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summarization

Three Empowering Activities for Summarization

by Miguel Guhlin August 11, 2022

written by Miguel Guhlin

Want to know about an instructional strategy that yields powerful gains for students? It’s a surface learning strategy intended to introduce students to new information. The strategy is so common yet seldom taught to students: Summarization. In fact, I credit summarization with my ability to read and get information for content curation. Summarization (d=0.74) is a powerful strategy that empowers students. It works not only as a way for students to show they comprehend a text but also as a way to control their own learning.

The Benefits of Summarization

The act of summarizing can involve finding what’s worth keeping and getting rid of the rest. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Let’s take a look at three activities for summarization that began with paper and pencil but grew into digital activities. In each of the activities offered, you can read an available selection and then take action. I’ve discussed the use of digital annotation tools like Diigo in previous articles. These tools allow you to highlight the relevant or irrelevant in different colors. Doing this again and again can improve reading comprehension.

Activity #1: Summarize with Art and Speech

Explore how to use art and speech to summarize with three text selections. When considering summaries, they are often a collection of words. The truth is, we can summarize with both art and speech. This particular activity has you read a text. Then, you use a digital tool to create an artistic representation. Tools can include the following:

You’ve heard the latest brain research, right? It says that drawing something can help a person better remember it. This works no matter the age of the student or the content. The benefits of drawing do not rely on the student’s level of artistic talent. This suggests the strategy may work for all students, not only the ones who are able to draw well. Learn More!

Activity #2: Story Wheel

Need to practice sequencing skills, summarizing a story, visualizing story elements, or recognizing story structure? Then give the Story Wheel a try. A Google Docs template is available for you to take and use. Students will take these steps for the story spinner activity:

Choose the top three, five, or seven most important events in a story.
Write the story title and author’s name in an open area of the story wheel.
Illustrate a story event in each of the story wheel wedges; so that when the story wheel is completed, it makes a summary of the story.
A written explanation can be included in each of the story wheel wedges.
Be prepared to share the story wheel!

This approach works great with summaries of multimedia content, too. Give it a spin.

Activity #3: 3-2-1 Summary

Use a simple technique to capture ideas, ask questions, and summarize a text with 3-2-1. The 3-2-1 Summary is a comprehension strategy in which students identify three relevant ideas, two interesting facts, and formulate a question. You can combine this with audio recording tools to have students record their rationale for the 3-2-1.

Want to Learn More?

Want to learn more? Use the infographic below to kick off your exploration. Click here to make a copy!

August 11, 2022 0 comments

Good Teaching

Virtual Learning Strategy #2: Summarization

by Miguel Guhlin September 30, 2020

written by Miguel Guhlin

In “Virtual Learning Strategy #1: Classroom Discussion,” I highlighted a popular strategy for virtual teachers. Yet classroom discussion does not reign supreme. It is not the sole high-effect size instructional strategy teachers are relying on. In this blog entry, we’ll explore another strategy that has garnered attention for your distant learners.

Weston Kieschnick’s Blended Approach

In his approachable book, BOLD Schools, author Weston Kieschnick (@Wes_Kieschnick) lays out a simple plan that blends a high-effect size strategy with a digital tool. He emphasizes that adding too many tools or strategies can be confusing. Worse, it may have the opposite effect than what you intend, which is, as John Hattie puts it, to speed up student growth in one year.

Let’s explore some of the strategies and digital tools educators are using. Here’s a hint which strategy we’ll be focusing on:

summarization

Strategy #2: Summarization

The second most oft-mentioned strategy is summarization. I have adapted the description below from the Corwin Visible Learning Meta X database:

The ability to summarize a text is often taken as a marker of reading comprehension. For this reason, many scholars have advocated explicit summarization training. For students who struggle with comprehension, explicit summarization training is a recommended.

Summarization isn’t only about finding what’s worth keeping. It can also be about deleting unnecessary material, or material that is redundant.

The act of summarizing can involve substituting a subordinate term for a list of items. It can also have students selecting a topic sentence. Students may construct a topic sentence if one is only suggested in a text.

