UndoDog

New possibilties for Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

2009-08-21T12:00:00.006-04:00

The fourth grade Choose-Your-Own-Adventure project was always one of my favorites, but was too difficult for many, even with lots of scaffolding, and not as relevant a skill set as blogging, so I've relegated it to an after-school club.

I've always hoped to expand the project, though--to incorporate video into the adventure, for example, or to include a historical fiction element, for example, as with the revolutionary war-based adventures or the age of exploration ones that included one branch that was what really happened in the life of the student's chosen explorer and others that imagined what might have happened had the explorer chosen differently.

Here is a lovely example of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure done by design critic/novelist Rudolph Delson that serves as both a witty and entertaining adventure, and a thoughtful critique of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I love that way Delson has used the CYOA structure in a fresh new way, and will keep this in mind as inspiration for future projects.

Safety, Citizenship, and Facebook

2009-07-24T17:16:00.005-04:00

A friend on Facebook has friended some former students, so I was privy to a severely disappointing batch of comments on a video put up by one of those former students. The video was fine, in fact it was the fifth grade graduation video of the class that is now going into tenth grade.

The comments, however, fell into one of several categories:
1) sweet and nostalgic
2) gratuitously profane and absurdly vulgar
3) rude, arrogant, and hateful
4) some combination of the above with appalling spelling and grammar errors.

Now, I don't think of myself as naive, and I am no stranger to the pottymouth, but I was really shocked by some of the things these kids were saying to each other. It made me think about my "internet safety and citizenship" curriculum.

I used to formally teach internet safety and citizenship in fourth and fifth grade, in addition to including informal lessons in the earlier grades. The safety part was actually pretty fun and engaging--I made a mask that had Miley Cyrus on one side and a scary picture of Harvey Keitel on the other and did a schtick to demonstrate that you may not know whom you're actually chatting with online; I showed PSAs; I had kids review a selection of internet safety sites for information and tips; and I had them make comics and posters to teach other kids about internet safety. But since the reports came out from the Crimes Against Children Research Center and the Internet Safety Technical Task Force indicating that the threat was much less than we thought, I reduced the emphasis on safety.

I still teach kids to keep certain information (including passwords) private and to be careful talking to strangers online or off, and I make sure they understand that anyone can put anything on the internet, and that it's their responsibility to stay on task and to close the window and let me know if they see anything that seems inappropriate, but I dropped the rest of that part of the curriculum. (This also ties into the part of the curriculum where they learn that you can't believe everything you read on the internet. (or elsewhere!))

The other part of the curriculum, the citizenship part, has basically been "be the same nice person you are in real life." (With some closing thoughts on leaving the internet a better place than you found it) And I leave it at that as if to say "of course you guys would never say anything mean or rude online, or log in to someone else's account, or vandalize a website. We don't even need to discuss it, right?" And this has seemed to be working, as we've had very few problems even though fourth and fifth graders have email and Blogger accounts. (Though, perhaps significantly, the kids now going into tenth grade did not.)

But then this Facebook experience. Should I have spent more time teaching them good internet citizenship? Or would that have been long forgotten by now, and their middle and high-schools should be teaching it? Or their parents? Or are these kids simply not nice in real life either? Or is it a passing phase, just part of the tempest that is adolescence? I'm inclined to believe all of the above. At least some of them have been smart enough not to use their full or real names, so they won't get caught when they're Googled by college admissions departments.

Blog's not dead

2009-07-23T22:52:00.003-04:00

The spring semester flew by, and with the yearbook and graduation movie, a huge personal movie project, the school newspaper, and 2 kidsclubs on top of the usual workload, I've been a delinquent blogger. I've also been a delinquent blog reader, so I've been looking forward to the quiet of summer to catch up on some of that reading.

The numbers of unread posts in my Google Reader were lower than I expected, so I figured other educators had a busy spring as well, but then I read this at Alan Levine's CogDogBlog:

I admit it.
I still regularly review content RSS feeds in that archaic, pre-twitter-is-all-i-need thing called a “Feed Reader”. Me and 3 other holdouts.
Go ahead, call me a throw back.

