Golden Bytes

I would love to be an author. (who wouldn’t want to be a late night, coffee drinking, wordophile?) I have often pondered writing science fiction books for boys aged 10-12, a very specific genre that is severely lacking in quality reading materials. The only books I know in the genre are the works of John Christopher, The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire.

I also would love to write about education, which surprises me. I dreaded starting a master’s program because I have always dreaded writing and research. Much to my surprise, I have found the writing for my master’s program to be the easiest part. Not to say that I am great at it, or even good, but I guess I have a lot to say and it seems to be easily coming out of me. I guess I’d like to think that after 10 years in the field of education I have a few things to say about it.

So if I were to write an educational book I would probably write about school climate or student and teacher interactions. I am a firm believer that the greatest impact on student learning is the relationship student’s have with their teacher. I’d love to research this and write about how teachers can impact students simply by how they interact with the kids. I think it is a simple thing we can do. It doesn’t involve standards, technology, money, resources. It’s simply how we talk to kids, how we react, what we say, how we say it.

No, that’s not what I am going to write about, it’s a blog called “Dangerously Irrelevant” written by Dr. Scott McLeod, a professor at Iowa State University.  I’ve just recently started reading his blog regularly.  He as been posting quotes from the book. The Game of School, by Robert Fried.   I haven’t read the book, I haven’t even read all of Dr. McLeod’s posts.  However, I find them very engaging for discussion.  Somewhat on the line of what Sir Ken Robinson had to say.  I think we really need to rethink how we have school and what our purpose is.  You can read his blog here.  Personally, I find his blog one of the best educational blogs to read.

Many of you who are part of the blogged^2 at RMS were wondering what the purpose of blogging was and why they might want to do it.  I was purposely vague because I believe blogging is about finding your own voice.  I could have given you a list of things to write about, but I didn’t want you to just tell me what you thought I wanted to hear, I wanted you to have a real experience with blogging.

As we move into the final week of Blogged^2 I may post a few more blogs that you might find interesting or inspiring.

I was asked to watch this TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson as part of my Master’s program last fall.  I keep coming back to it.    I think I keep coming back to it because it makes me question what I  do in my classroom.  It keeps forcing me to think about what the real purpose of what I do every day is. Is my job to prepare kids?  Or is my job to work with kids, to help them grow.  I think there is a subtle difference in the approach that can make a world of difference.

I often hear from teachers, and I agree with them, that teaching just isn’t fun anymore.   It’s no longer about kids, or about learning, or about people, but about meeting goals, making AYP, covering content, passing tests.

I also wonder if this is part of the discipline problems most schools are having today.  Are the students rebelling, in the only way they know how, to what they know in their hearts is wrong?  Are they calling out in the only way they know how asking for change?

So what is the answer?  I honestly don’t know.  I do think it starts with us as teachers.  I think we as teacher’s need to take a huge collective pause and reflect back on the road we have taken and how we got here.  Are we really in the place we need to be?  If not I think we as teacher’s need to take action.  Anne Bean touched on something similar to this in her blog post “Friday Frazzle” Schools are filled with some of the most educated people.  So why do we sit back and wait for administrators and politicians to make changes.  We are the ones with the expertise on learning.  We have the years of experience in classrooms working daily side by side with kids.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

www.ted.com

I continue to be impressed with my sutdents work in Google Sketchup.  My primary purpose in having the students learn Sketchup is for them to gain experience learning from the online tutorials, learning to share their expertise as they learn Sketchup, and to gain experience working in a three-dimensional world designing a model. (In the future I’d like to integrate this with a unit on architecture and scale models, asking the students to create a structure with a specific style of architecture and to create it to scale).

One of the challenges of Google Sketchup is that it is such a powerful program.  I have been using it for two years and still learn something new almost everyday.  Not being the expert in my class for every situation has sometimes been uncomfortable.  When the kids ask a question and I don’t immediatly know the answer they sometimes make a funny face, like “Your the teacher, your supposed to know!”   Being a perfectionist, this sometimes bothers me.  But if I waited until I knew everything about Google Sketchup I would never start and my students would be missing out on this experience.

To me, it’s a process over product debate.  As a class we are learning how to use Google Sketchup.  I am not the expert at Google Sketchup, but I am an expert learning Sketchup.  The students are learning from me what to do when you don’t know something and need to find out.  They are learning how to use their friends as resources, how to use the google help files, how to watch and learn from a youtube video (under my supervision).

Here are a couple examples of what students have done this semester.

Last week I was absent four days as I attended a face-to-face meeting for my masters program.  I had one day to prep my kids for this because we had three snow days in a row before this.  In the forty-five minutes that I had with my classes I quickly talked through by objectives for them and some instructions.  I then left what I hoped was decent directions in my Moodle site and with my substitute teacher.  I left hoping for the best but worried that I had forgotten something, that some sort of unforeseen technical problem would arise.

Upon my return I was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only where the kids fine, but that many exceeded my expectations.  For example, my sixth grade students are making models using Google Sketchup.  Having taught this before, I expected this to take two to three weeks.  Instead many of the students are almost finished.  Those that aren’t are creating incredible builds that, if I had been there, I might have suggested not doing because of time limitations and my expectations of what they could achieve.

This is a reminder to me to NEVER underestimate kids.  They will always do more if given the choice and the opportunity and they are engaged.  It’s also a reminder to me to talk less and let the kids DO more.  If I am talking, most likely the kids aren’t learning.   Kids need to DO in order to learn.

