Webinar #2
Paula: Welcome, everyone! Hi, facilitators and any colleagues you’ve invited to join you, welcome.
Thanks for joining us in the second in this series of webinars that have been developed just for you.
Today we will hear from two of your facilitator colleagues, Tabitha Pacheco and Heather Nelson from
Utah Virtual, on a topic you deemed important to learn about from the needs assessment you took in
September, Computer-Adapted Instruction and Assessment. Then, Dr. Dan Pollitt will present on the Ins
and Outs of using iPads for Students with Disabilities. There will time for questions and answers
throughout the webinar, and at the end there will be a short synopsis of the findings of the teacher
survey that you’ve distributed to other teachers for us. Before we begin, just a bit of housekeeping: this
webinar is being recorded and will be available on the survey facilitator website and the Center on
Online Learning website within a few business days. I’d like to introduce Tabitha and Heather. So
Tabitha Pacheco, she attended Brigham Young University and earned a bachelor’s degree in Family Life.
She started her career working in a residential treatment center focusing on students with
social/emotional and behavioral disorders. She then returned to BYU and completed a degree in special
education. She worked 4 years in the brick-and-mortar charter school setting, working with a variety of
students with disabilities. The last 3 years she has taken her skillset to the virtual world, working with
students with significant disabilities. She now coaches other special educators on how to engage
students in the virtual environment and how to prepare interactive virtual lessons. She also works as an
adjunct faculty member at BYU as a mentor teacher in the special education department. Tabitha has
been recognized with such awards as Teacher of the Year at her local school, Featured Teacher by her
new state program, and Outstanding Alumni by her university. She is the Southwest regional recipient
for the Pioneer Teaching Award, and last year she was awarded Significant Disabilities Teacher of the
Year by the Utah State Office of Education. She is currently working on her national board’s professional
teaching standards certification. Tabitha grew up in the Sacramento, CA area. She now resides in
Springville, Utah with her husband and two young children. In her free time she enjoys training for
marathons and participating in other fitness activities. So that’s Tabitha, and Heather is going to join
her. Heather Goodwin-Nelson has a diverse educational background and holds licenses in early
childhood, elementary, and special education. She has a bachelor’s of science in Elementary Education
from Brigham Young University in Hawaii, and a master’s of science in Special Education through
Brigham Young. Based on research during her graduate degree, Heather presented at four national
conferences: three for the National Center for Paraprofessionals and one for the Council for Exceptional
Children, Teacher Education Division. She also co-authored an article in the American Academies of
Special Education. Heather has worked in public charter and private school settings as a teacher,
mentor, educational coach, administrator, and consultant. She has worked specifically with startup
schools to create and implement special education and response to intervention programs. To help
mentor other schools, Heather was asked by the state to present at the Utah State Charter School
Conference. She has also been recognized for her innovative practices in implementing a teacher and
excellence program which mentored and recognized teachers’ instructional practices. Wanting to
expand her experience and expertise, Heather turned to online education. She currently works as a
behavioral specialist and instructional coach in the Utah-based online elementary and middle schools.
Heather grew up in Oahu and Tokyo and currently resides in Provo, Utah. She’s a single mother of 3 and
is a volunteer coach for two Utah Mountain Viking teams. And now I’d like to turn it over to Tabitha and
Heather.
Tabitha: Hello, everyone, I hope you can hear me okay. We are excited to present today. Awesome,
thank you Paula. Okay, so today we are doing a brief presentation; we’ll save the best for last when Dan
presents for us. We are going to share some of our knowledge on computer adaptive instruction and
assessment.
Heather: Okay, Tabitha, if you will go ahead and switch the screens. Those of us who are participating, if
you will access your arrows… you should have a drop down menu to access an arrow. Go ahead and put
an arrow on the state that you are representing today and that will give us an idea of where we are at
and who we are working with. Tabitha, why don’t we go ahead and move the slide through. Let’s do a
similar thing. How many of you use computers or smart boards within your teaching? And how often?
You can either click that with the arrow or you can submit it to the chat so we can have an idea of what
our audience base is and how to present as we go forward. Thank you, Dan. He presents daily. I also
work daily on mine. It’s not running as smoothly. I’m new to webinars, but we use Blackboard with
what we do. So as we go through, what technology do you utilize? At our school, we use Blackboard
Collaborate and different items in conjunction with that. We can use iPads, we can use clickers, and we
can even use our cell phones to monitor and enter in items. What do you use in your instruction or do
you use some more items as well? You can enter it on the board, you have options to hit on the side, or
you can enter into the chat. Thank you, Paula, for putting that in on the side. So as we go through our
computerized instruction, and as we enter into the work for online instruction, one of the things we did
notice when we looked at different research is that there is a lot out there. But I chose some recent
statements, one from a study that I was reading and one from a general business article, that I thought
were interesting to share what the view of computerized instruction was. And both of them basically
state that regardless of what technology we implement, the bottom line is that we need to have welldesigned lesson plans. In our state of Utah, we have quite a few online schools, but one of the things
that I have noticed in working with our state department of education is that their concept of online
instruction equates more to a packet, where you put all the materials, like a canvas or a very limited
Blackboard at a university, where you put instructional modules online that students complete and
submit to be graded, whereas in our world, we actually do interactive computerized instruction.