At first I was concerned: I love blogging, reading blogs, and having my students blog--am I to understand now that blogging is over? All of my favorite non-education-related bloggers are still blogging as usual, so I investigated further.

First I went back to some of the old reliable edu-bloggers, the Will Richardsons, Steve Hargadons, Wesley Fryers, and Kathy Schrocks. There may have been a slight drop-off in the frequency of some of their posting and commenting, but nothing to worry about.

Then I tried Twitter again, since Alan seemed to imply that Twitter was replacing blogs. I registered for Twitter when it was new and read a few tweets, followed a few twitterers for a little while, and then tired of its glibness pretty quickly. I appreciated Alan November's use of it to get quick answers from his personal learning network, but can't use it that way myself, not yet having gotten around to developing my own PLN. I'm all for economy of language, but the 140 character limit seems to incline most writers to either superficiality or snark. Then there are the twitterers who treat their tweets like a Facebook status. If you are an edu-twitterer, you have no business using the media to tell me the cute thing your cat just did. But following Alan's post, I decided to revisit Twitter. I searched for the best twitterers in technology and education. Three frustrating hours later, I came to the conclusion that my initial impressions were still valid, and that blogs are still the best medium currently available for the kind of information and ideas that I want to read and share.

Am I missing something? Do you know of any twitterers who might change my mind?

Reflections on the Fifth Grade Movie Project

2009-06-19T21:53:00.004-04:00

I have been so impressed with the fifth grade movie work this year. We haven't had enough time together, and I've had to rush them a lot, but many have chosen to come in early or during recess, and their hard work really shows. (Wish I could show some here, but a) didn't do permission slips and b) didn't have time for them to cite their image sources)

A couple more new things I tried this year (in addition to the new planning elements):
1) Incorporating real video with the zooming and panning of still images
Most video sharing sites are blocked at school, and it can be incredibly time-consuming to find the right bit of video within a longer clip, so I told students that all they had to do was write me a note or email requesting a particular kind of video clip (eg. someone making sushi, golden retrievers fetching, Ozzy Osbourne playing Crazy Train) and I would get it for them. This turned out, not surprisingly, to be a lot of work, but so worth it. It brought a whole new element into the project--both technically and artistically. It was too bad that only about 20% of kids opted to use video, but if everyone had I don't think I would have been able to collect it all.

This brings up the question of sustainability in designing a technology curriculum. I can't count on other teachers wanting to spend 8 hours a week at home doing prep work for a particular project, which makes the project not duplicatable at that level. If I want to share this work out in a way that others can try it, it also has to work without these elements. In this case I think it does, but I also thought the movies that mixed video and still images with voice-over were much more effective.

Here's the example I made for them. Some of the still images and the music are copyrighted, but I'm claiming fair use here:

2) Having kids take control of recording their voice-overs.
We use the built-in iMac microphones, which are nondirectional and record all ambient sound, which doesn't work well in a collaborative classroom setting. In the past, I've had kids come up during recess to record voice-overs for their movies, but since they get only 20 minutes a day for recess and they understandably value this time a lot, and I have 120-150 fifth graders, this meant not very many kids got to record. This year, I started out having kids record during class and I would get the room quiet for each student before they started recording, but it didn't take long for me to realize that they were capable of doing that for themselves. It was so satisfying to hear kids independently calling out "quiet on the set!" before and "clear!" after recording, and negotiating with each other so that everyone had a chance to record. I'm considering using this strategy in combination with a good usb mic next year.

How this project will evolve next school year depends on whether I'm able to have the fifth grade for the whole year. It was such a disappointment to have to rush this project and not to get to the "I Have a Dream" GarageBand remix project. Another semester would allow us to reflect and talk more about what we're learning, to collaborate and share work in progress, and to do research, which (in addition to its inherent value) would give kids more possibilties when choosing topics.

Fourth Grade Bloggers Hitting Their Stride

2008-12-09T09:21:00.003-05:00

I am so proud of my fourth grade bloggers! We're in week 4, and though the spelling and conventions may not be perfect, most of them are posting and commenting regularly and thoughtfully now, and some are including links and copyleft images, too! Check them out!

