Reflections of a Techie

Lettting them Choose....Getting Students ready to effectively use tools

Was reading an excellent post called I Did Leave it Up to Them.  This is someone after my own heart because this is precisely what I'm trying to do too.  I knew this was going to be a great post; listen to this

I gave the students a choice of tools (i.e., iPod Touch, Nintendo DS, iPad, and Livescribe Pen), and they were able to use any of the tools in any way that they wanted, as long as they shared their learning with me.

I think this is so smart.  Give them a number of tools that they know how to use and then let them decide on the best way of giving you back the information.  I did this with our Mastodon Project but since it was so early in the year, we didn't have network resrouces working yet, so very few of them utilized technology options.

Aviva is a 1st grade teacher, so her post really is evidence for people who might be skeptical that young children can use technology.  But probably the key to making this work is the modeling step she speaks about so well.  It seems to me that it is a forgotten step quite often.  You have to use the instructional tool so often in front of students that they get quite familiar with it.  I know that I had to not only show how to use the temperature probes, but also them use them in several demos before I asked students to use them for their own investigations.

I experience this in the past couple of weeks in my own room.  I wanted students to use probeware as an efficient means of data collection....which should free up time to help them focus on the analysis of what was happening.  The first couple of weeks they struggled to see how the graphs and tables revealed any patterns....and now don't even notice that they're using a tool.  They are focused on the science.  Even when I didn't have laptops on which to use the software and had to transfer them to a different interface on a handheld device, they were still able to do the analysis.

I think both of us are focused on empowering students to find their voice and to communicate with us.  Choice is a huge motivator and incorporating new technology tools with appropriate modeling makes it all possible.  I love the idea of "Letting Them Choose".

On a completely different note:

Another huge idea that this post included was I've been thinking about reflection, too.  And Aviva speaks about using smaller size paper to get students to write more.  I've done this when we read.....students are very resistant to reader logs in science class.  But they're totally content with creating mini-summaries and WOW facts (thanks Stephanie Harvey for this great idea).  Aviva read about it from  Zoe Branigan-Pipe wrote  how to improve audio feedback for her students who were writing their first lesson plans...she used sticky notes to amp it up.

Don't you just love how all good teaching circles around and around?

 

Accumulating a digital footprint...what students should know

"Digital footprints?  For real, Mrs. Ratzel?  I've never heard of anything like that...I can surf the web and no one knows who I am or where I come from." 

"Do I worry about who sees my work that I post?  No way."

"I love talking with my friends online and posting on their walls.  It's a blast and there's no one to tell me what to do."

Image licensed under Attribution CC http://goo.gl/AjLSL

I hear these whenever I bring up the subject of digital footprints to my students.  They feel all the power of surfing the web;  going wherever they chose, no one to say yes or no;  the perfect place for them to flex themselves as they grow and mature.  Can you blame them?  We felt that way too and just expressed it in different ways in our generation (doesn't matter how old you are, does it when you think of it like this).  I think the idea of a global generation is important with which to come to terms (the link will take you to a wonderful online speech by John Palfrey).  Digital identities leave behind traces of who you wherever you "travel" online.  Something like Google will bring these little pieces of "you" all together into a composite picture which mutates into a singular digital footprint.

So digital footprint matters.  As the adult in my classroom I know it and what I must do is to provide a learning experience to help students arm themselves with understanding.  I've been thinking about this idea of  digital footprints before.  Will they still feel that invincible power of teenagers?  Sure.  But maybe it will give them just enough of an awareness that they can hesitate (ever so slightly) and make a better decision.

Do you think they realize that all this goes on?

  

Now I've always used a digital driver's license approach.  It worked pretty well and it includes a set of 4 lessons, based on the Common Sense curriculum, that students must complete before I allow them to do much with computers. 