Tabitha, if you will go to the next slide for me… we thought we would give you a little bit of an idea of
what we do in our instruction. We actually work on engagement through video feeds, so you can see
our teacher on there and we have our lesson plan on there. Not only can our students see what is being
taught, they can also interact. You can see we have 4 different pointers on the screen. One is a blue
pointer, one is a smiley face, and there are two hands. They’re showing an answer to a question from
the teacher asking “Where is the ones’ place value chart?” So our students are able to interact with our
teachers through a variety of different methods. They can use online tools where they can actually write
on the board, pointers, holding techniques, and chat and emoticons. All of which are really valuable
since we are so far away from each other and we can’t have that face-to-face. We can use microphones
for our students to be able to talk with us and video feeds. However, generally, our rule is that we have
video feeds on for our teachers all the time, but we do not have video feeds for our students unless it is
a one-on-one situation. Part of the reason for that is that we want to keep things super friendly and we
can’t guarantee what will be in the background on the student video feed like we can with our teachers’.
On our next slide, we have another example of a teacher and one of the fun items that we have: we
utilize quiz managers and, for Tabitha coming to present to you, we were feeling a little limited because
our environment here online, doesn’t allow us to be as interactive and engaging as we do with our
students. Our students come in and we can do bell work, just like in a brick-and-mortar school. We
have quiz managers like you see on the board, where we can have them ask questions and they can
chose to respond in a summary and can turn in pictures. They work on their boards and actually draw it
out on their bamboo tablet, screenshot it and send it out. Or they can do it in terms of polling (A,B,C,D)
or multiple choice questions. When we do our instruction, a lot of times when we are virtual, we have
the tendency to just lecture, which becomes problematic because we lose a lot of student engagement
that way. So Tabitha and I this summer worked with USOE personnel and we designed some templates
for us to take data for our students and our teacher to help them with their instruction. One of the
things we did is that we went though and took Madeline Hunter’s traditional “You do, we do, I do” areas
of a lesson plan and implanted those. This is one of the data summaries that we would use with each
lesson. We observed and took notes for each of our teachers. Notice that on the cleanest slides, a lot of
them would put the “I do, we do, you do” so they would remember that as teacher, this is what they’re
doing. They’re not jumping ahead or skipping a part of the lesson. It was a nice internal organizer for
them, since a lot of their slides are PowerPoints they upload. Another aspect that we work on is that we
actually take praise ratios and we are pretty specific on our observations. So we will measure
reinforcing and corrected behaviors both academically and behaviorally. We’ll look at ratios and rates
for praise. We even want to go down and go look at their opportunities to respond. Every school
district and school does different items. For us, since we are virtual, we chose every polling item that
they have. Are they responding through an emoticon, by giving a happy face or a confused face in their
chat? Are they responding to the chat as a group or individually? What about pulling tools: are they
answering their questions? Our teachers can say “Give me a green check once you have finished your
assignment,” and do our students follow through with that? That way, we can measure their greater
response and have our teachers be able to gauge themselves, whether they are doing great in the green
section. We do a yellow section if the data doesn’t lie. If they are falling in the yellow, we look at some
interventions and what we can do differently. And if they are falling in the red and they are just now
having enough interaction or praise, then our teachers know we need to start putting in something
different right away. So we do this once a week to our teachers and they get the data tools back to
themselves and we have a post conference. In our post conference, we have various questions and we
have gone ahead and utilized questions out of “Help Teachers Engage Students: Action Tools for
Administrators.” It’s an awesome book. We go though and ask the reflective question with our teachers
and then plan the next section of their lesson designs. Part of this helps our students learn the lesson
materials a lot more effectively. The other part is for our teachers to be able to reflect on their own
instruction and see “what can I do differently?” Most teachers who come into our school or our district
are teaching on a brick-and-mortar module. They are used to being able to see that student and being
able to see the looks on their faces, their interactions, and whether they are off or on task on their desk.
Once you go to that virtual environment, that sixth sense of communication is no longer there and you
are left to see what you can see on the screen. So for the teacher to all of a sudden see their paradigm
make that shift to “What I did in a regular classroom is something I can do online, I just have to look at it
differently,” is a large jump to make. But once they make it, all of a sudden their instruction becomes
very focused and fine-tuned. I find if a teacher can teach virtually, that teaching brick-and-mortar is
amazing. So now we are going to turn back over to Tabitha for some assessments.
Tabitha: Great, so this presentation has two parts: about computer adaptive testing and just using
online testing to gather data and using it to drive out instruction. So computer adaptive testing (CAT) is
a form of computer-based testing that adapts to the examinee’s ability level. This is very exciting: they
are starting to use it for a lot of end of year tests. My specialty at my school is focusing on the
alternative assessment given to students with significant disabilities. We are utilizing the DLM, the
dynamic learning map. There are a few other states that are using this and other tests. The ones in the
dark blue are ones that will be using it. The great thing about this test is that it is a bit different than
normal adaptive tests. Depending on if you get a right or wrong answer, it is a traditional adaptive test.
