A Guide to Documenting Learning

by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

  The act of documenting and creating artifacts naturally lends itself to making documentation shareable. What was once invisible becomes visible and allows moments in time to be captured, replayed, organized, archived, and retrieved. It also aids in making meaning and deepening meaning.

  When documenting learning with a sharing perspective in mind, consider incorporating the following:

  Keep the sharing short and summarize or highlight the salient points. For example: Do not share hours of recorded video clips; instead, share short snippets that capture the thinking and learning in focus.

  Consider creating infographics to explain data and thinking about that data.

  Have an audience in mind who will be receiving or viewing the shared artifacts and anticipate potential questions, points of interests, and necessary clarifications.

  Determine the media platforms and tools that best aid in sharing the learning-thinking artifacts.

  Be conscious of privacy concerns when sharing personal or other learners’ artifacts.

  Be globally aware and culturally sensitive when sharing artifacts with the world.

  Making Learning and Thinking Amplified

  When sharing thinking and learning beyond an audience of one, a sharer becomes acutely aware of the impact his or her artifacts can have on a larger audience. Therefore, the act of amplifying needs to be purposeful as well.

  Amplifying personal or group learning-thinking is similar to a speaker’s voice is amplified and reaches a larger audience, especially when the learners are strategic about using social media to reach the desired audience. Learners who want to gain knowledge and deeper understanding from those with whom they share find amplifying to be enriching and enlightening. It encourages active participation in globally connected communities of learners, professional educational conversations, and communication among thought leaders.

  Transformational thinking and learning are positively affected through amplification because learners meaningfully interact with others while their learning is still taking place. Collaborating via amplification with experts from around the world provides evidence of its worthiness when witnessing the interactions students have with those who, in the not too distant past, where unreachable.

  For example, a fifth-grade class was about to study the American Revolution. Their teacher wanted them to experience a learning opportunity beyond the pages of their textbooks and her own expertise. With Silvia’s assistance, the class posted a collaboration want ad on her Langwitches Blog and tweeted her professional learning network asking for interested experts, teachers, and classrooms who would like to work with the students and provide varying perspectives concerning this time period in American history.

  QR Code 1.1 Scan this QR code to read the Wanted: Collaboration Partner for American Revolution blog post.

  http://langwitches.me/americanrevolution

  It did not take long before receiving inquiries and comments from experts, colleagues, and peers who were eager to connect and share with the class. Due to the want ad amplification, the class was able to skype and learn from:

  Travis Bowman, a sixth-generation descendant of Peter Francisco, a famous American patriot and soldier in the American Revolutionary War, who authored a historical novel about Francisco’s life titled Hercules of the Revolution.

  Richard Byrnes, a previous high school history teacher and well-known creator of the FreeTechnology4Teachers website.

  While local interactions with peers and colleagues within school and district learning communities cannot be underestimated, it is imperative that educators realize the power of participating in a living, breathing learning culture that amplifies to reach a global audience using social media platforms and tools. Documenting that includes amplification embraces and encourages modern forms of learning that accesses expertise, receives meaningful feedback, and connects beyond the limitations of zip codes and language barriers. When learners become acutely aware of how their learning grows due to amplification, it transforms their pre-planning for how to best amplify learning and thinking.

  When learners become acutely aware of how their learning grows due to amplification, it transforms their pre-planning for how to best amplify learning and thinking.

  Amplifying learning often brings unexpected and memorable surprises. For example, fourth graders created book trailers for fiction books they had read. They published the trailers via their student blogs by embedding their book-recommendation videos. The author of one of the recommend books received a Google alert that someone had posted something about her literary work. She was able to locate the specific student’s blog and video trailer about her book. She contacted the student’s teacher to see if she could use the book trailer on her own website. The teacher, knowing an incredible opportunity to continue the amplification was possible, asked the author if she would be willing to skype with her class to talk about being a professional writer and share her thought process when she wrote the recommended book. The author accepted without hesitation. Based on the actions of sharing the online book review and someone else unrelated to the class amplifying the student’s recommendation, an extended amplification learning opportunity now benefited the entire class and author.

  QR Code 1.2 Scan this QR code to read Framing a Skype Learning Experience.

  http://langwitches.me/learning-experience

  Sharing learning-thinking strategically online creates greater degrees of amplification—both expressively and receptively. Here are a few amplification considerations:

  Digitize an artifact. Digitizing allows learners to be able to share their artifacts online. Digitizing is the act of converting images or sound into a digital format. When the digital content is uploaded, sharing and amplification have begun. An audience—beyond one or a few who are physically present—who view and/or hear what the documentation artifacts are conveying allows thinking and learning connections to be enhanced.

