My new TED addiction

The more I watch TED, the more I like TED.  This is a clip from TEDxNYED 2010 of Dan Meyer talking about making over math class.  If you teach math or have any connection with math, you should watch this.  Also, he includes some modern tech and inquiry components.


http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html

Seems to be working again, so far

Testing again to see if I've worked the bugs out of this.  I spent part of yesterday with 400 Error messages and unable to access blogger at all, in either Firefox or Explorer.  Finally figured out it was the Adobe flash update that Firefox wanted, after backtracking and taking off everything I've added in the past couple of days.  I think that it downloaded the IE version instead... I think.  What I've gotten reinforced through all of this is that technology can really take up a lot of time.  You can spend a lot of time catching up on the latest news and updates, you can spend two hours just trying to search out the little thing that gumming up the whole works.  On the bright side, though, I guess I've been conducting my own mini-inquiry experiments.  My hypothesis is that this is the problem, remove, test, reevaluate -- and I've got a concrete real world example to share with my class ;)

week 3 reflection

Okay -- trying this a second time, cross your fingers...

Reflections on this week's stuff...



I really liked the section on plain English. That seems to me to be an important consideration in today's world of standards. Are we really telling students what the learning target is if we can even break it easily down into student-friendly language? I also liked the student videos in this section. We don't have a lot of technology so I can see this as something I could actually do with what I have. I also like the idea of students creating the pictures pencil/paper before shooting the video. It's good for their brains to do that kind of work.
 

The copyright information was interesting and eye-opening. I'm sure I'm not alone in the world thinking that things published on the internet were part of the fair domain. It seems like almost everything is covered under copyright. It's definitely a good thing to discuss with students in addition to plagiarism.  I do wonder, though, how sites like Facebook are able to add links to your page from anywhere (news, videos, etc.).  It would seem like that would be a copyright violation.


I like how the editors have created a pretty straightforward, yet informative book.  One thing the really impressed me was the research on the benefits of pictures and movies that date from the 1950’s!!  Our profession always seems to be on a pendulum going one direction or the other.  It was reassuring that the best practices from the 50’s – 80’s still make a lot of sense today.  I’m also glad to have the research resources.  I don’t know about anyone else in the class, but in my building it’s important to have the research that shows how practices benefit kids. 

Glogster

I had a lot of fun with Glogster today and made a (very basic) poster that I had students do this year on paper for our fossil unit. I can see using this as part of differentiated activities and I know that my teaching partner will be all over it for literature and poetry. The things I didn't like about the poster was that you can't see the whole thing at once and I couldn't find a way to change the size of the stickers put on the page. Must be able to somehow, just need to play with it more.

I also explored the education version of Glogster and its price tag.  It looks like there's a lot of advantages to the ed version, at least as far as managing student work and safety.  The fees would have to come out of my little yearly $$, so the question becomes, would we use it enough to justify the cost?  The normal version has its own pros and cons too -- right now I'm wondering if it would make it through our barracuda wall.  That's another consideration for all of these wonderful tools, which ones can make it through the filters.  I know that Facebook and Twitter are blocked in our district and the students aren't supposed to have access to YouTube, althogh some find a way around it. 

I'm going to try and attach my poster -- the sound isn't working with the video, gotta work on that.

http://truffula28.glogster.com/make-a-fossil-poster/

Random stuff from today

Today I just have a random list of progress and not so much.
1. Still having trouble commenting on blogster blogs.  I allowed the cookies in from this site, but that hasn't seemed to do the trick yet.  Eric suggests going through Firefox instread of Explorer, so that's my next plan. Posterus seems to be fine if I log in with my Twitter account.

2. I love, love, love Create a Graph.  A student told me about this while we were working on science projects.  The think I really like about it is that it's useful for students who sort of remember what goes where on a graph but arent' completely positive.  The preview function really lets you mess around with things, check on it, mess around some more.  Once I got a couple of students trained on it, they could help others without too much fuss.

3. Finding Google reader a little overwhelming.  I like the one page Netvibes dashboard that Eric set up much more, I think because it's not quite as distracting.

4. Had to disable Delicious because something about it gave IE fits, kept shutting down in an annoying way.   I was hoping to find in Delicious a place where I could set up bookmarks for students to go on to building approved sites, like cool math.  Next step will be to play with Diiego (I think that's it).