Giant All-Powerful Robot Librarian

2008-12-08T15:19:00.004-05:00

When I'm teaching 3rd graders about the internet research process, one of the things I spend some time on is how even though it is the most popular search engine now, and even though it happens to be my favorite for most things, Google is not the only game in town.

I go back to an analogy that I used with them in first grade, imagining that the internet is like the biggest library you could ever imagine, except instead of being in a building, it lives in computers all over the world, and anyone who wants to can put their stuff in there for others to see. I suggest that if you think of it like this, then browsers are like the glasses that let you look at the internet and search engines like Google are like the not-nearly-as-smart-as-real-live-ones robot librarians that help you find what you're looking for.

So, for the not-just-Google lesson, I remind them that there are other librarians in this crazy library, and ask them to imagine what might happen if there weren't. I suggest that as other librarians went away, Google would get bigger and more and more powerful, and soon might be the only search engine left, and then what if Google said "Sure, I'll find a picture of a puppy for you...if you give me a dollar!"

I don't want to have them use search engines that are less user-friendly or less effective, and I sure do like the ease of the built-in Google box in most browsers, (Will Richardson makes valid points about how AltaVista and others can be useful for some types of advanced searching, but I haven't found that relevant yet for my 3rd-5th graders.) so I still let them use Google if they choose, but hope that the image of a gigantic evil robot librarian sticks in their mind.

In a perfect world (ie. if I could see every class every day), I would love to do an inquiry where we compare results for a variety of searches from a variety of search engines, but I'm already packing too much into each class period and we haven't even gotten to helpful keyword add-ons (eg. history, biography, kids), choosing from search results, tabbed browsing, the Wikipedia conversation, navigating a page, dissecting a url, evaluating sites, or taking notes.

How do you all teach internet research skills?
(Image from Flickr user Mykl Roventine)

Benchmarks: Phase 2

2008-11-24T16:35:00.004-05:00

Trying to hone my benchmarks down to something comprehensive that I can use for assessment, here's what I've come up with so far for 5th grade. It would mean changing my thinking from how students do each week to how they do over a 5 month period, and it's certainly more rigid and less applicable to students' creativity, innovation, and effort. It seems to reduce their work to a set of skills--an idea at which I bristle--but it could still be useful, and it's what my administration is asking for.

The 2nd half of the document includes all of the criteria/understandings that go into each column, which would vary by grade, though most of the column headings could be the same for 3-5 and for k-2.

The other big question is whether it's doable to assess 750 kids for 14 different elements that have so many sub-elements...

How do you assess students? Do you have a set of benchmarks you use?

Website evaluation lesson: Who's behind this site?

2008-11-23T16:08:00.004-05:00

One of my favorite website evaluation lessons: I send kids to the website healthyfridge.org, and ask them to figure out who or what is behind it. (I try to do this around the time that 5th graders are studying nutrition, so there's that tie-in. That's actually how I discovered the site--when a teacher recommended it for a nutrition study before evaluating it herself!)

It seems like a friendly little educational website to teach kids about nutrition, right? But no, I tell them, there is more than meets the eye! I encourage them to use common sense, to scour the website like detectives, and to think about what the people who made the site might be trying to "sell" us. It usually takes about 20-30 minutes before they start getting close (sometimes they get distracted by the word search, but even that has clues in it), and if they aren't, I'll ask questions like "Do you notice any particular food they mention a lot? Or anything that stands out or seems strange?"

Sometimes they'll do a separate search for the organization named at the bottom of the page, sometimes I teach them about whois, sometimes they find the "about" page, but it's always a fun mystery to solve. I won't tell you who's behind it, so you can have the fun of discovering the nefarious masterminds for yourself!

(Also, there are usually a couple of kids who have never heard of the thing they're trying to promote, so I usually do a few minutes at the end about what it is and why it's not healthy.)

Alphabet Line

2008-11-19T10:21:00.005-05:00

Over at the Elementary Tech Teachers Ning (which I am so happy to have found!), I posted some photos from my lab, and this one elicited requests to share the alphabet line file, so here it is!

