Secret Life

I am pretty excited about a wiki I have created for the 8th grade girls to compliment their study of Sue Monk Kidd's Secret Life Of Bees. It is really a variation on the literature circle concept with 2 teams of 10 alternating chapter coverage of the 14 chapters. Over the course of their study of the book, each student will take on 7 different roles and post to the wiki. I am hopeful that , in addition to creating their own work, they will be creating discussion regarding the observations by their peers as well.

I am looking forward to the whole expereince with the students writing with purpose for a large audience. Should be exciting!

Mr new badge - Free Poverty

I read about this as part of a feed from Free Technology for Teachers. Lots of fun, and it gets substantially harder and quicker. Points are awarded in cups of water . a maximum of 10 cups per correct answer based on the proximaity of your marker to the actual location.
Great fun.
click on the link within the badge to play

You ain't got a thing if you ain't got that NING

We are experimenting today with a new tool that can introduce some web 2.o technology to our faculty. It is an exciting experiment.
More to come, as I am experimenting with the various tools it provides.

Google-icious?

I am slowly acknowledging the fact that school is soon to begin and all the wondrous information I have been privy to over this summer of learning needs to be tried and applied. today, I am experimenting just a tad more with my Google account. This reminded me that I had not entered any notes from my two experiences with training for Google; one with Lucy Grey in Lisle this winter and one with Brian Mull of November Learning at the BLC. So, as good a time as any to look over past notes and review.

This past May, Goggle introduced a special section of tools especially for teachers. This suite of activities is in addition to all the things that are available with a regular Google account-Google docs, Google earth, blogger, Google reader, Google maps,Google sketch up, etc. Lucy Grey will be hosting a Google educator workshop in Chicago that has yet to be announced.
My initial curiosity about Google was the concept of being able to use Google docs as both an alternative for those students with non-Office based computers in addition to experimenting with it as a collaborative tool for student work. In order to use Google as such, it would be necessary for each student to open a Goggle account, which potentially could be an issue with parents. Lucy suggests that student accounts for projects be generic, a one name fits all kind of thing perhaps by group .
Google spreadsheets, which I have not had the nerve to attempt, apparently also has a survey feature that can be used. ( I have also heard a lot about survey monkey, a tool to create online surveys. I could see the students having a lot of fun with this, especially with an election year.

I created a Google reader section on my Google page as a result of this particular presentation. Google Reader serves as a news aggregator and I have many of my favorite blogs that I follow listed usder it. The RSS portion of Google Reader notifies me any time one of my pages has had additional information added to it.
It has also allowed me to see that some of the bloggers I used to follow have way too much time on their hands or not too much of a life. ) Hopefully, I won't turn into one of those people, but I must add that there is SO much to write about, I imagine it will be tough.

The Global Refrigerator

I have been thinking a bit about the visual nature of learning and teaching and can't help but think about the artwork and homework I would post on the refrigerator when my kids brought home work they were proud of. In a lot of ways, the posting of our students work on Flicker or wikis or screencast works the same way. The students are motivated not only to perform for their own sake, but to share their work.
This is a continuation of my reflection of the cell phone photos for math. Eric Marcos had a great demonstration of the enthusiasm created in his students through the use of screencasting.
By using tablet pcs, a microphone and a moodle, this 6th grade class has created a website.I was so impressed with the live presentation presented by 2 students at the conference. This is really is a follow up on Darren K.'s theory of teaching like med school. When the students solve their equations on the screen, they are actually teaching it. In addition to being available for view on computers, they can also import some of the audio to an Ipod. His students have also created Mathtrain Tv ( link on the site). I haven't looked yet, but I believe they have also posted some things on You Tube, Teacher Tube, and google video. In addition to their videos, they close captioned them as a community service project to help special needs students.
The students create pseudonyms which, Marcos relates, they really enjoyed. This also provides a safety feature as well. A teacher who presented something similar at the e-pals session also has her students creat screen names for anonymity. In her case, it began the year with a Nativie American naming assignment that culminated with their first e-pal correspondence as they described why the chose their N.A. screen name and provided no other personal information.
There are some wonderful examples of students' work at the site.
The way I see it, it is an old idea with a new tool. So, it really isn't about the technology. It IS about the pedagogy.