The learning map is a network of sequence learning targets. Often, we think of learning as one skill
building on another single skill. A dynamic learning map, by comparison, shows a learning landscape in
which multiple skills are related to many other skills. Dynamic learning maps not only show the
relationships between skills but also show multiple learning pathways. Instead of assuming that all
children learn a skill in the same way, allowing for multiple pathways recognizes that there are
alternative ways to learn the same skill. This is really great for the significant students that I work with,
who may have some holes in their education. They have mastered one concept but can’t understand
another one. So even though things in Math really do build on top of each other, this learning map
allows getting different answers correct, instead of just assuming that if they don’t know this thing, they
can’t know anything else above that. That is exciting news. It is being piloted in my state this year.
Then, next year, it will be enforced as the test we will be using instead of the traditional assessment that
uses paper and pencil. There is a lot of training to do with our students to get them ready to take a
computer adaptive test. The first thing I can recommend for all students is general education resources
and significant practice. You want those students to get familiar using that computer. My students in
the virtual school get to use the computer every day but we still have to practice because there are
different things that may come up on the test that they may not be familiar with. Different ways to use
the keyboard and the mouse, using an online calculator, those were difficulties for my students because
they were used to using a big handheld calculator. Using an online calculator is something to practice,
that and getting used to hearing a computer-generated voice. I know that in my state, students are no
longer allowed to have tests read aloud to them by a person. It’s all a screen reader. So for someone
who is used to having a teacher read to them, going to a computer voice can be a big difference. Do any
of you have any techniques you have used to get your students ready for computer adaptive testing? I
can’t see anything in the chat box, so if you could say it in the mic that would be great. Okay, so that is
just a really brief overview on computer adaptive testing, so if you have questions, let us know. The
thing is that it does vary state to state. Some states are now requiring it for every student, so we use
the SAGE for our end of year tests, which is a computer based adaptive test that all students have to
take, and now we use to the DLM for those students who would have to take the alternative tests. Here
is computer testing – not necessarily adaptive, just an online test. How do we use that date to drive
instruction? This is one question that we get all the time, when people say “You do special ed. for a
virtual school? How do your partners monitor your kids? How do you collect data?” We have lots of
great tools. One program that we use is DIBELS, which is a reading fluency test. They do have an online
version, so we are able to call our students and hear them on the phone, see their face on the camera,
and do the DIBELS test. We collect data that way. Here are some data points of our students, of the
benchmarks and progress monitoring of where they have been. So we use this and we collect data on
them weekly, biweekly to make sure we are monitoring that fluency. We also use teacher-created
assessments. Heather showed you earlier some of the great instruction we can use. They use online
quizzes in their classroom, polling tools, raising hands – those types of things. Some of our teachers use
a Google survey, so at the end of class they will give everyone the link and tell them to complete the
survey. It would be like their independent practice and it would have questions. This is a survey that
was specifically on time-telling skills. They were given clocks and had to identify what time it was. We
took this before and after Christmas break to get ESY – end-of-school-year – data. So you can see she’s
sent out this Google survey, with a plus if they got it right and a minus if they got it wrong, so she could
see their progress before and after. So Google surveys are a great way to just do a curriculum-based
assessment, just a teacher-made one. This could be really fun for high school students: maybe they are
tired of writing things to turn in or filling out worksheets. If you have a class website, or some sort of
blog you use for your class, you could have your Google assessments at the end of class and they could
do that for homework and then it would grade it for you. That saves one step for teachers and all the
answers could be put on a spreadsheet for you, so Google surveys are great. I just would remind you to
make it student friendly in case someone hacked in. Our students just put their ID number in. Utilizing
the data-driven instruction, this is a more formal test that we use. It’s called the Common Interim
Assessment (CIA). This is a test that is administered school-wide every 5 weeks, and collects data on
progress towards meeting our state standards. So this is a test targeted to meet the Common Core,
which our state uses. There are many types of computer programs available; your district or school may
already have their own program. My school uses Study Island, so here is a snapshot of that. So this
says, regarding question number one, that the number of students in the class who got it right was 2,
and the number who got it wrong was 29. This was on a reading standard for literature. So this teacher
can look at this and say “Oh, wow, a lot of people missed this question, this is something I need to
reteach.” This is the type of information our teachers are getting every 5 weeks in regard to where they
students are at in meeting state standards. How we use this information is that we analyze our data in
PLCs. Most of you are familiar with that. It is a very hot thing right now in the education world. So we
have professional learning communities to analyze our data. We meet with our department teams once
a week in PLC meetings. Teams may vary school to school. Our school meets by subject. So all the high
school math teachers meet together; other schools I know meet by grade level. Each member brings a
completed data analysis sheet, and this information I used to guide instruction. Teachers look for
patterns, trends, strengths, and weaknesses to adjust their instruction accordingly. We very strongly
believe that data drives the instruction. So this is what our data analysis sheet looks like. If you
remember our form from a couple slides ago, this one came from our CIA, so it shows how they are
doing on state standards. The teacher looks at this information and then answered these questions:
“So what are the grade level standards that students scored 60% or higher on?” – These are the ones
they did well on. “What are the biggest priorities in going forward?” So these are the standards, these
are letters and numbers for the reading and literature 11th grade standard, so after putting the standard
in and looking at the bombed questions, we ask “Did all the students chose the wrong answer?” The
teacher said “no, incorrect answers were throughout.” Did they make significant progress in IEP goals?