Digital Documentaries 08: Phase One

2008-11-11T09:51:00.005-05:00

Past years' fifth grade movies have been somewhat mediocre overall, so I decided to a) start giving them more iMovie experience before fifth grade, and b) have students put more time and energy into the movie planning process this year so that when they are making the movies they're really just assembling ingredients they've prepared beforehand.

To that end, I had students first create GoogleDocs presentations of movie proposals--one slide each for 3-5 possible topics.

I had them use GoogleDocs both so that they could work on it at home if they chose (a few did) and so that they could use GoogleDocs smoothly when they need it for their class writing pieces later in the year. (They set up accounts last year, but not everyone used them, so we spent the first 2 periods resetting their passwords.) Then I chose or helped them choose the topic that would work best from the 3-5 they had proposed, and their next task was to create a presentation of 4-6 slides that would be a specific plan for their movies: what pictures (These are KenBurns style iMovies, not video), words, and sounds they would have in each part.

For both presentations, I gave students step-by-step direction sheets, shared my example presentations with them in GoogleDocs, and taught minilessons. They had 3 class periods for each.

I realize now I should have taken this much more slowly. I should have had them read the direction sheet aloud in a distraction-free environment. I should have had them "unpack" my presentations in class and talk about what they noticed and what they could do in their own presentations. (I also should have spent more time with them at the very beginning watching actual examples of 1-2 minute documentaries like the ones they'll be making. I'm sharing these examples after the plan is done, but should do some before as well.) I didn't do this, and as a result had about half of the kids confused in a variety of ways, like doing presentations all about a particular topic instead of 3-5 proposals. After getting this sorted out, some kids only wrote 1-2 proposals, or very incomplete proposals, but I let them move on to the second presentation because I didn't want them to get further behind.

Yesterday was the last class period for the second presentation, and out of 27 kids, 6 finished and are ready to start their movies, 8 are close, 12 will probably need 2 more class periods, and for 2 of them, I'm finally accepting that I will need to set up their Google accounts to remember them because they have wasted so much type mistyping their email and password, which is written on a piece of paper in front of them.

(In fairness to some kids, we did have some browser incompatibility problems, too. It used to be that GDocs worked with Camino, but not Safari, but with presentations it seems to be the other way around. Firefox would be ideal, but that's a story for another post.)

The moral of the story seems to be this: 6 class periods is not enough time for most fifth graders to create a proposal and a plan for a 1-2 minute movie in GoogleDocs, and if I want this project to succeed in the future, I will need to either:
a) have the fifth grades twice a week (sadly, this term I don't have 3/4 of them at all.)
b) get classroom teachers on board (a likelihood with some and very doubtful with others)
c) give students an option to use paper or the program of their choice (a word processor, presentation program, or mindmap program) instead of GoogleDocs
d) make sure that strugglers have helping partners set up beforehand, and get those kids in separately in small groups for extra support. (Some teachers do digital documentaries as a group project to help support strugglers, but I really want kids to get the whole experience, which doesn't happen if you break down the project into smaller jobs.)

The good news is that I can use what I've learned here with the other 3 fifth grade classes I hope to have in the spring. The bad news, as always, is that this class ends up the unfortunate guinea pigs.

There are so many great teachers doing digital documentaries with their students and posting about it, but I haven't found any yet who are doing it with classes of 25-32 kids in a once-a-week setting. Surely they must be out there, right?

Tiny boxes in action

2008-11-09T20:33:00.005-05:00

Some examples of the current (flawed) assessment sheets in action--complete with embedded flickr notes if you click the images! (Each box represents one class period. Blurred areas are student names.)

Pinkie nail

2008-11-09T19:19:00.002-05:00

How big is my pinkie nail, one interested reader wants to know, in reference to the last post:

Assessment: tiny notes in tiny boxes

2008-11-09T01:25:00.001-05:00

Over the course of a school year, I see approximately 700 students in grades k-5 (once a week for either 1 or 2 terms).

