Reflections of a Techie

It's Showtime Boys and Girls!!!

This was our last teaching day.  I'll have to say with all the frustrations of the days...crazed kids who were ready for summer to start, locker clean-out to name a couple....that I realized I really, really liked this crop of 6th graders.  I watch them sort through all their stuff.

Some of them look at the things in their locker and tell the stories behind each thing they take out.  The half full bottle of water, the almost full Reading Journal, the torn-up lab worksheets.  They have to figure out whether the stuff in their locker goes back home with them, whether it could be donated to community shelters, whether it can be recycled by our Green Team or if it's just trash.  Amazing how many lost textbooks, overdue library books and missing assignments come pouring from the depths of these 14" x 38" boxes.

I look at each of them and sort of allow myself to remember what they were like last August.  Their wide-eyes and respectful demeanor  long gone.  Now they tease me and let me tease them....they have grown up so much.  We gotten used to each other quirks and have found ways to enjoy the uniqueness of each other.

As we finish up lockers, we move down to the commons for the All School Talent Show.  OMG....it's amazing.  Now probably you wouldn't make that same evaluation if you listened to the acts.  But I am thrilled as I watch each student so bravely perform.  Here are some of my favorites....

This young man transferred into our school mid-year.  The transferring school told he was pretty much hopeless..he had terrible acne, BO and I'm not sure how long it had been since he washed his hair or clothes.  School was hard for him, no two ways about it.  When our social studies teacher got to the Rome unit, he wanted to research gladiators.  Figures, doesn't it.  Well, he studied them alright and really got interested.  He learned how they used their swords and blocks the blows of others.  He also learned how they choreographed their moves....and he started working on imitating them for his presentation.  And the rest is history.  OK....he transferred that love to light sabers from Star Wars.  But today he performed the most amazing set of moves in the dark with his light sabers blazing and everyone in the audience chanting his name.  A freak turned a hero.

One of my most brilliant math students stepped to the piano and started playing a composition she had written.  It was unbelievable that this 13 year old could even play the music she did, nevermind that she composed it.

Next was the AC/DC cover band.   A couple of our little guys had their big amps and the most popular sevie singing some random song I don't know.  The bass player in this is one of the most introverted kids I've ever met....you know the kind you have to get really close to hear him talk in class...and when he did that hop/jump thing that guitar players do across the stage....well, I thought I was going to bust my sides cheering for him.

The best part of all of it was that I saw kids that have evolved into new beings since I've had them.  I could almost watch the passing of the guard happening in this show...the 8th graders doing their last performance for the school and the new rising 6th grader stars taking their place.  I love and hate this time of year for that very reason.

It's showtime boys and girls.....time to cheer for each other, laugh and smile together before we have to say goodbye.  Some for the just the summer and others until they come back and visit from HS..some I will never see again.  I loved the day.

Increasing Student Involvement in Designing our Performance Assessment

I've been thinking about assessment non-stop lately.  We're in the middle of a huge performance assessment with my math students right now.  We've been studying similar figures and how they can be constructed.

We took the standard enlarge the comic strip project and tweaked it a bit.  This was one of the first times I've successfully asked students to help me design the assessment.  I read them what we'd done in the past and asked them how they thought they could improve the assessment.  Immediately they told me the task I had designed was too easy and didn't show if someone could create more than the simplest similar figure.  They suggested that we create a whole family of similar figures and then create an imposter.

The idea is to have a family of similar comic strip characters instead of simply enlarge one comic cell.  I thought this was a terrific idea.

As the week as progressed, students have asked me if we could take a "family portrait".  The portrait would be with them, as the cartoon character creator, and all their family members.  They want to somehow pose the imposter (in a secret way that ) so reveals who is not the similar figure.  They are writing entries about how they are going about this process and other students are entering our class blog to read about their process...commenting about what has gone well and what could be improved upon in the future.

This was an improvement they suggested from my "report".  They liked the idea of an interactive report where other students commented on what they were thinking and they could help each other.  Another sign of my 21st century students.

Once again, I think I've really learned that I can improve assessments with student input.  The task on which they are working is more complex and will show much more depth to their understanding of similarity.  I do believe that the written component where they have to describe their thinking is as important a piece to this assessment as the actual characters they are creating.  I also like the fact that during the assessment, I am continually asking questions and making suggestions.

I believe we will come closer to achieving our goal of making the assessment an exercise in continuous feedback to the student and that they learn something along the way....as well as I evaluate how well they understand a concept.

Monsters and Voicethreads....get the adjectives ready

I'm continually on the lookout for examples of student work that demonstrate learning AND technology integration.  Through my reader, I found this terrific example.  Kathleen McGeady's classroom wrote monster stories using colorful adjectives.  They illustrated them and then uploaded them to Voicethread.

The most charming part is hearing their voices read the stories.  I think this will be a great example of how the technology becomes invisible if the application is spot-on.  Here I can tell the focus was on the story and the use of adjectives...not Voicethread.

Thank you for such a great example of how this can work with younger children.  It was fantastic.

Thinking about IWB can really be interactive

Reading through my Twitter stuff this morning, brought me to a posting by Chris Betcher.  Part of what he says follows here.....

A slightly different angle - The Interactive Whiteboard Revolution. Which brings me to my third point, and that is this common misconception about what constitutes interactivity. I'm endlessly amused by those who think that the word "interactive" in "interactive Whiteboard" refers the the act of coming to the board and physically maneuvering objects around on a screen. In my opinion, that is missing the whole point. If you measure the success of IWBs by how "interactive" they are, and you measure the success of "interactivity" by how many people get to physically manipulate objects on the board, then yes, there will always be a ceiling on how successful they are in your eyes. However, I see the interactivity not as the physical interactivity of touching the board, but in the intellectual interactivity that can be created when a classroom is able to embed rich media into lesson, when it can flexibly divert off the planned course of a lesson by quickly calling up relevant web resources, when it can easily use media to juxtapose differing viewpoints that require students to think more critically or to have to defend their points of view. When you can have a large screen digital convergence facility in your classroom that adds richness and depth to the teaching and learning process, then I think you start to see the intellectual interactivity rise in that class. It is these deeper classroom discussions that arise by stimulating ideas in your students heads that really add interactivity to your classroom.

This is exactly how I feel about IWBs.  I can't take all the spending we do to give people new projection screens.

Where I've found the IWB most invaluable is similar to the movie example.  Because I teach science, I project Google Earth more than literature movies.  When we get to the place we're studying...say for example the mid-ocean ridges....we annotate the place using the screen capture function and add all sorts of information that is gathered from our textbooks and other sources.  When we finish, I export that Notebook file as a .pdf, upload it to our class webpage and/or make it available to kids for their science notebooks.  I think they find it extremely helpful.

Now that it's the end of the year, my kids always remind me (as if I'm so old I'll forget everything) to do this.  I ask myself why I was always doing all the hard work, so I taught them how to do it.  Now the best part is that someone just steps up to the IWB every day and does it for the rest of us.  To me, it's this habit of mind and of organizaitonal thinking that's very cool and I think extremely useful for their future lives.

Thanks Chris for the post.