Growth Mindset CanvasLIVE

Here’s the Growth Mindset Slidedeck for the CanvasLIVE presentation, with notes and links below, and I’ve also embedded the YouTube video of the event. 🙂

Here are the slides with notes:

Slide 1. Welcome Slide.

Slide 2. Title Slide.

Slide 3. Connected Learning… with Cats.
You can find the complete series here at this blog: Connected Learning with Cats. I’ve got four more events scheduled after this one: Javascripts, YouTube Playlists, Free Online Books, and Pinterest/Flickr. Let me know what other topics would be of interest!

Slide 4. Five Key Mindset Concepts.
In Part A of the presentation, I’ll describe my approach to the growth mindset concept with these five key ideas.

Slide 5. Carol Dweck: Mindset.
I recommend Carol Dweck’s book Mindset very highly, and you can also find some excellent Carol Dweck videos along with articles and interviews online. She is extremely good at speaking to a wide range of audiences: teachers, parents, and learners of all kinds.

Slide 6. Five Design Strategies.
In Part B, I’ll explain how I use growth mindset ideas when I design my courses.

Slide 7. Five Tools at the Website.
In the final part of the presentation, I’ll provide an overview of some helpful tools I am using to build a new open Canvas course resource: Exploring Growth Mindset which has this simple URL: Mindset.LauraGibbs.net.

PART A: FIVE KEY MINDSET CONCEPTS

Slide 8. Five Key Mindset Concepts.
I approach the growth mindset concept from different angles: Aim High — Explore — Work Hard — Improve — Enjoy. You might decide to break down the mindset concept differently for your students; this is what I have found works best for me!

Slide 9. 1. Aim High.
This area involves setting realistic personal goals, along with being willing to take risks to achieve those goals, and persevering. One thing I find really helpful is to get students focused on moving forward; don’t try to retrace your steps, but just keep on looking ahead to figure out what to do next! There are articles and more resources here.

Slide 10. 2. Explore.
This is probably my personal favorite among the growth mindset domains: curiosity and creativity. This is also where I locate research on neuroplasticity and the fact that as you learn, you are literally growing new connections in your brain. Given that many of my students are future medical professionals, this is definitely something I like to emphasize in the growth mindset approach. There are articles and more resources here.

Slide 11. 3. Work.
Side by side with open-ended exploration is the need to stay focused, work hard, and be patient as you put in all the practice that is required to learn new skills. I teach writing, so practice is a huge part of that process, and patience is definitely required! LOTS of patience. There are articles and more resources here.

Slide 12. 4. Improve.
As a teacher, there is where I put in the most effort: students need detailed, helpful, timely feedback in order to learn from their mistakes. I also urge the students to do a lot of self-reflection and to see themselves as learners beyond the scope of the course: my biggest goal is to help them become self-determined learners for life! There are articles and more resources here.

Slide 13. 5. Enjoy.
By fun and enjoyment, I have in mind the joy of learning itself, along with connecting and sharing with others. Plus, it’s important to take care of yourself: learning is hard work, so you need to make sure you take time to relax. You can’t afford to neglect health or happiness if you want to succeed over the long run! There are articles and more resources here.

PART B: FIVE DESIGN STRATEGIES.

Slide 14. Five Design Strategies.
These are strategies that work in my classes, and I am guessing they can be generalized to other classes as well: Teach about Mindset — Reinforce Daily — Create Challenges — Focus on Feedback — Be a Co-Learner.

Slide 15. 1. Teach about Mindset.
I start the semester with a growth mindset activity in the first week of class: Week 1 Growth MindsetThis TED talk by Carol Dweck is one good way to get started, and my students then share their thoughts and reactions in a blog post (my students all have their own blogs), although of course a discussion board could work also. Students usually have a lot to say on this topic!

Slide 16. 2. Reinforce Daily.
I use Growth Mindset Cats every day in my class announcements, and you can find out more about the daily announcements: CanvasLIVE on Blog-as Homepage. There are Growth Mindset Cats both in the body of the announcements and in the sidebar, along with random student quotes from their blog posts in the sidebar as well.

Slide 17. 3. Create Challenges.
Students can complete weekly growth mindset challenges of their choice; developing new kinds of challenges is one of my goals for this summer. In addition, as students work on their writing, I pose that process in the form of  writing challenges. For those of you who teach writing, I have found this to be really successful: it helps students remember that learning how to write is a long-term growth process, and it also encourages them to set goals for themselves as part of that long-term process.