My current system for assessment gauges how they do on the work I give them each week. If they do their job, they get a check; If they do it really well and help others, they get a check plus; if they do it beyond my wildest dreams, they get a star; if they sort of do it, but miss some point, they get a check minus; if they totally don't do it, they get an x--so it's sort of an assessment of the whole set of skills they use that day. I also use other codes like ot for off-task, fd for trouble following directions; h if they need extra help; hk for uses home keys, p for printed, a for absent, or b for major behavior problems. (I also keep separate sheets on the 4th grade bloggers, and 5th grade movie-makers, for whom there's a lot more information to track.)

Each mark or code goes in a box a little smaller than my pinkie nail--to accommodate a class of 32 students for 12 weeks on one sheet which also acts as a seating chart. It's hard to fit much information in a box that tiny, and I have more benchmarks than I have boxes (a possible sign that I am teaching too many things in the time I have, but I'm not prepared to cut back). I will sometimes make additional tiny notes that I need to work on a particular skill or concept with a particular kid, but not consistently or comprehensively, so the system has its flaws in terms of assessment driving teaching in a concrete way.

The only alternatives I see would be either:
a) Design a new sheet with fewer, bigger boxes for more notes per kid per week (which would also require that I devote more time to writing those notes each week, and consequently less time to teaching), or
b) Determine 5-10 concrete benchmarks per term for each grade and assess just for that (and effort and behavior) rather than for how they do generally on each particular day's tasks. This is closer to what other specialty teachers in my school do--most assess based on 4-5 benchmarks--but I have been resistant to condensing or reducing my goals that way. Given that my current system isn't giving me all the information I need, it may be time to reconsider and redesign the system.

Action items:
1) See if other techie teachers talk about this online
2) See if I can possibly boil down my goals to 5-10 benchmarks per grade per term
3) Take nap

Standards and Benchmarks

2008-11-08T16:10:00.009-05:00

School culture is all about benchmarks and assessment these days, and I'm working on honing my own informal standards and benchmarks (which are really just skills and concepts) for technology use in k-5. (I like the updated NETS07 and profiles, and made my own to complement rather than replace those.)

(The assessment piece is simply that I watch students and talk to them and look at their work with an eye towards these standards, but I have to admit that I can only guess at which of my ~700 students understand the concept of a network or remember, weeks after the lesson, how to create a folder. More on assessment to come.)

They've developed somewhat organically, and will certainly evolve further.
Maybe as a result of your comments!

Testing and Technology, or, Neglect vs Scrutiny

2008-11-03T00:23:00.001-05:00

I know many teachers who feel overwhelmed by the pressure they feel from their administrators to do more than they feel capable of doing, and anxious about the amount of scrutiny they are under. I have nearly the opposite situation: I get virtually no outside pressure, evaluation, or feedback. Fortunately, I set my own bar high and reflect on my practice and all that, but I'm sure I could do even more and do it better if I had another pair of eyes on me occasionally, noticing areas for improvement that I don't notice myself. Of course I would take neglect over scrutiny any day, but I'm always in favor of moderation.

Aside from the fact that I have a proven record and am trusted by my administrators, I suppose a major reason for the lack of attention paid to my curriculum and teaching is that my subject is not tested. I have often thought that the day they start standardized-testing my subject is the day I retire, but I don't expect that day to come until after the day that they impose more specific standards and ensure that every school has access to the same level of technology, which is a day I don't expect to come soon.

Even then, I expect the technology would change faster than the testing companies could keep up with it. I can imagine a test asking kids to identify the cpu or a floppy disk, for example. Other potential obstacles include the fact that so much that students do with technology is creative and untestable in any standardized way (or should be, anyway); and the fact that we want the use of technology to be integrated into other subjects--ideally, reading comprehension tests would include an online element, where students must navigate a website, glean information from it, evaluate it for reliability, and post a comment, for example.

Would identifying the usb port be on a separate test? What about changing page layout from portrait to landscape? Or centering a title? Emailing an attachment? Resizing an image? Creating a pdf? Staying safe online? Printing via keyboard shortcut, file menu, or toolbar? Embedding a video on your blog? I got an email this week from Atomic Learning advertising a "Tech Skills Assessment" based on ISTE NETS-S 2007 that can be completed in a single class period. I don't want to use it, but sure would be curious to see it.

What a fortuitous segue this will make to my next post: Benchmarks and Standards!