  Consider different media. Choosing to produce evidence of learning using a variety of media and social media applications allows online audiences to read, look at, watch, and listen to learners’ artifacts in multiple forms. Amplification happens when learners purposefully and strategically go beyond traditional media, which primarily has been text-based, to embrace different media forms, including the mixing of mediums to create new forms.

  Extend learning opportunities. Amplification can extend the learning time beyond a traditional school day or professional development hours. It is designed so the learners’ reach is 24/7 accessible. Traditionally, the only expert in the room was the teacher. Magical learning moments happen when teachers see themselves as learners and allow students to express their current knowledge—both accurate and inaccurate, plus pose inquiry questions that invite peers, experts, and eyewitnesses globally to interact with them and their documentation artifacts.

  Extend the reach. Until recently learners have not had a reach beyond their personal scope of families, friends, teachers, professors, and classmates. Today, extending one’s reach is multifaceted. For example, an extended reach happens when a blog post is uploaded, cross-posted, and linked strategically to others using social media, such as Twitter. By using strategic social networking, connections, collaborations, and dissemination paths can be immediately beneficial to learners. Disclaimer: Oftentimes the act of uploading content online is not enough to successfully extend the reach. The student or teacher must participate in building and interacting with professional learning networks (or know someone who does) to alert, contact, and disseminate the documentation.

  Connect with a global audience. Learners’ reach can be considered amplified when artifacts are created or uploaded in a password-protected environment (e.g., accessible only to classmates, colleagues, or limited community members). A broader amplification happens when artifacts and inquiries are sent out to the world. A global audience affords students to hear and learn from differing perspectives, viewpoints, and obtain resources that are unavailable wh
en confined to a controlled local audience. Understandably, when learners are permitted to share and amplify globally, it comes with responsibilities for both students and teachers.

  Have your voice heard. Making a difference in the world is possible through amplification and reaching a global audience. Even children as young as four and five years, with the help of their parents or teachers, are finding their voice and being heard. More and more children are being asked to be keynote speakers at educational and business conferences. This is because the traditional limitations of age, physical capabilities, and financial limitations are melting away due to the access that social media and network connections allow. Amplification is a learning strategy that allows student and teacher voices to be heard. It is a powerful realization that anyone, young or old, has something valuable to share with the world. For example, search for either of these hashtags and explore the amplification taking place: #kidscanteachtoo, #studentvoice.

  Summing Up

  Teachers must see themselves as active learners—both in the classroom alongside their student-learners and professionally with their colleagues. When all learners are provided ample documenting opportunities to transfer their learning and understanding from within a content area, one content area to another, one class or course to another, and one year to the next, their understanding of how they learn and what they are learning is purposeful and meaningful. Making meaning emerges and evolves naturally when documenting opportunities requires ownership of one’s learning actions. This is because the act of documenting the learning is occurring while the learning is taking place, not as a result of it.

  Being cognizant of one’s strategic actions to capture, share, and amplify learning-thinking artifacts at specific moments in time, coupled with revisiting artifacts over time, are essential to the documenting learning framework.

  Going Beyond

  To amplify your reading beyond this book’s pages, we have created discussion questions and prompts for this chapter, which are located at www.documenting4learning.com. To extend your thinking, reactions, and responses, you can connect with other readers by leaving comments on individual chapter’s discussion posts on our documenting4learning blog.

  We also invite you to contribute and share your artifacts in other social media spaces to connect with and learn from other readers around the world using the #documenting4learning hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram; or by mentioning @documenting4learning on Facebook and Instagram, and @doc4learning on Twitter.

  2 Documenting Learning and the Now Literacies

  Let us make our future now, and let us make our dreams tomorrow’s reality.

  —Malala Yousafza

  To provide learners with a deeper understanding of how documenting learning benefits their awareness, skills, and routines, they must be cognizant of and continually improve their now literacies:

  Basic literacy: reading, writing, listening, speaking

  Media literacy

  Digital citizenship

  Global literacy

  Information literacy

  Network literacy

  Now does not imply preparing for the future because the future is here. It is now (see Image 2.1).

  Relationship Between Documenting Learning and Now Literacies

  The point of a formal or informal education is to become literate—the ability to read, write, and communicate thoughts and ideas—regardless of chosen profession or passion. To be literate is to be a productive contributor to society.

