ those types of questions.“ With texting, relationship-building could continue after the classroom day:

“It definitely strengthens our face to face, day to day relationships,” Ted added. “When you’re texting you feel like you’re close to your teacher,” Obens summed up.

Relationship. Built and strengthened in this private backchannel between people who share a classroom, in a medium more comfortable to students of 2011. “Some people might feel more comfortable saying it via texting more than face to face — because in person you might feel shy, awkward and not know what to say back,” said a student from across the room.

We might chalk this up to a modern aversion to in-person communication: “I’d rather text my parents than call them,” a student added. But reading the actual texts, we saw certain communications that texting may particularly make possible. Joking. Banter. The quick check-ins of care that simply don’t happen in person during busy days.

“She’s making sure the kid doesn’t get in trouble – she asks him to call his mom and stuff,” Juan noted of another of Mo’s texts. “She couldn’t do this face to face b/c he wasn’t in school.”

Pointing out uses of humor in the texts, Juan made another point about how texting could add to student-teacher relationships: people could communicate even if a student was in a bad mood. A face-to-face conversation might end with the student “shouting” out of anger, unable to help it; with texting, you could “be mad” and still “send a funny text.” Another student elaborated relatedly from across the room: with texting, you could overcome the “intimidation” of possible “rejection” by the other person, by sending lighthearted texts across the private channel that did not have to be responded to immediately. Emotion was “easier to handle” via texts, another student said.

Students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; even to care. Obens summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year:

“it shows connection. It’s really helpful — it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on the schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Over and over that day, we talked about how texts showed not just “connection” but true caring, in both directions. Mo pointed out that one student had asked Ted “how was your weekend.” Students pointed out texts from Ted and Mo like “you made 1 day last week” (“I like the encouragement,” said one student) and “you’re a smart kid” (“That’s really nice because some kids might feel doubt and don’t get many compliments from people,” another student said.). Shelia pointed out that overall, the texts could build relationship and simultaneously, the motivation to try.

“You need to know [teachers] care in order to do stuff. Otherwise what’s the point in trying. If a person is ‘I’m here for you’ – you feel someone else cares, I should care too.”

Furthermore, Shelia added, texts kept that relationship around with you, for later viewing. “With a phone call, it’s out of your head,” Shelia explained. “With a text message it’s still there when you turn on your phone – it still reminds you. You have to delete it if you don’t want it – it’s there to remind you.”

We left sure that texting had “helped” with “connection” in these teachers’ classrooms but unsure how it might work in “a school of like 600,” as someone put it. Full Circle/Next Wave are particularly “personal” schools, some pointed out: “in other schools it’s less personal, you get five minutes with that teacher,” Shelia said. We left with a question: does that lack of “personal” face to face attention in other schools make something like texting more likely to help, or less?

“Have good conversations,” Juan advised others considering texting with students. “Like don’t just talk about school. Also talk about how your day’s going, stuff like that. Don’t just keep it about school.” Ted finished our Research Day with more overall advice: “It’s up to both people to enhance the texting relationship. If the student is just responding “ok” or “yes” or “no,” that doesn’t allow the texting relationship to develop and to go towards communications that aren’t just ‘be on time.’”

==The Little Things Revisited: The Importance of Connectedness==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:18:03 +0000
In the last blog post I talked about the importance of the low-level support communications between teachers and students at the Oneville site. I posted a few short excerpts in which a teacher was texting students before school in an effort to motivate otherwise disinclined students to come school that day. Such communications, while low level, were nevertheless important because they had an immediate impact– the student in question ultimately came to school–but they also had the simultaneous effect, as the teachers and students told us and I’ll detail below, of strengthening the relationship between teachers and students.

Both parties (students and teachers) maintain that the strengthening of the non-academic aspects of their relationships is essential to supporting and nurturing the academic relationship and communication. When discussing the ‘low level’ nature of some of the conversations with the two teachers, they both claimed that these conversations were important and essential because they helped them build stronger relationships with the students. This strengthening occurred, they maintained, because they got to see the students in a different light than they would normally during the school day through conventional methods. One teachers noted that “the language that the kids are using to thank (them) through texting” is significantly different than what the students use in verbal communication, and that “the difference is surprising. It’s refreshing to know that (the students) have that capability”.

Students also found the texting communications useful in building relationships with their teachers. One student, who admitted to not responding regularly to texts from his teacher still found them useful” “I find it helpful, but I just don’t want to text back”. Moreover, the students suggested that he’d engage with the teacher more over text if “maybe during the weekend (he’d) hear from the teacher about how his weekend is going”. He wanted to learn more about the teacher outside of school. He’d like that, he claimed because “if (they) talk about outside (of school) stuff, (our) relationship will grow even stronger”.

This sense of connectedness described by teachers and students jibes with much of motivational literature that highlights relatedness–a sense of being connected to a larger group–alongside autonomy and a sense of competence, as an essential component of motivation. If we are to be successful in motivating the students not just to come to school, but to become actively involved in their schooling and education, then we, as the supporting community, must acknowledge and respond to their (identified) needs. These low level communications may not be sufficient for helping the students become successful in school and life, but as teachers and students have expressed, they are necessary.

==The Little Things==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:07:20 +0000
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter the most in education: the moments that create and nurture relationships. When I first started with the Oneville Project, I believed that using the medium of texting would allow teachers, students, family members, and other stakeholders involved in the students’ lives to engage in crucial, in depth, involved, and sustained conversations about big picture issues affecting the students’ lives. The sky was the limit, I believed. The texting medium would allow students to get more one on one support from teachers than they would have otherwise received from a distracted teacher, in a crowded classroom, during a busy school day. Students would seek and receive the help they needed from their teachers at a time and place of their own choosing. In some ways, this has all turned out to be true: Mo and Ted, teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave who wanted to see how texting could support their communications with students and students’ supporters, have been texting when and from where they can; students are responding in kind. Communications that couldn’t happen before are happening now. But in many ways, these communications are about things that to an outsider, might seem “small.”

In these early stages of our texting pilot at Somerville site, we’re finding that teachers and students are regularly using texting for what might seem low level interactions — such as nudging students to get up and come to school, in real time:

7:01am TEACHER: Hey (STUDENT), rise and shine!!

7:08 am TEACHER: Hey, you getting up!!

7:36 am STUDENT: You up

7:39 am STUDENT: I made a pancake =D lol

7:41 Eww wait it came out nasty

*******************************

7:27 am TEACHER: Hey, I’m late

7:27 am TEACHER: Time to get up!!

7:27 am TEACHER: Got a nice flatbread for you!!

7:28 am STUDENT: Ok, I’m up

In these two exchanges we see the teacher prodding and then coaxing the student to get up and come to school. This is not a reminder sent the week or the night before, but a real time push to action; the first and second exchanges are within a 40 and one-minute time frame, respectively. The text based communication modality allows the teacher to reach through her phone and into the students’ house. And in both situations it seems to have worked! Another student recently told one of our research assistants – HGSE students themselves starting to text with students as college mentors – that he was coming to school more often because of these texts. Could the same exchange have happened over the phone? Possibly. Would it have happened? Unlikely. The student would have most likely silenced the phone. But texts are extremely insistent. The only quick way to stop them from coming in is to turn off the phone–which is akin to cutting of an appendage to most students. They could always ignore the phone and not read the message, but how long can/will a teenager ignore their portal to the world?

Although we’re seeing the beginning of larger forward looking conversations – reminder statements about homework, supportive statements about motivation and students’ intelligence — a more startling and significant finding so far is that little communications about little things — like pancakes — could be important to building a relationship, possibly the ultimate need of good teaching. More pragmatically, a teacher can have no impact, and the student no learning, if the student doesn’t show up to school. And while there are sometimes complex and intractable reasons why a student does not show up for school–problems at home, bullying, (arguably) more appealing and remunerative options – sometimes, smaller and more manageable causes are at the root of frequent tardiness and absences. Sometimes the students are just too tired – or too alone — to get out of bed.

Of course the example above raises many obvious questions that are fundamental to anyone exploring uses of social media in education today. 1) What about boundaries–the teacher reaching across settings, into the student’s home? What boundaries of privacy and trust need to be in place for such communications to be okay? 2) Do teachers really have time to do this one on one check up on students? 3) How often should such “wake up calls” occur, before they become demotivating or infantilizing? We’re exploring all of this with students and teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, and we’ll address these questions in future posts.

''Posted: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:15:10 +0000
'''OneVille’s mission is to facilitate collaboration in young people’s success by co-creating communication solutions linking the people in young people’s lives.

'''ePortfolio Reflection from Mike M.
''Posted: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:03:45 +0000
I started using online portfolios for my AP class last year. When I became part of the ePortfolio project at SHS, I saw what could be done with a ePortfolio and I decided to go farther. What started as a simple online file cabinet for students to store lab reports, became a place for students to reflect and help each other. It also became a place for me to share not only paper solutions and documents, but video to help students work through issues.

It then went further to include how-to videos for other new teachers on how to use lab equipment, and video tutorials for any students on how to use technology like Excel, and some of our digital lab analysis software.

I plan I adding a lot more, and turning my ePortfolio site into a place to share information with my students and fellow teachers. I think having the students make their own sites to post images, labs, reflections etc was invaluable and definitely added to their experience.

In the future I hope something can be put into place that will allow all freshman to develop an ePortfolio that they can utilize throughout their high school career to not only store examples of their best work, but help them organize and prepare for college or jobs, share things they are proud of with their teachers, family and fellow students and express themselves in a way that is actually valuable to their education and become a better human being, as opposed to something limited like twitter or facebook which well, we kind of know what those things are most useful for.

Check out my ePortfolio site at https://sites.google.com/site/somervillephysics/and my official site at http://mrmaloney.com

==Communicating the Whole Student – and Teacher==
''Posted: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 02:44:10 +0000

[[File:EportfolioCrewMarch20113-300x225.jpg]]

''Innovations by the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team, above

''Notes from the audience, by Mica Pollock

Last night, the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team gave a presentation of their work developing ePortfolios since October 2011. Up in front of an audience of nearly 30 from the superintendent’s office, school committee, school improvement council and community, 11 young people and 6 teachers shared how they went about creating their online portfolios and what they learned about themselves in the process.

Somerville High School has a paper portfolio tradition that has been, as one teacher put it, “a cumbersome collection of paper four times a year.” On Monday night, students and teachers discussed the ability to show themselves and their skill sets in multimedia – to colleges, employers, and one another.

As one student put it, the ePortfolio shows “a more accurate portrait of myself.” I was struck by this very thing overall: the rare chance for a student or a teacher, in school, to show other people one’s full self — and the ability of ePortfolios to make this a normal thing.

Zoe showed her mathematics equations, and her participation in the Boston Children’s Chorus opera. Sergio demonstrated his award-winning children’s book, and a gear shift he made by hand in the shop for his own car.

Astrid pointed out that ePortfolios allowed students to get closer to teachers they didn’t know as well; “it allows you to see the background of a student, and you can express yourself.” Clicking through videos on a school SmartBoard, she demonstrated the digital story of a poem she wrote in El Salvador from a hammock, on her iPod; it was the first time presenting her work this publicly, she said, as she had always been shy about sharing her poems.

A teacher, Mr Glynn, noted that he himself had approached the project from the perspective of a learner: what would a teacher need to know to help all students use wiki spaces and google sites? Students using the media had become more critical and self-reflective about their learning, he said, and were taking more control and ownership of it. ePortfolios also had the potential to show both growth and continuity in student skills over time. “These are so much more alive than the paper version of our portfolio,” he said. And his other conclusion about the technology itself: “a freshman in high school can definitely figure this out.”

Doug, a student, pointed out that ePortfolios let students interact with their teachers online, and “get critique” from peers; “students are always in search of some constructive criticism,” he added, pointing out as well that “Somerville High has a diversity of cultures; media and technology cross those boundaries.” As he clicked to some of his essays, a teacher called out that he was an excellent writer and an audience member commented on his large vocabulary; “there are some things that you can’t see that you can show on your ePortfolio,” he finished modestly.

Rocky showed his programming efforts in Java, next to his wacky chicken graphics; online images he had posted demonstrated both his lifelong curiosity about how food gets made (bubble tea was one example) and a long line of successful Somerville report cards. “EPortfolios are to show your improvement over life,” he finished.

Samantha, who said with a smile that “I hate technology,” showed herself as an award-winning dancer, an avocation she said she wanted to combine with a medical career; the ability to “show colleges what you can do,” rather than “just show people a piece of paper on yourself,” made tech “worth the struggle.”

Susan Olsen, a teacher, spoke of engaging a full range of students in the project, students both struggling and already succeeding academically. Mr. Maloney wowed the audience by showing his class website for AP Physics, which he had redone for the project using “the free tools the kids are using.” He showed us how he could communicate ways of solving physics equations online to students; he also was making and posting videos online that communicate to other teachers how to create physics equipment for a low cost. He also participated in blog community discussions sharing ahas with physics teachers across the world. “I didn’t collect one piece of paper this year from my students except for tests,” he said, and students were online regularly commenting on each others’ assignments.

David showed a video of his persistent skateboarding, and his sketches of animals and plants. His teacher Michelle Li pointed out that ePortfolios could personalize learning more effectively with students like David, and, that these could be accessed “any time, from anywhere.” (She showed us how her website also linked to the Somerville Public Schools calendar and daily bulletin, and to X2, the student information system, so students could check up on their grades.) Her “vision”: to have each student make an eportfolio that she could link to her own class website. This would allow her, her students, and even her students’ parents to have “meaningful conversations with kids.” (Another student, Sonam, has already been presenting his ePortfolio efforts to her class, and now lots of kids want to make ePortfolios!)

Mr. Petriv, a computer hardware teacher, had made the leap from his typical “shrink-wrapped programs with a manual” to experimenting with various free software for the project. He showed us pictures of the lilies he loved, the beetles that he hated, and his expertise in home repair, then talked about the potential for ePortfolios to show both the “filing cabinet” of all student work and the “best work” for graduation or career.

Sonam, an avid video game enthusiast, showed how he learned computer programming through an application called Scratch and created his own game.

Vanessa showed a physics video and online diary. “I lost my (paper) portfolio folder in sophomore year and nobody ever said anything,” Vanessa added, to laughs from the group. “If I had gotten this when I was a freshman, I could have linked to it on the common college application. . . .We are the new tech generation. Kids will lie to you and tell you they can’t make a website, but they can; we all have Facebook!”

Kamilla closed the evening with a photo of a chemistry class in Brazil, her paper drawings of flowers, her experiments with hair dyes, her hand-designed dresses from Brazil, and her dreams of being a chemical engineer.

The whole teacher, the whole student. The library glowed with pictures of lilies, of skateboards, next to drawings of physics and algebra equations and Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution plans; photos of hand-designed dresses posted next to dreams of becoming chemical engineers, next to poems written in hammocks. Students and teachers themselves, up in front, flowed back and forth between describing all parts of themselves, with equal interest; a love of chemistry and blue hair. When, in school, do we get to communicate who we actually are and what we can actually do? And what might happen if we did this all the time?

'''[[http://oneville.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ePortfolioFinalPresentationProgramMarch2011.pdfePortfolio Final Presentation]] '''

File:Mariasethlessblurryhotlinephoto.jpg

2012-07-23T00:29:18Z

Amaechi: uploaded a new version of "File:Mariasethlessblurryhotlinephoto.jpg"

Oneville Blog

2012-07-23T00:28:09Z

Amaechi:

Personalizing youth support, one text at a time
Posted: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:20:34 +0000
The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so, is acting as remote ally.

'''Notes by Mica Pollock

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Back on Nov 14, participants in the OneVille texting project at Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative middle and high schools, took the “stage” at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in our Digital Media and Learning Working Group, to share their past year of efforts to explore the potential of texting for supporting youth-teacher communication.

We discussed how texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. To Mo Robichaux, Next Wave teacher and texting pioneer, the practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day. Texting created “space for a more level relationship” in which students could discuss personal struggles and school goals, “that then go back like a rubber band, to a teacher-student relationship.”

Students and teachers together set ground rules for appropriate uses of text messaging in schools at the beginning of each year’s work. Almost everyone already had the ability to text; texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate.

At Berkman, texts like this prompted lively discussion of the support relationships texting could afford. As texting teacher Ted had said, “The language that the kids are using to thank and what they do verbally is surprising”:

Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

Often, we noticed, a text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation:

Teacher: Everything ok? 9:30 AM

Student: Ted? 10:39 AM

Teacher: Yup 11:02 AM

Student: Everythings alright I guess im gonna b in tm .. Is there anything I can do to put my grade up for your class 11:05 AM

Teacher: Be on time tomorrow, we’ll talk then.

Our next step: to work with partners at the Berkman Center to produce a teacher guide to the legal/privacy issues raised for those pioneering texting. This year, teachers, students, and OneVille texting pilot coordinator Uche Amaechi are continuing to test texting “teams.” They will wrap up that texting pilot at the end of this year or possibly, next fall, by sharing ¡Ahas! around the community to others wanting to explore texting for youth support and mentoring.

In other OneVille news: Healey bilingual parents and staff, with supporters Jedd Cohen and Ana Maria Nieto, continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network at the Healey School. They will also produce a parent-friendly “how to” guide to the puzzle pieces that work. Possibly, we will pilot and tweak our administrator and teacher dashboard views with principal and teachers.

We feel very privileged to have participated in these design innovations with the Somerville community.

'''Eportfolios: Sparking New Conversations about What Students Can Do
''Posted: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:53:35 +0000
''Notes by Mica Pollock

The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so is acting as remote ally.

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Last week, a group of student and teacher eportfolio researcher/designers from Somerville High School came to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, for a rousing share-out of their eportfolio project. After a year of participatory design work, eportfolios are seeding across the High School. Guests from Berkman’s Youth and Media Lab and other Working Group members from MIT, Tufts, and Emerson listened intently, as SHS young people and teachers shared their insights about the new communications about young people’s skills, talents and interests made possible when young people made and shared eportfolio entries.

SHS presenters described how over a year and a half of careful groundwork with the School Improvement Council and then critical participatory design research with dozens of students and teachers at SHS, SHS’s own students and teachers led a transition from the school’s prior portfolios to vibrant online “eportfolios” sharing students’ full range of learning products and accomplishments in and out of school, organized by 21st century skills rather than only in subject areas. From paper folders “locked in a cabinet,” student portfolios by spring 2011 included videos of students narrating their original poetry, solving math equations, and doing physics; interviews with teachers evaluating students’ negotiation skills, and videos of students’ efforts to learn to skateboard; photos and commentary on students’ original art and work experiences; and class assignments students found particularly valuable to their learning. As a student put it, an eportfolio allowed her to “show all of the sides of who I am, in one place,” to share “little cool things about me” as well as evidence of “being a good student.” Teacher Chris Glynn noted that if students entered his class at the beginning of the year with eportfolios communicating their skills and interests, learning would be “so much more individualized!”

Student researchers/eportfolio designers were chosen purposefully to demonstrate a full range of achievement levels and student backgrounds at SHS. As one student put it in the presentation, portfolios supported each student to show themselves as “exemplary,” by encouraging students to consider, document and post their best work done both inside and outside of school. “Every student can shine at this if they put in the time and effort,” a teacher said. “We are representative of the potential that everyone has,” a student agreed.

The energy to make eportfolios is spreading virally across the school, as teachers show each other how to use software and students who see others’ work get excited to post their own.

Now that the OneVille pilot phase of eportfolio design is over, students’ and teachers’ next plan is to make a Somerville High School eportfolio website created to support next schools exploring eportfolios!

==Let’s Spark Family-School Conversations about Student Data==
''Posted: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:08:31 +0000
''By Jedd Cohen, Seth Woodworth, and Josh Wairi

Getting “On the Same Page”: We can all see the data together, from any location

Update December 2011: this post was written this fall, when we expected to pilot the three dashboard views. Due to an undesired lag in final technological development, the “individual view” pilot has been delayed; we may do a small pilot of the “admin view” and “teacher view” this winter. Regardless, code has been created that pulls data out of Somerville’s Student Information System for quick viewing and can be put to use in any such “dashboard” project.

An idea common across Oneville’s projects has been: “A communication gap equals a gap in student service.” In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to share comprehensive student data, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, and how to communicate with schools about it.

Over the past two years in our “dashboard” project, we – local technologists, teachers, researchers — have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help make sure that key people can go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) for each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

Three resulting dashboard views are open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers to support each student’s success. Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. We’ve created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows each teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

'''Details: What do the dashboards look like?