Metaphors and analogies

2008-11-02T17:57:00.003-05:00

I like to use metaphor and analogy when helping my students understand foreign computer concepts. I talk about traffic jams when we're all trying to look at the same website at the same time; I compare the computer to a baby, in that "it is not as smart as you are, and it may not always understand what you want it to do, but you still have to be kind and gentle to it"; I compare learning to touch-type to learning to walk (hard at first, and slower than crawling, but then so easy you don't even have to think about it); and the internet is like the biggest library you can imagine, except it lives in all the computers of the world instead of in a building, and there is no librarian to organize everything and keep bad stuff out (though there are search engines to help you find stuff), and anyone is allowed to put their own writing and recordings and movies in it, for example.

The tricky concept I'm struggling to find an analogy for now is saving, when you are saving something that has been saved before, but has had changes made to it. Misunderstanding this concept can be disastrous. For example, kids who forget about the undo command (how could they?!) are likely to think "Ok, I just accidentally deleted all of my words. I know, I'll save, and then they'll be saved, right?" Alas, no. I try to explain that the save command saves whatever your document looks like right now, and replaces the previously saved version that was there a second ago, but many are not getting it, and either I need to make a Common-Craft type of video to illustrate this concept, or I need an analogy, and I'm not coming up with one.

It occurs to me now that the best solution would be to have students (the ones who get it) make that video illustrating the concept, but I'm still open to suggestions for analogies.

Mission Statement

2008-10-19T16:12:00.003-04:00

I get so bogged down in the management, the setup, and practicalities, that it's easy to forget why I'm doing this. Thinking about the previous post about blog hosts and others about the minutiae of word processing and passwords, I realize that while those things are necessary, I'd like to spend more time thinking about why I teach what I teach, and why it's important.

To that end, here's my mission statement:
I want for my students to be able to:

be self-directed, independent learners who figure out new technology independently and teach others,
use technology to efficiently find, organize, and share information
produce media creatively (take risks)
consume media wisely (think critically)
understand that they can change the world

What's your mission statement?

Blogger vs Edublogs

2008-10-19T14:27:00.005-04:00

Daunted by the looming task of setting up my fourth graders' blogs, I started considering Edublogs instead of Blogger, based on the great community that Edublogs seems to have, the ability I would have to monitor kids' posts before they go up, and posts like this.
After several hours trying it out, however, I found that my setup will be easier with Blogger. (Plus, we've already laid the difficult groundwork of email and Google accounts.)

Edublogs seems best if you want each student to have their own blog, or all of your students to contribute to one blog, but not so much when you're planning about 20 team blogs with 5-7 students each. Same problem with eChalk, which hosts our school website and has recently added blog capability, but only for individuals, and with the additional problem of having their usernames, which includes their last names, in the address.

Why team blogs?
1) No one wants to go through 130 fourth graders' blogs. It may give them more control and ownership to have their own individual blogs, but they'll have a much smaller audience. This brings it down to about 20 blogs, and they're arranged by topic, which is more authentic.
2) Having team blogs about a specific (but broad) topic gives students something to write about, which should help eliminate the writer's block problem, as well as the pointless posts problem.
3) Teams provide a structure for students to help and support each other.

Word processing in second grade--best practices?

2008-10-16T22:48:00.000-04:00

Second graders have been working on "about the author" pieces that they can use with their published pieces throughout the year. The learning objectives are basic word processing elements, but include so many obvious-seeming things that aren't at all obvious to them: typing in paragraphs (one space only after each word--when they instinctively want to use 2 or 3, auto-line-breaks, and return only for a new paragraph) capitalizing and punctuation (shift--not caps-lock, and space after the period--not before), on-screen editing (strategies for reading on-screen, where to click, the 2 different delete keys, the ever-important undo function), selecting and formatting text (a mouse skill that doesn't always come easily), spell-checking (in a different menu in every program, plus the care required to choose the right spelling and know when it's ok to click ignore), and inserting and resizing images (the simplest part). Add to this the steps of saving with a name that makes sense and various ways of finding your saved file, and this could easily be 2-months worth of lessons! (The minimally invasive approach breaks down somewhat here.) Compounded with their 2 wpm typing, a simple project becomes excruciatingly long.