Summarization enjoys an effect size of 0.74, the same as reciprocal teaching. This makes it a powerful tool for teachers and even more powerful as a self-regulation strategy for students. Summarization allows students to control their own learning.

In a similar way, teachers can scaffold student metacognition. They need to reflect on their own work. Weston suggests asking practical questions, such as:

Which specific strategy will you leverage to meet goals?
What will you as the teacher be doing?
What will students be doing?

This boils down to a question Diane Sweeney poses: “What instructional practices will help students reach the goal?” Let’s take a stab at responding to these questions. Summarization is the second high-effect size strategy in use to meet academic goals.

Summarization for Virtual Learning

Summarization, a surface learning strategy, works great for introducing students to new learning and plays well with virtua learning tools such as Flipgrid. Here’s what teachers are saying about this digital tool:

“I plan on using FlipGrid. Students submit timed audio submissions of them synthesizing the info.”
“Students need a lot of practice with summary. I use summary and Flipgrid to empower students. Students can create a summary of a text. Then they critique the summaries of others to determine who had the best summary. It also gives students the benefit of hearing the information several times as well.”

Other resources that have drawn the attention of teachers include KAMI and Buncee. In this example, you can see that selecting text is one way to summarize.

“The HESIS I will use is Summarizing. I will use KAMI to present a text as it allows students to highlight key terms. I will have students share the key terms they highlighted. Then, they will discuss why they selected the terms they chose. As a continuation, students share their summaries aloud.

“I could use summarization. Then, I would ask students to use Buncee. They would use it to share their thoughts and notes over the topic,” says another teacher. As you may have noted in each of these responses, there is something missing. Teachers assumed, or chose not to state, what they would be doing.

Let’s revisit Weston’s questions:

Which specific strategy will you leverage to meet goals? Summarization is the strategy teachers above chose.
What will you as the teacher be doing? We’re not sure what the teacher will be doing to introduce summarization practices. This is something that they could clarify.
What will students be doing? Students will summarize or highlight content then share what they have done. Technology tools like Flipgrid, KAMI, Buncee play a key role.

Before we leave these questions, take a moment to reflect on these questions from a teacher and/or coach perspective.

In Their Shoes

How would you, as a teacher, clarify one of the teacher activities above? What instructional practices would you, as a coach, encourage teachers to use? Coaches, be sure to check out Diane Sweeney’s free ebook, Moves for Virtual Coaching.

Did You Know?

Get an introduction to core learning, high-effect size instructional strategies. Do that via TCEA’s Strategies That Work, Part 1: Core Components self-paced course. Take the mystery out of teaching and learning strategies. Available online now and get a year of access to content.

Other Digital Tools to Pair with Summarization

In Matching HES Strategies and Digital Tools, find other ed tech tools to pair with summarization. Here’s a quick list:

Digital Annotation Tools

Buncee
Diigo
Hypothesis
Kami
Now Comment

Highlight the Relevant/Irrelevant

Summarization works as a powerful, surface learning strategy. Combine it with a digital tool to move beyond paper and pencil activities and end up with greater engagement and retention.

September 30, 2020 0 comments

Good Teaching

Embrace Lifelong Learning, Or Else

by Miguel Guhlin July 9, 2019

written by Miguel Guhlin

Did you know that the World Economic Forum identifies five trends that everyone should know about? The Fourth Industrial Revolution has arrived, a tsunami of technology change. Embracing these five trends could prepare us for change. In this blog entry, we’ll explore one of the trends.

The Five Trends

Let’s review the trends, then reflect on them from an education perspective. The five trends the World Economic Forum identifies include the following:

Automation, robotization and digitization are coming. The problem is, they look different depending on what industry you are in.
Significant job disruption lies ahead. Displacing 75 million current jobs, machines and algorithms shift the division of work. That news aside, 133 million new job roles may emerge at the same time.
Big shifts between who does what. Currently, humans do 71% of the work. In 2022, that will shift to 58%. What has changed the division of labor? Machines (robots) or algorithms.
New work tasks push workers to learn new skills. Check out the chart below to see the shift.
Embrace lifelong learning, or else. Each of those replaced will need at least 101 days of retraining and “upskilling.” If you plan to be working between now and 2022, you have some learning to do.