The admin and teacher views appear in the form of a colorful chart that allows sorting by up to four columns at a time. Original design model: an Excel spreadsheet made for the Healey School by Greg Nadeau, local parent! Based on feedback from former principal Jason DeFalco, we added: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores, IEP status, and afterschool program name:

[[File:Dashboard.png]]

Based on conversations with new Healey Principal Purnima Vadhera, we’ll also add average attendance over the past several weeks, to compare to the current week’s attendance, and 504 status. We may still add MCAS score and growth, MAP writing score and growth, and DIBELS and MELA-O scores. The updated admin view also creates scatter plots and bar graphs to display the relation between demographics and other data, i.e., achievement or attendance.

The admin and teacher views look like charts, displaying the same types of data for many students. The individual view is organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs at the top of the page allow the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile.

The narrative structure, as well as many decisions about exactly what to display in this view, came out of numerous brainstorming meetings last spring with author and Healey teacher Josh Wairi. We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views in his class in the fall. The individual view presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments – each type of data on its own page accessible by tabs at the top. (Most of this data is in Somerville’s “student information system,” just more scattered; we wanted to get it easily all in one place for a teacher and family/providers to see.) We’ve also created an interactive online version of Somerville’s K-6 report card, which parents are used to getting on a static piece of paper. We plan to add each student’s yearbook photo and data on allotted support services. Next to each ‘chunk’ of student data, “comment/question” boxes provide a space for the parent or afterschool provider to comment on the data by entering text that gets sent to the homeroom teacher’s email:

[[File:Report Card.png]]

On the “Comments” page, the parent or afterschool provider can request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them. Parents can specify any new contact info and convenient meeting times. After receiving these comments, the homeroom teacher can forward any relevant parts to the appropriate subject area teachers. (Josh feels that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other teachers about families’ comments.)

The Parent Connectors will help to make the user interface available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole (and we’ll use the district’s own translation for the report card). For more ongoing translation (email messages sent to and from parents, parent-teacher conferences, the summary comments on the dashboard), we’re adding links to Google Translate and to the Parent Connector calendar for setting up meetings with interpreters.

Knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we’ve designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people use the tools will be up to them – but rather than have the tools just “display” data, we wanted the individual view, in particular, to also prompt and encourage communication about data.

Feedback and next steps:

We’ve asked for feedback on the tool throughout, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, “Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!” When asked whether the dashboard might feel like extra work, another parent articulated his/her vision of parent involvement: “Not extra – you have children, you spend time to communicate. The more time you spend, the better students do.” One English-speaking parent with three children at the school explained that the dashboard’s comment and scheduling features solved a long-standing problem for her: After being a Healey parent for 11 years, she has only ever had time to meet with each of her children’s core academic teachers during PTA nights, but never the specialty teachers, e.g., music, art, support room teachers. Our dashboard enables and encourages parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who will forward it to the specials teachers. Another parent was especially enthusiastic about online access: “I do everything on the computer now.” And another immigrant parent said he does “everything” on his smart phone!

In a recent meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the potential value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Online access to this data could also help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [family dashboard] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” helps when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” Clearly, no proverbial dogs will eat it once it’s online.

Students with IEPs and 504 plans sometimes need accommodations on the MCAS, and Purnima often spends “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers that students’ needs have been met. Our tool allows her to sort by IEP and 504 plans, so that all these students appear together, “so we don’t have moments when things fall through the cracks.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. Such team conversations could involve the school’s “student support team” – a standing group of educators that evaluates struggling students – or each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that it could allow him to present a single student’s data in one of these team meetings without revealing all the other students’ grades unnecessarily (a breach of confidentiality).

We hope that these dashboards could be useful enough to help ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators, and catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our dashboards, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh can always share back, move forward in small increments. Maybe teachers would just want to get on board with this!”

We face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. The same work schedules that make parent-teacher meetings hard also make it hard for some parents to coordinate their schedules with the computer labs at local libraries or in the housing projects where some families live.

We hope to work with the PTA this year to create basic computer and email training for Healey parents who need this support. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet. Several years from now, the proliferation of smartphones and iphones will likely shrink this challenge dramatically, making it easier than ever for partners to join the conversation about student data.

==Figuring out the infrastructure for interpretation and translation: The Parent Connector Project==
''Posted: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:25:10 +0000

'''A parent recording information for other parents on the "Healey Hotline"

''By Mica Pollock, Gina D’Haiti, Tona Delmonico, and Ana Maria Nieto, for the Parent Connectors

[[File:Mariasethlessblurryhotlinephoto.jpg]]

We had one of our Multilingual Coffee Hours with the principal on Friday, May 20, at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville. Over some Portuguese bread, and coffee supplied by the PTA, we shared some of what we’ve been doing and learning in our Parent Connector project, and brainstormed next steps. The Connector project is a parent-led effort (in partnership with the school administration) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) via a phone tree to immigrant parents who speak their language.

We see the Connectors as one component of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation in a multilingual school. There are other pieces. We’re prototyping a hotline (using open source software and the Twilio API) allowing volunteer Translators of the Month (also bilingual parents, and maybe, students) to verbally translate information all parents need to know (in Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish). Bilingual parents have noted that translating material into their languages verbally – so, speaking it on to a hotline — is easier than doing it word for word from paper to paper. So far, we have parents coming to speak into a computer (see photo!). We hope to hone the hotline so that translators can record to it from home.

We’re working on other components of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation: a Googledoc as one organized place where principal and others put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translation (over time, our hotline).

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but glitches certainly can block communication too. One example: because our Connector project started mid-year, we had no beginning of the year form for all parents, saying “do you want a Connector? Check here to release your number to them!” So, it took us weeks to work through the Parent Information Center (PIC) to get parents to release their numbers to other parents! (School staff had to figure out how to download a spreadsheet of language-specific numbers for PIC staff from X2, the district’s “student information system”; then the PIC staff had to make the calls home to get parents’ permission to release numbers to the Connectors; then, finally, Connectors got lists and could start calling.)

A key issue we’re trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). Which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

==Research Day: Exploring the Potential of Texting for Student-Teacher Communication==
''Posted: Fri, 06 May 2011 01:52:06 +0000
On Saturday, April 21 from 10-1, ten young people and two teachers from Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative high school and middle school, came to a classroom at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. They joined Uche, me, and four other graduate students from the Ed School in “Research Day.” Our goal: to analyze texts students and teachers have been sending each other since the winter, in OneVille’s pilot of texting as a channel for rapid youth support.

We’ve been talking to students and teachers all year as co-researchers, about their experiences testing texting. We’d analyzed specific texts before with Ted and Mo, our teacher participants. But this was our first time sitting together with young people analyzing actual data. Reading transcripts taken from Google Voice (with participants’ permission and anonymized for analysis), students were immediately perceptive about “patterns in the data.” We talked in small groups, and then we shared ideas across the room. My small group included Mo (our Next Wave, middle school teacher), Shelia, Obens, “Juan,” and “Dan” (pseudonyms for initial blogging purposes!).

What we talked about most was how texting can enhance student-teacher relationships and so, students’ engagement with school.

Reading the transcripts, the students noticed first that students and teachers were noticeably polite to each other, texting “thanks and you’re welcome” after texts about permission slips, reminders, and personal check-ins on grades or life.

“The kids haven’t been crossing boundaries in any way – no one has been inappropriate,” Mo said later. Students agreed, saying that with texting, you’d just “give the teacher the same respect you’d give them in school.”

Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring. And that students were grateful for it: “it shows you appreciate the person and you’re thankful they helped you out,” Shelia said. Mo added: “They appreciate (Ted, our Full Circle teacher) taking time out of his own private life to send these texts.” Obens said that texts from Ted had gotten him to school on time.

Wielding her highlighter, Shelia selected another text from Ted to a student as important evidence:

“you need to be in school way more my friend.” “I feel like it’s genuine concern,” she explained. “It shows connection,” Obens added. “It also shows courage.”

He pointed out that the teacher was “taking time to text people about stuff – taking time to get a person to school on time. That shows courage on the part of the teacher. Also on the student, by replying back.” Shelia agreed, adding, “It takes the courage to make that bond – from the teacher — and also for the student to participate in the bond.” Juan added, “Who would want to text a teacher – there’s a lot you could be doing at that time. A lot of people won’t do it – that they do it means they really care about what they are doing.” As evidence, he pointed out a text he himself had sent back to Ted: he had “put in the effort” with responses, like “fine” and “I’ll make it [to school] by 8:10.” “I sleep a lot – but I made it before 8:10. It did help. I was used to coming in around 8:30,” he explained.

Ted highlighted this same point later in the research day: student texts to teachers

“show a level of investment. Even if (the text is) not school related, the student is checking in, making that contact, when they don’t have to. It’s really important to understand – the value of doing things not only when you have to do things.”

Looking again at Ted’s text “you need to be in school way more my friend,” both Mo and Shelia noted that texts put students and teachers “on the same level.” Shelia pointed out Mo’s own text to a student as similarly important: “worried about you.” “It shows that she really cares,” Shelia explained. “You had a bad day yesterday” was pointed out as a particularly caring teacher “check-in.”

Mo then pointed out a student request for information that had happened via text: “hey do you think they’re gonna extend the add drop period?” In class, Obens explained, “I don’t feel like bothering (Ted) w/ those types of questions.“ With texting, relationship-building could continue after the classroom day:

“It definitely strengthens our face to face, day to day relationships,” Ted added. “When you’re texting you feel like you’re close to your teacher,” Obens summed up.

Relationship. Built and strengthened in this private backchannel between people who share a classroom, in a medium more comfortable to students of 2011. “Some people might feel more comfortable saying it via texting more than face to face — because in person you might feel shy, awkward and not know what to say back,” said a student from across the room.

We might chalk this up to a modern aversion to in-person communication: “I’d rather text my parents than call them,” a student added. But reading the actual texts, we saw certain communications that texting may particularly make possible. Joking. Banter. The quick check-ins of care that simply don’t happen in person during busy days.

“She’s making sure the kid doesn’t get in trouble – she asks him to call his mom and stuff,” Juan noted of another of Mo’s texts. “She couldn’t do this face to face b/c he wasn’t in school.”

Pointing out uses of humor in the texts, Juan made another point about how texting could add to student-teacher relationships: people could communicate even if a student was in a bad mood. A face-to-face conversation might end with the student “shouting” out of anger, unable to help it; with texting, you could “be mad” and still “send a funny text.” Another student elaborated relatedly from across the room: with texting, you could overcome the “intimidation” of possible “rejection” by the other person, by sending lighthearted texts across the private channel that did not have to be responded to immediately. Emotion was “easier to handle” via texts, another student said.

Students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; even to care. Obens summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year:

“it shows connection. It’s really helpful — it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on the schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Over and over that day, we talked about how texts showed not just “connection” but true caring, in both directions. Mo pointed out that one student had asked Ted “how was your weekend.” Students pointed out texts from Ted and Mo like “you made 1 day last week” (“I like the encouragement,” said one student) and “you’re a smart kid” (“That’s really nice because some kids might feel doubt and don’t get many compliments from people,” another student said.). Shelia pointed out that overall, the texts could build relationship and simultaneously, the motivation to try.

“You need to know [teachers] care in order to do stuff. Otherwise what’s the point in trying. If a person is ‘I’m here for you’ – you feel someone else cares, I should care too.”

Furthermore, Shelia added, texts kept that relationship around with you, for later viewing. “With a phone call, it’s out of your head,” Shelia explained. “With a text message it’s still there when you turn on your phone – it still reminds you. You have to delete it if you don’t want it – it’s there to remind you.”

We left sure that texting had “helped” with “connection” in these teachers’ classrooms but unsure how it might work in “a school of like 600,” as someone put it. Full Circle/Next Wave are particularly “personal” schools, some pointed out: “in other schools it’s less personal, you get five minutes with that teacher,” Shelia said. We left with a question: does that lack of “personal” face to face attention in other schools make something like texting more likely to help, or less?

“Have good conversations,” Juan advised others considering texting with students. “Like don’t just talk about school. Also talk about how your day’s going, stuff like that. Don’t just keep it about school.” Ted finished our Research Day with more overall advice: “It’s up to both people to enhance the texting relationship. If the student is just responding “ok” or “yes” or “no,” that doesn’t allow the texting relationship to develop and to go towards communications that aren’t just ‘be on time.’”

==The Little Things Revisited: The Importance of Connectedness==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:18:03 +0000
In the last blog post I talked about the importance of the low-level support communications between teachers and students at the Oneville site. I posted a few short excerpts in which a teacher was texting students before school in an effort to motivate otherwise disinclined students to come school that day. Such communications, while low level, were nevertheless important because they had an immediate impact– the student in question ultimately came to school–but they also had the simultaneous effect, as the teachers and students told us and I’ll detail below, of strengthening the relationship between teachers and students.

Both parties (students and teachers) maintain that the strengthening of the non-academic aspects of their relationships is essential to supporting and nurturing the academic relationship and communication. When discussing the ‘low level’ nature of some of the conversations with the two teachers, they both claimed that these conversations were important and essential because they helped them build stronger relationships with the students. This strengthening occurred, they maintained, because they got to see the students in a different light than they would normally during the school day through conventional methods. One teachers noted that “the language that the kids are using to thank (them) through texting” is significantly different than what the students use in verbal communication, and that “the difference is surprising. It’s refreshing to know that (the students) have that capability”.

Students also found the texting communications useful in building relationships with their teachers. One student, who admitted to not responding regularly to texts from his teacher still found them useful” “I find it helpful, but I just don’t want to text back”. Moreover, the students suggested that he’d engage with the teacher more over text if “maybe during the weekend (he’d) hear from the teacher about how his weekend is going”. He wanted to learn more about the teacher outside of school. He’d like that, he claimed because “if (they) talk about outside (of school) stuff, (our) relationship will grow even stronger”.

This sense of connectedness described by teachers and students jibes with much of motivational literature that highlights relatedness–a sense of being connected to a larger group–alongside autonomy and a sense of competence, as an essential component of motivation. If we are to be successful in motivating the students not just to come to school, but to become actively involved in their schooling and education, then we, as the supporting community, must acknowledge and respond to their (identified) needs. These low level communications may not be sufficient for helping the students become successful in school and life, but as teachers and students have expressed, they are necessary.

==The Little Things==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:07:20 +0000
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter the most in education: the moments that create and nurture relationships. When I first started with the Oneville Project, I believed that using the medium of texting would allow teachers, students, family members, and other stakeholders involved in the students’ lives to engage in crucial, in depth, involved, and sustained conversations about big picture issues affecting the students’ lives. The sky was the limit, I believed. The texting medium would allow students to get more one on one support from teachers than they would have otherwise received from a distracted teacher, in a crowded classroom, during a busy school day. Students would seek and receive the help they needed from their teachers at a time and place of their own choosing. In some ways, this has all turned out to be true: Mo and Ted, teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave who wanted to see how texting could support their communications with students and students’ supporters, have been texting when and from where they can; students are responding in kind. Communications that couldn’t happen before are happening now. But in many ways, these communications are about things that to an outsider, might seem “small.”

In these early stages of our texting pilot at Somerville site, we’re finding that teachers and students are regularly using texting for what might seem low level interactions — such as nudging students to get up and come to school, in real time:

7:01am TEACHER: Hey (STUDENT), rise and shine!!

7:08 am TEACHER: Hey, you getting up!!

7:36 am STUDENT: You up

7:39 am STUDENT: I made a pancake =D lol

7:41 Eww wait it came out nasty

*******************************

7:27 am TEACHER: Hey, I’m late

7:27 am TEACHER: Time to get up!!

7:27 am TEACHER: Got a nice flatbread for you!!

7:28 am STUDENT: Ok, I’m up

In these two exchanges we see the teacher prodding and then coaxing the student to get up and come to school. This is not a reminder sent the week or the night before, but a real time push to action; the first and second exchanges are within a 40 and one-minute time frame, respectively. The text based communication modality allows the teacher to reach through her phone and into the students’ house. And in both situations it seems to have worked! Another student recently told one of our research assistants – HGSE students themselves starting to text with students as college mentors – that he was coming to school more often because of these texts. Could the same exchange have happened over the phone? Possibly. Would it have happened? Unlikely. The student would have most likely silenced the phone. But texts are extremely insistent. The only quick way to stop them from coming in is to turn off the phone–which is akin to cutting of an appendage to most students. They could always ignore the phone and not read the message, but how long can/will a teenager ignore their portal to the world?

Although we’re seeing the beginning of larger forward looking conversations – reminder statements about homework, supportive statements about motivation and students’ intelligence — a more startling and significant finding so far is that little communications about little things — like pancakes — could be important to building a relationship, possibly the ultimate need of good teaching. More pragmatically, a teacher can have no impact, and the student no learning, if the student doesn’t show up to school. And while there are sometimes complex and intractable reasons why a student does not show up for school–problems at home, bullying, (arguably) more appealing and remunerative options – sometimes, smaller and more manageable causes are at the root of frequent tardiness and absences. Sometimes the students are just too tired – or too alone — to get out of bed.

Of course the example above raises many obvious questions that are fundamental to anyone exploring uses of social media in education today. 1) What about boundaries–the teacher reaching across settings, into the student’s home? What boundaries of privacy and trust need to be in place for such communications to be okay? 2) Do teachers really have time to do this one on one check up on students? 3) How often should such “wake up calls” occur, before they become demotivating or infantilizing? We’re exploring all of this with students and teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, and we’ll address these questions in future posts.

''Posted: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:15:10 +0000
'''OneVille’s mission is to facilitate collaboration in young people’s success by co-creating communication solutions linking the people in young people’s lives.

'''ePortfolio Reflection from Mike M.
''Posted: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:03:45 +0000
I started using online portfolios for my AP class last year. When I became part of the ePortfolio project at SHS, I saw what could be done with a ePortfolio and I decided to go farther. What started as a simple online file cabinet for students to store lab reports, became a place for students to reflect and help each other. It also became a place for me to share not only paper solutions and documents, but video to help students work through issues.

It then went further to include how-to videos for other new teachers on how to use lab equipment, and video tutorials for any students on how to use technology like Excel, and some of our digital lab analysis software.

I plan I adding a lot more, and turning my ePortfolio site into a place to share information with my students and fellow teachers. I think having the students make their own sites to post images, labs, reflections etc was invaluable and definitely added to their experience.

In the future I hope something can be put into place that will allow all freshman to develop an ePortfolio that they can utilize throughout their high school career to not only store examples of their best work, but help them organize and prepare for college or jobs, share things they are proud of with their teachers, family and fellow students and express themselves in a way that is actually valuable to their education and become a better human being, as opposed to something limited like twitter or facebook which well, we kind of know what those things are most useful for.

Check out my ePortfolio site at https://sites.google.com/site/somervillephysics/and my official site at http://mrmaloney.com

==Communicating the Whole Student – and Teacher==
''Posted: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 02:44:10 +0000

[[File:EportfolioCrewMarch20113-300x225.jpg]]

''Innovations by the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team, above

''Notes from the audience, by Mica Pollock

Last night, the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team gave a presentation of their work developing ePortfolios since October 2011. Up in front of an audience of nearly 30 from the superintendent’s office, school committee, school improvement council and community, 11 young people and 6 teachers shared how they went about creating their online portfolios and what they learned about themselves in the process.

Somerville High School has a paper portfolio tradition that has been, as one teacher put it, “a cumbersome collection of paper four times a year.” On Monday night, students and teachers discussed the ability to show themselves and their skill sets in multimedia – to colleges, employers, and one another.

As one student put it, the ePortfolio shows “a more accurate portrait of myself.” I was struck by this very thing overall: the rare chance for a student or a teacher, in school, to show other people one’s full self — and the ability of ePortfolios to make this a normal thing.

Zoe showed her mathematics equations, and her participation in the Boston Children’s Chorus opera. Sergio demonstrated his award-winning children’s book, and a gear shift he made by hand in the shop for his own car.

Astrid pointed out that ePortfolios allowed students to get closer to teachers they didn’t know as well; “it allows you to see the background of a student, and you can express yourself.” Clicking through videos on a school SmartBoard, she demonstrated the digital story of a poem she wrote in El Salvador from a hammock, on her iPod; it was the first time presenting her work this publicly, she said, as she had always been shy about sharing her poems.

A teacher, Mr Glynn, noted that he himself had approached the project from the perspective of a learner: what would a teacher need to know to help all students use wiki spaces and google sites? Students using the media had become more critical and self-reflective about their learning, he said, and were taking more control and ownership of it. ePortfolios also had the potential to show both growth and continuity in student skills over time. “These are so much more alive than the paper version of our portfolio,” he said. And his other conclusion about the technology itself: “a freshman in high school can definitely figure this out.”