The last month of school I spent teaching/preparing students to create a digital story. This is my first full fledged attempt at Digital Story Telling. I have learned so much about the process. This has been one of the most involved learning experiences I have ever attempted with students. I am blown away by the power of the activity and the students’ response.

To begin with, digital story telling takes a lot of work. I had the students write rough scripts, then do research and search for photos or take photos with digital cameras. Then they revisited their scripts. They finally put all this together to create a story board. This alone took a lot of work, but was so valuable. The integration of skills going on here is intense. I asked students to write their scripts in a Moodle Journal. They quickly adapted to this word processor. Many students had color coded scripts and bulleted lists. When I taught them to keep a works cited they were to keep this in another Moodle Journal. Then, the students asked me to create another journal to keep track of the research they were doing! Along the way I gave mini-lessons on how to use search engines, copy and pasting links, copyright issues, importing and exporting to Moodle from home, file management, downloading photos from a camera, taking pictures, and many more. Remember, this is all before we have even opened PhotoStory3.

What has impressed me the most, and made an impact on me, is the student response. They were completely engrossed. My classroom management problems mostly went away, though a few new ones cropped up. (Get that Camera wrist strap on!) Students who before I had not been able to connect with I had engaging conversations with about their process, interests and ideas.

I have created a brainstorm map of all the skills and Ideas I could think of using bubble.us. Check it out below.

I teach in a Lab, and I have the students everyday for 45 minutes. I am rethinking the organization of my units. I am thinking that instead of a culminating activity I might try this to start with to teach all of these skills. It might take more time, but is definitely more authentic than the made up activities I have to teach them these skills independently. If I was in a classroom I think this would be a great way to use lab time during the first month or two of school. Once the students have all these skills there is so much more you could do with them the rest of the year.

Digital StoryBoarding Skills Map

(or just look at it here.)

I had a great week this past week working with my students and six Canon A460 digital cameras. We spent a day and a half looking at Kodak’s 10 Tips for Great Pictures. The next day I let them loose with the cameras. The first group went outside, but it was too sunny by then. So we were in the cafeteria for the next two classes. By afternoon it had clouded over and my three fifth grade classes were able to go outside and take some great shots! I wish I could share them with you but I don’t have parent permission (yet!). I sat after-school and sorted out about 10 photos I though were outstanding and sent them to Walgreens for 8×10 ptints. The next day I had them sitting on the center table in cheap document frames.

The most incredible part about this experience was the last day processing. As a class we sat around the LCD projector and discussed every students photo that they had taken the day before. The conversations we had about camera angles, lighting, flash, being a camera director blew me away. I was worried that I had spent to much time yaking at them about the 10 tips, but they really got it! I was really glad I had taken the extra effort to print some of the photos. It added an authentic feel to the class and generated excitement. I am l already thinking about possibilities of a showing at our local art gallery, and perhaps even a fund raiser for more cameras!

(as a teacher tip, I suggest showing all of the photos as a slideshow very quickly to get all the giggles out, then go back and really discuss, think of it as giving time to play with new math manipulatives before you ask them to use them.)

This is my very first blog post, I know things are bare around here, but I wanted to get started since I finally have something really great to blog about.

In a nutshell. Yesterday I wanted to share a PowerPoint  for students who had been absent or who had fallen behind so they could catch up on their own projects. I didn’t want to put the PPT file on the server because I thought the students would get confused with two PPT files open at the same time. (these are 5th and 6th graders in their third week of my class, the week after break, they are still newbies) It is also something I had been meaning to try for a while. So I uploaded the PowerPoint to Gdocs, I had intended to just share the published page, but I noticed they give you an embed code like a YouTube video. So I copied and pasted that into a Moodle webpage and it worked wonderfully. The students had no problem multi-tasking between the two windows, and they now have access to it at home as well. Later in the day I needed to update the Gdoc PPT for a few typos, and I wondered what would happen to the file in Moodle. As you would guess, it updated too. WOW, I immediately saw the implications. If I can embed all my documents, I can update them in Gdocs and never have to upload a file to Moodle again ( which I consider a huge pain).

Today, I had a chance to try to embed a Gdoc (word file). No luck. Google doesn’t give you an embed code, only a link to a webpage. I wasn’t happy with this  as I want everything inside the security of Moodle. So, I tried Zoho.com, and they DO provide an embed code, not only for their writer, but also their spreadsheets (they may do this for other types,  I haven’t tried it out yet). My co-teacher was really excited about the spreadsheet because when you embed the spreadsheet in a Moodle web page, students can enter data right there online, and there is a link to download to excel right there.

Looking around Zoho, I noticed they have a MS Office plugin. I tried it out and… it was like fireworks going off in my head. I can create a file in Microsoft Word. With Zoho’s plugin I now have a toolbar that lets me upload the file(or save any changes) to Zoho right from word. If I already have the file embedded in Moodle the changes take place immediatly without ever having to log-in to Zoho or Moodle.

So with a little upfront work of embedding code into Moodle web pages, I can now create documents in word and keep them updated without ever having to upload files to Moodle.

It is my personal goal to have all my lesson plans, files, videos, and slideshows online and available to students next year. This is my first year with Moodle and I have been experimenting with it all year. I think I have finally found a way to share files, publish my work, and keep files up-to-date with a reasonable amount of effort and time.

Pros: saves time, easy to update, links to MS Office,

Cons: initial setup work (I don’t feel this set up work is much different than uploading a file and linking it in Moodle)