Some Novel Ideas

Six Word Peer Relations Memoirs

I was finally able to get the Voicethread embedded. Enjoy!

Try Voicethread-ing!

So, what exactly is Voicethread? It's a lot of things.  It's digital storytelling.  It's "group conversation" (as it calls itself).  It's a place for students to have a voice (literally), and a place for collaborating with someone in the next room or across the globe.  Now, I have not bought into Ed.Voicethread yet, which is the secure k-12 network, so my students do not yet have a closed network on which to create Voicethreads. For the time being, I'm fooling around with creating my own on the general site.  In the spring, if I decide to follow through with an awesome project I have in my head, I'll ask the Head of our Middle School if we have any funds for the school version.

Basically, Voicethread is a 21st century presentation tool.  It's like Power Point's way cooler and smarter younger brother.  Whereas a Power Point is just an assemblage of static slides, Voicethread is a dynamic compendium of images, voices, and text that can expand and grow long after it has been published. 

I can see using Voicethread for many projects in my classroom.  For example, it's a great group project venue.  I can actually hear the kids comments and know what the participation level was for each student in the group.  And the students can share their entire project with friends who aren't in their class or their parents or anyone they want! Another way I can see using it is to create an archive of lessons and projects that the kids can access at any time. I'd love to hook up with another teacher outside of my school and collaborate on a Voicethread project.

To create my Voicethread, I used jing to screen capture the pages of a Smartboard lesson.  Then I put each page into Voicethread as a separate slide and added my comments.  I took pictures of the kids' six word peer relations memoirs and uploaded some to the Voicethread.  Finally, I had the kids, whose pictures I'd uploaded, read their memoirs aloud and comment briefly on why they wrote what they wrote.  I used My Identities in Voicethread to add the kids to my "account" so they didn't have to set up their own.

I'l be speaking about Voicethread at the Ohio Free-Tech conference in January.  I hope I see some of you there!

I am having some problems embedding the Voicethread into my blog, so here's a link for you to view it:

Voicethread

Six Word Peer Relations Memoirs

Thanks to Anne at Read, Write, Talk!  She turned me on to this book, and a great activity for my seventh graders came from it! We are finishing up our Unit of Inquiry on peer relations, for which The Outsiders is our class novel.  Using the book I Can't Keep My Own Secrets as a base, I developed a short presentation for my Smartboard about expressing one's thoughts about peers and friendships in just six words.  First, we looked at a number of examples from the book and discussed what we were able to learn about each person from what he or she wrote.  It's amazing how much you can glean from just a half dozen words.  Then, we talked about what makes the examples we looked at so strong: Honesty...Thoughtfulness...Character...Clarity...Strong Words.

Next, I had the students draw a box in their spirals, and in that box, they wrote all kinds of thoughts about themselves and their peer relationships.  Finally, they whittled the thoughts down to six words.  They typed up their memoirs using what they felt were appropriate fonts and colors, etc., and printed them out.  I allowed them to be anonymous if they wanted to, or they could put their names on their pieces.  Naturally, this being 7th grade, most of the kids just put their names on the back.

Here are some results.  I was blown away by how thoughtful some of these were.

 

  

 

There were countless others that I could have posted here.  I'm making a Voicethread of the lesson and results.







 

Having fun with technology

I am having so much fun!  My proposal was accepted for the SMART ed tech conference in Ohio in January, so I've thrown myself into creating a great presentation.  The title: English Alive! Using the Smartboard and Web 2.0 technology in the language arts classroom.  I've created a glog to use for the presentation, which, if you visit it, is obviously a work in progress.  But why not use the technology to teach the technology?  I'll keep you posted as to how this is coming along.  I think it should be an interesting session at the conference.  I use my Smartboard almost daily for all kinds of things, especially grammar lessons.  Now, as for the Web tools, I have no idea what the audience's levels of comfort and knowledge will be when I speak. Hopefully, they'll know less than me!!! More to come...