Slide 18. 4. Focus on Feedback.
I am constantly trying to improve my own feedback practices, while helping students understand both giving and receiving feedback. This is where I spend the largest chunk of my time as a teacher, and I try really hard to couch my feedback to the students in terms of growth mindset concepts.

Slide 19. #TTOG Teachers Throwing Out Grades.
I also have to say something here about the need to stop punitive grading if we want students to trust us that learning from mistakes is really okay. If it’s really okay, we have to stop penalizing for mistakes and instead focus on recognition of learning progress. You can read about how I’ve tried to do that in my classes here: all-feedback-no-grades.

Slide 20. 5. Be a Co-Learner.
Probably the thing I like best about growth mindset is that I am constantly working on my mindset, side by side with my students. We are COLEARNERS. Admittedly, our goals are different (I’m trying to learn how to become a better teacher; they are learning how to become better writers)… but growth mindset allows us to see those different goals as part of a shared growth process.

PART A: FIVE CANVAS-FRIENDLY TOOLS.

Slide 21. Five Canvas-Friendly Tools.
I’ll finish up with a quick overview of my new Canvas course resource site: Exploring Growth Mindset. My goal is for this site to have a continuous stream of new content automatically. I am not going to have time to update it when the school year begins, so I need it to update based on my normal web activities which is based on using these tools.

Slide 22. 1. Flickr & Pinterest.
As I create new mindset cats, I add them to my albums at Flickr and at PinterestBoth of these tools are easy to embed inside a Canvas course, and I’ll be doing a CanvasLIVE presentation later this summer about using Flickr and Pinterest in Canvas: Beautiful Curation: Pinterest and Flickr in Canvas.

Slide 23. 2. Diigo Bookmarks.
As I find new resources, I bookmark them with Diigo, and they then appear automatically in Canvas. My current focus is transcribing infographics. To get the Diigo bookmarks to appear in Canvas, I use an RSS tool called Inoreader; if that is something you are interested in, get in touch with me, and I will be glad to share details about how that works.

Slide 24. 3. Twitter.
I have a dedicated Twitter account, @MindsetPlay, that I use just for growth mindset and related materials. You can see the live feed inside the Canvas course, and I did a CanvasLIVE that explains how to use real Twitter widgets this way inside a Canvas course: Twitter4Canvas CanvasLIVE.

Slide 25. 4. YouTube.
I have a YouTube playlist of growth mindset videos. Please send me suggestions of videos you find useful in teaching about growth mindset with your students! There’s a Feedback form at the site you can use for that. Also, I have a CanvasLIVE about YouTube Playlists coming up this summer: Amplify YouTube with Playlists.

Slide 26. 5. Padlet.
I am really excited about using Padlet to collect and share thoughts from my students about their growth mindset experiences. I find their ideas to be really inspiring! You can read more in my Canvas Community blog about Padlet and my Padlet Randomizer. I’ll be doing a CanvasLIVE on javascript randomizers like this: Laura’s Widget Warehouse: Canvas-Friendly Javascripts.

Slide 27. A recap….

Slide 28. Five Key Mindset Concepts.

Slide 29. Five Design Strategies.

Slide 30. Five Canvas-Friendly Tools

Slide 31. Let’s connect!
And I’m glad to discuss and brainstorm about any and all of those things! You can reach me at Twitter: @OnlineCrsLady and at the Canvas Community where I’m now blogging regularly.

Slide 32. Get Involved…

 

 

CanvasLIVE: Planning the Mindset Cats

Beware: brain dump! These are notes… but I am happy with how it turned out. 🙂

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So, I need to start thinking about a way to go with the actual CanvasLIVE presentation proposal. It looks like I’ve got two more-or-less separate tracks to follow: Mindset Cats and Twitter4Canvas. I’ll sketch them both out, and then list the components I have ready to go, along with components I still need to document to fill in the gaps.

For today, I’ll focus on the Growth Mindset one; I’ll do Twitter4Canvas tomorrow.