What do these trends mean for us as educators? Here are my initial thoughts on that final trend: embracing lifelong learning.

Make It Real

Do you know what irks me about reports like these? They never quite turn out the way you expect. As someone who’s leaning into middle age, I’m reminded of Ms. Nelda Crabknee. At fifty-five years of age, Nelda didn’t want to learn exciting new teaching strategies. She’d seen it all before, and retraining seemed like so much hocus pocus. Instead, she decided to retire in a year.

For folks like Nelda, I ask myself, “How can we make lifelong learning real?” When teachers succumb to human nature, learning new stuff may lead to retirement.

One way to make it real involves relying on strategies that work. Human beings have not changed all that much. One thing is certain: We will still have to consume content to learn it. How do you make lifelong learning real? You learn how to engage with that content in ways that align to how our brains are wired with proven strategies.

Proven Strategies

You can’t solve problems if reading presents you with an insurmountable challenge. A 2018 research study found primary students push themselves to read difficult books. As they get older, that push weakens. Can you imagine them as adults? “Wait, we have to read that technical text on stationary robot operation?”

“Over eighty-five percent of the reading and writing we do as adults is nonfiction,” says Tony Stead. Consider that students will need to devour nonfiction writing to be future ready. There are four building blocks to improving reading comprehension and engagement. These building blocks assist students in ways that will not change in the future. Those blocks include:

Staying engaged. Working through complicated texts, manuals, and video tutorials can be tough. Students need to learn to look for different clues and ideas in what they read.
Improving literacy. In studying manuals, texts, and websites, students may skip words they don’t know. Instead, they need to be able to figure out what they mean.
Enhancing comprehension. Students must be able to do more than decode text. They have to understand what they are reading.

And one final building block that ties into the World Economic Forum’s trend number five. That block is being able to learn on their own or in group. Many of our students struggle alone, trying to figure out how to learn on their own. Yet learning is social. Knowing how to learn as part of a team prepares them for the future. Let’s take a look at some strategies that may help our children get there.

Strategy #1: Summarization

“Your daughter has trouble with summarization,” the teacher told us. She said it in a much kinder tone and used my daughter’s name. As for myself, I was a bit at a loss. I had noticed my daughter tended to repeat everything that had happened.

Summarization involves identifying the main idea and most important facts. For me, outlining text was a great way to capture those ideas. I switched to concept maps in high school when a teacher modeled it for me. It became my go-to strategy.

If you know John Hattie’s work, you know that summarization has an effect size of .79. Since the hinge point for student growth is .40, which is a year’s normal growth, .79 is significant. It’s almost two year’s of a student’s normal growth in half the time. How do you teach summarization? There are many strategies. One of my concerns, as Tony Stead points out in his book Is That a Fact?, remains the focus on storytelling. I assure you that the work of tomorrow will require comprehension of nonfiction.

For students, summarizing can be straightforward. They can learn to circle the main idea, underline details, and use sentence starters to summarize.

Sentence Starters

Some sentence starters you can introduce students to include the following by category:

Summarizing a Process might involve one of these:

The first step to solving___is to…
When solving for _, first __, then ___, and finally .
To solve [name of a problem], first [describe the first step in a solution]. Then [describe the second step and so on].
Follow these steps to….

Summarizing and Interpreting Visuals can have students saying:

The image/video shows…
This table or drawing suggests…
The graph or picture shows….
After looking at this image, I now understand….

Summarizing Ideas in a Nonfiction Text may begin in one of these ways:

The main point is…
One important detail is…
This page or paragraph is about…
Today, we learned about a new word/idea/concept….

These are some powerful ways to get students engaging with text as they identify key content. Think of the many ways students can use technology to do this. Explore paper slide videos as one way to do this.

