Reflections of a Techie

Tools to amp up kids' thinking

I've been working all week on scientific argumentation...trying to distill the parts of what makes a scientific argument and then how to teach those parts to my 6th graders.  It is a daunting task.

One thing I know for sure is that I need constructs or models for how they should think when approaching a task.  I know that it will mean that they must also know when to apply the strategy, but I think it won't leave them so flat footed if they have a bag 'o tricks from which to pull.

My Google Reader brought me a very interesting post by Dave Gray on something he called Q-Tools.   Dave Gray » Q-tools: An approach for discovery and knowledge work.  He has a set of very insightful pictures that capture the thinking strategy that will be applied to a particular setting.

THIS is what I am hoping to create for scientific arugmentation.  I wonder if it's better to first think up the final product (something like making a claim) or if it's better to think up pictures to define the filters that you must apply to your thinking (evaluating the claim for evidence--stuff like data, facts, opinions or theories).  Probably doesn't matter.

I'm going to hang out a bit more with Mr Gray's piece and see what I can come up with about my own thinking structures/filters.  But thank you for the great seed of an idea!!!!

Need more student feedback

As this school year comes to an end (yes, only 3 more days)...I've really been wondering about what/how my planning for the next year should change.  I looked over my plan book, but it really doesn't reveal the kinds of data that I am wondering about.

Then I realized...I needed much more student input about the things we've done.  It's far too late in the year to ask them.  I have already circulated my student satisfaction survey and gathered parental feedback.  But what I really need is better info.

I've made a resolution that next year, I'll really work on incorporating this into every end of the unit assessment.  Maybe at the end of the summative....I think just a couple of questions that ask about what they thought was the most effective thing we did, what was the least effective (and I can promise you it lots of comments about having no homework and/or no tests), and what they wished we'd done that we didn't do.   I know I have my perspective, but their perspective would be very helpful.

Motivating Kids to Practice math

I'm always looking around for things to motivate my kids to get better and better on the basic...you know those boring old math facts.  That's not easy to do because there are so many things that compete for the time and attention.

Luckily I went to the NCTM conference in Salt Lake City.  There I ran into a booth that was selling an online version of the Game of 24.  I played this for hours when my children were young and it never ceased to challenge them and kept them asking to play more.  So when I saw the online version, I thought what could be better?

Luckily again, I was able to get a "free" subscription for my math classes to play until the end of the school year.  First in Math is the name of the vender selling this version.  It took me a bit to set up my classes (and I think the user name and passwords are way too clunky)...but then we were off.

Students earn "stickers" for successfully completing different levels of skill sets.  There are bonus games to play and different areas that all practice different skills.  Actually the documentation isn't half bad and pretty clearly explains things.  Although I'll tell you that the kids figured out way faster than I could digest the documentation where and how to accumulate stickers quickly.

Right now my 2nd hour has almost 10,000 stickers after 2 weeks of optional play on your own time and my 1st hour class has about 3,000.  The most obvious thing to do was to setup a competition between the two hours and 4 or 5 kids in 2nd hour took the challenge seriously....they have buried the 1st hour.  I think that might have been discouraging for them UNTIl I helped them see that it was really only the effort of those 4 or 5...and that if they could find 10 that would do half as much...they could be back in it.

So with a renewed commitment to beat 2nd hour they left for the weekend.  We'll see.

What I can tell you is that for some types of kids this is really engaging.  For others, they just don't care.  Like so many things in school...you have to use multiple means to find engagement.  The big question will come when I try to figure out the cost benefit of this....

Reg Weaver's Lettter---By Any Other Name May Still have Thorns

Warning...I thought I had found an encouraging note, but was more of the same old, same old.  One of those eye catching side bars in the President's Viewpoint letter in the March, 2008 issue of NEA Today..."Too many teachers...have been denied professional pay for too long."

Hurray I thought.  He's finally going to take the jump and acknowledge the possibilities of pay for performance systems.

Wrong....after a flowery intro the article says..."Yet much of the conventional wisdom and public discussion about teacher pay is misleading"  (OK, I thought I agree with that) and then "The result is misguided policies that divert attention from addressing the root cause of teacher turnover and stagnant student achievement".  I know I'm a hopeless optimist because I know better than to read this letter because it usually just makes me mad.

What?   Later he says.."The question isn't how to differentiate pay between teachers.  The question is how to pay teachers a salary that encourages the creation of a great public school for every child".  And then he launches into a laundry list that sounds as apple pie as it can be but is really nothing more than dragging feet and throwing cold water on the idea of pay for performance.  At least in my opinion.