This is something our special education teachers do: work really hard to make sure our IEP goals align
with our state standards so that we are helping students to close the gap and catch up to their grade
level. So this maybe wasn’t the best example to pull, but this student’s IEP goals are spread throughout
the standards as well to other areas. The IEP goals were scored poorly over all. So the teacher for this
piece, since the answers were all over, said that in his class, he is going to put an emphasis on test-taking
skills. He chose to do that because of the wide variation in time used to take the test. He noticed that
some kids it took 10 minutes to take the test and others took an hour and some kids were maybe logged
on for 2 minutes. So that could have resulted in the difference. After they have all this data they can
look at it and form their instructional plan. This is the standard that the teacher chose, and only 33% of
the class got it correct. So his plan is to teach and reteach the lesson on context clues, practice
repetition, and reinforce the use of Study Island, which is a practice testing site that has games our
school uses. This is what he took from that information to make a plan. This is a plan for his class and
also the IEP goals and what he can do for the student. He mentioned that he needs to adjust and maybe
add an intervention group, and invite them to one-on-one help during office hours. Do you all have
questions yet? I know this is a lot of information on data and different ways to analyze it. Are your
schools doing similar things? I love that there are people here from all over the United States. I
sometimes assume we all do the same things, but I know it varies from school to school and state to
state.
Paula: Okay, well, I want to go ahead and thank Heather and Tabitha and let you guys know that the
tools and PowerPoints will be available on the archived webinar. A lot of those tools, as you can see, are
what they pulled from the big tool that they are using. So they have shown us that. They are very
useful-looking to me though. I really appreciate what you’ve done. Dan has written a couple of things.
Apparently we are having some chat room problems that we have written how exciting some of the
graphics look and how interesting those would be. Thank you very much. Now, I would like to
introduce Dr. Dan Pollitt.
Dr. Pollitt is an assistant research professor at the Center for Research on Learning at the University of
Kansas. He’s currently LEA facilitator for school-wide integrated framework for transformation, SWIFT, a
national technical assistant center on inclusive school reform at KU. Dan taught middle school in Kansas
City and currently researches specific learning disabilities, adolescent literacy, instructional strategies,
and classroom-based technologies. Dan has lived in 7 Midwest states and is a 3rd generation Chicago
Cubs fan and has run five 26.5-mile marathons. He earned his PhD in special education by completing
his dissertation titled, “Effects of an iPad iBook on Reading Comprehension, Electrodermal Activity and
Engagement for Adolescents with Disabilities” in spring of 2013. In his free time, he enjoys spending
time with his wife and his two week old baby, running with his two dogs, and reading fiction. He can be
reached at @dtpollitt on twitter and blogs at the literary mind at his blogspot.
Dan: Can you see my name and title up there? Perfect. Okay everybody, welcome, and thank you for
that warm introduction. My name is Dan Pollitt. I’m here from Kansas City, Kansas. I recently acquired
my PhD at KU. Regarding the dynamic learning maps that were just talked about a little bit ago: a lot of
research is being done with those just down one floor from me at KU. Right now I am an assistant
research professor at KU and the Center for Research on Learning. Today I am going to talk about my
dissertation specifically, but I am going to make it broad and applicable for all of us that are here. Most
recently I have worked in Kansas City as a middle school teacher for grades 4-5 for students with
disabilities, mainly students with specifically learning disabilities, high-functioning autism, Asperger’s,
and emotional behavior disorders. My research question really came out of my classroom experience
and I’d like to share that with you today, so I’d like to get started. If you need to contact me, my email is
dpollitt@ku.edu. If you are interested in the slides, they are on the website there. You can also find me
on Twitter. Here is our outline; it is always best to give an advance organization. I’m going to give an
introduction and some feedback, I’ll propose some critical questions for us to address today, show some
iPad research, and show some demonstration and resources for you today. If you have an iPad but have
never heard of iBooks or don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll give you an overview on those. Then I’ll
have some time for questions. I’d like to thank my Center for Research on Learning, the school where I
taught, Paula, and my advisor, Dr. Don Deshler, as well. Okay, I always preface my presentations with
this. Not to just look at my face, but so you can take me at face value rather than just some guy talking
on the computer to you. I think it is important for you to know a bit about me and my background, since
it is important to be a critical evaluator of research and those presenting research as a classroom
teacher working with students with disabilities. I’m from the Midwest. I did my undergrad at
Wisconsin, my master’s in Minnesota, and now I’m at Kansas. I’ve had a wealth of experience working
with students. I’ve worked with foster students, I’ve tutored K-12, and I’ve been a classroom teacher.
My focus in my degree was on cognition, strategy, and instruction in adolescent literacy. There’s the
long, exciting title of my dissertation there, and I’ll talk about that. I have a 3-month-old baby daughter, I
like baseball, I have some dogs, and I run marathons. So there’s some basic information about me, it’s
nice to put a face with the name. I’m going to ask you to do something at the end of our lecture: I’m
going to ask you to provide some sort of feedback to me.