1. What information should be private and what can I share with the world?
2. How can I be smart about online talk and messaging?
3. Cyberbullying---it isn't funny and what you should do to make sure it doesn't happen to you as well as what you can do to help stop it
4. Sharing what you do with your parents---how to keep them informed, sharing passwords, and teaching them about what you're learning

Last year when I started blogging with students, I  incorporated a tiered system of gaining access to student publishing by having another gaunlet of skills that they must demonstrate before they were able to get their own blog, publish blog posts without my moderation and/or write posts for the class blog.  I read lots of materials, including some interesting work at the Youth and Media project which considers not only how this issue affects American youth, but youth throughout the wordl.

This year in a graduate course I teach, we started talking about all the aspects of digital citizenship and the driver's license.  They questioned whether a driver's license was broad enough to incorporate all the places students would be going.  Their questions made me realize that I need to revamp the idea and turn the driver's license into a passport. 

Changing from a Driver's License to a Digital Passport Makes Sense

It makes sense to me to manage the footprint with a passport because a student has to "visit" so many different places.  It allows me to use the metaphor of the internet being another world...and each place we go will be like another country.  To enter that country, you have to have a valid passport visa.

 

 I'm in the process of defining each of those "countries" right now.  Here's my brainstormed list so far

• Searching---synomyns, keywords
• Twitter---how to read, how to interact
• Images---copyright, how to find them
• Image alterations---where to manipulate the way they look both online and with school software
• High quality posting and commenting
• i Touch skills
• Recording audio & editing it
• USGS and NOAA websites---where to go; what you can find;
• Citation---how to do it; web-based citation helps; citation apps
• Scribe posting--how to notetake for the class; where to post
• Archiver--what to document, where to store what's been gathered; how to curate what you've done so other people can find it in the future

If there are things on this list that you think would be useful, please make a suggestion.  I've been designing an electronic version of the passport which I will post in the near future so that everyone can use it.

So what would you add?

 

Passport picture Image licensed under AttributionCC http://www.flickr.com/photos/gravitywave/366712496/sizes/m/in/photostream/

 

 

Lights, Camera, Action Research!

via plpnetwork.com

When you get to hear about other people's work, it helps you to dream bigger than you would if you only stay within your own boundaries.  I know I'm tired of waiting around for people to figure out that we need to change how we work with kids.  I'm trying new things.  Testing new ways of interacting with the curriculum and seeing what works.  Not everything works to be sure, but to have a community of people with whom to share ideas, tweak what did work, fix what didn't work...well, it's where my head and heart want to be.  It's why I'm a teacher.  It's my classroom.  It's my kids.  It's all about learning.

And if that work includes action research....student evidence that shows the learning behind the big idea...it's even more invigorating.  So I'm looking forward to this  sharing of learning teams from around North America come to Elluminate for a speed-dating style report out.  May 24th!!!  That's when it's happening from 8-10 EDT.

Check out the Powerful Learning Practices blog for all the details and get it on your calendar.

Reduce that summer learning slump with just five!!! Kids got it!!!

Don't be a chump, Avoid the slump...Read just 5!!!

You can be a leader, find good ones and read 'em!!!

Go for sky...find your five!!!!

Take the dive and read your five, and then another five and another five...you can jive.

Students had a blast this week designing bookmarks for their summer reading.  Having shared the news my good friend Donalyn Miller @donalynbooks gave us during #titletalk last month that if students would read only 5 titles over the summer they could help reduce their summer slump.  I challenged them to come up with catchy slogans and bookmarks that we could reproduce and distribute.  See what you think of some of the ones that have been submitted so far.

 

 

They have so many ideas.  But you can tell that swimming is a huge theme for them no matter what else they do this summer.

 
While others appreciated the idea that they wouldn't lose the ground they just fought so hard to gain during this past school year.

The original artwork from some students was amazing, although not everyone can be this artistic...we agreed that everyone can and should read.

My overwhelming impression from these bookmarks is that students do love to read and they can be enthusiastic readers if we help them see the upside of their efforts.  They just don't fall in love with reading in a world where there are so many choices...many of which are "easier".   You know where I'm taking this next don't you....for the last three weeks I'm asking them......

So what's your five?

I've got mine in mind.  Get yours.