  Basic Literacy

  How does documenting learning support and foster the development of basic literacy? Preparing for and creating documentation artifacts enable thoughts and ideas to move from one’s mental thinking to shareable thinking using text and images. Artifacts aid in visibly conveying connections of otherwise isolated thoughts, reflections, events, and projects, to create meaning making. Likewise, they provide learners with pattern-and-trend timelines that enable learners to describe, explain, illustrate, and interpret their learning journeys.

  Artifacts can involve various text types and purposes for both student and professional learning. Table 2.1 provides information concerning ten text types from a documenting perspective, including an example of each from Silvia’s blog posts.

  It is important to remember that the documenting process and creation of artifacts capture what oftentimes goes unnoticed. This is beneficial to learners as they are working toward becoming stronger readers, writers, listeners, speakers, and thinkers.

  Whether the learning process is taking place through passionate pursuits or required content, it is important for learners to realize they are

  becoming action researchers involving both active and reflective opportunities;

  engaging with connected learning communities to share their insights and discoveries; and

  gaining authentic feedback and new considerations related to current or future learning.

  Image 2.1

  For example, all three realizations are present when a middle school teacher strategically selects and annotates multimedia artifacts from her fourth period’s small-group teams focused on student voice when writing and conveying one’s ideas succinctly. Using the artifacts as evidence, she shares and amplifies her professional learning observations and realizations using her blog and Twitter. From her shared introspections coupled with the insights shared by others, she realizes that while she continues to encourage her students to improve their voice capabilities, she needs to make a few adjustments and improvements to her instruction and her students’ writing expectations.

  Media Literacy

  How does documenting learning authentically incorporate media literacy? Media literacy expresses an informed, critical understanding of the explicit and subliminal purposes and influences of mass media. It also includes the ability to understand and create visual messages. This now literacy enables learners to analyze, evaluate, and create messages using a wide variety of media modes, genres, and formats, including text, image, video, audio, or a mixture thereof. This literacy is also based on the premise that visual images can be read both for comprehension (making meaning) and inferencing (interpreting and negotiating meaning).

  Documenting is tightly connected to media literacy because the documentation process involves making the learning visible to the learner and to others. Therefore, documenting allows learners to see the learning in action, especially when engaging in the interpretation and analyzation of artifacts. Questions to pose while planning to capture media-based artifacts include:

  What will the learning look like?

  Will I recognize learning when I see it?

  How can one image or series of images represent that can’t be touched or easily seen?

  How can a video clip become evidence of a learning process?

  How can I become aware of, and on the lookout for, the absence of learning?

  Since documenting is about capturing the invisible and making it visible to oneself and others, the process over time points out learning patterns, trends, and unconscious points that are often missed. Wien, Guyevskey, and Berdoussis (2011) state that

  Graphic design principles and processes are important to pedagogical documentation, along with an understanding of visual literacy—how the human eye reads images and how people interpret those images. Also helpful is an awareness of the ways that combining text and image, or text and audio, or video and still image can convey information effectively. A grasp of how digital technologies can be used in visual design may also be applied to documentation.

  Given their points:

  How could I make learning and thinking visible?

  How can I capture a potential absence of learning?

  How can the contributing invisible factors be captured and made visible (e.g., motivation, engagement, trust, curiosity)?

  How could a process over time be captured in strategic short clips or images?

  What media are best suited to communicate and convey
my message?

  What techniques for capturing media will I incorporate?

  How can I mix media to best communicate evidence of learning?

  Media literacy is not only about reading, writing, and creating media. It is equally about interpreting, analyzing, evaluating, and make meaning of the media:

  Do the media I captured demonstrate evidence of, or lack of, learning?

  What media can be shared (considering digital citizenship)?

  Which media will help convey my message?

  How do I connect related or contrast captured media?

  What media do I keep? What media get cut/deleted?

  How will I need to edit the media to make it appealing to my viewing audience?

  How does the captured media influence how I will express what was experienced?

  Did what was captured inform me about what I need to look for or pay attention to next?

  It is important to document to aid one’s own learning, but when sharing learning strategically with others, it creates a new dimension. Preparing documentation media to share and communicate a message requires technology capabilities and considering how the sharing will aid in one’s learning process:

  Why would I share this learning documentation?

  What message do I want to share with my potential audience?

  How do I best present my documentation to receive feedback about my learning and current understanding?

  How do I prepare the media to make them easily sharable?

  What types of media are best suited for specific platforms of dissemination?

  How should I disseminate the created media to best share and amplify them with my intended audience?