Growth Mindset / Feedback Cats: This is one that would start from a more pedagogical perspective, following up on Janie’s Feedback presentation. I’d like to do what she did, going from the teaching philosophy/strategy and then to the technology. My goal is a 15-minute presentation. So, that would be maybe 5 minutes on the role of growth mindset / feedback in teaching and learning, and then maybe 10 minutes on strategies for using cats and other motivational memes to weave that content into the online course environment.

Some kind of quick 1-minute introduction followed by:

TEACHING (total of 4 minutes): Growth mindset shifts the focus away from teacher-awarded grades to student-driven learning.

Growth Mindset / Feedback: 2 minutes. I need to series of cats to demonstrate the main themes. I have lots of cats; just have to choose key themes. These slides can go quickly; I’ll reduce each main them to a single word or short phrase — and I’m creating new feedback cats as my focus this semester:


Student Voices: 1 minute
. These would be key quotes from student blog posts that I will read. I can get quotes student blog posts via their Mindset stream as they write about and explore growth mindset in class (I learn so much from reading their posts). I need to do a Canvas page that has that blog post stream in; works same as at wiki page where I feature growth mindset student blog stream, as in screenshot here:


Growth versus Grading: 1 minute
. Quick statement about all-feedback-no-grading approach. I’ve collected grading materials at Grading.MythFolklore.net, including page of quotes from students re: both grading and curiosity), so I would select key quotes to read.

Some kind of quick 1-minute transition into next section:

TECHNOLOGY (total of 8 minutes). So, once you’ve decided to weave growth mindset into a course, how do you want to do it? Growth mindset is not just content to cover on a given day of the class; instead, it’s about how you approach the design of the class, and it’s also about how you help the students reflect on their own assumptions and take charge of their own learning. For growth mindset to be effective, it needs to be a persistent, recurring feature of the class.

Sharing Cats Out to Students

1. Announcements: 1 minute. New cat every day. Myth.MythFolklore.net. And I’ve already written up how to do blog for announcements in Canvas. What I want to talk about here is power of daily class announcements as way to both remind students about deadlines, etc., and also to reinforce the goals and strategies of the class itself. I value growth mindset, and I show that every day by including a cat. Students can subscribe to the blog by email; snag screenshot of how the cat looks in the email.

2. Random Cats: 1 minute. I have a randomizing widget in the sidebar of the announcements: Myth.MythFolklore.net. This means that in addition to the cat of the day, there is a new cat every time students log on to Canvas course; no scrolling – I put it up near the top! Say something about power of random to continually surface material, provide something new, etc. – lots of randomizing widgets in my blogs and also at Widget Warehouse.

3. Widgets-in-Canvas: 2 minutes. You can also embed randomizing Growth Mindset Cats widget in any Canvas page, integrated with other types of Canvas content. I should mock up a page so there could be a random cat page that can go at open or close of any Canvas module… and explain that my widgets are ready to go and use; if there is interest I would be glad to demo how to use RotateContent.com to create widgets like this – no programming required.

Prompting Students to Reflect, Write, and Share

This is obviously the important part: getting students to engage with the mindset materials, experiment, apply them, share what they learn, etc.

4. Discussion Board: 2 minutes. You can use random cats or cats of the day as Discussion Board prompts; I tested to make sure it works – it does! Details. I use blogs instead of discussion boards, but same idea applies of course: students need space to write and share what they write with others. They can also create their own cats, their own memes, etc. (Tech Tips for students). Basically all of my blog-based challenge assignments and tech tips can be repurposed as Discussion Board prompts for people relying on that space for student sharing:

5. More Resources-as-Prompts: 2 minutes. In addition to randomizers, you can also use blog streams and also Diigo bookmark streams to share content with students for them to reflect on as part of their chosen growth mindset challenges that students could write about and share at Discussion Boards (my students do that in their blogs, but it’s the same idea). Here is how you could do those kinds of prompts in Canvas:

Blog. For example, I have a blog stream for my new Feedback Cats; new blog posts show up automatically in Canvas page:


Diigo. I also have a stream of new articles at Diigo that I have bookmarked and annotated for the students to use:

Videos. Plus, it’s easy to embed a YouTube playlist in Canvas, and you can keep the content fresh by recycling, just bumping up a video from bottom of list to the top every day or as often as you want. (I need to write up instructions on how to embed video playlist in Canvas; emphasize advantages of playlist over single videos).