Either that goes to Paula, or you can email, chat, or tweet with me. The reason I do this with my
students, even 4th and 5th grade, is that feedback is something that is immediate; it happens as soon as
the behavior occurs. It’s direct, so I go straight to the person and I give them direct feedback. It’s
positive because I want them to improve their desired behavior or change their behavior that is less
desired. It’s measurable, something I can reproduce, and something I can count or understand, and
make sure to do again. So hopefully, by the end, one way or another, contact me. Give me two
strengths and one thing I can improve on. I want to hear you. Here are our four critical questions for
today. I’ll address each of these. There is so much content as a classroom teacher and so little time,
what do I do? Second – and this was a big failure of mine as a classroom teacher – what important
instructional design features do I need to consider in textbooks? Third, what resources are available to
me? And I’ve given you some we’ll go over. Finally, if you have any questions, I would love to hear
those. I’ve learned just as much from talking to others as I have from working with students. Okay, so
this is a great slide if any of you are big tech geeks and you really like learning about this stuff. If you’re
not familiar Mary Meeker and Leann Wu’s internet trends, it’s put out every year, usually November or
December. It’s a 200-page PDF and it’s beautiful. It’s slides of learning about technology and education,
how many tweets per second, how many kids use iPads compared to textbooks in the classroom, etc.
It’s a free PDF download. I promise you it isn’t boring; it’s very exciting if you like technology. This is a
good way to preface my discussion. If you first look at types of computers when they first hit the market
in 1995 to present day, you have, in the green, desktop computers; in the blue, laptops; and in the red,
tablets. And as you can see, tablets are far and away the most popular form of computing we have ever
had before. We love it and can’t get enough of it; our satiation point hasn’t been hit yet. Furthermore, I
always ask the question: are we putting the cart before the horse? We look at what is being done in LA
Unified: they have had some difficulties rolling out an iPad project for their tens of thousands of
students. Here are some headlines that I have pulled from the Washington Post, the New York Times,
and other newspapers. You can get the big picture that there have been some problems with the iPad
rollout there. Furthermore, Diana Ravitch just said this past week that she is analyzing the Common
Core. If you have looked at the Common Core, one thing you have found is that we have started to move
from fiction and fiction information in how we are understanding literacy to much more informational
texts. We are asking students more and more to learn more about factual based, expository
information in the world and less and less about fiction. Policy and opinions aside, if that is happening,
it seems like it is, we need to do a better job of presenting that information so that they can learn from
it. Richard Mayer, he’s a researcher out of Santa Barbara in California, says the problem isn’t the access
to the information. It is integrating it and making sense out of it. So to Mayer, it isn’t so much that we
give the students the information; rather, it’s all about how they mold it and make it malleable and how
they are going to try and understand it, and take all their prior knowledge and build upon that and have
something that has meaning to them. Now, I ask, how are we going to do that? The purpose of my
dissertation study was that I took a traditional textbook, a science class book that I used in my 5th grade,
distributed by a large publisher, and I converted it into an iPad iBook. I’ll show you that a little bit later.
We are finding out that there are some differences. If you think of textbooks, they are pretty
interesting. Textbooks are a pretty good form of technology. They have great battery life, you can write
on them, you can draw on them, you can color them whatever you want, and they are portable. Most
textbooks are pretty poorly designed: they do not consider students with disabilities. I work mainly with
students with severe dyslexia and a lot of students with dyslexia commit a lot of cognitive resources to
finding the correct information and when they do, they latch onto that so much, while often it is the
wrong information or leaves them without any cognitive resources available for other important
information. The construction and design are kind of an afterthought. Now we look at some things that
we think about the iPad. We know iPads are engaging and exciting. If you are not familiar with iBook
author software, unfortunately, it’s only available for Macintosh and not PC. You can read iBooks on
multiple devices, but as for the production of creating a book, you as a teacher can only do that on a
Macintosh currently. We know that there is some emotional connection between how we feel about
learning and the outcomes. There is some recent meta-analysis: the most recent I read was in 2009 or
2010 saying that students benefit if we have a strong emotional and social connection with learning, and
it increases academic outcomes. Think about that for a minute: if we show that we care about our
learning and our students really want to learn, it improves academics. What a concept! Rather than just
focusing on STEM or core content here, we also consider how they feel about learning, and it improves
all academic outcomes. So this is what I did, and this is one of my big takeaways here. Remember, I was
a doctoral fellow when I was a classroom teacher. I’m trained classically in strategic explicit instruction.
I thought I was a really good teacher; however, the unfortunate – or funny – thing in retrospect is that I
didn’t do a very good job or teaching my students how to read a book. And I don’t mean fluency or
decoding or understanding morphemes: I mean big picture. If I were to ask one of my students “Where
is the glossary?” you know because you are a good learner and all of us have had good education that a
glossary is almost always in the back of the book. We know if we see vocabulary, if we see a bolded
word, we know it is probably a vocab word. If we see big headers, we probably know that is important
information that is helping to orient us. However, for my students, my own classroom students, I did a
study with almost ¾ of my whole school. I found that my peers and I did a poor job or teaching students
how to read a book. What I did was I instructed book features: I instructed those 7 features you see on
the left and those 10 features you see on the right. We are probably all familiar with using an iPad, but
reading a book on an iPad is a little different. You’ll see these first 7 are identical, and then the last
couple is obviously so that you can’t have a video on a textbook or an audio clip on a textbook, and I
taught those first. Now let me pause for a moment. My first takeaway for those of us here who are
classroom teachers or working with students or working with teachers is that we need to explicitly teach
the instructional design features of books. Does that make it clear? I didn’t just pull these out of thin
air: I’ve used some evidence and other strategies used to teach books. And this is what I came up with.