5. Also played with Glogster today, but I think that might deserve its own space.

Google Docs and Bloom's Taxonomy

A friend emailed this link to me earlier in the year and now at least I understand what some of it is.  She got it from Kathy Schrock's email list and it's a chart of Google tools broken up by Bloom Taxonomy.

http://kathyschrock.net/googleblooms/

Science and Literacy

I suppose I've seen the necessary connection between science and literacy since I began my pre-service work.  Returning to school for teaching, I was in a K-8 program with a fairly heavy emphasis on reading.  Most of my classmates were concentrating on self-contained elementary areas but I was always leaning towards science.  I also had issues with "when am I going to use this stuff", mainly because the emphasis on reading was centered around fiction and not non-fiction or informational works.  I had left a career were part of my job requirements were research and writing informational reports for government documents.  I've always felt that students needed to have informational literacy in order to be successful in college and the world beyond.  Last fall I was part of a group from our school who attended a conference on the Common Core State Standards.  I was impressed by their overarching goal that (ideally) all students will be ready for college or career training by the time they graduate.  As for including the new CCSS literacy standards into science, I don't see that as too much of a jump.  Most of what is there are things that I'm sure we all do anyway, or would do more of with some guidelines to follow.  I also like the idea of connecting my classes more with language arts so that my students get the point that just because this isn't your writing class, it doesn't mean that you don't have to use proper punctuation.  

I found the article, Science and Literacy, Tools for Life, interesting and informative.  Posting performance expectations, or learning targets, is expected by my principal although I am working on rewriting ours into more student friendly language.  I've been to training for Sheltered Instruction, Observation Protocol (SIOP) and along with the performance expectation they include a communication expectation, or how will you show what you've learned.  This is something else I'd like to include in my classroom strategies.  I found the writing section in Tools for Life somewhat limiting for my classroom situation.  Students taking notes in their text books isn't possible.  Some of the writing strategies might work with inquiry-type situations and materials, I'll have to think about them in the arena of my inquiry class.  My favorite part of the article was the metacognition section.  Like everyone, I've heard of the benefits of metacognition for students but I haven't seen many concrete examples to get students started with the process.  I think that the cues for metacognitive conversations in small groups will be helpful in my classroom.

The wonders of new technology vs. physical reality of my classroom

I spent yesterday morning at a training for our new math textbook adoption.  The book itself is very nice and I was initially impressed because it appears to contain all of our learning standards, so there should be less hunting up filler materials.  The technology component, though, is simply amazing.  The text is available online, there are tutorials, practice problems and tests, and the list goes on.  The piece that really got my attention was the diagnostic pre-test before each chapter.  Taken online or paper/pencil, the test will identify the skills the student needs to review before moving on with the new stuff and will assign online tutorials and practices for them.  Amazing stuff and very, very exciting.  But... I look at the logistical issues with utilizing this new tool (and the tools we're learning about in this class) and the hurdles start popping up left, right and center.  I'm very lucky to be in a technology rich school but it still has its limitations. I have four student computers in my room, we have 13 library computers, and our computer lab is also an active classroom, available once a day during that teacher's prep period.  Some of my students have online access at home while others may be able to use the local library.  One students had no Internet access permission this year at all. 

So where am I headed with this?  I guess in the back of my mind I'm always trying to figure out how I can utilize programs like these within the limitations of my technology and do it in a timely fashion.  What does it look like to run 26-29 students through a test or quiz, four at a time?  What else has to be in place with the rest to make this a feasible option? 

If you can't figure out the basics....

... how can you become proficient in this medium?  I'm trying to figure out how to add a comment on a comment to post #1 and it keeps sending me back to the sign in page.  Urgh...  Heather, thanks for the comment.  Here's what I would have added:  "There is so much out there -- blogs, comments, articles, etc. -- that I'm finding it very easy to become overwhelmed.  I'm working on overcoming the idea that I have to read and explore absolutely everything.  This form of communication seems to require some strict time-management skills."

first test blog

My enchantment with being done with the year is being tempered by the amount of homework I have to catch up on for both of my classes.  But it's exciting homework -- soemthing that I really believe will be worthwhile additions to my classes.  It's amazing how easy it is to fall behind being "tech-savvy".