Doug, a student, pointed out that ePortfolios let students interact with their teachers online, and “get critique” from peers; “students are always in search of some constructive criticism,” he added, pointing out as well that “Somerville High has a diversity of cultures; media and technology cross those boundaries.” As he clicked to some of his essays, a teacher called out that he was an excellent writer and an audience member commented on his large vocabulary; “there are some things that you can’t see that you can show on your ePortfolio,” he finished modestly.

Rocky showed his programming efforts in Java, next to his wacky chicken graphics; online images he had posted demonstrated both his lifelong curiosity about how food gets made (bubble tea was one example) and a long line of successful Somerville report cards. “EPortfolios are to show your improvement over life,” he finished.

Samantha, who said with a smile that “I hate technology,” showed herself as an award-winning dancer, an avocation she said she wanted to combine with a medical career; the ability to “show colleges what you can do,” rather than “just show people a piece of paper on yourself,” made tech “worth the struggle.”

Susan Olsen, a teacher, spoke of engaging a full range of students in the project, students both struggling and already succeeding academically. Mr. Maloney wowed the audience by showing his class website for AP Physics, which he had redone for the project using “the free tools the kids are using.” He showed us how he could communicate ways of solving physics equations online to students; he also was making and posting videos online that communicate to other teachers how to create physics equipment for a low cost. He also participated in blog community discussions sharing ahas with physics teachers across the world. “I didn’t collect one piece of paper this year from my students except for tests,” he said, and students were online regularly commenting on each others’ assignments.

David showed a video of his persistent skateboarding, and his sketches of animals and plants. His teacher Michelle Li pointed out that ePortfolios could personalize learning more effectively with students like David, and, that these could be accessed “any time, from anywhere.” (She showed us how her website also linked to the Somerville Public Schools calendar and daily bulletin, and to X2, the student information system, so students could check up on their grades.) Her “vision”: to have each student make an eportfolio that she could link to her own class website. This would allow her, her students, and even her students’ parents to have “meaningful conversations with kids.” (Another student, Sonam, has already been presenting his ePortfolio efforts to her class, and now lots of kids want to make ePortfolios!)

Mr. Petriv, a computer hardware teacher, had made the leap from his typical “shrink-wrapped programs with a manual” to experimenting with various free software for the project. He showed us pictures of the lilies he loved, the beetles that he hated, and his expertise in home repair, then talked about the potential for ePortfolios to show both the “filing cabinet” of all student work and the “best work” for graduation or career.

Sonam, an avid video game enthusiast, showed how he learned computer programming through an application called Scratch and created his own game.

Vanessa showed a physics video and online diary. “I lost my (paper) portfolio folder in sophomore year and nobody ever said anything,” Vanessa added, to laughs from the group. “If I had gotten this when I was a freshman, I could have linked to it on the common college application. . . .We are the new tech generation. Kids will lie to you and tell you they can’t make a website, but they can; we all have Facebook!”

Kamilla closed the evening with a photo of a chemistry class in Brazil, her paper drawings of flowers, her experiments with hair dyes, her hand-designed dresses from Brazil, and her dreams of being a chemical engineer.

The whole teacher, the whole student. The library glowed with pictures of lilies, of skateboards, next to drawings of physics and algebra equations and Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution plans; photos of hand-designed dresses posted next to dreams of becoming chemical engineers, next to poems written in hammocks. Students and teachers themselves, up in front, flowed back and forth between describing all parts of themselves, with equal interest; a love of chemistry and blue hair. When, in school, do we get to communicate who we actually are and what we can actually do? And what might happen if we did this all the time?

'''[[http://oneville.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ePortfolioFinalPresentationProgramMarch2011.pdfePortfolio Final Presentation]] '''

Oneville Blog

2012-07-23T00:27:14Z

Amaechi:

Personalizing youth support, one text at a time
Posted: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:20:34 +0000
The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so, is acting as remote ally.

'''Notes by Mica Pollock

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Back on Nov 14, participants in the OneVille texting project at Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative middle and high schools, took the “stage” at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in our Digital Media and Learning Working Group, to share their past year of efforts to explore the potential of texting for supporting youth-teacher communication.

We discussed how texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. To Mo Robichaux, Next Wave teacher and texting pioneer, the practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day. Texting created “space for a more level relationship” in which students could discuss personal struggles and school goals, “that then go back like a rubber band, to a teacher-student relationship.”

Students and teachers together set ground rules for appropriate uses of text messaging in schools at the beginning of each year’s work. Almost everyone already had the ability to text; texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate.

At Berkman, texts like this prompted lively discussion of the support relationships texting could afford. As texting teacher Ted had said, “The language that the kids are using to thank and what they do verbally is surprising”:

Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

Often, we noticed, a text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation:

Teacher: Everything ok? 9:30 AM

Student: Ted? 10:39 AM

Teacher: Yup 11:02 AM

Student: Everythings alright I guess im gonna b in tm .. Is there anything I can do to put my grade up for your class 11:05 AM

Teacher: Be on time tomorrow, we’ll talk then.

Our next step: to work with partners at the Berkman Center to produce a teacher guide to the legal/privacy issues raised for those pioneering texting. This year, teachers, students, and OneVille texting pilot coordinator Uche Amaechi are continuing to test texting “teams.” They will wrap up that texting pilot at the end of this year or possibly, next fall, by sharing ¡Ahas! around the community to others wanting to explore texting for youth support and mentoring.

In other OneVille news: Healey bilingual parents and staff, with supporters Jedd Cohen and Ana Maria Nieto, continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network at the Healey School. They will also produce a parent-friendly “how to” guide to the puzzle pieces that work. Possibly, we will pilot and tweak our administrator and teacher dashboard views with principal and teachers.

We feel very privileged to have participated in these design innovations with the Somerville community.

'''Eportfolios: Sparking New Conversations about What Students Can Do
''Posted: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:53:35 +0000
''Notes by Mica Pollock

The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so is acting as remote ally.

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Last week, a group of student and teacher eportfolio researcher/designers from Somerville High School came to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, for a rousing share-out of their eportfolio project. After a year of participatory design work, eportfolios are seeding across the High School. Guests from Berkman’s Youth and Media Lab and other Working Group members from MIT, Tufts, and Emerson listened intently, as SHS young people and teachers shared their insights about the new communications about young people’s skills, talents and interests made possible when young people made and shared eportfolio entries.

SHS presenters described how over a year and a half of careful groundwork with the School Improvement Council and then critical participatory design research with dozens of students and teachers at SHS, SHS’s own students and teachers led a transition from the school’s prior portfolios to vibrant online “eportfolios” sharing students’ full range of learning products and accomplishments in and out of school, organized by 21st century skills rather than only in subject areas. From paper folders “locked in a cabinet,” student portfolios by spring 2011 included videos of students narrating their original poetry, solving math equations, and doing physics; interviews with teachers evaluating students’ negotiation skills, and videos of students’ efforts to learn to skateboard; photos and commentary on students’ original art and work experiences; and class assignments students found particularly valuable to their learning. As a student put it, an eportfolio allowed her to “show all of the sides of who I am, in one place,” to share “little cool things about me” as well as evidence of “being a good student.” Teacher Chris Glynn noted that if students entered his class at the beginning of the year with eportfolios communicating their skills and interests, learning would be “so much more individualized!”

Student researchers/eportfolio designers were chosen purposefully to demonstrate a full range of achievement levels and student backgrounds at SHS. As one student put it in the presentation, portfolios supported each student to show themselves as “exemplary,” by encouraging students to consider, document and post their best work done both inside and outside of school. “Every student can shine at this if they put in the time and effort,” a teacher said. “We are representative of the potential that everyone has,” a student agreed.

The energy to make eportfolios is spreading virally across the school, as teachers show each other how to use software and students who see others’ work get excited to post their own.

Now that the OneVille pilot phase of eportfolio design is over, students’ and teachers’ next plan is to make a Somerville High School eportfolio website created to support next schools exploring eportfolios!

==Let’s Spark Family-School Conversations about Student Data==
''Posted: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:08:31 +0000
''By Jedd Cohen, Seth Woodworth, and Josh Wairi

Getting “On the Same Page”: We can all see the data together, from any location

Update December 2011: this post was written this fall, when we expected to pilot the three dashboard views. Due to an undesired lag in final technological development, the “individual view” pilot has been delayed; we may do a small pilot of the “admin view” and “teacher view” this winter. Regardless, code has been created that pulls data out of Somerville’s Student Information System for quick viewing and can be put to use in any such “dashboard” project.

An idea common across Oneville’s projects has been: “A communication gap equals a gap in student service.” In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to share comprehensive student data, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, and how to communicate with schools about it.

Over the past two years in our “dashboard” project, we – local technologists, teachers, researchers — have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help make sure that key people can go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) for each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

Three resulting dashboard views are open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers to support each student’s success. Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. We’ve created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows each teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

'''Details: What do the dashboards look like?

The admin and teacher views appear in the form of a colorful chart that allows sorting by up to four columns at a time. Original design model: an Excel spreadsheet made for the Healey School by Greg Nadeau, local parent! Based on feedback from former principal Jason DeFalco, we added: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores, IEP status, and afterschool program name:

[[File:Dashboard.png]]

Based on conversations with new Healey Principal Purnima Vadhera, we’ll also add average attendance over the past several weeks, to compare to the current week’s attendance, and 504 status. We may still add MCAS score and growth, MAP writing score and growth, and DIBELS and MELA-O scores. The updated admin view also creates scatter plots and bar graphs to display the relation between demographics and other data, i.e., achievement or attendance.

The admin and teacher views look like charts, displaying the same types of data for many students. The individual view is organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs at the top of the page allow the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile.

The narrative structure, as well as many decisions about exactly what to display in this view, came out of numerous brainstorming meetings last spring with author and Healey teacher Josh Wairi. We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views in his class in the fall. The individual view presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments – each type of data on its own page accessible by tabs at the top. (Most of this data is in Somerville’s “student information system,” just more scattered; we wanted to get it easily all in one place for a teacher and family/providers to see.) We’ve also created an interactive online version of Somerville’s K-6 report card, which parents are used to getting on a static piece of paper. We plan to add each student’s yearbook photo and data on allotted support services. Next to each ‘chunk’ of student data, “comment/question” boxes provide a space for the parent or afterschool provider to comment on the data by entering text that gets sent to the homeroom teacher’s email:

[[File:Report Card.png]]

On the “Comments” page, the parent or afterschool provider can request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them. Parents can specify any new contact info and convenient meeting times. After receiving these comments, the homeroom teacher can forward any relevant parts to the appropriate subject area teachers. (Josh feels that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other teachers about families’ comments.)

The Parent Connectors will help to make the user interface available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole (and we’ll use the district’s own translation for the report card). For more ongoing translation (email messages sent to and from parents, parent-teacher conferences, the summary comments on the dashboard), we’re adding links to Google Translate and to the Parent Connector calendar for setting up meetings with interpreters.

Knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we’ve designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people use the tools will be up to them – but rather than have the tools just “display” data, we wanted the individual view, in particular, to also prompt and encourage communication about data.

Feedback and next steps:

We’ve asked for feedback on the tool throughout, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, “Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!” When asked whether the dashboard might feel like extra work, another parent articulated his/her vision of parent involvement: “Not extra – you have children, you spend time to communicate. The more time you spend, the better students do.” One English-speaking parent with three children at the school explained that the dashboard’s comment and scheduling features solved a long-standing problem for her: After being a Healey parent for 11 years, she has only ever had time to meet with each of her children’s core academic teachers during PTA nights, but never the specialty teachers, e.g., music, art, support room teachers. Our dashboard enables and encourages parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who will forward it to the specials teachers. Another parent was especially enthusiastic about online access: “I do everything on the computer now.” And another immigrant parent said he does “everything” on his smart phone!

In a recent meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the potential value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Online access to this data could also help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [family dashboard] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” helps when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” Clearly, no proverbial dogs will eat it once it’s online.

Students with IEPs and 504 plans sometimes need accommodations on the MCAS, and Purnima often spends “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers that students’ needs have been met. Our tool allows her to sort by IEP and 504 plans, so that all these students appear together, “so we don’t have moments when things fall through the cracks.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. Such team conversations could involve the school’s “student support team” – a standing group of educators that evaluates struggling students – or each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that it could allow him to present a single student’s data in one of these team meetings without revealing all the other students’ grades unnecessarily (a breach of confidentiality).

We hope that these dashboards could be useful enough to help ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators, and catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our dashboards, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh can always share back, move forward in small increments. Maybe teachers would just want to get on board with this!”

We face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. The same work schedules that make parent-teacher meetings hard also make it hard for some parents to coordinate their schedules with the computer labs at local libraries or in the housing projects where some families live.

We hope to work with the PTA this year to create basic computer and email training for Healey parents who need this support. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet. Several years from now, the proliferation of smartphones and iphones will likely shrink this challenge dramatically, making it easier than ever for partners to join the conversation about student data.

==Figuring out the infrastructure for interpretation and translation: The Parent Connector Project==
''Posted: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:25:10 +0000

'''A parent recording information for other parents on the "Healey Hotline"

''By Mica Pollock, Gina D’Haiti, Tona Delmonico, and Ana Maria Nieto, for the Parent Connectors

[[File:Mariasethlessblurryhotlinephoto.jpg]]

We had one of our Multilingual Coffee Hours with the principal on Friday, May 20, at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville. Over some Portuguese bread, and coffee supplied by the PTA, we shared some of what we’ve been doing and learning in our Parent Connector project, and brainstormed next steps. The Connector project is a parent-led effort (in partnership with the school administration) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) via a phone tree to immigrant parents who speak their language.

We see the Connectors as one component of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation in a multilingual school. There are other pieces. We’re prototyping a hotline (using open source software and the Twilio API) allowing volunteer Translators of the Month (also bilingual parents, and maybe, students) to verbally translate information all parents need to know (in Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish). Bilingual parents have noted that translating material into their languages verbally – so, speaking it on to a hotline — is easier than doing it word for word from paper to paper. So far, we have parents coming to speak into a computer (see photo!). We hope to hone the hotline so that translators can record to it from home.

We’re working on other components of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation: a Googledoc as one organized place where principal and others put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translation (over time, our hotline).

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but glitches certainly can block communication too. One example: because our Connector project started mid-year, we had no beginning of the year form for all parents, saying “do you want a Connector? Check here to release your number to them!” So, it took us weeks to work through the Parent Information Center (PIC) to get parents to release their numbers to other parents! (School staff had to figure out how to download a spreadsheet of language-specific numbers for PIC staff from X2, the district’s “student information system”; then the PIC staff had to make the calls home to get parents’ permission to release numbers to the Connectors; then, finally, Connectors got lists and could start calling.)

A key issue we’re trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). Which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

'''Research Day: Exploring the Potential of Texting for Student-Teacher Communication
''Posted: Fri, 06 May 2011 01:52:06 +0000
On Saturday, April 21 from 10-1, ten young people and two teachers from Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative high school and middle school, came to a classroom at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. They joined Uche, me, and four other graduate students from the Ed School in “Research Day.” Our goal: to analyze texts students and teachers have been sending each other since the winter, in OneVille’s pilot of texting as a channel for rapid youth support.

We’ve been talking to students and teachers all year as co-researchers, about their experiences testing texting. We’d analyzed specific texts before with Ted and Mo, our teacher participants. But this was our first time sitting together with young people analyzing actual data. Reading transcripts taken from Google Voice (with participants’ permission and anonymized for analysis), students were immediately perceptive about “patterns in the data.” We talked in small groups, and then we shared ideas across the room. My small group included Mo (our Next Wave, middle school teacher), Shelia, Obens, “Juan,” and “Dan” (pseudonyms for initial blogging purposes!).

What we talked about most was how texting can enhance student-teacher relationships and so, students’ engagement with school.

Reading the transcripts, the students noticed first that students and teachers were noticeably polite to each other, texting “thanks and you’re welcome” after texts about permission slips, reminders, and personal check-ins on grades or life.

“The kids haven’t been crossing boundaries in any way – no one has been inappropriate,” Mo said later. Students agreed, saying that with texting, you’d just “give the teacher the same respect you’d give them in school.”

Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring. And that students were grateful for it: “it shows you appreciate the person and you’re thankful they helped you out,” Shelia said. Mo added: “They appreciate (Ted, our Full Circle teacher) taking time out of his own private life to send these texts.” Obens said that texts from Ted had gotten him to school on time.

Wielding her highlighter, Shelia selected another text from Ted to a student as important evidence:

“you need to be in school way more my friend.” “I feel like it’s genuine concern,” she explained. “It shows connection,” Obens added. “It also shows courage.”

He pointed out that the teacher was “taking time to text people about stuff – taking time to get a person to school on time. That shows courage on the part of the teacher. Also on the student, by replying back.” Shelia agreed, adding, “It takes the courage to make that bond – from the teacher — and also for the student to participate in the bond.” Juan added, “Who would want to text a teacher – there’s a lot you could be doing at that time. A lot of people won’t do it – that they do it means they really care about what they are doing.” As evidence, he pointed out a text he himself had sent back to Ted: he had “put in the effort” with responses, like “fine” and “I’ll make it [to school] by 8:10.” “I sleep a lot – but I made it before 8:10. It did help. I was used to coming in around 8:30,” he explained.

Ted highlighted this same point later in the research day: student texts to teachers

“show a level of investment. Even if (the text is) not school related, the student is checking in, making that contact, when they don’t have to. It’s really important to understand – the value of doing things not only when you have to do things.”

Looking again at Ted’s text “you need to be in school way more my friend,” both Mo and Shelia noted that texts put students and teachers “on the same level.” Shelia pointed out Mo’s own text to a student as similarly important: “worried about you.” “It shows that she really cares,” Shelia explained. “You had a bad day yesterday” was pointed out as a particularly caring teacher “check-in.”

Mo then pointed out a student request for information that had happened via text: “hey do you think they’re gonna extend the add drop period?” In class, Obens explained, “I don’t feel like bothering (Ted) w/ those types of questions.“ With texting, relationship-building could continue after the classroom day:

“It definitely strengthens our face to face, day to day relationships,” Ted added. “When you’re texting you feel like you’re close to your teacher,” Obens summed up.

Relationship. Built and strengthened in this private backchannel between people who share a classroom, in a medium more comfortable to students of 2011. “Some people might feel more comfortable saying it via texting more than face to face — because in person you might feel shy, awkward and not know what to say back,” said a student from across the room.

We might chalk this up to a modern aversion to in-person communication: “I’d rather text my parents than call them,” a student added. But reading the actual texts, we saw certain communications that texting may particularly make possible. Joking. Banter. The quick check-ins of care that simply don’t happen in person during busy days.

“She’s making sure the kid doesn’t get in trouble – she asks him to call his mom and stuff,” Juan noted of another of Mo’s texts. “She couldn’t do this face to face b/c he wasn’t in school.”

Pointing out uses of humor in the texts, Juan made another point about how texting could add to student-teacher relationships: people could communicate even if a student was in a bad mood. A face-to-face conversation might end with the student “shouting” out of anger, unable to help it; with texting, you could “be mad” and still “send a funny text.” Another student elaborated relatedly from across the room: with texting, you could overcome the “intimidation” of possible “rejection” by the other person, by sending lighthearted texts across the private channel that did not have to be responded to immediately. Emotion was “easier to handle” via texts, another student said.

Students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; even to care. Obens summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year:

“it shows connection. It’s really helpful — it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on the schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Over and over that day, we talked about how texts showed not just “connection” but true caring, in both directions. Mo pointed out that one student had asked Ted “how was your weekend.” Students pointed out texts from Ted and Mo like “you made 1 day last week” (“I like the encouragement,” said one student) and “you’re a smart kid” (“That’s really nice because some kids might feel doubt and don’t get many compliments from people,” another student said.). Shelia pointed out that overall, the texts could build relationship and simultaneously, the motivation to try.

“You need to know [teachers] care in order to do stuff. Otherwise what’s the point in trying. If a person is ‘I’m here for you’ – you feel someone else cares, I should care too.”

Furthermore, Shelia added, texts kept that relationship around with you, for later viewing. “With a phone call, it’s out of your head,” Shelia explained. “With a text message it’s still there when you turn on your phone – it still reminds you. You have to delete it if you don’t want it – it’s there to remind you.”

We left sure that texting had “helped” with “connection” in these teachers’ classrooms but unsure how it might work in “a school of like 600,” as someone put it. Full Circle/Next Wave are particularly “personal” schools, some pointed out: “in other schools it’s less personal, you get five minutes with that teacher,” Shelia said. We left with a question: does that lack of “personal” face to face attention in other schools make something like texting more likely to help, or less?