Let the "31 Day Game" Begin!!! Wanna have fun & learn too???

via thecleversheep.blogspot.com

I'm just at the point where I'm learning from my PLN, so imagine my delight when this strange Tweet came up about the 31 Day Challenge.  What in the heck is that?

Who plays that?  I thought I'd seen this as a math game...but how would it be a PD activity using Twitter? 

As part of my continuing commitment to try all things and just see how they go, I am testing the waters for this idea.  The newest game just starts today and I couldn't be more excited.  The first question was to examine the ideas behind a jigsaw or a graffatti instructional tool and decide which one is the better cooperative learning strategy in your classroom.

Each strategy was hyperlinked with a resource to read which reminds you of how that strategy can be used and then I read thru the Twitter feed to see what other people had been saying.

  

 

 

 

I'm sure you get the idea.  So now, I had to decide for myself.

Well actually it wasn't that hard.  I love the way that the graffatti appeals to middle schoolers, how it is to implement and how versitle it is.  I'm going to vote for that strategy.  There's a whole website devoted to housing the information and strategies from this learning.

What a wonderful...and relatively quick review of things I knew but hadn't recently thought about applying my classroom.  What a nonthreatening way to ask for help from colleagues and to build my twittterverse up with other practitioners who are thinking about how to improve.  I think this could be winner application of Twitter for me.

The last tip I thought was useful was to bookmark the search results for this so I could easily come back to it everyday (plus this was another tips from one of the game organizers).  I love it that the organizers are helping everyone and even a newbie like me doesn't feel overwhelmed or like it's too much.  Learning can be so much fun and finding structures like this are the best of traditional learning and the online world.

 

Blogging frenzy continues as students unravel the mystery

via teachingtechie.typepad.com

Just an update on our efforts...the deception continues. Students are busy answering akadangreen's questions.    We're rapidly approaching almost 200 comments.

My favorite interchange was between one of my most reserved students who hardly ever speaks loudly....akadangreen wanted to know about his mineral...lead.  Lead you might ask?  How did he pick lead?  Well, his dad is a radiologist so what other kind of mineral would he pick?  Don't you love that?  akadangreen asked him how much lead was exported from the US every year!!!!

He looked at me because he had no idea what that even meant.  So we talked about what an export was.  And then we on a hunt.  We tried a bunch of keywords...and pretty soon we had a group of 10 kids standing around trying to thing of synonyms we could use to find data on how much lead the US exports in any year.

Eventually we found it at the USGS...of course students said.  We downloaded an insane .pdf chart detailing the export #s for every mineral in the whole US and we followed the list down to lead where we found the 2009 #. (One of the kids asked me if everything was answered at either USGS or NASA or NOAA!!!  I guess that tells you a lot about our classroom.) Here's what Nick wrote and posted on the blog about what he did with the number....

In 2009 the US actually produced 82,000 metric tons. This equals 180,800,000 pounds. How I got that answer is 1.808 multiplied by 10 to the eighth power. Your answer from that is the amount of pounds.  The computer told me 10^8, then the calculator made it into 180,800,000.

Sources: WolframAlpha.com

The USGS only had metric ton info.  That meant we had to have a discussion about the kinds of tons.  Which then meant we had to change the metric tons into pounds.

Jokingly I asked him if he could do that conversion.  His eyes sort of popped out and then I told him I had no idea how to do it either.  But I knew a place that could help us.  Wolfram.  Oh yeah he said,we've used that before.  So off to Wolfram we went where he typed in "How many pounds is 82,000 metric tons?" which came back with

Immediately he whips out a calculator to find out what that looks like.  And is able to come up with 180,800,000.  I think he was super pleased with himself and actually looked forward to going home and posting this answer to akadangreen.

What a fun couple of days where kids have learned so much about minerals PLUS about a million other things.  Who would have thought the ensuing conversation---with all the questions back and forth would keep them wondering, asking and answering.

Another fantastic way to use Google's spreadsheet for formative assessments

While I've been using Google docs for quite a while but this week I tried a new assignment with my students and happened (and how I wish I could say that I planned it) on a fabulous ah-ha.  Formative assessments are terrific AND the goal should not only be for me to learn something about where the student stands in their learning, but also to give them feedback AND for them to learn something as they complete the assessment.  Instead of creating the typical checklist in a wordprocessing format, I created a spreadsheet.