Teaching The Outsiders

It was a tough day in language arts class today. I showed "The Outsiders" today. There are so many things that make this day bittersweet each year. First of all, Patrick Swayze is no longer with us.  The boys all look so young and invincible in the movie, and now one of them is dead. That's hard to take. Another reason the day is tinged with sadness is that the girls in my seventh grade class no longer find these guys attractive.  Not even Rob Lowe.  Now that's uber sad.  When I used to show this movie in the early 90's, the girls would literally squeal when Matt Dillon was onscreen. Today...nothing.  I mean, Matt Dillon's a middle aged man now, and he can't hold a candle to Taylor Lautner, can he?

But, I digress.  I want to talk about teaching this classic S.E. Hinton book, which I have done many, many times in my career. Despite the fact that it was written about 40 years ago and has aged to the point of nostalgia for many of us, The Outsiders is still a wildly popular book in the classroom.  The kids still love it, and its themes and focus are still completely relevant to kids today.  They still identify with the ideas of being on the fringes, finding common ground with others, conformity and nonconformity, and loyalty among peers.

My Edublog Award Nominations

    Well, this is exciting! I'm a total newb, as my students would say, but I'm happy to nominate the following blogs for the 2009 Edublog Awards:

    Best individual blog:Neil Stephenson's Thinking in Mind- consistently thoughtful and intelligent posts.

    Best group blog: A Year of Reading- Does a two-person blog count as a group blog? I think so! And these ladies are the best!

                                Best new blog: Read...Write...Talk...

                                Best teacher blog: Two Writing Teachers

Good luck to all of you! I've learned a lot from you just in the six weeks I've been blogging.  Thanks!

Creating Lesson Plan Objectives

I remember graduate school well. They worked us pretty hard at Columbia University Teachers College, and I loved every minute of it. I was lucky enough to take classes with some world renowned professors, like Heidi Hayes Jacobs, who taught my Curriculum Design and Instruction class.  In her class, I learned how to create lesson plans from scratch, step-by-step, the only way to do it in the days before the internet. 

I have been teaching at private schools since finishing my degree at Columbia, and to be honest, I never had to turn in a lesson plan to my higher-ups in my whole career.  Maybe not a good thing. Actually having to write down the lesson plan, from step A to step Z, really focuses you on the design of your lesson. I think I've had more than my share of lessons in the past twenty years that have meandered around, searching for their learning objectives!

Objectives should be one of the first things you think about when writing lesson plans.  Even if you don't have to physically write the plans down, the objectives are still essential to making the lesson work. This is basic Education 101. 

So, why am I having so much trouble coming up with my set of objectives for a conference presentation I hope to make in January? This would be my first time presenting at a large conference, and I'm concerned about getting the proposal just right. It shouldn't be so daunting; I'm just obsessing.

Instructional/learning objectives need to be:

1. specific,

2. measurable, and

3. observable in student work and behaviors.

Don't make your objectives long-winded, rambling, or overly general. They should be short and to the point. Another teacher should be able to look at your lesson objectives and know the intent of the lesson as well as how you will assess the students and measure success.

Ask yourself: What do I want the students to be able to do? What do I want them to accomplish, learn, and demonstrate? These answers are the essence of your objectives! The best learning objectives use specific verbs that correspond to learning levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. You can find plenty of those verb charts on the web, but here's one that I like: Bloom's Taxonomy learning levels/verbs. The chart is on the second page.

Why exactly did I write this post if everyone who reads it already knows this stuff? It can never hurt to go back to your educational roots, back to the beginning, when you didn't know what you were doing.  It re-centers you and really shows you how far you may have strayed from the path you should be on. Think about just one lesson you plan to teach next week.  Do you have observable objectives for your lesson? Do you know specifically how you will measure student achievement? Sometimes people who have been doing something forever seem to have ventured furthest from the path because they haven't been thinking about where they're walking for a long, long time. I know I'm guilty of this. So, now that I am refocused, I'm going to write those damn objectives.  And they're going to rock!

"No, I Can't Get It Out of My Head...": Reviews of Candor and Feed

    When I came across Candor by Pam Bachorz (Egmont, 2009) and read the jacket, I was perplexed and intrigued.  The story of a boy who is being fed messages into his head, who falls in love with a girl who tries to fight the messages- "That sounds a lot like Feed," I thought. Feed, by M.T. Anderson (Candlewick, 2004) is less than a decade old, but it's already a classic.  It's a beautiful, rich book, dense with allegory and symbolism.  Anderson's book is a cautionary tale, a work of speculative fiction that sounds chillingly possible. Candor comes up a bit short in comparison, but it is a smart, interesting teen read.