“Have good conversations,” Juan advised others considering texting with students. “Like don’t just talk about school. Also talk about how your day’s going, stuff like that. Don’t just keep it about school.” Ted finished our Research Day with more overall advice: “It’s up to both people to enhance the texting relationship. If the student is just responding “ok” or “yes” or “no,” that doesn’t allow the texting relationship to develop and to go towards communications that aren’t just ‘be on time.’”

==The Little Things Revisited: The Importance of Connectedness==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:18:03 +0000
In the last blog post I talked about the importance of the low-level support communications between teachers and students at the Oneville site. I posted a few short excerpts in which a teacher was texting students before school in an effort to motivate otherwise disinclined students to come school that day. Such communications, while low level, were nevertheless important because they had an immediate impact– the student in question ultimately came to school–but they also had the simultaneous effect, as the teachers and students told us and I’ll detail below, of strengthening the relationship between teachers and students.

Both parties (students and teachers) maintain that the strengthening of the non-academic aspects of their relationships is essential to supporting and nurturing the academic relationship and communication. When discussing the ‘low level’ nature of some of the conversations with the two teachers, they both claimed that these conversations were important and essential because they helped them build stronger relationships with the students. This strengthening occurred, they maintained, because they got to see the students in a different light than they would normally during the school day through conventional methods. One teachers noted that “the language that the kids are using to thank (them) through texting” is significantly different than what the students use in verbal communication, and that “the difference is surprising. It’s refreshing to know that (the students) have that capability”.

Students also found the texting communications useful in building relationships with their teachers. One student, who admitted to not responding regularly to texts from his teacher still found them useful” “I find it helpful, but I just don’t want to text back”. Moreover, the students suggested that he’d engage with the teacher more over text if “maybe during the weekend (he’d) hear from the teacher about how his weekend is going”. He wanted to learn more about the teacher outside of school. He’d like that, he claimed because “if (they) talk about outside (of school) stuff, (our) relationship will grow even stronger”.

This sense of connectedness described by teachers and students jibes with much of motivational literature that highlights relatedness–a sense of being connected to a larger group–alongside autonomy and a sense of competence, as an essential component of motivation. If we are to be successful in motivating the students not just to come to school, but to become actively involved in their schooling and education, then we, as the supporting community, must acknowledge and respond to their (identified) needs. These low level communications may not be sufficient for helping the students become successful in school and life, but as teachers and students have expressed, they are necessary.

==The Little Things==
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:07:20 +0000
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter the most in education: the moments that create and nurture relationships. When I first started with the Oneville Project, I believed that using the medium of texting would allow teachers, students, family members, and other stakeholders involved in the students’ lives to engage in crucial, in depth, involved, and sustained conversations about big picture issues affecting the students’ lives. The sky was the limit, I believed. The texting medium would allow students to get more one on one support from teachers than they would have otherwise received from a distracted teacher, in a crowded classroom, during a busy school day. Students would seek and receive the help they needed from their teachers at a time and place of their own choosing. In some ways, this has all turned out to be true: Mo and Ted, teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave who wanted to see how texting could support their communications with students and students’ supporters, have been texting when and from where they can; students are responding in kind. Communications that couldn’t happen before are happening now. But in many ways, these communications are about things that to an outsider, might seem “small.”

In these early stages of our texting pilot at Somerville site, we’re finding that teachers and students are regularly using texting for what might seem low level interactions — such as nudging students to get up and come to school, in real time:

7:01am TEACHER: Hey (STUDENT), rise and shine!!

7:08 am TEACHER: Hey, you getting up!!

7:36 am STUDENT: You up

7:39 am STUDENT: I made a pancake =D lol

7:41 Eww wait it came out nasty

*******************************

7:27 am TEACHER: Hey, I’m late

7:27 am TEACHER: Time to get up!!

7:27 am TEACHER: Got a nice flatbread for you!!

7:28 am STUDENT: Ok, I’m up

In these two exchanges we see the teacher prodding and then coaxing the student to get up and come to school. This is not a reminder sent the week or the night before, but a real time push to action; the first and second exchanges are within a 40 and one-minute time frame, respectively. The text based communication modality allows the teacher to reach through her phone and into the students’ house. And in both situations it seems to have worked! Another student recently told one of our research assistants – HGSE students themselves starting to text with students as college mentors – that he was coming to school more often because of these texts. Could the same exchange have happened over the phone? Possibly. Would it have happened? Unlikely. The student would have most likely silenced the phone. But texts are extremely insistent. The only quick way to stop them from coming in is to turn off the phone–which is akin to cutting of an appendage to most students. They could always ignore the phone and not read the message, but how long can/will a teenager ignore their portal to the world?

Although we’re seeing the beginning of larger forward looking conversations – reminder statements about homework, supportive statements about motivation and students’ intelligence — a more startling and significant finding so far is that little communications about little things — like pancakes — could be important to building a relationship, possibly the ultimate need of good teaching. More pragmatically, a teacher can have no impact, and the student no learning, if the student doesn’t show up to school. And while there are sometimes complex and intractable reasons why a student does not show up for school–problems at home, bullying, (arguably) more appealing and remunerative options – sometimes, smaller and more manageable causes are at the root of frequent tardiness and absences. Sometimes the students are just too tired – or too alone — to get out of bed.

Of course the example above raises many obvious questions that are fundamental to anyone exploring uses of social media in education today. 1) What about boundaries–the teacher reaching across settings, into the student’s home? What boundaries of privacy and trust need to be in place for such communications to be okay? 2) Do teachers really have time to do this one on one check up on students? 3) How often should such “wake up calls” occur, before they become demotivating or infantilizing? We’re exploring all of this with students and teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, and we’ll address these questions in future posts.

''Posted: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:15:10 +0000
'''OneVille’s mission is to facilitate collaboration in young people’s success by co-creating communication solutions linking the people in young people’s lives.

'''ePortfolio Reflection from Mike M.
''Posted: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:03:45 +0000
I started using online portfolios for my AP class last year. When I became part of the ePortfolio project at SHS, I saw what could be done with a ePortfolio and I decided to go farther. What started as a simple online file cabinet for students to store lab reports, became a place for students to reflect and help each other. It also became a place for me to share not only paper solutions and documents, but video to help students work through issues.

It then went further to include how-to videos for other new teachers on how to use lab equipment, and video tutorials for any students on how to use technology like Excel, and some of our digital lab analysis software.

I plan I adding a lot more, and turning my ePortfolio site into a place to share information with my students and fellow teachers. I think having the students make their own sites to post images, labs, reflections etc was invaluable and definitely added to their experience.

In the future I hope something can be put into place that will allow all freshman to develop an ePortfolio that they can utilize throughout their high school career to not only store examples of their best work, but help them organize and prepare for college or jobs, share things they are proud of with their teachers, family and fellow students and express themselves in a way that is actually valuable to their education and become a better human being, as opposed to something limited like twitter or facebook which well, we kind of know what those things are most useful for.

Check out my ePortfolio site at https://sites.google.com/site/somervillephysics/and my official site at http://mrmaloney.com

==Communicating the Whole Student – and Teacher==
''Posted: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 02:44:10 +0000

[[File:EportfolioCrewMarch20113-300x225.jpg]]

''Innovations by the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team, above

''Notes from the audience, by Mica Pollock

Last night, the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team gave a presentation of their work developing ePortfolios since October 2011. Up in front of an audience of nearly 30 from the superintendent’s office, school committee, school improvement council and community, 11 young people and 6 teachers shared how they went about creating their online portfolios and what they learned about themselves in the process.

Somerville High School has a paper portfolio tradition that has been, as one teacher put it, “a cumbersome collection of paper four times a year.” On Monday night, students and teachers discussed the ability to show themselves and their skill sets in multimedia – to colleges, employers, and one another.

As one student put it, the ePortfolio shows “a more accurate portrait of myself.” I was struck by this very thing overall: the rare chance for a student or a teacher, in school, to show other people one’s full self — and the ability of ePortfolios to make this a normal thing.

Zoe showed her mathematics equations, and her participation in the Boston Children’s Chorus opera. Sergio demonstrated his award-winning children’s book, and a gear shift he made by hand in the shop for his own car.

Astrid pointed out that ePortfolios allowed students to get closer to teachers they didn’t know as well; “it allows you to see the background of a student, and you can express yourself.” Clicking through videos on a school SmartBoard, she demonstrated the digital story of a poem she wrote in El Salvador from a hammock, on her iPod; it was the first time presenting her work this publicly, she said, as she had always been shy about sharing her poems.

A teacher, Mr Glynn, noted that he himself had approached the project from the perspective of a learner: what would a teacher need to know to help all students use wiki spaces and google sites? Students using the media had become more critical and self-reflective about their learning, he said, and were taking more control and ownership of it. ePortfolios also had the potential to show both growth and continuity in student skills over time. “These are so much more alive than the paper version of our portfolio,” he said. And his other conclusion about the technology itself: “a freshman in high school can definitely figure this out.”

Doug, a student, pointed out that ePortfolios let students interact with their teachers online, and “get critique” from peers; “students are always in search of some constructive criticism,” he added, pointing out as well that “Somerville High has a diversity of cultures; media and technology cross those boundaries.” As he clicked to some of his essays, a teacher called out that he was an excellent writer and an audience member commented on his large vocabulary; “there are some things that you can’t see that you can show on your ePortfolio,” he finished modestly.

Rocky showed his programming efforts in Java, next to his wacky chicken graphics; online images he had posted demonstrated both his lifelong curiosity about how food gets made (bubble tea was one example) and a long line of successful Somerville report cards. “EPortfolios are to show your improvement over life,” he finished.

Samantha, who said with a smile that “I hate technology,” showed herself as an award-winning dancer, an avocation she said she wanted to combine with a medical career; the ability to “show colleges what you can do,” rather than “just show people a piece of paper on yourself,” made tech “worth the struggle.”

Susan Olsen, a teacher, spoke of engaging a full range of students in the project, students both struggling and already succeeding academically. Mr. Maloney wowed the audience by showing his class website for AP Physics, which he had redone for the project using “the free tools the kids are using.” He showed us how he could communicate ways of solving physics equations online to students; he also was making and posting videos online that communicate to other teachers how to create physics equipment for a low cost. He also participated in blog community discussions sharing ahas with physics teachers across the world. “I didn’t collect one piece of paper this year from my students except for tests,” he said, and students were online regularly commenting on each others’ assignments.

David showed a video of his persistent skateboarding, and his sketches of animals and plants. His teacher Michelle Li pointed out that ePortfolios could personalize learning more effectively with students like David, and, that these could be accessed “any time, from anywhere.” (She showed us how her website also linked to the Somerville Public Schools calendar and daily bulletin, and to X2, the student information system, so students could check up on their grades.) Her “vision”: to have each student make an eportfolio that she could link to her own class website. This would allow her, her students, and even her students’ parents to have “meaningful conversations with kids.” (Another student, Sonam, has already been presenting his ePortfolio efforts to her class, and now lots of kids want to make ePortfolios!)

Mr. Petriv, a computer hardware teacher, had made the leap from his typical “shrink-wrapped programs with a manual” to experimenting with various free software for the project. He showed us pictures of the lilies he loved, the beetles that he hated, and his expertise in home repair, then talked about the potential for ePortfolios to show both the “filing cabinet” of all student work and the “best work” for graduation or career.

Sonam, an avid video game enthusiast, showed how he learned computer programming through an application called Scratch and created his own game.

Vanessa showed a physics video and online diary. “I lost my (paper) portfolio folder in sophomore year and nobody ever said anything,” Vanessa added, to laughs from the group. “If I had gotten this when I was a freshman, I could have linked to it on the common college application. . . .We are the new tech generation. Kids will lie to you and tell you they can’t make a website, but they can; we all have Facebook!”

Kamilla closed the evening with a photo of a chemistry class in Brazil, her paper drawings of flowers, her experiments with hair dyes, her hand-designed dresses from Brazil, and her dreams of being a chemical engineer.

The whole teacher, the whole student. The library glowed with pictures of lilies, of skateboards, next to drawings of physics and algebra equations and Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution plans; photos of hand-designed dresses posted next to dreams of becoming chemical engineers, next to poems written in hammocks. Students and teachers themselves, up in front, flowed back and forth between describing all parts of themselves, with equal interest; a love of chemistry and blue hair. When, in school, do we get to communicate who we actually are and what we can actually do? And what might happen if we did this all the time?

'''[[http://oneville.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ePortfolioFinalPresentationProgramMarch2011.pdfePortfolio Final Presentation]] '''

Oneville Blog

2012-07-23T00:21:50Z

Amaechi:

Personalizing youth support, one text at a time
Posted: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:20:34 +0000
The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so, is acting as remote ally.

'''Notes by Mica Pollock

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Back on Nov 14, participants in the OneVille texting project at Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative middle and high schools, took the “stage” at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in our Digital Media and Learning Working Group, to share their past year of efforts to explore the potential of texting for supporting youth-teacher communication.

We discussed how texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. To Mo Robichaux, Next Wave teacher and texting pioneer, the practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day. Texting created “space for a more level relationship” in which students could discuss personal struggles and school goals, “that then go back like a rubber band, to a teacher-student relationship.”

Students and teachers together set ground rules for appropriate uses of text messaging in schools at the beginning of each year’s work. Almost everyone already had the ability to text; texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate.

At Berkman, texts like this prompted lively discussion of the support relationships texting could afford. As texting teacher Ted had said, “The language that the kids are using to thank and what they do verbally is surprising”:

Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

Often, we noticed, a text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation:

Teacher: Everything ok? 9:30 AM

Student: Ted? 10:39 AM

Teacher: Yup 11:02 AM

Student: Everythings alright I guess im gonna b in tm .. Is there anything I can do to put my grade up for your class 11:05 AM

Teacher: Be on time tomorrow, we’ll talk then.

Our next step: to work with partners at the Berkman Center to produce a teacher guide to the legal/privacy issues raised for those pioneering texting. This year, teachers, students, and OneVille texting pilot coordinator Uche Amaechi are continuing to test texting “teams.” They will wrap up that texting pilot at the end of this year or possibly, next fall, by sharing ¡Ahas! around the community to others wanting to explore texting for youth support and mentoring.

In other OneVille news: Healey bilingual parents and staff, with supporters Jedd Cohen and Ana Maria Nieto, continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network at the Healey School. They will also produce a parent-friendly “how to” guide to the puzzle pieces that work. Possibly, we will pilot and tweak our administrator and teacher dashboard views with principal and teachers.

We feel very privileged to have participated in these design innovations with the Somerville community.

'''Eportfolios: Sparking New Conversations about What Students Can Do
''Posted: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:53:35 +0000
''Notes by Mica Pollock

The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so is acting as remote ally.

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Last week, a group of student and teacher eportfolio researcher/designers from Somerville High School came to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, for a rousing share-out of their eportfolio project. After a year of participatory design work, eportfolios are seeding across the High School. Guests from Berkman’s Youth and Media Lab and other Working Group members from MIT, Tufts, and Emerson listened intently, as SHS young people and teachers shared their insights about the new communications about young people’s skills, talents and interests made possible when young people made and shared eportfolio entries.

SHS presenters described how over a year and a half of careful groundwork with the School Improvement Council and then critical participatory design research with dozens of students and teachers at SHS, SHS’s own students and teachers led a transition from the school’s prior portfolios to vibrant online “eportfolios” sharing students’ full range of learning products and accomplishments in and out of school, organized by 21st century skills rather than only in subject areas. From paper folders “locked in a cabinet,” student portfolios by spring 2011 included videos of students narrating their original poetry, solving math equations, and doing physics; interviews with teachers evaluating students’ negotiation skills, and videos of students’ efforts to learn to skateboard; photos and commentary on students’ original art and work experiences; and class assignments students found particularly valuable to their learning. As a student put it, an eportfolio allowed her to “show all of the sides of who I am, in one place,” to share “little cool things about me” as well as evidence of “being a good student.” Teacher Chris Glynn noted that if students entered his class at the beginning of the year with eportfolios communicating their skills and interests, learning would be “so much more individualized!”

Student researchers/eportfolio designers were chosen purposefully to demonstrate a full range of achievement levels and student backgrounds at SHS. As one student put it in the presentation, portfolios supported each student to show themselves as “exemplary,” by encouraging students to consider, document and post their best work done both inside and outside of school. “Every student can shine at this if they put in the time and effort,” a teacher said. “We are representative of the potential that everyone has,” a student agreed.

The energy to make eportfolios is spreading virally across the school, as teachers show each other how to use software and students who see others’ work get excited to post their own.

Now that the OneVille pilot phase of eportfolio design is over, students’ and teachers’ next plan is to make a Somerville High School eportfolio website created to support next schools exploring eportfolios!

'''Let’s Spark Family-School Conversations about Student Data
''Posted: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:08:31 +0000
''By Jedd Cohen, Seth Woodworth, and Josh Wairi

Getting “On the Same Page”: We can all see the data together, from any location

Update December 2011: this post was written this fall, when we expected to pilot the three dashboard views. Due to an undesired lag in final technological development, the “individual view” pilot has been delayed; we may do a small pilot of the “admin view” and “teacher view” this winter. Regardless, code has been created that pulls data out of Somerville’s Student Information System for quick viewing and can be put to use in any such “dashboard” project.

An idea common across Oneville’s projects has been: “A communication gap equals a gap in student service.” In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to share comprehensive student data, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, and how to communicate with schools about it.

Over the past two years in our “dashboard” project, we – local technologists, teachers, researchers — have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help make sure that key people can go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) for each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

Three resulting dashboard views are open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers to support each student’s success. Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. We’ve created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows each teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

'''Details: What do the dashboards look like?

The admin and teacher views appear in the form of a colorful chart that allows sorting by up to four columns at a time. Original design model: an Excel spreadsheet made for the Healey School by Greg Nadeau, local parent! Based on feedback from former principal Jason DeFalco, we added: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores, IEP status, and afterschool program name:

[[File:Dashboard.png]]

Based on conversations with new Healey Principal Purnima Vadhera, we’ll also add average attendance over the past several weeks, to compare to the current week’s attendance, and 504 status. We may still add MCAS score and growth, MAP writing score and growth, and DIBELS and MELA-O scores. The updated admin view also creates scatter plots and bar graphs to display the relation between demographics and other data, i.e., achievement or attendance.

The admin and teacher views look like charts, displaying the same types of data for many students. The individual view is organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs at the top of the page allow the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile.

The narrative structure, as well as many decisions about exactly what to display in this view, came out of numerous brainstorming meetings last spring with author and Healey teacher Josh Wairi. We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views in his class in the fall. The individual view presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments – each type of data on its own page accessible by tabs at the top. (Most of this data is in Somerville’s “student information system,” just more scattered; we wanted to get it easily all in one place for a teacher and family/providers to see.) We’ve also created an interactive online version of Somerville’s K-6 report card, which parents are used to getting on a static piece of paper. We plan to add each student’s yearbook photo and data on allotted support services. Next to each ‘chunk’ of student data, “comment/question” boxes provide a space for the parent or afterschool provider to comment on the data by entering text that gets sent to the homeroom teacher’s email:

Individual view (click image to enlarge)

On the “Comments” page, the parent or afterschool provider can request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them. Parents can specify any new contact info and convenient meeting times. After receiving these comments, the homeroom teacher can forward any relevant parts to the appropriate subject area teachers. (Josh feels that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other teachers about families’ comments.)

The Parent Connectors will help to make the user interface available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole (and we’ll use the district’s own translation for the report card). For more ongoing translation (email messages sent to and from parents, parent-teacher conferences, the summary comments on the dashboard), we’re adding links to Google Translate and to the Parent Connector calendar for setting up meetings with interpreters.

Knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we’ve designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people use the tools will be up to them – but rather than have the tools just “display” data, we wanted the individual view, in particular, to also prompt and encourage communication about data.

Feedback and next steps:

We’ve asked for feedback on the tool throughout, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, “Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!” When asked whether the dashboard might feel like extra work, another parent articulated his/her vision of parent involvement: “Not extra – you have children, you spend time to communicate. The more time you spend, the better students do.” One English-speaking parent with three children at the school explained that the dashboard’s comment and scheduling features solved a long-standing problem for her: After being a Healey parent for 11 years, she has only ever had time to meet with each of her children’s core academic teachers during PTA nights, but never the specialty teachers, e.g., music, art, support room teachers. Our dashboard enables and encourages parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who will forward it to the specials teachers. Another parent was especially enthusiastic about online access: “I do everything on the computer now.” And another immigrant parent said he does “everything” on his smart phone!