New Pedagogies

I have been overwhelmed with the information I still need to process and the great amount of contacts/networking that is avaialbe to me and my little brain as a result of the BLC conference. While I have opened a blog there, I don't know if it pays to have more than one so, for the time being, this will have to be it.
I was blown away by the enthusiasm and creativity of Darren Kuropatwa While I have bookmarked a number of articles about cell phones and education, this was the first time I saw it in action. I might add, I was impressed. Participants were asked to take photos with their cell, send it to an address at Flickrand then shared them right away.
Kuropatwa says he adapted the idea of how things are taught at medical school to his H.s. math class. In med school, you watch it - do it- then teach it. Using these principles, he enables his students to be the teachers and amke their thinking ransparent. This is similar to a presentation that I will talk about in another post using screencasting in a 6th grade math class in Calfiornia.In both instances, not only do kids feel there is value to what they know, but they work on writing in a content area with great care as their work will be published and seen. He refered to the work of Liz Kolb as a good place to begin.
I have a lot of notes from this session that I had hoped to blog, but maybe it is TMI. In a nutshell, students took pictures of mathematic concepts with phone. Saved These on Flickr and need to tag with class name and mark the photos with hotspots that explain why something is a good visualization of the concepts. The students then used Google docs to collaboratively create a rubric for their assessments. In addition to being evaluatied by their peers, his class has connected with mentors who communicate with his class online. The students were not only finding math in the world around them, but were also creating visual study tools that they felt helped them apply the concepts and remember.
I loved his concern not with the tools, but with the pedagogy that allows us to reach the students at theire level . He teaches them to do what experts do and allows the opportunity to create lieflong learners.
Interstingly, the last part of his assignment is always a reflection which gives the students an opprtunity to evaluate what they have learned, but again in a variety of formats that speak to them. He shared some podcasts and also refered to videos also created by the students.
i was fortunate to be able to see this presentation. I had made as a goal to try to take advantage of hearing what people are doing in other countries and this was such a great follow up, for me at least, after Ewan McIntosh.

How the game works

My first inkling about what was to come at the BLC08 conference was introduced to me when I heard Ewan McIntosh of Scotland present " Not all Native Wit: From Creativity to Ingenuity." It is easiest to learn by doing things that are intuitive to you. for me, it was reading, writing and talking. For the 90% of today's 15-25 year olds who have visited a social network , it is something else. If My space were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world! Our job is to get to students at their level and present the opportunity to learn and create in a system that is easiest for them.


I particularly related to the 3 steps of learning that McIntosh referred to:

• Saturation - immerse yourself in everything


• Incubation - let it settle with no deadlines or stress ( and I have a LOT to do after this conference)


• Illumination - the "a-ha!" that you can then share with a larger audience

These steps relate to both teacher and student. The idea is this - tech is the tool and creativity is the pinball. We need to focus on the pinball . We don't need to teach technology as much as teach subject matter and learning USING it. Today's youth culture is a culture of participation. Our students have lots of identities online: secret spaces, group spaces, publishing, performing, participating, watching,etc. We need to create a new awareness and allow them to create new groups. ( A random fact to support the social nature of our world? 426,000 cell phones thrown away every day!)

This session was introduced using Promethean clickers in response to the question " How would students today describe school?" The most popular answer among the audience of teachers and administrators? BORING!! McIntosh suggests that our challenge is to make learning REMARKABLE!!!

His closing quote came from one of the founding fathers of our country, Ben Franklin:

"There are three types of people, those who are immovable, those who are movable and those who move."

THAT is how the game should be played.