    I love Feed. It's awesome. Titus, a normal teen of the future, goes to the moon with his friends for Spring Break.  There he meets Violet, an odd loner who doesn't talk or think like Titus and his friends do.  It seems that she is not as tuned into the "feed" as the others. What is the feed? It's a chip installed in the brain of anyone who can afford it.  The feed sends you everything you need: music, TV shows, ads for products that fit your buying profile, chat, images, memories (both yours and other people's)- all directly into your brain.  The result? People, especially consumer-oriented teens, have been turned into empty-headed dimwits who live to shop, follow trends that change on an hourly basis, and worship the media-dominated culture of their world.

    On the surface, Feed doesn't seem like highbrow sci-fi.  Titus and his friends party as much as they can, get high (go "mal"), hook up, and curse like sailors.  They "mchat" constantly directly into one another's heads, even if they're sitting right next to one another.  They dance to music that they hear only in their heads.  But this is actually powerful satire. Titus and his friends look, sound, and act dangerously similar to today's teens.  Anderson has just taken our culture to its potential extreme: a 24/7 barrage of messages about what to buy, what to consume, what to watch.  Violet opens Titus's mind to the possibility that their world is dying, going up in flames while they are all metaphorically fiddling like vacuous Neros. Titus is a wonderful character, a typical teen who doesn't necessarily want to face the dark side of his world, but who also wants to get into his girlfriend's pants. Violet is beautifully tragic, a Cassandra for her time, doomed to be ignored by the teens whose eyes she's trying to open.

    You just have to read this book.  It's too bad that most classrooms would not be able to use it as a part of their curriculum.  The book is not just laced with profanity; it's dripping with it. It's perfect teen-speak, but who could let their students read a book where the characters spout the f-bomb in every other sentence? I know it would not go over big at my school, at least not in the middle school.  I guess upper school teachers could get away with it.  I wish I could.  Boy, how I wish I could.

Focusing on Teaching With Purpose

I've read over my last post a few times.  I was a bit overwrought when I wrote it, frustrated with my own shortcomings as a "modern" teacher and annoyed that my school sometimes comes up short as a forward-thinking institution. Now, here I am, coming off my high horse on a Friday, the day I find I am always most contemplative.

I'm reading four books at once right now, two YA novels and two professional resources, which is ridiculous,isn't it? Truthfully, I don't always read professional books in a very linear fashion.  I do a lot of poking around, reading a chapter here and another there, until I've digested the whole book.  It works a lot of the time because these books are often written in a "find-what's-best-for-you" kind of way.  But driving into work today, something hit me: I'm doing exactly what I don't want my students to do.  I don't want them learning in a haphazard, chaotic way.  I don't want to present lessons that jump from topic to topic without settling on a true focus for forty minutes. So, why am I approaching my own professional development in that way?

Here I am, around two decades into my career as a teacher, and I still get so worked up by new, shiny stuff that I'm like my own dog.  Lily, my adorable but dim-witted Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, spends a lot of time barking at the ceiling of my house as she follows shifting light reflections from various objects. That's kind of what I do.  I find a new resource or come across a great idea, and I work myself into a frenzy over the fact that I'm not using it in my classroom yet! I'll skim a chapter in a great professional book, mining for ideas, ideas, ideas, without taking a close enough look at the why I want to use the ideas in the first place. Technology should not be used for technology's sake.  We should use it as a powerful, empowering tool to help students become motivated lifelong learners and leaders. I have to slow down, focus, and think about linking technology to effective teaching strategies.  This will lead to the kind of student learning that is lasting, not the kind that just chases the latest cool Web trends.

I recommend both of the following books, regardless of your level of comfort with technology integration:

Using Technology in the Classroom That Works by H. Pitler, E. Hubbell, M. Kuhn, and K. Malenowski: If you are at all familiar with Robert Marzano's work (or even if you're not!), you should consider checking out this book. It presents methodology for integrating Marzano's nine instructional strategies in the classroom through the use of technology.  The book contains both theory and application, pedagogy and practical resources, for teachers who want to use any number of tech tools to move learning forward.