In future blog entries, we’ll explore other strategies in the context of reciprocal teaching.

Practice Makes Perfect, or at Least Better

Want to prepare yourself for lifelong learning? Learn to read and comprehend technical texts. Practice working with others to summarize in an effective way. Use strategies like summarization with your students to speed their annual academic growth. Have fun and keep pushing!

July 9, 2019 0 comments

Good Teaching

Lumen5-Powered Videos

by Miguel Guhlin July 20, 2017

written by Miguel Guhlin

Want to capture people’s attention with video? Then Lumen5 may offer you a way to create powerful videos from blog entries, news articles, and online text. If you’re like me, you are not a video designer. I have no idea how to better arrange pictures with quotes to create a video segment, or what accompanying music to use for the soundtrack. Therefore, my videos often lack punch and engagement because I’m uncertain in my arranging skills. Allow me to introduce you to a tool you can use in the classroom to create a technology anticipatory set.

Lumen5 Saves the Day

The good news is that Lumen5.com has some absolutely beautiful video arrangements and tools for the video challenged. Take an existing blog entry or web-based text and then let Lumen5 do the rest. Here are two examples that I shared via YouTube.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMsqo6m5-Fs]

Read the blog entry, Creating Worlds of Tomorrow, from which the video above was created. Here’s another example, Enhancing Parental Access with OneNote Class Notebook.

Creative Process

After getting your free account at their website, you can click on the CREATE VIDEO button and see a screen similar to the one shown below:

lumen

The process is drop-dead simple, allowing you to paste in a website address. You will have the option of grabbing the text from the first section of the article. You can also cherry-pick choice sentences. Each sentence series gets a slide with its own picture. Longer text is split across slides with matching images. You are able to edit sentences once selected for readability. You can put (a.k.a. upload) your own pictures in the slides. Another option for finding relevant images involves an internet search, which is built-into the Lumen5 interface. Placing pictures in the slideshow is drag-and-drop easy.

A few other screen shots:

lumen

In the shot above, you can see the results of an image search with “Minecraft” as the search term. Below, you see stock soundtracks you can add to your video. You also have the option of NOT adding sound, saving the movie as an MP4, and then modifying it in iMovie, WeVideo, Shotcut, or another video editor.

lumen

Rendering the video can take anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour, as shown below:

lumen

Once the video is done rendering, you can save it as an MP4 to your computer/device in anticipation of putting it on YouTube or another online storage location (e.g. OneDrive, Google Drive).

lumen

In the Classroom

It wasn’t until high school that I started figuring out how to read non-fiction text, picking out what text would make it into a test. Now, much of the non-fiction text that students read finds its way online. Pull text from anywhere, such as Dogo News, Newsela, Newseum, or Tween Tribune and then paste the web link into Lumen5 for a quick summarization tool.

lumen

For example, the video below was generated from the Tween Tribune article, Watching Others Play Video Games the next big thing. It might be fun to create a summary of online content using Lumen5.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJIURH2NWCw&w=560&h=315]

Rendering Time: 90 minutes*

*Note: When I checked with Lumen5 crew, they mentioned that the long rendering time is atypical. Most videos are rendered in ten minutes or less. They asserted that my experience may have been due to some unfortunate server errors they experienced early on. As I recall now, the server did crash while I was using it, so this supports their assertion. Let me know in the comments if your experience matches their assertions.

Closing Thoughts

How do you see yourself using Lumen5 in your K-12/adult learning situation? Given the rendering time, it’s not a quick tool to use. Another piece that needs tweaking involves the slide editing component. Although I uploaded a picture, a screen shot of the actual article at Tween Tribune, I was unable to place the picture on its own slide alone. I would have had to replace the image and text of an existing slide. That may just involve some planning ahead, adding slides you don’t need so you can replace the image.

One thing is for certain, students can easily adapt the technique Lumen5 introduces with a variety of video editors. Lumen5’s approach serves as an excellent starting point for beginners like me.

July 20, 2017 0 comments