Does that make sense? So far, are we good on that? I tried to see if there are some differences
between textbooks and iPad books. We’ve read books and read books on textbooks and iPad and we
took some tests. First, we took some reading tests. These are the ones at the back of the book that all of
you have seen before. We used something called the Q sensor, which is a really fancy watch; it was
developed out of MIT, and it looks like this. It looks real fancy. It records electro-dermal activity, which
is kind of like your flight-or-fight response. It is physiological data and it lets me know how high or low
your EDA, electro-thermal activity, level is. EDA is a measurement that you interpret by itself because
what it does is that it tells your body’s response to the environment. So somebody like Tabitha may
have a higher EDA response rather than someone like Paula who may have a lower response to some
sort of video, activity, or book. And so it has an accelerometer and measures temperature as well as
EDA. I did some cognitive workload measures: this is a fun one developed by NASA for pilots flying in
space. I used that. I did some satisfaction surveys to ask “Hey, do you like using textbooks? Do you like
using iPad books?” And then I did some interviews. Here are my results: unfortunately, you know, no
results or significant results are just as important as significant results. I found for some of them that we
did not get significant results on reading score or electro-thermal activity; however, I did get results for
satisfaction that were significant and book type correlations. Let me explain that one for a moment.
EDA – let me go back to that – EDA is interpretable by each person. Maybe I have ADHD, so my baseline
EDA is higher than others’ EDAs when reading a specific type of book that was found to decrease as
reading score increased. Students’ EDA levels were lower as their reading comprehension score
increased. Now think about how you feel when you get a higher score on a reading test rather than a
lower score. On a higher score, you are calmer, maybe you are more comfortable, and maybe you feel
better about yourself when you think you did well. Maybe you are more confident. Maybe you are
more motivated. So let me go back to that slide again. One inference I may be able to make from this
study is that as students did better on a reading test, they were more comfortable – and that kind of
seems sensible. My second takeaway is that students enjoy learning on iPad books as their test score go
up and their EDA levels increase. They may be able to associate or think about comfort or stress or
anxiety. Now, I did some interviews asking “What book type helps you comprehend better?” and a lot
of them said the iPad book did. Some of them said the traditional textbooks did and some said both
were about the same. In what classes do you prefer the iPad book? Students overwhelmingly chose the
iPad book and this is probably the most interesting graph that I have. What features did you like to use
the most or were most useful? Not surprising are the three on the iPad: obviously, you can’t put a video
on a traditional textbook. That’s business as usual. These were the features that I taught to all the
students. They knew how to find important information. Those three in green on the right were three
of the ones that were only available on the iPad, but not surprisingly were found to be pretty useful.
The third takeaway I have is that book features that appear to leverage academic outcomes the best are
the ones that involve active participation. So go back and think about that for a moment. With video
recorders, you engage in one way or another with some type of widget. I am watching a video on
photosynthesis or I am learning about the stages of pollination, an interaction that requires me to put
my hands on something; I grab it and consume it. And an audio clip is usually listening to the teacher,
me, Mr. Pollitt, and they are hearing my voice and saying “Mr. Pollitt has given me the review for this
chapter.” So my third takeaway is that with an iPad book, the features that were most interactive, that
involved doing something rather than passively sitting, were ones that students benefitted from or
identified as the ones they liked the most. Now let’s give you some examples. I’m going to switch over
here. For those of you who remember using an iPad book before, here is what one looks like. So what
we have here is a book that I developed – and this is the same content that would be on a traditional
paper-based textbook, only it has been enhanced and I’ve considered principles of constructional
design. So at the beginning of every chapter I have a video that pretends you are in the chapter. I have
a systematic way that each chapter is outlined. So I didn’t just put words, pictures, and textures on the
page. It looks the same for every single chapter. There’s these buttons called stops: stops are
checkpoints that say, “Do you remember the parts of a plant? Do you remember parts of information?”