In a recent meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the potential value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Online access to this data could also help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [family dashboard] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” helps when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” Clearly, no proverbial dogs will eat it once it’s online.

Students with IEPs and 504 plans sometimes need accommodations on the MCAS, and Purnima often spends “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers that students’ needs have been met. Our tool allows her to sort by IEP and 504 plans, so that all these students appear together, “so we don’t have moments when things fall through the cracks.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. Such team conversations could involve the school’s “student support team” – a standing group of educators that evaluates struggling students – or each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that it could allow him to present a single student’s data in one of these team meetings without revealing all the other students’ grades unnecessarily (a breach of confidentiality).

We hope that these dashboards could be useful enough to help ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators, and catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our dashboards, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh can always share back, move forward in small increments. Maybe teachers would just want to get on board with this!”

We face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. The same work schedules that make parent-teacher meetings hard also make it hard for some parents to coordinate their schedules with the computer labs at local libraries or in the housing projects where some families live.

We hope to work with the PTA this year to create basic computer and email training for Healey parents who need this support. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet. Several years from now, the proliferation of smartphones and iphones will likely shrink this challenge dramatically, making it easier than ever for partners to join the conversation about student data.

'''Figuring out the infrastructure for interpretation and translation: The Parent Connector Project
''Posted: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:25:10 +0000

'''A parent recording information for other parents on the "Healey Hotline"

''By Mica Pollock, Gina D’Haiti, Tona Delmonico, and Ana Maria Nieto, for the Parent Connectors

We had one of our Multilingual Coffee Hours with the principal on Friday, May 20, at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville. Over some Portuguese bread, and coffee supplied by the PTA, we shared some of what we’ve been doing and learning in our Parent Connector project, and brainstormed next steps. The Connector project is a parent-led effort (in partnership with the school administration) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) via a phone tree to immigrant parents who speak their language.

We see the Connectors as one component of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation in a multilingual school. There are other pieces. We’re prototyping a hotline (using open source software and the Twilio API) allowing volunteer Translators of the Month (also bilingual parents, and maybe, students) to verbally translate information all parents need to know (in Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish). Bilingual parents have noted that translating material into their languages verbally – so, speaking it on to a hotline — is easier than doing it word for word from paper to paper. So far, we have parents coming to speak into a computer (see photo!). We hope to hone the hotline so that translators can record to it from home.

We’re working on other components of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation: a Googledoc as one organized place where principal and others put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translation (over time, our hotline).

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but glitches certainly can block communication too. One example: because our Connector project started mid-year, we had no beginning of the year form for all parents, saying “do you want a Connector? Check here to release your number to them!” So, it took us weeks to work through the Parent Information Center (PIC) to get parents to release their numbers to other parents! (School staff had to figure out how to download a spreadsheet of language-specific numbers for PIC staff from X2, the district’s “student information system”; then the PIC staff had to make the calls home to get parents’ permission to release numbers to the Connectors; then, finally, Connectors got lists and could start calling.)

A key issue we’re trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). Which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

'''Research Day: Exploring the Potential of Texting for Student-Teacher Communication
''Posted: Fri, 06 May 2011 01:52:06 +0000
On Saturday, April 21 from 10-1, ten young people and two teachers from Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative high school and middle school, came to a classroom at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. They joined Uche, me, and four other graduate students from the Ed School in “Research Day.” Our goal: to analyze texts students and teachers have been sending each other since the winter, in OneVille’s pilot of texting as a channel for rapid youth support.

We’ve been talking to students and teachers all year as co-researchers, about their experiences testing texting. We’d analyzed specific texts before with Ted and Mo, our teacher participants. But this was our first time sitting together with young people analyzing actual data. Reading transcripts taken from Google Voice (with participants’ permission and anonymized for analysis), students were immediately perceptive about “patterns in the data.” We talked in small groups, and then we shared ideas across the room. My small group included Mo (our Next Wave, middle school teacher), Shelia, Obens, “Juan,” and “Dan” (pseudonyms for initial blogging purposes!).

What we talked about most was how texting can enhance student-teacher relationships and so, students’ engagement with school.

Reading the transcripts, the students noticed first that students and teachers were noticeably polite to each other, texting “thanks and you’re welcome” after texts about permission slips, reminders, and personal check-ins on grades or life.

“The kids haven’t been crossing boundaries in any way – no one has been inappropriate,” Mo said later. Students agreed, saying that with texting, you’d just “give the teacher the same respect you’d give them in school.”

Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring. And that students were grateful for it: “it shows you appreciate the person and you’re thankful they helped you out,” Shelia said. Mo added: “They appreciate (Ted, our Full Circle teacher) taking time out of his own private life to send these texts.” Obens said that texts from Ted had gotten him to school on time.

Wielding her highlighter, Shelia selected another text from Ted to a student as important evidence:

“you need to be in school way more my friend.” “I feel like it’s genuine concern,” she explained. “It shows connection,” Obens added. “It also shows courage.”

He pointed out that the teacher was “taking time to text people about stuff – taking time to get a person to school on time. That shows courage on the part of the teacher. Also on the student, by replying back.” Shelia agreed, adding, “It takes the courage to make that bond – from the teacher — and also for the student to participate in the bond.” Juan added, “Who would want to text a teacher – there’s a lot you could be doing at that time. A lot of people won’t do it – that they do it means they really care about what they are doing.” As evidence, he pointed out a text he himself had sent back to Ted: he had “put in the effort” with responses, like “fine” and “I’ll make it [to school] by 8:10.” “I sleep a lot – but I made it before 8:10. It did help. I was used to coming in around 8:30,” he explained.

Ted highlighted this same point later in the research day: student texts to teachers

“show a level of investment. Even if (the text is) not school related, the student is checking in, making that contact, when they don’t have to. It’s really important to understand – the value of doing things not only when you have to do things.”

Looking again at Ted’s text “you need to be in school way more my friend,” both Mo and Shelia noted that texts put students and teachers “on the same level.” Shelia pointed out Mo’s own text to a student as similarly important: “worried about you.” “It shows that she really cares,” Shelia explained. “You had a bad day yesterday” was pointed out as a particularly caring teacher “check-in.”

Mo then pointed out a student request for information that had happened via text: “hey do you think they’re gonna extend the add drop period?” In class, Obens explained, “I don’t feel like bothering (Ted) w/ those types of questions.“ With texting, relationship-building could continue after the classroom day:

“It definitely strengthens our face to face, day to day relationships,” Ted added. “When you’re texting you feel like you’re close to your teacher,” Obens summed up.

Relationship. Built and strengthened in this private backchannel between people who share a classroom, in a medium more comfortable to students of 2011. “Some people might feel more comfortable saying it via texting more than face to face — because in person you might feel shy, awkward and not know what to say back,” said a student from across the room.

We might chalk this up to a modern aversion to in-person communication: “I’d rather text my parents than call them,” a student added. But reading the actual texts, we saw certain communications that texting may particularly make possible. Joking. Banter. The quick check-ins of care that simply don’t happen in person during busy days.

“She’s making sure the kid doesn’t get in trouble – she asks him to call his mom and stuff,” Juan noted of another of Mo’s texts. “She couldn’t do this face to face b/c he wasn’t in school.”

Pointing out uses of humor in the texts, Juan made another point about how texting could add to student-teacher relationships: people could communicate even if a student was in a bad mood. A face-to-face conversation might end with the student “shouting” out of anger, unable to help it; with texting, you could “be mad” and still “send a funny text.” Another student elaborated relatedly from across the room: with texting, you could overcome the “intimidation” of possible “rejection” by the other person, by sending lighthearted texts across the private channel that did not have to be responded to immediately. Emotion was “easier to handle” via texts, another student said.

Students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; even to care. Obens summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year:

“it shows connection. It’s really helpful — it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on the schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Over and over that day, we talked about how texts showed not just “connection” but true caring, in both directions. Mo pointed out that one student had asked Ted “how was your weekend.” Students pointed out texts from Ted and Mo like “you made 1 day last week” (“I like the encouragement,” said one student) and “you’re a smart kid” (“That’s really nice because some kids might feel doubt and don’t get many compliments from people,” another student said.). Shelia pointed out that overall, the texts could build relationship and simultaneously, the motivation to try.

“You need to know [teachers] care in order to do stuff. Otherwise what’s the point in trying. If a person is ‘I’m here for you’ – you feel someone else cares, I should care too.”

Furthermore, Shelia added, texts kept that relationship around with you, for later viewing. “With a phone call, it’s out of your head,” Shelia explained. “With a text message it’s still there when you turn on your phone – it still reminds you. You have to delete it if you don’t want it – it’s there to remind you.”

We left sure that texting had “helped” with “connection” in these teachers’ classrooms but unsure how it might work in “a school of like 600,” as someone put it. Full Circle/Next Wave are particularly “personal” schools, some pointed out: “in other schools it’s less personal, you get five minutes with that teacher,” Shelia said. We left with a question: does that lack of “personal” face to face attention in other schools make something like texting more likely to help, or less?

“Have good conversations,” Juan advised others considering texting with students. “Like don’t just talk about school. Also talk about how your day’s going, stuff like that. Don’t just keep it about school.” Ted finished our Research Day with more overall advice: “It’s up to both people to enhance the texting relationship. If the student is just responding “ok” or “yes” or “no,” that doesn’t allow the texting relationship to develop and to go towards communications that aren’t just ‘be on time.’”

'''The Little Things Revisited: The Importance of Connectedness
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:18:03 +0000
In the last blog post I talked about the importance of the low-level support communications between teachers and students at the Oneville site. I posted a few short excerpts in which a teacher was texting students before school in an effort to motivate otherwise disinclined students to come school that day. Such communications, while low level, were nevertheless important because they had an immediate impact– the student in question ultimately came to school–but they also had the simultaneous effect, as the teachers and students told us and I’ll detail below, of strengthening the relationship between teachers and students.

Both parties (students and teachers) maintain that the strengthening of the non-academic aspects of their relationships is essential to supporting and nurturing the academic relationship and communication. When discussing the ‘low level’ nature of some of the conversations with the two teachers, they both claimed that these conversations were important and essential because they helped them build stronger relationships with the students. This strengthening occurred, they maintained, because they got to see the students in a different light than they would normally during the school day through conventional methods. One teachers noted that “the language that the kids are using to thank (them) through texting” is significantly different than what the students use in verbal communication, and that “the difference is surprising. It’s refreshing to know that (the students) have that capability”.

Students also found the texting communications useful in building relationships with their teachers. One student, who admitted to not responding regularly to texts from his teacher still found them useful” “I find it helpful, but I just don’t want to text back”. Moreover, the students suggested that he’d engage with the teacher more over text if “maybe during the weekend (he’d) hear from the teacher about how his weekend is going”. He wanted to learn more about the teacher outside of school. He’d like that, he claimed because “if (they) talk about outside (of school) stuff, (our) relationship will grow even stronger”.

This sense of connectedness described by teachers and students jibes with much of motivational literature that highlights relatedness–a sense of being connected to a larger group–alongside autonomy and a sense of competence, as an essential component of motivation. If we are to be successful in motivating the students not just to come to school, but to become actively involved in their schooling and education, then we, as the supporting community, must acknowledge and respond to their (identified) needs. These low level communications may not be sufficient for helping the students become successful in school and life, but as teachers and students have expressed, they are necessary.

'''The Little Things
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:07:20 +0000
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter the most in education: the moments that create and nurture relationships. When I first started with the Oneville Project, I believed that using the medium of texting would allow teachers, students, family members, and other stakeholders involved in the students’ lives to engage in crucial, in depth, involved, and sustained conversations about big picture issues affecting the students’ lives. The sky was the limit, I believed. The texting medium would allow students to get more one on one support from teachers than they would have otherwise received from a distracted teacher, in a crowded classroom, during a busy school day. Students would seek and receive the help they needed from their teachers at a time and place of their own choosing. In some ways, this has all turned out to be true: Mo and Ted, teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave who wanted to see how texting could support their communications with students and students’ supporters, have been texting when and from where they can; students are responding in kind. Communications that couldn’t happen before are happening now. But in many ways, these communications are about things that to an outsider, might seem “small.”

In these early stages of our texting pilot at Somerville site, we’re finding that teachers and students are regularly using texting for what might seem low level interactions — such as nudging students to get up and come to school, in real time:

7:01am TEACHER: Hey (STUDENT), rise and shine!!

7:08 am TEACHER: Hey, you getting up!!

7:36 am STUDENT: You up

7:39 am STUDENT: I made a pancake =D lol

7:41 Eww wait it came out nasty

*******************************

7:27 am TEACHER: Hey, I’m late

7:27 am TEACHER: Time to get up!!

7:27 am TEACHER: Got a nice flatbread for you!!

7:28 am STUDENT: Ok, I’m up

In these two exchanges we see the teacher prodding and then coaxing the student to get up and come to school. This is not a reminder sent the week or the night before, but a real time push to action; the first and second exchanges are within a 40 and one-minute time frame, respectively. The text based communication modality allows the teacher to reach through her phone and into the students’ house. And in both situations it seems to have worked! Another student recently told one of our research assistants – HGSE students themselves starting to text with students as college mentors – that he was coming to school more often because of these texts. Could the same exchange have happened over the phone? Possibly. Would it have happened? Unlikely. The student would have most likely silenced the phone. But texts are extremely insistent. The only quick way to stop them from coming in is to turn off the phone–which is akin to cutting of an appendage to most students. They could always ignore the phone and not read the message, but how long can/will a teenager ignore their portal to the world?

Although we’re seeing the beginning of larger forward looking conversations – reminder statements about homework, supportive statements about motivation and students’ intelligence — a more startling and significant finding so far is that little communications about little things — like pancakes — could be important to building a relationship, possibly the ultimate need of good teaching. More pragmatically, a teacher can have no impact, and the student no learning, if the student doesn’t show up to school. And while there are sometimes complex and intractable reasons why a student does not show up for school–problems at home, bullying, (arguably) more appealing and remunerative options – sometimes, smaller and more manageable causes are at the root of frequent tardiness and absences. Sometimes the students are just too tired – or too alone — to get out of bed.

Of course the example above raises many obvious questions that are fundamental to anyone exploring uses of social media in education today. 1) What about boundaries–the teacher reaching across settings, into the student’s home? What boundaries of privacy and trust need to be in place for such communications to be okay? 2) Do teachers really have time to do this one on one check up on students? 3) How often should such “wake up calls” occur, before they become demotivating or infantilizing? We’re exploring all of this with students and teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, and we’ll address these questions in future posts.

''Posted: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:15:10 +0000
'''OneVille’s mission is to facilitate collaboration in young people’s success by co-creating communication solutions linking the people in young people’s lives.

'''ePortfolio Reflection from Mike M.
''Posted: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:03:45 +0000
I started using online portfolios for my AP class last year. When I became part of the ePortfolio project at SHS, I saw what could be done with a ePortfolio and I decided to go farther. What started as a simple online file cabinet for students to store lab reports, became a place for students to reflect and help each other. It also became a place for me to share not only paper solutions and documents, but video to help students work through issues.

It then went further to include how-to videos for other new teachers on how to use lab equipment, and video tutorials for any students on how to use technology like Excel, and some of our digital lab analysis software.

I plan I adding a lot more, and turning my ePortfolio site into a place to share information with my students and fellow teachers. I think having the students make their own sites to post images, labs, reflections etc was invaluable and definitely added to their experience.

In the future I hope something can be put into place that will allow all freshman to develop an ePortfolio that they can utilize throughout their high school career to not only store examples of their best work, but help them organize and prepare for college or jobs, share things they are proud of with their teachers, family and fellow students and express themselves in a way that is actually valuable to their education and become a better human being, as opposed to something limited like twitter or facebook which well, we kind of know what those things are most useful for.

Check out my ePortfolio site at https://sites.google.com/site/somervillephysics/and my official site at http://mrmaloney.com

'''Communicating the Whole Student – and Teacher
''Posted: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 02:44:10 +0000

'''Innovations by the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team, above

''Notes from the audience, by Mica Pollock

Last night, the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team gave a presentation of their work developing ePortfolios since October 2011. Up in front of an audience of nearly 30 from the superintendent’s office, school committee, school improvement council and community, 11 young people and 6 teachers shared how they went about creating their online portfolios and what they learned about themselves in the process.

Somerville High School has a paper portfolio tradition that has been, as one teacher put it, “a cumbersome collection of paper four times a year.” On Monday night, students and teachers discussed the ability to show themselves and their skill sets in multimedia – to colleges, employers, and one another.

As one student put it, the ePortfolio shows “a more accurate portrait of myself.” I was struck by this very thing overall: the rare chance for a student or a teacher, in school, to show other people one’s full self — and the ability of ePortfolios to make this a normal thing.

Zoe showed her mathematics equations, and her participation in the Boston Children’s Chorus opera. Sergio demonstrated his award-winning children’s book, and a gear shift he made by hand in the shop for his own car.

Astrid pointed out that ePortfolios allowed students to get closer to teachers they didn’t know as well; “it allows you to see the background of a student, and you can express yourself.” Clicking through videos on a school SmartBoard, she demonstrated the digital story of a poem she wrote in El Salvador from a hammock, on her iPod; it was the first time presenting her work this publicly, she said, as she had always been shy about sharing her poems.

A teacher, Mr Glynn, noted that he himself had approached the project from the perspective of a learner: what would a teacher need to know to help all students use wiki spaces and google sites? Students using the media had become more critical and self-reflective about their learning, he said, and were taking more control and ownership of it. ePortfolios also had the potential to show both growth and continuity in student skills over time. “These are so much more alive than the paper version of our portfolio,” he said. And his other conclusion about the technology itself: “a freshman in high school can definitely figure this out.”

Doug, a student, pointed out that ePortfolios let students interact with their teachers online, and “get critique” from peers; “students are always in search of some constructive criticism,” he added, pointing out as well that “Somerville High has a diversity of cultures; media and technology cross those boundaries.” As he clicked to some of his essays, a teacher called out that he was an excellent writer and an audience member commented on his large vocabulary; “there are some things that you can’t see that you can show on your ePortfolio,” he finished modestly.

Rocky showed his programming efforts in Java, next to his wacky chicken graphics; online images he had posted demonstrated both his lifelong curiosity about how food gets made (bubble tea was one example) and a long line of successful Somerville report cards. “EPortfolios are to show your improvement over life,” he finished.

Samantha, who said with a smile that “I hate technology,” showed herself as an award-winning dancer, an avocation she said she wanted to combine with a medical career; the ability to “show colleges what you can do,” rather than “just show people a piece of paper on yourself,” made tech “worth the struggle.”

Susan Olsen, a teacher, spoke of engaging a full range of students in the project, students both struggling and already succeeding academically. Mr. Maloney wowed the audience by showing his class website for AP Physics, which he had redone for the project using “the free tools the kids are using.” He showed us how he could communicate ways of solving physics equations online to students; he also was making and posting videos online that communicate to other teachers how to create physics equipment for a low cost. He also participated in blog community discussions sharing ahas with physics teachers across the world. “I didn’t collect one piece of paper this year from my students except for tests,” he said, and students were online regularly commenting on each others’ assignments.

David showed a video of his persistent skateboarding, and his sketches of animals and plants. His teacher Michelle Li pointed out that ePortfolios could personalize learning more effectively with students like David, and, that these could be accessed “any time, from anywhere.” (She showed us how her website also linked to the Somerville Public Schools calendar and daily bulletin, and to X2, the student information system, so students could check up on their grades.) Her “vision”: to have each student make an eportfolio that she could link to her own class website. This would allow her, her students, and even her students’ parents to have “meaningful conversations with kids.” (Another student, Sonam, has already been presenting his ePortfolio efforts to her class, and now lots of kids want to make ePortfolios!)

Mr. Petriv, a computer hardware teacher, had made the leap from his typical “shrink-wrapped programs with a manual” to experimenting with various free software for the project. He showed us pictures of the lilies he loved, the beetles that he hated, and his expertise in home repair, then talked about the potential for ePortfolios to show both the “filing cabinet” of all student work and the “best work” for graduation or career.

Sonam, an avid video game enthusiast, showed how he learned computer programming through an application called Scratch and created his own game.

Vanessa showed a physics video and online diary. “I lost my (paper) portfolio folder in sophomore year and nobody ever said anything,” Vanessa added, to laughs from the group. “If I had gotten this when I was a freshman, I could have linked to it on the common college application. . . .We are the new tech generation. Kids will lie to you and tell you they can’t make a website, but they can; we all have Facebook!”

Kamilla closed the evening with a photo of a chemistry class in Brazil, her paper drawings of flowers, her experiments with hair dyes, her hand-designed dresses from Brazil, and her dreams of being a chemical engineer.