As students completed each task, they entered the required info or a yes/no to indicate where they were on the checklist.  They could also enter data into the spreadsheet about the sources of information they were using for their work.  That I anticipated and expected to happen.  But I was thinking of the document in a more static way....I knew multiple people could edit on it at the same time in Google Docs but I had never actually thought about monitoring their progress as they did it.  It was that dynamic quality that allowed me to give the feedback which then resulted in them learning more during the assessment.  We didn't have to wait until the next lesson to remediate where they weren't "getting it" and I could draw in an expert "student" to help them get what they needed to know.  Right then...on the spot.

Usually I walk around the lab and find that I get pulled into a protracted conversation with someone about doing a particular process...which is fine and OK...except that I don't accomplish what I really need to do which is to keep surveying the whole group and getting everyone moving along.

BUT  I had this EUREKA moment when I saw that keeping the Google spreadsheet open gave me that gave me a unique bird's eye vantage point as they did their work and I could also ask questions and ask for clarfication.  I was so overwhelmed, that I tried to capture as much of the experience as I could on a Jing screencast to share.  I was stationary and staying to my purpose and not being sidetracked.   I was still able to direct extra help to the people who needed it but I called on the expertise of my students to meet those needs instead of me!!!  instead of cloning myself I figured a way to develop more capacity from students.  I've long been a believer in this but I hadn't seen this method for deploying that student expertise before.

I made this on the fly and it is filled with the chatter of the students in the background but I think you'll be able to see what I mean.

I know it's sounds dorky but I was able to help students know exactly what to do and I knew exactly where they stood with getting their blogs up to speed on each of these elements. 

I think I hadn't appreciated the dynamic nature of watching the information transform before my eyes.  I could see where they were struggling to get something filled it and they were able to see what other students had done to get that part of the assignment finished.  This is such a wonderful example of a formative assessment that is outside the box of what most people think of formatives....but it is part of my imagining how formatives can and should be used in the future to help students learn in a powerful, connected future-forward (I hate the term 21st century) way.

Sometimes you're good and find something.  Lots of times, you're just lucky and have to be smart enough to see that you've stumbled on something wonderful.  I'm lucky!!!!  So how cool is that I figured out how to do a formative assessment AND tap into the student expertise of my kids....all just by using a tool that I've used a million times before just not in this way.

Have you discovered anything like this that could be purposed for formative assessments?  I just know that there are many, many more possibilities just waiting to be discovered out there.

Readers who know what they like....maturing as science nonfiction readers

We've been reading and reading...and talking and talking about reading and books.  And exploring authors and titles and topics of books.  So much to learn because they are becoming nonfiction science readers this year.  It's a huge investment of time and I hope that it pays off for them...I hope that it gives them inspiration, strategies and confidence to read more long after they've left Room 66.

One of the two things that keeps re-surfacing is that a book must be enjoyable and easy to read.  In my last post, I discuss what characteristics made a book easy to read.  The included the book telling a story, giving details but not too many, having pictures and diagrams but not too many and explanations that drew from 
what they already knew.

The second characteristic is that a book must be enjoyable.  I know that you think that must be an "of course" but you'd be wrong.  Students are quick to divide books into two categories....books that are good for writing reports because they give lots of information and the ones that are good for reading to learn.  We're not sure if nonfiction writers know the difference between the two because it seems like they get mixed up and drift back and forth between the two....which spells disaster.  It doesn't have enough to help out with a report and it isn't fun to read.

Here are some of their favorites...in the Force & Motion category they love the DK Force and Motion book best.  Here's what they said are the top three reasons

1. You can read it in two page sections.  Anyone can read 2 pages...so even if you're not a good reader, you can do 2 pages.
2. Pictures are great and very realistic.
3. Captions are better than the article.  They tell the whole story of what's going on.  Rarely are they are more than 5-6 sentences long and anyone can understand that much information at once.