Much of this they get in kindergarten and 1st grade, but practicing something just a few times and then not again for 6-9 months doesn't always make it stick. For the sake of our sanity, I've been compressing lessons, skipping spellchecking and certain other elements with some classes, and addressing problems with individual kids as they pop up just to keep the project to 4 class periods, but this seems like an imperfect solution, especially in light of the "teach one thing per lesson" philosophy.

Ideally, they would have lots of opportunities to practice these skills in their classroom, rather than just in the lab once a week, but until we achieve that ideal state, I need to develop an organized and purposeful way to teach and reinforce these skills so that I don't catch 4th graders still using caps-lock instead of shift and using the space bar to center a title, but also so that I don't bore or frustrate them.

I'm sure the principles we use for teaching conventions in writers' workshop should work here--I remember a chart Jane Hsu had in 1st grade where we added things as kids learned them for which they would be held accountable in all of their future pieces--capitals, periods, word-wall words, etc.--but it's tough to design such a chart to work across the grades (or even across classes) and in a once-a-week environment.

Anyone else have an organized way of teaching basic text skills that's not boring and still leaves us time to make comics and movies in a once-a-week lab setting?

Brains

2008-10-11T16:43:00.007-04:00

More recent non-technology-specific reading: The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, and another recommended by my sister: Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by John Ratey.

The first book is primarily about neuroplasticity and how various mental, physical, and emotional habits, training, and experiences can physically change our brain maps. It's largely anecdotal, sort of Oliver Sacks-like, and one story in particular has significant relevance to education: Barbara Arrowsmith had an array of serious learning disabilities, as well as some remarkable strengths. She developed for herself cognitive exercises to overcome (not just compensate for) her disabilities, and founded a school based on her discoveries and research. The rote exercise aspect is counter to my school's philosophy of authenticity, where our students' work is supposed to be meaningful and personally relevant, but I believe in general that a balance of approaches is best.

I wanted to find out for myself by having some students try software based on the same principles, Fast ForWord (designed by neuroplasticity revolutionary Michael Merzenich), but pricing starts at around $10,000 for a 12 month subscription of two products on 3 computers, so until we get a grant, that won't happen. Additionally, it seems that though Doidge speaks highly of the program, its Wikipedia page, disappointingly, cites 2 studies that "seem to call [its] efficacy into question."

The second brain book, Spark, is also based on neuroplasticity, but is more about the ways that exercise can help with specific mental problems like anxiety, depression, and ADD, and also includes a chapter on exercise and learning. We've known that our kids need to move more, but with time and space limitations, haven't prioritized it. Most classes only get 1 period of gym a week, and most kids do not get real aerobic exercise during their 25 minute recess. We've prioritized academics over PE, but it turns out that regular PE, in the form of sustained aerobic activity, has been proven to significantly improve academic achievement. The yard, gym, and gym teachers are in constant use with 32 classes and 3 periods of recess, but it seems like a simple solution would be for classroom teachers to take their classes on a brisk walk or jog around the block every day--mid-morning or after lunch. Include some jumping or spinning, and you've got a piece of the sensory diet puzzle in there, too. Personally, I plan to take start taking a brisk lunchtime walk myself (possibly with jumping), and see if my afternoons are any cognitively perkier. If programs like PE4life (touted in Spark) and the Naperville program had been around when I had gym class, I might even be more inclined to engage in real aerobic exercise.

Singers, Pushers, and Wigglers

2008-10-11T11:18:00.007-04:00

Even after 9 years in the classroom, I am still frequently chagrined at the disservice I feel I've done past students when I learn something new from which past students didn't benefit.

Current case in point: Sensory Integration. My sister, the superstar OT, specializes in Sensory Integration and Sensory Diet, and recommended to me The Sensory-Sensitive Child as a good beginning text on the subject. After finally reading it, as well as the handouts for her workshop I'll be attending next month, I see many of my students' behaviors in a new light.