The whole teacher, the whole student. The library glowed with pictures of lilies, of skateboards, next to drawings of physics and algebra equations and Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution plans; photos of hand-designed dresses posted next to dreams of becoming chemical engineers, next to poems written in hammocks. Students and teachers themselves, up in front, flowed back and forth between describing all parts of themselves, with equal interest; a love of chemistry and blue hair. When, in school, do we get to communicate who we actually are and what we can actually do? And what might happen if we did this all the time?

'''[[http://oneville.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ePortfolioFinalPresentationProgramMarch2011.pdfePortfolio Final Presentation]] '''

Oneville Blog

2012-07-23T00:19:34Z

Amaechi:

Personalizing youth support, one text at a time
Posted: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:20:34 +0000
The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so, is acting as remote ally.

'''Notes by Mica Pollock

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Back on Nov 14, participants in the OneVille texting project at Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative middle and high schools, took the “stage” at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in our Digital Media and Learning Working Group, to share their past year of efforts to explore the potential of texting for supporting youth-teacher communication.

We discussed how texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. To Mo Robichaux, Next Wave teacher and texting pioneer, the practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day. Texting created “space for a more level relationship” in which students could discuss personal struggles and school goals, “that then go back like a rubber band, to a teacher-student relationship.”

Students and teachers together set ground rules for appropriate uses of text messaging in schools at the beginning of each year’s work. Almost everyone already had the ability to text; texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more people to communicate.

At Berkman, texts like this prompted lively discussion of the support relationships texting could afford. As texting teacher Ted had said, “The language that the kids are using to thank and what they do verbally is surprising”:

Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

Often, we noticed, a text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation:

Teacher: Everything ok? 9:30 AM

Student: Ted? 10:39 AM

Teacher: Yup 11:02 AM

Student: Everythings alright I guess im gonna b in tm .. Is there anything I can do to put my grade up for your class 11:05 AM

Teacher: Be on time tomorrow, we’ll talk then.

Our next step: to work with partners at the Berkman Center to produce a teacher guide to the legal/privacy issues raised for those pioneering texting. This year, teachers, students, and OneVille texting pilot coordinator Uche Amaechi are continuing to test texting “teams.” They will wrap up that texting pilot at the end of this year or possibly, next fall, by sharing ¡Ahas! around the community to others wanting to explore texting for youth support and mentoring.

In other OneVille news: Healey bilingual parents and staff, with supporters Jedd Cohen and Ana Maria Nieto, continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network at the Healey School. They will also produce a parent-friendly “how to” guide to the puzzle pieces that work. Possibly, we will pilot and tweak our administrator and teacher dashboard views with principal and teachers.

We feel very privileged to have participated in these design innovations with the Somerville community.

'''Eportfolios: Sparking New Conversations about What Students Can Do
''Posted: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:53:35 +0000
''Notes by Mica Pollock

The OneVille Project’s 2009-11 pilot phase is ending, with point people in charge of completing or continuing – if they want to — specific pieces. These pieces may or may not live on titled “OneVille,” but the work we seeded will grow! We all have been working up a wiki to release our 2009-11 work and ¡Ahas! publicly. Mica has moved to a new job at UC San Diego and so is acting as remote ally.

This year, OneVille participants have been participating in a Digital Media and Learning Working Group funded by the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the MacArthur Foundation. Our working group brings together various local people interested in how diverse, intergenerational design teams can transform schools from the inside by experimenting with technology.

Last week, a group of student and teacher eportfolio researcher/designers from Somerville High School came to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, for a rousing share-out of their eportfolio project. After a year of participatory design work, eportfolios are seeding across the High School. Guests from Berkman’s Youth and Media Lab and other Working Group members from MIT, Tufts, and Emerson listened intently, as SHS young people and teachers shared their insights about the new communications about young people’s skills, talents and interests made possible when young people made and shared eportfolio entries.

SHS presenters described how over a year and a half of careful groundwork with the School Improvement Council and then critical participatory design research with dozens of students and teachers at SHS, SHS’s own students and teachers led a transition from the school’s prior portfolios to vibrant online “eportfolios” sharing students’ full range of learning products and accomplishments in and out of school, organized by 21st century skills rather than only in subject areas. From paper folders “locked in a cabinet,” student portfolios by spring 2011 included videos of students narrating their original poetry, solving math equations, and doing physics; interviews with teachers evaluating students’ negotiation skills, and videos of students’ efforts to learn to skateboard; photos and commentary on students’ original art and work experiences; and class assignments students found particularly valuable to their learning. As a student put it, an eportfolio allowed her to “show all of the sides of who I am, in one place,” to share “little cool things about me” as well as evidence of “being a good student.” Teacher Chris Glynn noted that if students entered his class at the beginning of the year with eportfolios communicating their skills and interests, learning would be “so much more individualized!”

Student researchers/eportfolio designers were chosen purposefully to demonstrate a full range of achievement levels and student backgrounds at SHS. As one student put it in the presentation, portfolios supported each student to show themselves as “exemplary,” by encouraging students to consider, document and post their best work done both inside and outside of school. “Every student can shine at this if they put in the time and effort,” a teacher said. “We are representative of the potential that everyone has,” a student agreed.

The energy to make eportfolios is spreading virally across the school, as teachers show each other how to use software and students who see others’ work get excited to post their own.

Now that the OneVille pilot phase of eportfolio design is over, students’ and teachers’ next plan is to make a Somerville High School eportfolio website created to support next schools exploring eportfolios!

'''Let’s Spark Family-School Conversations about Student Data
''Posted: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:08:31 +0000
''By Jedd Cohen, Seth Woodworth, and Josh Wairi

Getting “On the Same Page”: We can all see the data together, from any location

Update December 2011: this post was written this fall, when we expected to pilot the three dashboard views. Due to an undesired lag in final technological development, the “individual view” pilot has been delayed; we may do a small pilot of the “admin view” and “teacher view” this winter. Regardless, code has been created that pulls data out of Somerville’s Student Information System for quick viewing and can be put to use in any such “dashboard” project.

An idea common across Oneville’s projects has been: “A communication gap equals a gap in student service.” In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to share comprehensive student data, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, and how to communicate with schools about it.

Over the past two years in our “dashboard” project, we – local technologists, teachers, researchers — have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help make sure that key people can go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) for each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.

Three resulting dashboard views are open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers to support each student’s success. Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. We’ve created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows each teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.

'''Details: What do the dashboards look like?

The admin and teacher views appear in the form of a colorful chart that allows sorting by up to four columns at a time. Original design model: an Excel spreadsheet made for the Healey School by Greg Nadeau, local parent! Based on feedback from former principal Jason DeFalco, we added: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores, IEP status, and afterschool program name:

[[File:Admin view (click image to enlarge)]]

Based on conversations with new Healey Principal Purnima Vadhera, we’ll also add average attendance over the past several weeks, to compare to the current week’s attendance, and 504 status. We may still add MCAS score and growth, MAP writing score and growth, and DIBELS and MELA-O scores. The updated admin view also creates scatter plots and bar graphs to display the relation between demographics and other data, i.e., achievement or attendance.

The admin and teacher views look like charts, displaying the same types of data for many students. The individual view is organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs at the top of the page allow the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile.

The narrative structure, as well as many decisions about exactly what to display in this view, came out of numerous brainstorming meetings last spring with author and Healey teacher Josh Wairi. We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views in his class in the fall. The individual view presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments – each type of data on its own page accessible by tabs at the top. (Most of this data is in Somerville’s “student information system,” just more scattered; we wanted to get it easily all in one place for a teacher and family/providers to see.) We’ve also created an interactive online version of Somerville’s K-6 report card, which parents are used to getting on a static piece of paper. We plan to add each student’s yearbook photo and data on allotted support services. Next to each ‘chunk’ of student data, “comment/question” boxes provide a space for the parent or afterschool provider to comment on the data by entering text that gets sent to the homeroom teacher’s email:

Individual view (click image to enlarge)

On the “Comments” page, the parent or afterschool provider can request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them. Parents can specify any new contact info and convenient meeting times. After receiving these comments, the homeroom teacher can forward any relevant parts to the appropriate subject area teachers. (Josh feels that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other teachers about families’ comments.)

The Parent Connectors will help to make the user interface available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole (and we’ll use the district’s own translation for the report card). For more ongoing translation (email messages sent to and from parents, parent-teacher conferences, the summary comments on the dashboard), we’re adding links to Google Translate and to the Parent Connector calendar for setting up meetings with interpreters.

Knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we’ve designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people use the tools will be up to them – but rather than have the tools just “display” data, we wanted the individual view, in particular, to also prompt and encourage communication about data.

Feedback and next steps:

We’ve asked for feedback on the tool throughout, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, “Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!” When asked whether the dashboard might feel like extra work, another parent articulated his/her vision of parent involvement: “Not extra – you have children, you spend time to communicate. The more time you spend, the better students do.” One English-speaking parent with three children at the school explained that the dashboard’s comment and scheduling features solved a long-standing problem for her: After being a Healey parent for 11 years, she has only ever had time to meet with each of her children’s core academic teachers during PTA nights, but never the specialty teachers, e.g., music, art, support room teachers. Our dashboard enables and encourages parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who will forward it to the specials teachers. Another parent was especially enthusiastic about online access: “I do everything on the computer now.” And another immigrant parent said he does “everything” on his smart phone!

In a recent meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the potential value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”

Online access to this data could also help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [family dashboard] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” helps when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” Clearly, no proverbial dogs will eat it once it’s online.

Students with IEPs and 504 plans sometimes need accommodations on the MCAS, and Purnima often spends “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers that students’ needs have been met. Our tool allows her to sort by IEP and 504 plans, so that all these students appear together, “so we don’t have moments when things fall through the cracks.”

Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. Such team conversations could involve the school’s “student support team” – a standing group of educators that evaluates struggling students – or each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that it could allow him to present a single student’s data in one of these team meetings without revealing all the other students’ grades unnecessarily (a breach of confidentiality).

We hope that these dashboards could be useful enough to help ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators, and catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our dashboards, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh can always share back, move forward in small increments. Maybe teachers would just want to get on board with this!”

We face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. The same work schedules that make parent-teacher meetings hard also make it hard for some parents to coordinate their schedules with the computer labs at local libraries or in the housing projects where some families live.

We hope to work with the PTA this year to create basic computer and email training for Healey parents who need this support. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet. Several years from now, the proliferation of smartphones and iphones will likely shrink this challenge dramatically, making it easier than ever for partners to join the conversation about student data.

'''Figuring out the infrastructure for interpretation and translation: The Parent Connector Project
''Posted: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:25:10 +0000

'''A parent recording information for other parents on the "Healey Hotline"

''By Mica Pollock, Gina D’Haiti, Tona Delmonico, and Ana Maria Nieto, for the Parent Connectors

We had one of our Multilingual Coffee Hours with the principal on Friday, May 20, at the K-8 Healey School in Somerville. Over some Portuguese bread, and coffee supplied by the PTA, we shared some of what we’ve been doing and learning in our Parent Connector project, and brainstormed next steps. The Connector project is a parent-led effort (in partnership with the school administration) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) via a phone tree to immigrant parents who speak their language.

We see the Connectors as one component of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation in a multilingual school. There are other pieces. We’re prototyping a hotline (using open source software and the Twilio API) allowing volunteer Translators of the Month (also bilingual parents, and maybe, students) to verbally translate information all parents need to know (in Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish). Bilingual parents have noted that translating material into their languages verbally – so, speaking it on to a hotline — is easier than doing it word for word from paper to paper. So far, we have parents coming to speak into a computer (see photo!). We hope to hone the hotline so that translators can record to it from home.

We’re working on other components of the “infrastructure” for translation and interpretation: a Googledoc as one organized place where principal and others put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translation (over time, our hotline).

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but glitches certainly can block communication too. One example: because our Connector project started mid-year, we had no beginning of the year form for all parents, saying “do you want a Connector? Check here to release your number to them!” So, it took us weeks to work through the Parent Information Center (PIC) to get parents to release their numbers to other parents! (School staff had to figure out how to download a spreadsheet of language-specific numbers for PIC staff from X2, the district’s “student information system”; then the PIC staff had to make the calls home to get parents’ permission to release numbers to the Connectors; then, finally, Connectors got lists and could start calling.)

A key issue we’re trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). Which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

'''Research Day: Exploring the Potential of Texting for Student-Teacher Communication
''Posted: Fri, 06 May 2011 01:52:06 +0000
On Saturday, April 21 from 10-1, ten young people and two teachers from Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative high school and middle school, came to a classroom at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. They joined Uche, me, and four other graduate students from the Ed School in “Research Day.” Our goal: to analyze texts students and teachers have been sending each other since the winter, in OneVille’s pilot of texting as a channel for rapid youth support.

We’ve been talking to students and teachers all year as co-researchers, about their experiences testing texting. We’d analyzed specific texts before with Ted and Mo, our teacher participants. But this was our first time sitting together with young people analyzing actual data. Reading transcripts taken from Google Voice (with participants’ permission and anonymized for analysis), students were immediately perceptive about “patterns in the data.” We talked in small groups, and then we shared ideas across the room. My small group included Mo (our Next Wave, middle school teacher), Shelia, Obens, “Juan,” and “Dan” (pseudonyms for initial blogging purposes!).

What we talked about most was how texting can enhance student-teacher relationships and so, students’ engagement with school.

Reading the transcripts, the students noticed first that students and teachers were noticeably polite to each other, texting “thanks and you’re welcome” after texts about permission slips, reminders, and personal check-ins on grades or life.

“The kids haven’t been crossing boundaries in any way – no one has been inappropriate,” Mo said later. Students agreed, saying that with texting, you’d just “give the teacher the same respect you’d give them in school.”

Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring. And that students were grateful for it: “it shows you appreciate the person and you’re thankful they helped you out,” Shelia said. Mo added: “They appreciate (Ted, our Full Circle teacher) taking time out of his own private life to send these texts.” Obens said that texts from Ted had gotten him to school on time.

Wielding her highlighter, Shelia selected another text from Ted to a student as important evidence:

“you need to be in school way more my friend.” “I feel like it’s genuine concern,” she explained. “It shows connection,” Obens added. “It also shows courage.”

He pointed out that the teacher was “taking time to text people about stuff – taking time to get a person to school on time. That shows courage on the part of the teacher. Also on the student, by replying back.” Shelia agreed, adding, “It takes the courage to make that bond – from the teacher — and also for the student to participate in the bond.” Juan added, “Who would want to text a teacher – there’s a lot you could be doing at that time. A lot of people won’t do it – that they do it means they really care about what they are doing.” As evidence, he pointed out a text he himself had sent back to Ted: he had “put in the effort” with responses, like “fine” and “I’ll make it [to school] by 8:10.” “I sleep a lot – but I made it before 8:10. It did help. I was used to coming in around 8:30,” he explained.

Ted highlighted this same point later in the research day: student texts to teachers

“show a level of investment. Even if (the text is) not school related, the student is checking in, making that contact, when they don’t have to. It’s really important to understand – the value of doing things not only when you have to do things.”

Looking again at Ted’s text “you need to be in school way more my friend,” both Mo and Shelia noted that texts put students and teachers “on the same level.” Shelia pointed out Mo’s own text to a student as similarly important: “worried about you.” “It shows that she really cares,” Shelia explained. “You had a bad day yesterday” was pointed out as a particularly caring teacher “check-in.”

Mo then pointed out a student request for information that had happened via text: “hey do you think they’re gonna extend the add drop period?” In class, Obens explained, “I don’t feel like bothering (Ted) w/ those types of questions.“ With texting, relationship-building could continue after the classroom day:

“It definitely strengthens our face to face, day to day relationships,” Ted added. “When you’re texting you feel like you’re close to your teacher,” Obens summed up.

Relationship. Built and strengthened in this private backchannel between people who share a classroom, in a medium more comfortable to students of 2011. “Some people might feel more comfortable saying it via texting more than face to face — because in person you might feel shy, awkward and not know what to say back,” said a student from across the room.

We might chalk this up to a modern aversion to in-person communication: “I’d rather text my parents than call them,” a student added. But reading the actual texts, we saw certain communications that texting may particularly make possible. Joking. Banter. The quick check-ins of care that simply don’t happen in person during busy days.

“She’s making sure the kid doesn’t get in trouble – she asks him to call his mom and stuff,” Juan noted of another of Mo’s texts. “She couldn’t do this face to face b/c he wasn’t in school.”

Pointing out uses of humor in the texts, Juan made another point about how texting could add to student-teacher relationships: people could communicate even if a student was in a bad mood. A face-to-face conversation might end with the student “shouting” out of anger, unable to help it; with texting, you could “be mad” and still “send a funny text.” Another student elaborated relatedly from across the room: with texting, you could overcome the “intimidation” of possible “rejection” by the other person, by sending lighthearted texts across the private channel that did not have to be responded to immediately. Emotion was “easier to handle” via texts, another student said.

Students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; even to care. Obens summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year:

“it shows connection. It’s really helpful — it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on the schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Over and over that day, we talked about how texts showed not just “connection” but true caring, in both directions. Mo pointed out that one student had asked Ted “how was your weekend.” Students pointed out texts from Ted and Mo like “you made 1 day last week” (“I like the encouragement,” said one student) and “you’re a smart kid” (“That’s really nice because some kids might feel doubt and don’t get many compliments from people,” another student said.). Shelia pointed out that overall, the texts could build relationship and simultaneously, the motivation to try.

“You need to know [teachers] care in order to do stuff. Otherwise what’s the point in trying. If a person is ‘I’m here for you’ – you feel someone else cares, I should care too.”

Furthermore, Shelia added, texts kept that relationship around with you, for later viewing. “With a phone call, it’s out of your head,” Shelia explained. “With a text message it’s still there when you turn on your phone – it still reminds you. You have to delete it if you don’t want it – it’s there to remind you.”

We left sure that texting had “helped” with “connection” in these teachers’ classrooms but unsure how it might work in “a school of like 600,” as someone put it. Full Circle/Next Wave are particularly “personal” schools, some pointed out: “in other schools it’s less personal, you get five minutes with that teacher,” Shelia said. We left with a question: does that lack of “personal” face to face attention in other schools make something like texting more likely to help, or less?

“Have good conversations,” Juan advised others considering texting with students. “Like don’t just talk about school. Also talk about how your day’s going, stuff like that. Don’t just keep it about school.” Ted finished our Research Day with more overall advice: “It’s up to both people to enhance the texting relationship. If the student is just responding “ok” or “yes” or “no,” that doesn’t allow the texting relationship to develop and to go towards communications that aren’t just ‘be on time.’”

'''The Little Things Revisited: The Importance of Connectedness
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:18:03 +0000
In the last blog post I talked about the importance of the low-level support communications between teachers and students at the Oneville site. I posted a few short excerpts in which a teacher was texting students before school in an effort to motivate otherwise disinclined students to come school that day. Such communications, while low level, were nevertheless important because they had an immediate impact– the student in question ultimately came to school–but they also had the simultaneous effect, as the teachers and students told us and I’ll detail below, of strengthening the relationship between teachers and students.

Both parties (students and teachers) maintain that the strengthening of the non-academic aspects of their relationships is essential to supporting and nurturing the academic relationship and communication. When discussing the ‘low level’ nature of some of the conversations with the two teachers, they both claimed that these conversations were important and essential because they helped them build stronger relationships with the students. This strengthening occurred, they maintained, because they got to see the students in a different light than they would normally during the school day through conventional methods. One teachers noted that “the language that the kids are using to thank (them) through texting” is significantly different than what the students use in verbal communication, and that “the difference is surprising. It’s refreshing to know that (the students) have that capability”.

Students also found the texting communications useful in building relationships with their teachers. One student, who admitted to not responding regularly to texts from his teacher still found them useful” “I find it helpful, but I just don’t want to text back”. Moreover, the students suggested that he’d engage with the teacher more over text if “maybe during the weekend (he’d) hear from the teacher about how his weekend is going”. He wanted to learn more about the teacher outside of school. He’d like that, he claimed because “if (they) talk about outside (of school) stuff, (our) relationship will grow even stronger”.

This sense of connectedness described by teachers and students jibes with much of motivational literature that highlights relatedness–a sense of being connected to a larger group–alongside autonomy and a sense of competence, as an essential component of motivation. If we are to be successful in motivating the students not just to come to school, but to become actively involved in their schooling and education, then we, as the supporting community, must acknowledge and respond to their (identified) needs. These low level communications may not be sufficient for helping the students become successful in school and life, but as teachers and students have expressed, they are necessary.