The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age by William Kist: Kist takes the stance, with which I agree, that schools cannot shrink from the communication challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.  The book presents stories of teachers taking "the sometimes messy first steps" toward integrating social networking into their teaching practices.  These teachers are giving their students the new communication experiences that are necessary for literate citizenship in today's world while striving to keep the kids safe, too. Kist explores the "new literacies" in chapters that mirror the level of technology at the various schools, moving from low-tech environments to schools with unlimited technology situations.

Trudging into the 21st Century

The tortoise ended up winning the race against the hare, right?  Slow and steady wins the race, doesn't it?  Not necessarily. Let's face it: If the tortoise and the hare were school leaders today, (Just go with me on the metaphor-) whose classrooms would be using a wide range of Web 2.0 resources?  Which school would be collaborating online with a classroom in Argentina or Alaska?  Which school would be publishing student work online using the latest multimedia applications? That would be the hare's school. The tortoise's school, on the other hand, thinks that it's up to speed because the students know how to add a chart into a Word document.

Who are you? Is your school the tortoise's or the hare's? The following article by Ernie J. Cox in the Sept./Oct. issue of Multimedia & Internet @ Schools made me sit back and consider my own school's place in that race: Tools for 21st Century Learning. 

My school is not keeping up in the race. Is yours? I know that some of you are saying to yourselves, "But it's not actually a race. Whether schools are or are not using 21st century tools does not put them in a race against one another."  I disagree.  It is a race, because if your school is still stuck in Ernie Cox's first scenario from his article (like mine), you are the tortoise and it's not just the hare but the whole world that's passing you by and guess what? No one else is going to stop and take a nap so you can catch up.

I have done a few things that have worked well and have gone a long way toward satisfying my desire to keep moving forward with technology.  Last year, I set up an interactive blog on Moodle that the students posted to as they read Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. The students felt quite empowered by the ability to get their thoughts out there and share them with their peers. The kids expressed themselves on the blog in a thoughtful, reflective manner, and I witnessed quality conversations online. This project whet my appetite for more, more, more!

But the tortoise is still crawling through the hallways here. I am not allowed, at this point anyway, to have my students set up Google accounts. The only students in my k-12 school who have email accounts on the school server are the kids in the Upper School (9th-12th grades).  My students cannot collaborate dynamically, and I cannot create the collaborative learning environment that I believe the 21st century demands because of the walls surrounding our beautiful, but very "old school," classrooms. I read a lot of blogs, and I'm so impressed with the kinds of projects and everyday learning that goes on in so many schools today.  Classrooms are using everything from collaboration and communication tools on Google to online discussion tools like Ning to MUVEs like Second Life. As Alan November said at the last conference workshop of his that I attended, "You should all be doing this!"

So what is stopping schools from moving forward? As Mr. Cox indicates, for many schools, it is budgetary restraints. The school does not have the money to invest in expensive site licenses or costly software packages.  But, ALL of the tools I mention in the preceding paragraph are FREE, as are so many of the resources available on the Web.

I know that budget is not the thing that is keeping my school firmly planted in the 20th century. For us, there are two factors: fear and more fear. Fear on the part of the parents and administration that if the kids have any kind of connection to the outside world at school, they will no longer be inside the Bubble.  You know the Bubble.  That's the padded, opaque orb that parents have created for their children, the protective balloon in which the kids float through life.  Without the Bubble, bad things may happen.  The parents don't necessarily know what those bad things may be, but they are sure that they will happen. The rest of the fear comes from other teachers. Are there teachers at your school whose only connection to technology is the Xerox machine? There are plenty of teachers out there who shut their door when class begins, who hope that no one ever visits their room.  Teachers who are still using handouts that they made up (or xeroxed) ten years ago. There are plenty of teachers who don't really see how technology can truly enhance their traditional classrooms and engage their students in their world, the 21st century world that is all these kids know.

I'm going to put my best foot forward here and actively pursue change at my school. I spend so much time thinking about implementing these materials, I'm practically bursting at the seams (if a person has seams)! I would very much like to hear from those of you who are moving like the hare into the next decade.  What 21st century learning and collaborating goes on at your school? How does it look in the classroom?  Do you get pushback from parents or administrators? What barriers do you face and how do you deal with them?  Basically, are you a tortoise or a hare?