In the physics category, there was a tie between Dan Green's Physics and another DK on Physics.  My students love all of Dan Green's book because of their short attention span and the sense of humor and playfulness.... they all possess.  Each two page spread has a short article with the most critical information and the other page has a humorous cartoonish picture that represents the subject.   This title is part of a bigger collection of books known as Basher Laboratories...and there isn't a title in the whole collection that we haven't read and practically worn out this year.  It's the combo of illustration genius, humor and information that works brilliantly and makes them ENJOYABLE.

 

You can also see that they've picked an older title from a science series called Fun with Physics.  This book was published way back in 1987 but it still had to same formula of information, great pictures and easy to understand explanation.  Students have checked this out time and again because they can understand how ideas of speed, motion, gravity and acceleration works after reading just a few pages.  It gives great examples that they've seen in their own lives.  This is not for my struggling readers, but the more advanced readers love it.

You'd think that experiment books would be a winner. You'd be wrong according to them.  Not that they don't own tons of them and not that there aren't tons of them in the library....it seems that people who buy books think they're good...just not my students.   Maybe they would be a good choice if you were picking a book to have at home where you could actually do the experiments, students said.  Many kids said their parents wouldn't let them drag all the stuff out to do experiments...too messy or dangerous  Without getting to do the experiments, my students would tell you that it didn't help you learn about the subject...mostly because they never did the experiments.  Reading about an experiment isn't enjoyable and they didn't learn anything....so rapidly they stopped choosing books that were primarily experimental books.

Our big takeaway was this......The more they read, the more they knew what they liked to read and how to find it within a book.  They got better and better at finding titles that matched their abilities and that would satisfy their curiosity and keep them interested.

I think they're becoming science nonfiction readers.

 

Reflecting: Learning how to better young scientists

Putting problems back on the shoulders of students has been an interesting process.  I realized that I was not letting my students do enough and that I was making them teacher-dependent.  If they had problems interpreting results, they looked to me to solve the problem, figuring out what had happened and what they should do to fix it.  I had succumbed to their pressure because I felt like I didn't have the time to linger and give the breathing space to them to figure it out for themselves.  It's such a struggle because the curriculums and support materials AND the pacing guides set us up to believe we must go

faster, faster, faster, faster, faster.  

It's really not the fault of our curriculums. It's that I've let myself become so distracted with all the testing talk, the pressure to conform to the norm and to march in the exact footsteps of other teachers around me.  Some of that pressure is real and much is self imposed by my desire to have my students be well prepared.

Connecting learning to current events...finding patterns...is it worth the invested time?

But another huge problem is that we don't connect the learning we're doing to what happens outside the classroom.  What I desperately need is to have a better awareness of how real science is done...how do scientists struggle with the pressures of producing results faster, faster, faster and faster. 

How do I get students to realize that things don't just happen for one class period and then they're over....all fall they groaned whenever we studied another hurricane as if it was riduclous to do it again?  Their world has no connection to the pacing of the happenings of the real world...and that's the beauty of my job.  I get to help them make those connections.  So we're studying another hurricane and another earthquake and soon another spring storm/tornado.  Eventually the realization does come, though....that under the general label there are differences.  It may be called a hurricane but every one has a different personality based on the water temperature, the air pressure and other factors.

Do you think my students will get that they know these nuanced differences?  Do their parents?  Is that even important?  Am I doing the right thing to linger and teach these kinds skills?

Big science ideas matter...lots to if they'll be able to hang in there with science beyond 6th grade

And I needed to stop and reflect on what how students were learning along the way as long as they are "mastering" curriculum indicators.  When we were learning about density (yes, again but what else is one of the driving, underlying concepts of earth science if not density????), I realized they weren't measuring displaced volume accurately.

I can hear you groaning.  And I know it's SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO boring.  But it's really not about this one lab or even about measuring displaced volume.  It's whether or not my students will know that their data is all messed up and shouldn't be used to draw conclusions from, if they can hang in there if I tell them they have to repeat their investigation, and if they can come up a process by which to get better results and then perfect that process.

And that's the heart of what a science teacher should, can and must do, I think.