'''The Little Things
''Posted: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:07:20 +0000
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter the most in education: the moments that create and nurture relationships. When I first started with the Oneville Project, I believed that using the medium of texting would allow teachers, students, family members, and other stakeholders involved in the students’ lives to engage in crucial, in depth, involved, and sustained conversations about big picture issues affecting the students’ lives. The sky was the limit, I believed. The texting medium would allow students to get more one on one support from teachers than they would have otherwise received from a distracted teacher, in a crowded classroom, during a busy school day. Students would seek and receive the help they needed from their teachers at a time and place of their own choosing. In some ways, this has all turned out to be true: Mo and Ted, teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave who wanted to see how texting could support their communications with students and students’ supporters, have been texting when and from where they can; students are responding in kind. Communications that couldn’t happen before are happening now. But in many ways, these communications are about things that to an outsider, might seem “small.”

In these early stages of our texting pilot at Somerville site, we’re finding that teachers and students are regularly using texting for what might seem low level interactions — such as nudging students to get up and come to school, in real time:

7:01am TEACHER: Hey (STUDENT), rise and shine!!

7:08 am TEACHER: Hey, you getting up!!

7:36 am STUDENT: You up

7:39 am STUDENT: I made a pancake =D lol

7:41 Eww wait it came out nasty

*******************************

7:27 am TEACHER: Hey, I’m late

7:27 am TEACHER: Time to get up!!

7:27 am TEACHER: Got a nice flatbread for you!!

7:28 am STUDENT: Ok, I’m up

In these two exchanges we see the teacher prodding and then coaxing the student to get up and come to school. This is not a reminder sent the week or the night before, but a real time push to action; the first and second exchanges are within a 40 and one-minute time frame, respectively. The text based communication modality allows the teacher to reach through her phone and into the students’ house. And in both situations it seems to have worked! Another student recently told one of our research assistants – HGSE students themselves starting to text with students as college mentors – that he was coming to school more often because of these texts. Could the same exchange have happened over the phone? Possibly. Would it have happened? Unlikely. The student would have most likely silenced the phone. But texts are extremely insistent. The only quick way to stop them from coming in is to turn off the phone–which is akin to cutting of an appendage to most students. They could always ignore the phone and not read the message, but how long can/will a teenager ignore their portal to the world?

Although we’re seeing the beginning of larger forward looking conversations – reminder statements about homework, supportive statements about motivation and students’ intelligence — a more startling and significant finding so far is that little communications about little things — like pancakes — could be important to building a relationship, possibly the ultimate need of good teaching. More pragmatically, a teacher can have no impact, and the student no learning, if the student doesn’t show up to school. And while there are sometimes complex and intractable reasons why a student does not show up for school–problems at home, bullying, (arguably) more appealing and remunerative options – sometimes, smaller and more manageable causes are at the root of frequent tardiness and absences. Sometimes the students are just too tired – or too alone — to get out of bed.

Of course the example above raises many obvious questions that are fundamental to anyone exploring uses of social media in education today. 1) What about boundaries–the teacher reaching across settings, into the student’s home? What boundaries of privacy and trust need to be in place for such communications to be okay? 2) Do teachers really have time to do this one on one check up on students? 3) How often should such “wake up calls” occur, before they become demotivating or infantilizing? We’re exploring all of this with students and teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, and we’ll address these questions in future posts.

''Posted: Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:15:10 +0000
'''OneVille’s mission is to facilitate collaboration in young people’s success by co-creating communication solutions linking the people in young people’s lives.

'''ePortfolio Reflection from Mike M.
''Posted: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:03:45 +0000
I started using online portfolios for my AP class last year. When I became part of the ePortfolio project at SHS, I saw what could be done with a ePortfolio and I decided to go farther. What started as a simple online file cabinet for students to store lab reports, became a place for students to reflect and help each other. It also became a place for me to share not only paper solutions and documents, but video to help students work through issues.

It then went further to include how-to videos for other new teachers on how to use lab equipment, and video tutorials for any students on how to use technology like Excel, and some of our digital lab analysis software.

I plan I adding a lot more, and turning my ePortfolio site into a place to share information with my students and fellow teachers. I think having the students make their own sites to post images, labs, reflections etc was invaluable and definitely added to their experience.

In the future I hope something can be put into place that will allow all freshman to develop an ePortfolio that they can utilize throughout their high school career to not only store examples of their best work, but help them organize and prepare for college or jobs, share things they are proud of with their teachers, family and fellow students and express themselves in a way that is actually valuable to their education and become a better human being, as opposed to something limited like twitter or facebook which well, we kind of know what those things are most useful for.

Check out my ePortfolio site at https://sites.google.com/site/somervillephysics/and my official site at http://mrmaloney.com

'''Communicating the Whole Student – and Teacher
''Posted: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 02:44:10 +0000

'''Innovations by the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team, above

''Notes from the audience, by Mica Pollock

Last night, the Somerville High School/OneVille ePortfolio team gave a presentation of their work developing ePortfolios since October 2011. Up in front of an audience of nearly 30 from the superintendent’s office, school committee, school improvement council and community, 11 young people and 6 teachers shared how they went about creating their online portfolios and what they learned about themselves in the process.

Somerville High School has a paper portfolio tradition that has been, as one teacher put it, “a cumbersome collection of paper four times a year.” On Monday night, students and teachers discussed the ability to show themselves and their skill sets in multimedia – to colleges, employers, and one another.

As one student put it, the ePortfolio shows “a more accurate portrait of myself.” I was struck by this very thing overall: the rare chance for a student or a teacher, in school, to show other people one’s full self — and the ability of ePortfolios to make this a normal thing.

Zoe showed her mathematics equations, and her participation in the Boston Children’s Chorus opera. Sergio demonstrated his award-winning children’s book, and a gear shift he made by hand in the shop for his own car.

Astrid pointed out that ePortfolios allowed students to get closer to teachers they didn’t know as well; “it allows you to see the background of a student, and you can express yourself.” Clicking through videos on a school SmartBoard, she demonstrated the digital story of a poem she wrote in El Salvador from a hammock, on her iPod; it was the first time presenting her work this publicly, she said, as she had always been shy about sharing her poems.

A teacher, Mr Glynn, noted that he himself had approached the project from the perspective of a learner: what would a teacher need to know to help all students use wiki spaces and google sites? Students using the media had become more critical and self-reflective about their learning, he said, and were taking more control and ownership of it. ePortfolios also had the potential to show both growth and continuity in student skills over time. “These are so much more alive than the paper version of our portfolio,” he said. And his other conclusion about the technology itself: “a freshman in high school can definitely figure this out.”

Doug, a student, pointed out that ePortfolios let students interact with their teachers online, and “get critique” from peers; “students are always in search of some constructive criticism,” he added, pointing out as well that “Somerville High has a diversity of cultures; media and technology cross those boundaries.” As he clicked to some of his essays, a teacher called out that he was an excellent writer and an audience member commented on his large vocabulary; “there are some things that you can’t see that you can show on your ePortfolio,” he finished modestly.

Rocky showed his programming efforts in Java, next to his wacky chicken graphics; online images he had posted demonstrated both his lifelong curiosity about how food gets made (bubble tea was one example) and a long line of successful Somerville report cards. “EPortfolios are to show your improvement over life,” he finished.

Samantha, who said with a smile that “I hate technology,” showed herself as an award-winning dancer, an avocation she said she wanted to combine with a medical career; the ability to “show colleges what you can do,” rather than “just show people a piece of paper on yourself,” made tech “worth the struggle.”

Susan Olsen, a teacher, spoke of engaging a full range of students in the project, students both struggling and already succeeding academically. Mr. Maloney wowed the audience by showing his class website for AP Physics, which he had redone for the project using “the free tools the kids are using.” He showed us how he could communicate ways of solving physics equations online to students; he also was making and posting videos online that communicate to other teachers how to create physics equipment for a low cost. He also participated in blog community discussions sharing ahas with physics teachers across the world. “I didn’t collect one piece of paper this year from my students except for tests,” he said, and students were online regularly commenting on each others’ assignments.

David showed a video of his persistent skateboarding, and his sketches of animals and plants. His teacher Michelle Li pointed out that ePortfolios could personalize learning more effectively with students like David, and, that these could be accessed “any time, from anywhere.” (She showed us how her website also linked to the Somerville Public Schools calendar and daily bulletin, and to X2, the student information system, so students could check up on their grades.) Her “vision”: to have each student make an eportfolio that she could link to her own class website. This would allow her, her students, and even her students’ parents to have “meaningful conversations with kids.” (Another student, Sonam, has already been presenting his ePortfolio efforts to her class, and now lots of kids want to make ePortfolios!)

Mr. Petriv, a computer hardware teacher, had made the leap from his typical “shrink-wrapped programs with a manual” to experimenting with various free software for the project. He showed us pictures of the lilies he loved, the beetles that he hated, and his expertise in home repair, then talked about the potential for ePortfolios to show both the “filing cabinet” of all student work and the “best work” for graduation or career.

Sonam, an avid video game enthusiast, showed how he learned computer programming through an application called Scratch and created his own game.

Vanessa showed a physics video and online diary. “I lost my (paper) portfolio folder in sophomore year and nobody ever said anything,” Vanessa added, to laughs from the group. “If I had gotten this when I was a freshman, I could have linked to it on the common college application. . . .We are the new tech generation. Kids will lie to you and tell you they can’t make a website, but they can; we all have Facebook!”

Kamilla closed the evening with a photo of a chemistry class in Brazil, her paper drawings of flowers, her experiments with hair dyes, her hand-designed dresses from Brazil, and her dreams of being a chemical engineer.

The whole teacher, the whole student. The library glowed with pictures of lilies, of skateboards, next to drawings of physics and algebra equations and Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution plans; photos of hand-designed dresses posted next to dreams of becoming chemical engineers, next to poems written in hammocks. Students and teachers themselves, up in front, flowed back and forth between describing all parts of themselves, with equal interest; a love of chemistry and blue hair. When, in school, do we get to communicate who we actually are and what we can actually do? And what might happen if we did this all the time?

'''[[http://oneville.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ePortfolioFinalPresentationProgramMarch2011.pdfePortfolio Final Presentation]] '''

File:Mariasethlessblurryhotlinephoto.jpg

2012-07-23T00:17:47Z

Amaechi:

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2012-07-23T00:17:32Z

Amaechi:

File:Dashboard.png

2012-07-23T00:17:11Z

Amaechi:

2012-07-23T00:04:11Z

Amaechi: /* What is the OneVille Project? */

The OneVille Project

2012-07-23T00:03:44Z

Amaechi: /* What is the OneVille Project? */

The OneVille Project

2012-07-23T00:02:58Z

Amaechi:

Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support

2012-07-19T18:33:21Z

Amaechi: /* If You'd Like To Try Texting In Your School--A Guide to Setting Up a Texting Pilot */

[[Image:Juneresearchday.jpg|thumb|Teachers and students analyzing texting in June 2011]]

''Written by Mica Pollock (2009-11 work), Uche Amaechi, Maureen Robichaux, and Ted O'Brien for the texting project, with input from students piloting texting at Full Circle/Next Wave

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story]] '''on this project.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

''What aspect of existing communication did we try to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success? How’d it go?
:''(Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent? What did the project accomplish?)

In the texting pilot, Somerville students, teachers, and local researchers all set forth to learn how texting might enable youth and supporters to communicate rapidly to support students' personal and academic progress.

[[Image:Textingresearchday.jpeg|thumb|Students and teachers analyzing (anonymized) examples of student-teacher texts: Research Day at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, April 2011]]

Of the various technologies in our lives, it is cell phones that are with us all day, and keep us most connected and available. Texting (often called “SMS”) and other mobile text based communications (like instant messaging) give people particular control over when and where they communicate. In theory, people can review and respond to texts at their leisure--in the evening from home, or over the weekend/after sports practice. But a text is particularly hard to ignore, and responses to texts often arrive in seconds -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support '''([[Texting: Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!|see the full story here.]]''')

They were on to something: texting has been shown to be a particularly used channel for youth communication today. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study on teenage use of mobile phones, teen use of texting has increased dramatically since 2006 (Campbell et al, 2010). Between 2006 and 2010, the percentage of all teens that used text messaging doubled from 27% to 54%. The only other communication medium that increased during those dates showed more muted gains: cell phone calls increased from 34-38% and the use of social networking sites increased from 21-25%. While calls remained a “critically important function” for teens, especially when communicating with parents, teens were clearly taking to texting in a much more dramatic way than any other communication medium. By 2009, the use of texting had increased among young people between the ages of 12 and 17: on average, older teens were even more likely to text than younger ones (Campbell et al, 2010). Furthermore, the Pew Polls have found that 70% of teens use texting to do "things related to school work," and a smaller but more dedicated 23% of teens use texting for school at least daily. Texting seems to be used more for general school-related communications than for detailed discussions of assignments and homework: 30% of all students and 45% of poor students specifically report never texting about school assignments (see Campbell, S., Lenhart, A., Ling, R., Purcell, K., 2010. Teens and Mobile Phones. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Teens-and-Mobile-Phones.aspx).

In its small character capacity, texting may not be an obvious choice for discussions of the details of homework. But we thought that as a channel for anytime sharing of basic information and typically informal, individualized information about life and school experiences, texting might be able to support the sort of ongoing personalized attention we know is necessary for supporting young people in schools (http://studentsatthecenter.org/papers/personalization-schools).

Still, do a Google search for student-teacher texting and most of what you will find is fear: districts considering bans on texting or teachers quietly posting updates about their own personal experiences with trying it. Many view texting as an inappropriate mode of communication between teachers and students, for several main reasons. To many adults, texting feels like a “youth”-owned medium. Texting also extends the boundaries of potential communication with students outside the school day and into teachers’ own afterschool lives. Also, because texting really feels like a private “tube” between two people, the sort of support texting can offer immediately seems particularly personal. That privacy is exactly what scares some people about misuse: teachers and students somehow seem more “alone together” while texting (even though in some ways, private classroom conversations after school are even more “alone” -- texting records actually record interactions between youth and teachers, for review and safety).

Instead of just fearing texting, we decided to learn together what it could offer public school communities. So, we – teachers, researchers, and students -- rolled out a texting pilot with 40 students across multiple classrooms. As we describe in more detail in the '''[[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story]],''' although some teachers in Somerville weren’t ready to try texting for reaching their students, these students and teachers were. They really were pioneers in testing how a communication tool already in the hands of most young people in the building could be pulled in for everyday student support.

In some ways, our site -- Full Circle/Next Wave, Somerville’s alternative high/middle school -- is a special school: all teachers work in what our participating high school teacher Ted called “teacher-counselor mode” and expect personal support relationships as part of their job. Each teacher has a co-counseling group that meets twice a week, where he/she gets to know more about young people’s personal struggles. Teachers work in a “triangle” with clinicians and students’ other counselors. But really, teachers at FC/NW simply are encouraged by their school to build teacher-student support relationships, something every teacher has to do but may not have the time or the administrative support to do. And to Ted and Mo, texting seemed like a possible way to supplement that student support effort.

In 2010-11 and again in 2011-12, we have been testing one-to-one (private) texting between teachers and students; and secondarily, between students and graduate student mentors from the Harvard Graduate School of Education who helped us connect to the students to check in. We’ve used Google Voice, a free service that records all of the texts in teachers’ inboxes. This setup allowed two academic researchers in the group (Uche and Mica) to review the texts along with co-researcher teachers Mo and Ted, to see if they were helpful -- with students’ advance, overall permission. (GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.)

Since starting, we’ve seen student-teacher texting after and before school take off successfully with middle and high school youth.

==Our work, and our '''¡Ahas!==

''What was the basic groundwork needed to support the current work? How did the project change and grow over time? At this point, what are our main ¡Ahas! about improving communications in public education? What communication and implementation ¡Ahas! and turning points did we have over time?
-------

[[Image:textingteachersteam.jpg|thumb|Mo and Ted, texting teacher pioneers, with Uche and Mica. . .and donuts]]

Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. As stated earlier, we originally wanted to test rapid support communications among a “team” of youths’ chosen supporters (see the '''[[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story]] ''' for details). We began in 2009-2010 with testing a school-based online social network and eventually moved toward testing one-to-one texting between students and teachers instead in 2010-11, with the vision of testing out “team” texting next by adding one youth supporter at a time. We found student-teacher texting so fruitful that we focused primarily on it for the next two years!

So, our work proceeded in stages and also in a rolling manner over several years, based on ongoing reactions to Somerville students’ and teachers’ insights and interests re. support communications that might assist youth.

Throughout, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? And, we came to ask: how might texting enable (or not enable) the rapid, personalized exchanges of information and caring often so needed to support young people?

Note: Unlike in our '''[[Eportfolio]]''' pilot, where the goal was to create ePortfolios that would succeed and stick at Somerville High School, we decided in this case not to “make sure texting works, by doing whatever is necessary to make it work.” Instead, we wanted to explore how teachers and students would use (or NOT use) texting in youth support, if they were just explicitly invited to text for school-related communication. We also wanted to know if some type or series of communications could help make a young person more connected to school or more successful academically.

So, in a nutshell, we offered the channel and waited to see what everyone would do with it. We didn’t push any particular use of the texting, but instead kept talking actual uses. Mo, Ted, and the students became a research team with Uche, Mica, and the HGSE students, together exploring the use of texting in rapid youth support. We put our Ford support resources into stipending teachers $25/hr (2 hrs/week) for their extra time piloting the tool and analyzing data, paying kids back with food and $25/each for a formal “research day,” and supporting Uche to coordinate the pilot. (We felt it was important not to pay students or teachers TO text, because then we would have had no idea if texting was a natural thing to do. Instead, we stipended participants as researchers of texting data.) For course credit, HGSE students checked in on the students and acted as anytime mentors for young people who wanted to share questions or thoughts via texts. We also agreed to line up tutors or mentors for anyone who wanted one and did for several students—though as we mention in the the '''[[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story]],''' logistics and low youth interest later fizzled that plan.

We held regular focus group conversations with students and teachers to analyze how the texting was going for them. HGSE students also informally interviewed the FC/NW students a few times a month, over donuts at the school. Uche and Mica talked with Ted and Mo, Uche texted regularly with Ted and Mo himself, and Mica took on a “team” of students as a texting partner. Everyone was invited to analyze anonymized transcripts of the texting conversations together in two Research Day events, the first held at Harvard and the second held at the FC/NW building. In 2011-12, new teachers entered the texting pilot, and youth and HGSE graduate students co-ran a Media class further exploring youths' use of texting and other media.

So, we have tried texting between teachers and individual students; next wishes include trying mobile messaging to support communication among a “team” of supporters of students’ choice.

In our pilot of one-to-one student-teacher texting, our main '''¡Ahas!''' over time have been these:

:*'''¡Aha! Texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships regarding academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

:*'''¡Aha! Texting is a “common-denominator” tool that allows more students to communicate with teachers. People can use regular phones, smart phones, and computers to communicate via text message. And for youth, text based communications are often preferable to phone calls.

:*'''¡Aha! Texting also supports personalized, two-way communication between youth and their supporters, about a range of school-related and life topics.

:*''' Main ¡Aha! To students, texts demonstrated caring because they demonstrated effort by both students and teachers to respond to the other. And as texting partners actively "cared" about the person on the other end of the line, texts could also make both partners care more about student success.''' As students and teachers both noted, texting allowed students and teachers to support each other as well as "bond," in ways crucial for solidifying students' commitment to both teachers and school. Students made it clear that the more they felt teachers cared about them and their success, the more they wanted to succeed in school -- and that texting helped solidify this confidence.

:*'''¡Aha! All texts sent between school personnel and students are school "records," meaning they can be reviewed for safety and accountability as needed. At the same time, we're seeing that the feeling of quiet privacy that texting affords can jumpstart personalized support for students less likely to articulate their needs publicly in school.'''

:*'''¡Aha! Articulating joint norms for safe and supportive texting is crucial.''' We brainstormed norms for safe and supportive texting together with teachers and students each time before starting our texting pilots in 2010-11 and 11-12. For example, we brainstormed rules for when texts could be sent, when responses could be expected, and what information should be "shared" by whom. In our pilots, both students and teachers were impressed with the level of "politeness while texting" that occurred. No one felt that inappropriate texts were sent.

:*'''¡Aha! Go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.''' Starting with Mo and Ted in 2010-11 as teachers excited to try texting was crucial; other teachers later saw the potential for texting to reach students and joined in for 2011-12.