[Audio lost]
For the books I put together for my dissertation, you know there are things I enhanced, but the content
is the same. I enhanced it with the principles of an iBook that you would think you would be able to
enhance with. Traditional books would just have a definition and perhaps a sentence; now I was able to
include a picture of that content and find some related terms, like how extinction is related to fossils,
and give some examples of those as well. Another type of book is this one that I am going to
recommend. It is not one that I made, but it is a great basic book. It is the innovation challenge one. I’ll
go over that one here in a moment. If you are familiar with the iBook author software, this is kind of
what it looks like. And what you have down here in the left is all of the chapters that I have made. I can
go in here and see my specific chapters and sections and each page. And you can do things: I can see all
of these widgets which are kind of the ways that you interact with the student or the environment when
you are making some types of features. Okay, so I am going to go back over here. Now what I have
given here in front of us are four or five references. If you are looking to use these for your classroom or
your students, these are some of the resources that I have found to be most effective. This, again, I think
Paula put up on my website. You can download the PDF of the slides there and I’ll leave it up for a
minute while I talk through some of them. The first one is a free iPad iBook that you may download that
is not necessarily a K-12 book, but I think it is a great simplistic format that is very easy for you if you are
collaborating with general education teachers or even a professional learning committee. The PLC and
you can work with someone like a science teacher and help make one of these books accessible for
students with all needs. This challenge book is really a basic way to get into it, videos and interactions, a
great way to start. There is a good podcast that I would recommend there that helps you figure out how
to use iBooks. There is some other publication information there on the third one. The fourth one is
kind of interesting because I haven’t seen this one in my own example, but I’ve read about it on the
web. Some teachers in high school are including thinking of inclusive classrooms. Students with
disabilities are being included in a general education classroom like a science class and teachers are
assigning work that makes students create their own iBooks, so rather than you giving a WWI written
report, you may have to make an iPad book and present that back to the class as the assignment. I think
that is really sensitive to Universal Design for Learning and has implications of multiple modalities of
expression and engagement and action, so those are the first four. If you have questions about those,
let me know. Finally, there was just a recent study published this week that speaks about eBooks in
general, not just iPad books, and how some young children have been benefitting from using an eBook
and seeing in proof more language comprehension and their ability to use multiple modalities for
learning and expression, and that’s been pretty positive as well. So let’s go back here and I want to take
questions first. The iPad book is something that I think is very exciting, but there is truly not a lot of
research on it right now. The iPad book software has only been around for less than 2years, so teachers
are just now starting to take a hold of it. It is a big advancement financially since you need to have an
iPad and software and it’s a time investment. I would see this as one special educator creating it; I don’t
think that is a good use of resources and collaboration. What I do see is perhaps, in a small learning
group, being able to use this to create content or curriculum that would be helpful for multiple students
or a whole grade level or a whole school and being able to update it repeatedly, kind of like a live wiki
that you would use in your school, district, or classroom. I would love questions if there are questions on
how to use this or anything related to that because I went over a lot of information.
Paula: Okay, well I have one. Dan, I might have missed something on the slide where you showed what
was most useful between a book and an iPad book. Is that showing? The blue is BAU and BAU stands for
what again?
Dan: Yes. I meant that is “business as usual” as what we traditionally do in a classroom or a traditional
textbook.
Paula: So, are they saying traditional textbooks give better text clues? You’ve got 15 there, and then an
iPad which is 6.
Dan: Yeah, so great question. The graphic is a little confusing and I played around with the best way to
describe this. So what we have here is table of contents, you know: where you see the chapters and the
outlines. You have glossary and vocabulary right here, and text clues and text clues as modifications to
text (highlighting, bold, italics). Cues are prompts that let the reader know that information is coming:
“Can you remember the four states of this?” “What are the oceans?” Something like that: it cues the
reader into information. Highlighters are highlighting and note taking, which is physical activity either
with a highlighter or your finger on the iPad book. There’s end of the chapter or section reviews, videos,
some sort of interactive widget, and audio. Obviously, these three on the right – kind of a duh moment,
since you wouldn’t be able to have these three on a traditional textbook or business as usual. I do think
it is important that all the green ones are weighted towards those, which tells me those are the most
active forms of participation, not just sitting passively not doing anything. The blue ones that were high
though were highlighting and note taking, text clues, and pictures. Because these are the only options
that students could choose from a traditional textbook, it isn’t too surprising. Highlighting and note
taking is an active process, you have to do something while you are actually reading. We have text
clues, the bolding and italicizing of words. Then we have the general pictures.
Paula: Okay, thank you very much. Tabitha had a question. I don’t know if everyone can see it so I’ll
read it. Do you think Android tablets will soon catch up to iPads?
Dan: Great question. So one website, if you are looking at possibly doing this and not just staying within
Apple, is called “Inkling,” and Inkling is a company that caters to the college-level, post-secondary
education. It sells eBooks on any device, which includes any iPhone, iPad, and Android device, any
tablet, and even a computer. Inkling is trying to become the next phase of the iTunes store, so you
would be able to go in there and buy your own textbooks, but the cool thing is that rather than buying a
whole book, you can buy just a chapter. Say for instance Tabitha is interested in science. She is a
classroom teacher but she doesn’t need the whole book, just the chapter on mammals or something like
that. She can buy just that mammal chapter. Inkling is something that has not yet entered the K-12
realm yet. It is pretty much just for postsecondary and medical fields, but they are starting to move into
K-12. The neat thing about it is it was started by a former Apple executive who used to work in the
education aspect of Apple. He is really in tune with K-12 education, so I think that is something that is
on the horizon that will probably start to be addressed soon.
Paula: So Tabitha also wrote: is that more cost effective?
Dan: If it was right now, unfortunately, I don’t know of many other resources besides iBooks that allows
a teacher to make his or her own classroom books. Inkling is more driven at the publishers but I’m told
they will start readdressing the audience of K-12 teachers. At this moment I do not think they do. Has
anyone used eBooks or experienced that in the classroom at all? Heather, about your comment of
iBook not being compatible with Mac software: they did release an updated version of iBook Author
and iBooks for the Macintosh, so when I scroll over here I am using the iBook Aauthor software and this
program. This is iBooks Author, how I create the book. Then, if I go here, I can show you all my books
that I have read personally and used for some of those things. You can read iBooks now on your
computer, iPad, and phone. You can do all of those. Here is Diary of a Wimpy Kid that I bought for one
of my students. Does that make sense?