To me it IS about differentiating teacher pay.  It's about saying that we do not all do the same thing and that we cannot all be thrown together into one lump pile and paid as if we are interchangeable widgets. 

To me the question IS about differentiating pay so that every teacher can be compensated according to how well they do their job.  Because to assume that we are all the same just seems dumb to me.  We are not the same because our communities and students are not the same.  We sound foolish when we try to simplify this incredibly complex task down to getting more training and experience.  It's well beyond that.

That is the status quo.  It is where we pay teachers for staying in their position another year regardless of what they did with their students during that year.  It is the status quo where you get a pay raise because you completed graduate hours regardless of how useful or useless those hours are to your job. 

Wake up.  The status quo is not enough.  It's terrible.  It's why people are not coming into our profession, it's why they aren't staying and it's why I want to find other systems that will pay teachers according to how well they did their jobs.  Yes this system was a huge step forward for teachers but that was years and years ago.  It needs revamping and revitalizing.

Let's take a cue from the current political revolution that is going on right now. Regardless of which candidate you support, it's clear that democracy is alive and well if you can go around the entrenched machines and communicate with the grassroots.  I  think it's the dawn of a new era of politics and I hope teachers are at the front of the line ready to explain their position and explain their ideas.  Instead of having to talk through old world machines, it may be our opportunity to take the place at the policy making table and advocate for ourselves.

Tying History Inquiry to Earth Science---It's the Droughts that Did It!!!!

In the middle of my Earth's Water unit I knew I needed some more punch...something to perk student interests in the ever present water cycle (how many times does it appear in the curriculum???? a million????) and ocean chemistry.  Climate change current events is everywhere so I knew that something could pique the interests of my students.

Sure enough it was a book about Droughts.....sounds pretty exciting doesn't it.  Well, the topic is even if a whole book isn't.  I knew that they were especially interested in the Dust Bowl.  Heck many of their grandparents remember  the 1930s.  So I thought I utilize that as my hook.

I created another Voicethread that merged our science content with historical pieces from the Kansas Historical Society.  They went nuts reading the newspaper article accounts of dust storm encounters.  They were amazed at the photographs that are available.  In a little over a week they left over 100 comments about what they were seeing and what interested them.

Take a look at the work they created and the comments they left.

Shifting Theory into Practice--Web 2.0 Interactivity

By George I really think I've not only got it but I'm really getting it.

Twitter and Voicethread may be the mediums of my understanding, but I think I'm finally moving into the next phase of growth.  OK I've always gotten that Web 2.0 is interactive but I never fully understood how that might happen for me....and the students that I serve.

Just been working with Twitter.  At first it seemed like I  wasn't really interested in the same things that "my" network was writing about.  So I deleted some people and added some others.  Eureka....then I got it.  "My network" started to have more things about which I care.  I am being transformed from the passive member into a dynamic learning environment for me.  Tom Barrett has written about this idea and has some terrific graphics that cemented my own thinking.  And that's the crux of what a personal learning network does...it helps you flesh out what you think, helps you formulate the ideas you want to persue and gives you feedback in doing that.

Voicethread is where I think I'm putting those same notions into action with my students.  We are developing a simple, first time project on classifying triangles.  It's something that stumps many 6th graders...so why not let them take photos from their worlds, post them and have a conversation about which method of classification best describes these triangles.

Will it help them on the state assessment?  You know that's the question that everyone wants you to answer before you do anything.  Honestly I don't know.  But I don't think it could hurt and maybe it will be 1) more engaging for them and 2) help us incorporate more authoring tools for them.  Now I know this project is very teacher directed and doesn't have its origin from students.  You have to start somewhere and this is my where.

I can tell you that one of my early adopter kids has taken the seeds sown by the Triangle project (in its still infancy stage) and create his own account.  He is doing a social studies project about ancient China and got my teaching partner to let him use VT to present his research.  So it begins!!!!!

Google Earth and the K12Online Conference

More and more this weekend I'm getting inspired to really try out my wings.  The ideas that I've heard about through the K12 Online Conference.   An inspiring teacher, Quentin D’Souza, describes how he has used Google Earth with his students.  He makes me believe in his video that I could do this.  You know we've been working on using EarthKAM which has brought the love of geography alive for students and spiced up my earth science class tremendously.  Google Earth has the potential to do the same.  I was just worried that there would be too steep a learning curve for me.  Mr. D'Souza convinces me otherwise.

I've spent almost all day fiddling with this new tool. I'm not there yet because I can't figure some basics moves out....but I'm determined not to give up.