Kids who talk to themselves? Not simply inconsiderate of those around them, they have a sensory need to talk themselves through things. Likewise the singers and hummers: they may be drowning out room noise or they may need the auditory input. Pushers and shovers? They need more or different tactile input. Kids who can't concentrate or who work slowly? My room is just too visually and auditorily stimulating for them. Wigglers and fidgeters? I understood this as a need before, but have new strategies for accommodating the need now. Sleepy or spacey? They may just need "alerting" input.

New things I'll try now: Move-n-Sit or Disc-o-Sit cushions for more kids, let the dancers step outside and dance when they need to, let the hood-wearers in need of retreat wear their hoods (contrary to school policy), headphones for the noise-sensitive, fidgety things for the hand- and mouth-fidgeters, and strategies for the kids who need to reconcile their needs with those of the kids around them.

Ideally, I'd love for all of our teachers to know about this and all of our kids to know themselves sensorily--to learn and practice sensory regulation skills. (Two books for kids that look promising: Arnie and His School Tools, and The Goodenoughs Get In Sync.) The question now is: how to do that in my own classroom while also teaching my technology curriculum and/or how to spread the news to my already overburdened colleagues?

Google Earth

2008-10-07T09:09:00.006-04:00

I've had trouble in the past coming up with intelligent ways to use Google Earth with my k-5 students. Creating a tour of places they might want to go didn't seem to take full advantage of all Google Earth has to offer, and felt somewhat random.

But this year we have a fantastic new social studies staff developer and we're teaching geography for real! Fifth graders are studying landforms, and third and fourth are studying maps. Third graders will even choose different countries to study as a class!

So far, we've just looked at our neighborhood and school and explored other places with and without layers like borders and roads. They've discovered many other features, but I think I want to focus now on the earth itself, more than on using the program. A third grader was frustrated that he wasn't seeing any buildings when he zoomed in on a random spot, which led to a fascinating discussion about cities vs farm/desert/forest land and suburbs, and why cities were settled in particular places.

My next challenge is coming up with a way to document these conversations (and to have students create something from their explorations) without having them write, which they do plenty of during the rest of the day, and which tends to slow down their thinking. Maybe this is the push I need to start using Voicethread? Or would screenshots in iMovie be simpler? Or maybe I need to actually read some of those Google Earth blogs I've subscribed to and see what other people in k-5 are doing.

Google Earth Lessons Blog

Kids and Passwords II

2008-09-30T16:50:00.003-04:00

Part of the confusion some kids had setting up their accounts could be due to the design of my password sheet, which had 4 boxes: username, email address, ps116.org password, and GoogleDocs password. The boxes on the sheet were similar visually to the ones where they type their passwords online, but the sequence of boxes on the sheet didn't correspond to the sequence of boxes on the login screens. The sequence in my redesign, while not as logical, does correspond to the login screens (with a section for the username and password they enter at ps116.org, and a section for the email address and password they enter at GoogleDocs), and should lessen confusion somewhat.

The only problem is that this year's kids are all set up, so I may have to wait until next September to try it.

The next quandary is whether to let kids choose their own passwords (which many often forget without the password sheet) or have them use a formula (which is less secure, but also teaches them a strategy they can use for managing multiple passwords later in life, and which some still forget). I've tried both and neither is perfect. Anyone else have experience with this?

GTA application video

2008-09-28T10:45:00.001-04:00

The hardest part was keeping it to 60 seconds.

Minimally Invasive

2008-09-26T20:42:00.005-04:00

Many of my students are comfortable exploring and figuring things out on the computer independently, but many are much more cautious and want more direction and reassurance. Nine times out of 10, when a student asks me a question like "how do you save?" I'll ask the same question back to them, and they'll answer it themselves. For the more apprehensive, I've been telling them the story this week of Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall experiment and theory of minimally invasive education.

I tell them that it's not that these kids in India were super-mega-geniuses to figure out the computer with no one teaching them, it's that all kids are super-mega-geniuses. "You all know how to use Kidpix, right? But I never taught it to you! You just figured it out!" (Yes, I gave them tips and taught them a few special tricks, but mostly they made discoveries and taught each other.)

I don't believe 100% in Mitra's philosophy, however. I do lots and lots of teaching every day that I think is absolutely necessary, but I also give them opportunities to explore and set them up to figure things out on their own.