Quick 1-minute conclusion to review and point to Slidedeck online plus single page with all the links mentioned here.

Okay, that’s a rough sketch, and I think it is fitting together pretty well. Now I am excited! 🙂

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

Friday… and what a great week!

What a long week, but it was soooo productive! I’m going to write up a kind of highlights of this week here just to remind myself of why I am so tired (TGIF: Thank the Goddess It’s Frigg’s-Day), but also why it was such a good week!

1. Google Sites. First and foremost, my students started publishing their project websites. There will be a lot more this weekend, but I had 8 sites go up (Myth-Folklore, Indian Epics), and I was so relieved: the new Google Sites seems to be working great! I’ve been using the old Google Sites since 2010, but I’ll be the first to admit that the old Google Sites was kind of clunky and weird. In particular, the navigation options, while good, were very hard to configure. In the new Google Sites, everything is streamlined; it’s not really my style of web publishing (no access to the HTML at all now), but for my students, I was guessing it would be better than the old Sites… and so far, so good! I put up just one simple page of instructions, and based on that, the students published these sites without asking me a single question about anything! Probably 30 more sites will go up this weekend, so I’m hoping they will all go just as smoothly, and look just as nice, as the ones so far. Check out The Tales of Pegasus: Seeking Love! Nice!

2. Twitter4Canvas. I made a breakthrough with the Twitter4Canvas, figuring out how to share not just a Twitter widget but an entire configured page. I was thinking that it really would be great if all the faculty in the Ed School were promoting @OklaEd chat with all their students, and offering a fully ready-to-go Canvas Page might be the way to do that, so here’s what I came up with: Twitter Widget Ready-to-Use: @OklaEd. I need to document the steps this weekend, because the real goal is not for me to build these pages, but for other people to build and share pages this way. I’m really starting to see this Twitter project as a serious form of distributed content; now I just need to find some people at my school willing to experiment on it with me. I will shamelessly start contacting people by email over the coming weeks to see who’s interested! The selling point is that we are going all-Canvas next Fall, so now is really the time to develop plans like this, test them, and then be ready to promote them heavily with the full Fall roll-out. Fingers crossed.

3. Feedback and Growth Mindset. I watched a CanvasLIVE video that really got me excited about developing more of my growth mindset and feedback materials, especially using distributed approaches like javascript widgets. Here is the video and my thoughts: CanvasLIVE with Janie Ruddy: Feedback!

4. Brainstorms. I also brainstormed all the topics I would eventually like to share through the CanvasLIVE program: Brainstorming. This is going to keep me busy for months, ha ha. But that’s good. When I shared this with my supervisor in the College of Arts & Sciences (I don’t have an academic department; instead, I am employed by the Dean’s Office to teach Gen. Ed. courses online), she was really supportive and enthusiastic, so that made me feel good too. She’s known me since I first started teaching online, and so she can appreciate what an opportunity Canvas has given me: I’ve always wanted to share more of my work with others, but I know most faculty are not going to want to have their own websites and blogs; they want to work in the LMS. Now, with Canvas, I can share my work in ways that integrate with the LMS, making it truly useful to other faculty at my school. I’ve been using widgets and such for over 10 years and now, finally, I have ways to “show and tell” … and I’m just as excited as a little kid in kindergarten on “show and tell” day!

5. Twitter. I really enjoy Twitter as a way to collect and share content with my classes, but this week Twitter AS THERAPY was amazing. From #DressLikeAWoman to #ActualLivingScientist to #ShePersisted, I was so glad and even proud to be a user of Twitter this week, and I look forward to more Twitter consciousness-raising hashtags in the future. Two things I really value: humor AND social justice. We are going to need lots of both in the months to come.

Finally, I also got around to watching For the Love of Spock (free at Netflix!). I cannot hope to find words for how much this film moved me; Spock was my best friend when I was growing up in the 1970s — we moved around a lot, and as a result I had attended 9 different schools by the time I graduated from high school in 1986; I was the “weird new kid” over and over, a friendless and freaky geek. Friendless, that is, except for Spock and my other imaginary Star Trek friends. So, even if you are not a Trekkie, this is a really lovely film…and if you are a Trekkie, it’s a must-watch. But get out your handkerchiefs, especially for the Burning Man scene at the end (you’ve been warned!).

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