Math Planning with a Pro

This was a great day because I had the chance to sit with a colleague and chat-up math.  I was feeling a little sketchy on how I was going to do somethings in my classroom, so I thought it best to get with someone who has done this before....a lot...and make sure I'm on track.

Sure I know how to define learning targets, match to objectives, pre-test...blah blah blah.  But then I want to see the plan books on how the implementation actually went.  Darn it all....if we only had curriculum mapping I wouldn't have to go through all this angst.  I could just call up a respected, known quantity and peer over their virtual shoulder to see how they accomplished everything.  But we don't do that.  Yet.

But how cool is it to walk into someone else's room.  They open their teacher's guide up and it looks as marked up as mine.  I spent the summer solving all the problems and making notes to myself about what prerequisite skills I'd need to teach before I started a lesson, which problems were too squirrely, maybe the ones where A problem was as long as 10 other problems combined so I needed to be careful in making HW assignments. 

Her teacher's manual was infected with chicken pox.  Or so I thought for a fleeting moment.  Instead it turns out that she's gone through the entire manual and crossed referenced every problem, every lesson, well every everything to the state curriculum.  If it's tested, that's marked on there, too.  So when she does her lesson planning, she can see where her concentration needs to be focused to make it through the objectives and also to practice those tested parts, too.

She has also created these awesome student daily practice books.  She took all the supporting materials and copied the regular, the re-teach and the enriched pages...stuck them together instead of being in 3 different places.  Now when she works on the skills on that page during a daily practice problem, all kids can pull out the same book.  Some will only work a couple of problems off the re-teach page, most will probably work on the regular page and those that already know the material will work on the enriched page....which all have the same page ###.  How pragmatically simple is that?  How cool is that?

I walked away with her pre-assessments.  In return I promised we get together a couple of weeks after school starts and compare the data we're about to gather.  I promised to be a PLC with her!!!  Ha! And she thought that was a good deal.  Common assessments won't be far behind as we move through the material.  I know that I will stink by comparison and my kids won't perform like hers, but I don't care (well not much...well not enough to make me not do this).  I want to learn what I'm doing right/wrong/otherwise.

I'm not sure what she is getting.  Maybe it was that cherry limeade I stopped and bought and the gift of a highlighter that also has post-its!!!  Probably not.  I think she would have done all this anyway.  It's the beautiful side of teachers.

Emerging Tools for Teachers:Wiki, IM and online chat: Using it all at once. Would our kids ever believe us? Probably not.

A small group of teachers gathered together in TappedIn, a multi-user online virtual community, to talk about how to improve the wiki they are writing about Interactive Notebooks.  What was so amazing is that until about 2 months ago, none of these people (except me) had ever used a wiki or TI.  We gathered together in my virtual TI office to chat about how to improve the functionality of the wiki...how to make it better...editing it as we went along.  In the middle of our chat, one member couldn't find her way to TappedIn, so she used Instant Messenger to get ahold of us.  It was using IM that made it possible for her to join us.  We had just finished discussing how to use Trillian to keep track of everyone using IM.  It's one of the hardest things to do as a teacher...every student seems to use a different IM solution. Trillian lets you "listen" to MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger at the same time.  I haven't figured out how to incorporate AIM from AOL, but maybe it's possible.  Again the cool part here is that teachers were multi-processing with digital kids tools.  They were solving problems with the best technology tool available at the moment. 

We talked about how to use IAN in our classrooms.  We talked about how to improve our teaching practices so that we all become better teachers.  Mostly we felt excited about what we had accomplished in terms of learning and using new kinds of technology.  We made a pact to meet every Wednesday night for a while to continue this professional collaboration.  I know there aren't 4 teachers in my district who would want to chat about IAN and wikis once a week.  It's only through the conversation of the Internet can I find like-minded teachers who want to grow in the same way that I do.  That's slick.

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says.

Not very often is it that you read something and see remnants of your own life.  But Jobs talks about how every deadend has really been a start to something better.  Not quite fired, but job eliminated by the Board, I know how he feels.  To be on top of what you "do" and then to be released...it sucks.  Thankfully I'm old enough and have had enough of these disappointments to know that maybe, just maybe, if I don't let myself plunge into discouragement, I will come out stronger and happier on the other side.

Hey, I would never had had the chance to put legs on all my good ideas inside the context of a classroom had I not been eliminated.

As for the cancer part well.....he's darn lucky.  My kids' dad had a similar diagnosis and was dead within a year.  Their world collapsed and so my walk with them has been difficult.  You go Steve Jobs...you have a great perspective and a new lease on life to do something with it.