Beyond Boundaries: Talking Web 2.0 Tools with Bill Sheskey

Laura Varlas

I'm on the phone with School District of Oconee County (S.C.)'s instructional technology specialist Bill Sheskey, and he's giving me the rundown of some of the Web 2.0 tools he'll be discussing in his ASCD Annual Conference session, "Using Web 2.0 Tools for Authentic Assessments." In his own words, here's Sheskey's short list of tools:

• Google for Educators is a tremendous resource for document sharing and presentation sharing.
• Jottit is a very simple Web application where a student [can turn] in a writing assignment [by creating] a Web site, and they can turn it in virtually to the teacher online with just a simple URL. They don't have to register, and there are no ads on it.
• Photo Story is a digital slideshow program that lets you edit your images and add narration and original music.
• Picnik is an image editing program that takes all of the cool, fun stuff from Photoshop and makes it easy enough for a 2nd grader. It's probably one of the most popular sites that we use with teachers.
• SlideBoom only takes knowledge of PowerPoint, and it's very simple to upload. Students can create a password to keep it private. That's the other thing that we emphasize as we review these sites—that they've got to be secure. (He adds that Google Groups is off-limits because it hyperlinks to groups inappropriate for K–12 students.)
• TeacherTube uses the YouTube format but isn't blocked at most schools like YouTube. TeacherTube's got a privacy setting where if you just want to have a video and just show it to your class, you can upload it and it goes into their server but doesn't generate a public URL or embedding code.
• WikiSpaces is a collaborative Web space that a teacher can set up to [create] secure sites for students to work, collaboratively or independently, on writing and multimedia assignments.

Throughout our conversation, Sheskey emphasizes the simplicity and accessibility of Web 2.0 tools. "Teachers don't have to purchase software," he says. "In most cases, they just need an Internet connection, and a lot of these applications, especially the writing sites, work with dial-up. We're in a rural area and probably 50 percent of our students still, if they have a computer at home, are not operating on a high-speed connection."

Photoshop's No Picnik

Sheskey says teachers are using Web 2.0 tools to bring images, text, and audio together to create formative assessments of learning that harness multiple content areas and learning styles. It seems pretty straightforward to me that Web 2.0 would make writing assessments easier (and save paper!), but I'm curious how images are used in assessments.

"OK, here's an example," starts Sheskey. "A student takes a photograph of a lab setup in science, and they can go to Picnik and put the photo in there and put labels on it. You can type text right onto the picture, and Picnik saves it in a .jpeg format or whatever you want. Or in art class, students can very simply build their art portfolio and use Picnik to label the pictures. And then you can do all the standard editing of the picture—exposure and contrast and highlighting and all the cool stuff that's in Photoshop."

"That's good," I say, "because Photoshop's a little bit intimidating." He laughs. "You know, I can handle fairly complex software and I have taken two Photoshop courses trying to teach myself how to be better at it, and I don't use it. It's just too complex. It's for professional photographers. We've got all our newspaper classes using Picnik, too.”

Rousseau in the 2nd Grade

Sheskey enthuses about another example of using Web 2.0 to combine words and images to create an authentic assessment. "Our 2nd graders were doing [Henri] Rousseau-style paintings—a combination of papier-mâché and watercolor," he says. "And we wanted the kids to write descriptively about what they were painting, and with 2nd graders, just asking them to write about their work—that's not enough of a prompt. Plus, you've got young students at all different levels of writing ability.

"So, we asked students to pretend they were writing a postcard to their mom or guardian, describing the animals they painted. The art teacher took photos of each student's painting, and the students edited their paintings in Picnik. They wrote descriptive postcards about their art but also used Audacity (an audio editing tool) to record their descriptions. This helps kids use words they might not yet be able to write." The audio editor that comes with Windows XP "works just as well, for the needs teachers have," Sheskey adds. 

He continues, "So, we've got the Picnik image of their painting and the audio description, and now they put it into Photo Story and build a digital story out of that. All together, you've got a writing assessment, an art assessment, and then the culminating presentation of the two in Photo Story."

Trash Can Math

"What about Web 2.0 assessments in subjects like science and math?" I ask.

"In math, we've got students using images to show how they write out a problem, taking photos and doing drawings of math manipulatives that go with the problem that they're solving," Sheskey says. "And just like the 2nd graders with their Rousseau postcards, math students can take their images and write a description of how they solved a problem, record it, and put it together in Photo Story.

"A geometry teacher did a lesson she called trash-can math—taking photos of trash cans overloaded with objects. Students had to measure the angles of all the stuff sticking out of the trash cans and graph their measurements."

Weeding Through Web 2.0

My next question: "So, how do you know what Web 2.0 tools are going to add value—just trial and error?"

"A lot of Web 2.0 stuff just comes from young programmers showing off their skills, hoping that Google or some big company will buy their application," Sheskey says. "A lot of what's out there is junk, and part of my job is spending some time every week at Go2Web2.0 (an online library of all the newest 2.0 tools) reviewing these sites for teachers. Teachers don't have time to weed through thousands of apps."

Sheskey continues, "Tech-savvy teachers are going to find their applications on their own and use them the way they want, and that's great. We learn a lot from them, too. But what about the kindergarten teacher who's three years away from retirement and she's just trying to hang on? She's still going to have students for three more years, though, and what about them? It's been a challenge, but ultimately fun, to move those teachers toward using these tools that students really relate to—and in the meantime, creating all this valuable, accessible student learning data."

"The key thing, Laura, that's important in my job," he continues, "is [that] we're using the Web 2.0 tools to stimulate writing, to improve science lab reports, to stimulate the students' brains to try harder on the math problem. My theme for this workshop is authentic assessment, but you can say it in a different way. It's giving students an opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned. And when students demonstrate that, the teacher is automatically evaluating them."

Laura Varlas is a project manager in the Newsletters & Special Publications Unit at ASCD. Bill Sheskey is the instructional technology specialist for Oconee County School District in Walhalla, S.C. He talked to us during his commute about his 2009 ASCD Annual Conference session, "Using Web 2.0 Tools for Authentic Assessments."