Paula: That’s great. I didn’t know about a lot of what you taught us today. I really didn’t know you could
get the iBooks on your computer now.
Dan: I would encourage any of you that are thinking or worried that is way too much: “There’s no way I
could do this!” I don’t think that is true and I think any of you that love technology, even as a hobby,
could do something like this. This innovation challenge book that I went over is a book design. It serves
two purposes: it is a team building exercise, and I’ve used it with a lot of my students and it is a lot of
fun, so let me show you a really fun one. If you’ve ever seen the marshmallow challenge, you know this:
you have to use the marshmallows with hardened spaghetti noodles and you only get so many. It is an
engineering project with kids. The activities themselves are great for K-12 students. However, if you
look at the design from an instructional design standpoint, it is great as a model for you as a teacher to
start to figure out how you can take your knowledge that you have in your head and put it into a book.
Then you can publish for free. It is very systematic: they have a brief challenge here, they have a list of
supplies, they have some short clips where you can see examples, they have some learning outcomes
and a video by a man that helps make this stuff clear. And that is the whole chapter – it is two pages. So
now if we take this and think of it: say you are working with a physics teacher, and you can see how
rather than giving a syllabi or a one sheet Word document, making something like this makes it much
more exciting for students and it’s a live document that could be changed all the time.
Paula: Tabitha, do you want to unmute yourself.
Tabitha: I was just going to say that as he said to try this stuff out: coming from a teacher at a virtual
school, I think anyone can learn to use technology. I teach parents, grandparents, students, and
teachers all the time to use the online curriculum, online books, different blackboards and different
things so practice with it a little bit and you can use it. Kids love technology. They love it.
Dan: I was just going to say that this is another activity that I did. The cool thing about it is that it is a
challenge you can do as adults when you want to team-build. You know the activity: you are blindfolded
and you fall back to be caught. This is more creative than that, and the fun thing is that I would take the
pictures of my kids doing these activates and put them in the book and the kids would freak out that
they were in a book that Mr. Pollitt made for them. That is taking something that is abstract, like
physics, and making it personal with their own faces and with their own activities inside of them. So
Tabitha is right, if you did that it can just be an incredible experience.
Paula: Yeah, that is a fabulous idea, making it really personal for the people that are using it, very
engaging. So I think we might be preaching to the choir on how we can all use technology because the
people that are on and will be listening are our survey facilitators for online learning so they do use
online learning quite a bit. Thank you very much everyone, all three of you guys for joining us on this,
and the participants for joining as well. If you would like to stay on for a bit longer, I will go over some
of the teacher surveys. Right now, just want to tell you that you are invited to the next survey
facilitators webinar, webinar #3, Universal Design for Learning and the Online Class by Skip Stahl. I
noticed that Dan used a lot of Universal Design for Learning principles within his teaching because
universal design is basically just good teaching. So if you want to stay on, that’s great, if you can’t that’s
great: you can always watch it again. It will be on the archive. Dan, Tabitha, and Heather, wonderful
presentation, we really appreciate everything you have done for us today.
Dan: Thank you so much for having me, I’m going to teach my methods class. Thank you, I appreciate it.
Paula: Thank you, Dan.
Heather: Thank you, Paula.
Heather: I am actually going to stay on because I want to see what the results are.
Paula: Great, for those of you staying on, please everyone unmute yourself and feel free to chat with us
because there are not very many of us so we can go ahead and talk. The teacher survey findings closed
at the end of December, so in the beginning of January we started analyzing the data. Here are our
initial findings. We have 298 responses from across the nation. The teachers represented special
education and general ed. in various content areas. Most of the teachers that responded spent 76-100%
of the time teaching online. That’s 44% of the respondents. Most of them teach in a fully online
environment, that’s 53% of the respondents. And most of them also teach in high school. So the
category of disability most often served online was specific disabilities. 60% reported having students
with specific learning disabilities in their class. Autism: 52% of teachers reported serving these students.
Emotionally disturbed: 52% reported serving theses students. The categories least often served online:
deaf-blindness (2%) and deaf (6%). I don’t have it on the slide, but visual impairments were also low,
and I believe that could choose any of these category groups listed as the least often served. Most
teachers feel that they have a high level of knowledge of teaching their students with disabilities online.
They feel well prepared to teach the students with disabilities online and they are satisfied in teaching
students with disabilities in an online environment. They also feel they have enough administrative
support and they plan on continuing online teaching for at least the next two years. So these are all
pretty good findings. Does anyone have anything to say about this? Is this what you would have
expected so far? The biggest challenges that were reported by teachers were accommodating for
disabilities online and the district’s technology infrastructure seemed to cause a challenge for teachers
as well. Related services that districts do provide are speech language pathology:43% of the teachers
say their district provides that; occupational therapy: 23% of the teachers reported that. Then physical
therapy and the other were minimally reported as being provided by their district. So the question was
“What considerations did teachers think their districts consider when enrolling students with disabilities
in an online setting?” Health needs were one of the top priorities, parent preferences was another one
of the considerations their districts considered and that it is easier in online learning. Teachers believe
the districts consider when enrolling students with disabilities online. Most of the teachers didn’t know
what information they are required to provide to parents of students with disabilities, or they reported
their district didn’t have a specific requirement of what they have to provide to parents of students with
disabilities. And that is the end of the slideshow.