'''Most of the actual texts that prove these points can be found in the [[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story,]] but we wanted to tempt you by showing you a few more examples of what supportive teacher-student texting can look like:

:Teacher: Everything ok? 9:30 AM

:Student: Ted? 10:39 AM

:Teacher: Yup 11:02 AM

:Student: Everythings alright I guess im gonna b in tm .. Is there anything I can do to put my grade up for your class 11:05 AM

:Teacher: Be on time tomorrow, we'll talk then. 11:06 AM

:Student: Alright 11:09 AM

:Teacher: [Student,] do you still have the math book I gave you for homework? If you do let me know and [teacher] too 2:38 PM

:Student: Ya I do 2:59 PM

:Teacher: Use it! 3:27 PM

:Student: Ok. I will 3:31 PM

:Student: I just left my house right now so I'm going to b late 7:47 AM

:Teacher: And I need to know this? 7:48 AM

:Teacher: Hurry up! 7:49 AM

:Student: Because I don't want you to worry 7:49 AM

:Teacher: You miss school regularly silly goose 7:51 AM

:Student: I came in all this week and collected points 7:54 AM

:Teacher: Get here, we can celebrate 7:55 AM

:Student: Hahaha okk I'm on cross street now 7:58 AM

:Teacher: Like I said, you need to get it from him. Be on time for school today 7:00 AM

:Teacher: You’re doing great 7:00 AM

:Student: I will and u woke me up .thanks 7:01 AM

:Teacher: You’re welcome 7:03 AM

'''Want to see more texts? See the [[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story.]]

In discussions throughout the year and in focused data analysis meetings, student and teacher participants argued that texting had two key benefits: individualized, timely student support and the ability to strengthen student-teacher relationships. Students argued that supportive texts from teachers were giving them the motivation or information necessary to come to school on time, complete homework, remain aware of requirements, and participate in afterschool activities. Over the semester, we also saw texting teachers and students having more frequent, and deepening, conversations about school commitments and life struggles, both via text and then in person. In reviewing texts between students and university mentors, we began to see that afterschool supporters can also use texting to build stronger relationships with students and to communicate regularly about careers, jobs, and school persistence.

Overall, in Research Days and throughout the pilot, students and teachers argued that the main thing possible via texting was increased ''caring'' for the person on the other end of the line. Students and teachers pointed out that each flurry of texts between teacher and student was already evidence of “caring,” because each partner was taking the time to respond to the other. In their commentary on the teacher-student "bond" created through texting, they noted that texting also ''made'' the texters care more about one another.

In sum: most school districts are out to regulate and restrict texting and fear student-teacher texting as somehow inappropriate. We’ve seen that texting can simply extend relationship-building and student support outside of school hours. But this raises several overall questions for public schools. One: adults’ time. If gluing a relationship together outside of the school day helps young people do better in school, is it “worth” teachers’ time? Two: Where do the school walls end? If a teacher supports young people’s school success through wakeup texts or afterschool reminders, is this an appropriate reach into the home or out of the classroom? What if these small efforts improve the student-teacher interactions that then occur during the school day? While one-to-one communications seem particularly time-consuming in an era of limited resources, counterintuitively, the speed at which relationships can be built over this channel could counteract the “extra” time utilized to text. Three: appropriate student-teacher relationships. If good teaching requires strengthening relationships between students and teachers, how can students and teachers communicate via today’s most “friendly” media but still within age- and role-appropriate bounds of partnership? Might the relationships made possible via the extended communications of texting, enable the true holy grail of successful relationships inside the classroom? It may be that we need to actively define “appropriate” student-teacher relationships in the digital age. As Shelia, age 17, put it in this pilot, texting definitely put students and teachers more “on the same level,” but Mo noted that “the relationship” could also then snap back almost like a “rubber band” to teacher-student hierarchy in the classroom. Also, texting was definitely a “youth medium” when we started, but it may not be for long!

===Communication and implementation ¡Ahas!, and turning points!===

We had many ¡Ahas! in sequence on this project over three years. '''To read the full story of the efforts that gave us these ¡Ahas!, see the [[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story.]]''''''

Our ¡Ahas! about texting included the following.

'''¡Aha! Texting works when you can’t reach young people any other way for time-sensitive information.

'''¡Aha! Texting helps when students don’t have home phones or literally aren’t in school.

'''¡Aha! Texting can support communication about a wide variety of school issues.'''
Texting can provide a conduit for private or sensitive youth-support conversations that could not be had in a more public sphere such as a classroom. Students can share private or sensitive information that they did not feel comfortable discussing a) in school b) around their classmates and c) around their friends. These issues can range the spectrum between purely academic to purely personal.

'''¡Aha! We began to see that students and teachers can build personal relationships via text that then support more successful school-based interactions.

'''¡Aha! Fundamental academic support, personal support, and light banter can occur in the same texting conversation.

'''¡Aha! Texting can build a relationship for school even if you are not talking about school.

'''¡Aha! Texting didn’t supplant face to face conversation. Often, the text was really just a portal to more informed face to face conversation.

'''¡Aha! As relationships grow, they are documented in texts!

'''¡Aha! Normalizing texting as something students and teachers can do makes it easier to strike up a supportive relationship with a young person, jumping over barriers of limited time.

'''¡Aha! The style of texts can put students and teachers “on the same level,” even as teachers remain teachers.

'''¡Aha! The many emotions possible via text can give students and teachers a range of ways to share their feelings.

'''¡Aha! Texting can provide students with more control over how they manage their emotions in conversations.

'''¡Aha! Concerns about students being “inappropriate” with the channel may be overblown.

'''¡Aha! Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring because they demonstrated effort by both students and teachers to respond to the other. Texts also made both partners care more!

'''¡Aha! According to students, texting’s time commitment (for teachers) shows caring and builds relationship. But it also -- takes time.

'''¡Aha! Of course, if your support network uses your phone to reach you, you need a phone.

'''¡Aha! In our brief test of texting between HGSE students and the FC/NW students, we began to see that texting can support ongoing career mentoring, too.

'''¡Aha! Finally, face to face mentoring meetings can be really hard to schedule, making texting even more sensible.

===Our products: Concrete communication improvements and next steps===

We have successfully supported a pilot of student-teacher texting at Full Circle/Next Wave and have dozens of students and four new teachers now engaged in the work. The principal became interested in expanding uses of texting to include other current and former teachers within the school. While many teachers still didn’t know how to use a cell phone in fall 2011, some newly started to text. We joked in 2011 that maybe the principal himself would start using our texting “blast” to message his entire staff, but now the idea actually seems pretty sensible.

Both students and teachers say that we’ve all demonstrated that texting is a possible tool for communication with young people that mixes personal support, academic support, and everyday banter. We have realized so far that texting is a very natural and important channel not only for check-ins and updates not possible during the school day, but for a key, perhaps ultimate support: building a supportive relationship between student and teacher or adult mentor.

At our April Research Day at Harvard in 2011, Obens, one of the students, summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year: “it shows connection. It’s really helpful --- it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on this schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Later in the school year, Obens would point out that texting helped him focus overall on school, but couldn’t keep him focused during class – that was his next frontier for self-improvement. Many students also made clear that while improving student-teacher communication was key, linking in other people in their lives was crucial too. As Mica wrote to herself in February 2011 after a group conversation that followed texts with several individual girls, “note: several times in this conversation I felt the need to tell others in the school, things that I was texting about w/ an individual student, so that others could be pulled in for the collective support.” But which "supporters" should be pulled in, to discuss what, via texting or otherwise?

So, our next hope for 2011-12 was to see how texting could work with new student supporters -- to test texting “teams.” As we discussed with students how or whether to add next supporters to a texting conversation, we approached the issue with the following questions: Is the private and personal nature of communication via one-to-one text a key to its use for rapid student support? If so, can a group text together for youth support, or not? Throughout the pilot, one-to-one texting continued to feel particularly private (even while texts were reviewable by teachers and admnistrators, or by request, by parents)-- which was, perhaps, why so much relationship-building was possible over it. So, could a “team” use texting to communicate rapidly about student support, or would the “group” communication make texting less desirable? Which communications should be private, which public to a “team”? And who should be on a texting “team”? As one student said, she was now up for texting teachers but not for having her mom aware of her school related “business.” As Ted put it, to “honor the kids’ sense of privacy,” “which communications should go to parents? Which to kids? which to both?”

In fall 2011, Uche and teachers continued one-to-one teacher-student texting with additional teachers and youth and started teacher-full class texting. The group discussed how to best incorporate parents into the texting discussions. However, because of student resistance to the notion of including parents, and a general disagreement to agree on which adults in the students' lives to incorporate on texting "teams," we did not yet add next adult supporters to the texting conversation.

Resistance to including parents in texting was particularly heated for these middle- and high school students: in the media class we held together at FC/NW during the spring of the 2011/12 school year, students were quite clear that they would find it particularly weird if their teachers texted their parents. Texting was something that kids do, they argued at first. But texting with teachers was feeling more normal; beyond the "weirdness", students voiced several practical reasons why they felt teachers should focus on phone calls with their parents, not texts (although they expressed personal misgivings about this channel also, indicating that the ultimate issue may have been that for many of these students, parents simply were not optimal “support team” members). Most of the students felt that their parents were not tech savvy enough to use texting and would not read or engage deeply via texting. They also suggested that parents "wouldn't have enough time to text back." Students argued that voice communication could provide more flexibility for teacher-parent communication. Once the call is started, one student argued, parents and teachers are engaged in the conversation and "parents can just get to the point" faster through voice communication.

We did not work directly with FC/NW parents this year, but we will begin talking to middle/high school parents about their general tech use, as well as how they might envision interacting with teachers and school beyond the typical occasional phone conversations or automated voice mails (and robocalls); we engaged these issues with multilingual parents of elementary school students in the '''[[Summary:_Schoolwide_toolkit/parent_connector_network|Parent Connector Network]]''' effort, and at that level, connecting regularly to parents via any media was a normalized idea. However, it must be noted that there was one minority report at the high school level: one High School student suggested that texting could potentially be preferable to some parents because they would be left with a written record of their conversations with teachers about their children. This last point is identical to a strength identified by teachers.

These questions of "team" support for middle and high school students via text (or other media) remain a next frontier for work.

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

What big issues would we recommend others think about in their own attempts to improve communications in public schools? Contact us to talk more!

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:

:➢ In your school, when students have personal questions or needs, are there ways for them to privately and/or rapidly reach their supporters?
:➢ How do teachers supplement their often-limited interactions with students during the school day?
:➢ How much do teachers communicate with students and families outside of the classroom?
:➢ What type of relationships and interactions do teachers have with their students, both in and outside of the classroom?
:➢ What policies, structures, and norms do teachers and students have for interacting outside of class?
:➢ Could texting help with rapid and/or more personalized/private youth support? What are your reservations about texting, and how might these be addressed?

===If You'd Like To Try Texting In Your School--A Guide to Setting Up a Texting Pilot===

''by Uche Amaechi, Ted O'Brien, and Maureen Robichaux''

This mini-Guide is designed to support teachers who might like to try texting in their student support efforts. We discuss some ways of creating classroom and school contexts for piloting texting as one tool for rapid, personalized youth support.

In the "Technological How-Tos" section at the end, this brief Guide also explains the rationale for using Google Voice or some other similar web or app based service for teachers, and explains how to set up and manage the service.

*''Note: This project is about how to incorporate text messaging into student/teacher communication outside of school. That is, we don’t discuss ways of using texting inside the classroom during the school day. We use the term text messaging and mobile messaging interrelatedly to refer to communication that is sent “on the go”, and that is short and text-based but not done via email. This kind of communication can be done through traditional phone based text messaging as well as through apps and the internet on phones and computers.

*''We also aren’t offering a formula for successful texting for youth support. We’re just offering a set of recommended points to consider when attempting to implement texting. Just as different construction projects might require different sets of tools to, say build a cabin vs. building an apartment building, different youth support or school contexts require different communication tools and strategies.''

*''We suggest texting in an effort to meet the students where they are. Most students already have mobile phones and are good at using them to communicate with each other over text. Moreover, the students we worked with in this project explicitly prefer text based communication over phone based communication in most cases. Many students told us that they rarely talked on the phone or checked their voice mail. They felt that talking on the phone was often too confining--it was difficult to multitask while on the phone--and could be “boring” as people on the other end of the line “go on and on.” Texting, they said, allows them to read and respond at their leisure, when they want and how they want -- which is pretty frequently!''

*''In our discussions with middle school and high school students, we have heard repeatedly from both groups that the general idea of texting with teachers sounds “weird.” Students describe texting as something they do with their friends, in their own language (i.e. jargon such as LOL, IDK etc.) and in their own space. However, after engaging in regular conversations with teachers via text in this pilot, many of the same students found the texting useful because it made them feel closer to the teachers -- it showed that the “teachers cared.” See the rest of the texting documentation for more on our findings on the potential for texting to help improve youth support communications and strengthen student/teacher relationships.''

'''The basic context needed for successful “texting”''' includes:
:1) Student access to and basic facility with mobile phones, and teacher access to/basic facility with mobile phones or computers (phones make the process much easier),
:2) Existing friendship or basic relationship between students and teachers
:3) Comfort or acceptance with the idea of interacting with each other outside of school time and space, and
:4) Agreement on behavior norms for these interactions. A shared understanding of how students and teachers can benefit from texting is also helpful, though this understanding can be built through experimentation during the process.

'''In addition to that basic context, teachers must be willing to experiment''' with how this new “tool” might be incorporated into their existing practices and communication patterns. Teachers should understand that the texting is a tool for communicating in new ways, and not a solution for all challenges of relationship or interaction with youth. Texting with students is simply one more way of communicating with and building relationships with students. Viewed in that light, teachers should review their student communication and engagement strategies and consider where and how texting might supplement current approaches to interacting with students.

'''Teachers considering texting can discuss these topics with other similarly minded teachers and consider the following items''':

*Current school and district-level policies on teacher-student communication and, texting specifically.

*Teacher and Student Privacy. What will your expectations be about what to do with texts? Who gets to see them? When would student safety mean that you should and should not share texts? Note that administrators and parents can request to see texts at any point as a matter of student safety. Define, clarify and share your initial expectations.

*The potential benefits and challenges of texting’s unique affordances:
**Unusually rapid communication.
**Anytime/anywhere access to students, and vice versa.
**Texting can save time, but it can also multiply the time/attention teachers give students and vice versa. Teachers and students now have access to each other beyond school hours and can potentially connect with each other individually in ways that weren’t feasible during the crowded school day.
**The fact that conversations are recorded in a running record on both users’ phones or computers.

*'''Teachers should also consider what type of additional support they might need from school and district administration:'''
**Clarity on district policies about communicating with students, via text or any social media, or, after school hours
**Time for training, learning and sharing and discussing experiences with other teachers
**Direction and/or support on where to integrate texting into larger school or district communication strategies.

'''After teachers have had a chance to discuss the topics above, they should then sit down with their students to discuss the texting plan.''' Why are they trying out texting? What will they text about? When?
'''Teachers and students should create a set of norms and expectations to help build a good context for successful texting.''' While the primary goal of the meeting is to establish norms and expectations as mentioned above, a secondary if not more important goal of the meeting is to start building trust between the students and the teachers: Trust that each party is speaking the same language regarding expectations and norms, and trust that each party is looking out for the best interest of the other--that they care about supporting each other as students and as teachers. That is, the point of texting between students and teachers should never be just “talking more” or, connecting privately outside of school hours -- it is to build student-teacher relationships that help improve upon current youth support efforts. While it is extremely important that students understand this last fact, teachers must also believe in the potential of communications to eventually help students trust that teachers are there to support their school and life success. This sort of trust is essential to laying the foundation for successfully engaging students in the classroom, via texting or not.

'''To help establish norms for texting and support trust building, the group can discuss:'''

*Students’ opinions on communicating with teachers outside of school (students have particular ideas about adults’ and teachers’ facility and awkwardness with texting).
*Students' opinions on having teachers contact them outside of school; when might that be helpful, when harmful?
*Students' thoughts on texting adults in general and teachers in particular.
*Time: how early and how late can people text? What days of the week?
*What language is or is not acceptable?
**Be particularly thoughtful here, as this can have a huge impact on how close the students feel to the teacher, how comfortable they feel and how much they engage and share.
**Grammar is key. Students have created their own texting language replete with acronyms, slang and symbols. Will you request students to use proper grammar--i.e. no acronyms or slang? What type of grammar and syntax will teachers use? See above rationale.
*Privacy: Define and arrive at a shared understanding of privacy and discuss what each group expects.
**Be sure to explain who else might have access to view their texts. Policies and laws will require certain people to have on-demand access to the texting record as needed to support student safety and well-being: parents/guardians, and administrators. Also agree on under what circumstances you will (have to) report conversations. For example,
***Mention of illegal acts
***Mention of dangerous situations
***Make sure to consider school policies first before having this conversation.
*Given the discussion so far, what potential use cases might call for texting? Which feel appropriate to the group? e.g.,
**Information sharing and request, about something related to student support or academic success (teacher to student and vice versa)?
**Wake up calls --OK to contact re. tardiness and attendance?
**Reminders? when are reminders “babying,” when helpful?
**Homework help?

'''During this conversation with students, teachers should also discuss whether and when they plan to review the usefulness and effectiveness of the texting experience.''' Will teachers have monthly meetings? What will be the goal of these meetings? Will they include students in analyzing the texting pilot’s effects? (We found this particularly effective.) Letting students know that their input will be requested will likely engage them more.

'''At this meeting, teachers should also begin to craft a notice to parents to inform them of the texting and give them the option to opt their children in or out of the process depending on your school or district's requirements.''' Send an explicit permission slip or note home. Our permission slip invited parents to explicitly refuse participation in the texting pilot if they wanted to. No parents refused.

'''Regardless of the specific norms teachers and students set up, create a structure and process to discuss on a regular basis the outcomes of the texting effort.''' Teachers need time to reflect with other teachers that are trying out the texting. But equally if not more importantly, teachers must communicate and share with administrators and other teachers that have not participated in the texting. How are youth support efforts at the school going, via texting and not? Even if these other teachers do not overlap with texting students, keeping them abreast of the progress with texting could yield useful suggestions and could pique their interest in trying out various new youth support efforts. At least, that’s what we found!

If you set up a formal research pilot of texting at your school, you might even do what we did -- anonymize the texts and share them with students, to jointly analyze texting’s effects on youth support efforts and student success. ''If you decide to review anonymized texts this way, write that potential use into your permission slip.'' Make certain that no texts identifying any student are ever inappropriately shared.

===Technological how-tos===

Here's where we describe "how to" use every tool we used, so that others could do the same. We also describe "how to" make every tool we made!

'''Google Voice

We chose to use Google Voice for a number of reasons: it was free for teachers, it recorded all texts in one place for ongoing or as-needed review and for student safety, and, it allowed teachers to use a new phone number for the texting pilot instead of their personal phone numbers.

Google Voice provides a virtual phone number that can be used for texting and calling. All texts received at this number can be forwarded to any phone or viewed on a computer or through a smartphone app. When viewed on a computer or a smart phone, no texting charges apply. Unless they’re using a smartphone app, the person receiving your texts from Google Voice will be charged based on their regular texting plan.

Teachers can sign up for the service by going to voice.google.com and following the instructions. There are tutorial videos to explain the various features. The web interface pictured below is very similar to any web email interface. Instead of entering students’ email addresses into your contacts, you create contacts with students’ phone numbers.

[[Image:Google_Voice_image.jpeg]]

Like any email program, Google Voice allows users to easily send text messages to multiple students (now limited to 5 at a time). Conversations with individual students will be seen in threads as shown above. Each individual text message is time and date stamped and this information will show up on the web and smartphone app interfaces. Unlike regular text messages which are typically linked to specific phones, text messages received through Google Voice are tied to an account and are consequently stored indefinitely.

Texts sent and received through Google Voice are also accessible by anybody with the account information. This share-ability allows administrators, parents/guardians (if they actively request this), or other adult supporters (by students’ permission) to have access to the communications, providing a level of transparency that is essential for liability and safety purposes. School and district policy may also determine which administrators appropriately can view these private texts.

At the same time that it provides transparency, the account interface also lends a level of privacy to the teacher, by allowing him/her to separate personal communication from school based communications. Students need never see or know of the teacher’s real phone number, and he/she has full access to blocking any unwanted communication. Furthermore, if students are made aware that all texting communications are recorded and shareable if necessary for student safety, students will likely limit any untoward behavior. Indeed, the teachers we worked with in this two-year pilot reported that there were no major misbehavior from the students, and the students also remarked often on how polite everyone was via text!

Click here for the '''[[Summary: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Summary]] '''on this project; click here for the '''[[Expanded story: Texting for Rapid Youth Support|Expanded story]] '''on this project.