So to get at this problem, as I checked lab notebooks I had them entered their personal results for density of the 5 samples into an Excel spreadsheet...which means we collected information from all 120 students.  And you can imagine the range of values for density....we had almost no consensus on what the density of a mineral should be.

Which means that we had to have a discussion about whether or not the density could change with the size of a sample.  yes...they had read the book and memorized the fact that density doesn't change, but it wasn't real to them yet.  They hadn't bumped their heads into it and touched it in a concrete way.  And until they do that...they don't own the idea.  This all means we had to go back and talk about what a "definite chemical composition" means and that brought us back to talking math (and I hear you sigh again since now we've got math in science....).  So we talked about making orange juice with cans of water to cans of concentrate...making one batch and then making many batches...Was it still OJ?  with the same composition?

Well....I could go on and on about our conversations.  I won't (and I know you are cheering)...but I will say this.  It took me 4 extra class periods to double back to revisit these ideas, to let them argue with me and among themselves until we had a process that could "work".  We had to uncover why the villian in our measurements was that pesky displaced volume...why some rock types were harder to measure than others (imagine that the rocks that float have the nerve not to displace water unless you "force" them to)!!! and so on.

But they did come up with much better measurements that were pretty close.

Takeaways from the whole experience

For students:

• they could do better quality science
• I think they were satisfied with themselves at the end of the day

I'm not sure they saw as much value in it as I did but they tolerate me well and most played along and worked at trying to be more accurate. 

• I KNOW they had to think more and that they felt like they had mastered more of the mind set of thinking and not just blindly following along

For me as their teacher:

Here again is where I need help. 

• I need to have a better grasp of how the real world does this.  I know that the science community publishes their work and other scientists look to see if that experiment could be replicated and if the data seem reasonable/accurate.  If it does, then the "results" are accepted and knowledge moves forward. 

That's how I tried to set up this whole re-learning process.  I divided the kids into separate lab groups...and within each group they had to produce individual results that matched with each other...and then the group "published" their group reports which had to be scrutinized by the other groups.  And if it looked like everything was similar, we accepted it.  But I think 12 year olds think that's a lot of rig-a-ma-roll...and just teacher stories to get them to do the work.

• I would love to have outside eyes to tell the scientific stories of how this works and/or to look at the data.

It seems pretty unrealistic to me that we could find enough earth scientists who have time to do this kind of thing...but maybe through the magic of technology we could/should write new curriculums that connect students together to do this kind of analysis.  Then sprinkle in a few interactions with real scientists and I think this could be a rockin' kind of curriculum.  Sort of a modified science fair kind of idea.

• So I need to find other science teachers who want to do this kind of work.  Social networking is going to be the key for me here.

What started off as a way to explore the definition of a mineral turned out to be so much more for me.  Again, I find everything I do with students makes me think more and more about how they learn best and what I should be doing to improve their learning.  It's what keeps me young and engaged in this profession.

John Brown's Geotag is moving

The kids have been waiting and waiting for the geotag to move.  They've been watching it like a hawk on the Geotagging website.  They will be totally stoked when they get back from spring break and see that it's taken a huge jump from just outside San Francisco all the way to Sacramento. 

It's still more than a 1,000 miles from Kansas, but this was a huge jump across California and I feel momentum.   I'm hoping all the work the kids have done about John Brown will start to make a difference and we can write some terrific things about the tag's journey across the country.

So why am I doing this kind of learning...how does it apply to my curriculum?  It applies because social studies is about the world....it's history and it's culture.  And it's about becoming curious about where things are and how you construct pictures of the world inside your head.  My curriculum is ancient history but I think this fits perfectly because it gives them a curiosity about geography that they don't have.  Most think geography is boring.  So I had to spice it up and having this unknown quantity....how this geotag moves across the country from the goodwill of people is extremely interesting to them.  It's sort of like a treasure hunt...except we already have the treasure but don't know the trail of the treasure. 

So more than specific curriculum objectives (which I actually have and could quote but who would care???), this project fosters their sense of wonder about the world and gives them a reason to be interested in geography.