On my way to Los Angeles last Saturday I began a conversation with a producer sitting next to me. We started talking about our iPads and how we were always PC users but that we would never go back because we have not gotten viruses and both of our iPads have been very reliable for us thus far. He was probably in his 40's and he was telling me about his miracle baby and how his family is trying to limit his son's technology use. He told me how his little four year old knows how to use an iPad perfectly and that him and his wife broke down and bought a playstation as well. He told me about a game that I cannot remember the name of now but how cool it is and how it integrates a lot of different basic skills.
Once he finsihed telling me about the game I started talking about our degree in integrating technology in schools. I told him that it is okay to use technology but that I approved of him limiting it at home. I told him about our ITS belief in that students are not all ADHD but that most of them are super bored at school because they are overly stimulated at home. I also told him the reason for that is that a lot of teachers are not using technology properly. My biggest piece of advice to him was that when his little boy plays games is to help him learn how to reflect on what the game taught him. Too many teachers and parents skip this part but it is actually the most meaningful. It helps the student synthesize all of the different ideas that were presented in the game!
It was really fun to talk about all of the things I have learned while being an ITSer and to give him some parental advice even though I do not even know his name! Always remembering to reflect on games is what he told me he would tell his wife. Hopefully they will!
The video clip above is my connection with my continued frustration with how technology at my school is not evolving. I am pretty sure we have the same computers for students as we did four years ago when I began my journey at this school. How many new Dells have come out since the ones that my students use? How many times do these same computers die in the middle of a project or get locked out of the entire network.
When Doug answers the phone in the video and is talking to the political polist it reminds me of the majority of the teachers at my school. "I don't know" or "I don't care" about the lack of technology available to their students is a common answer when questions come up on this topic.
When Arthur picks up the phone and begins to dial while Doug is on the phone it reminds me of my administration this year and our new school based technology specialist. They think they know best when they don't really have that much education on what is best.
My new school based technology specialist recently sent an email out about how she had acquired a bunch of Alpha Smarts. I was speechless. I found out that my administration was excited because it was more technology. My response, sometimes less is more.
Arthur and Doug's banter at the end of this video is the good ol' fashioned, who knows best? Who can put the other person down the most before they decide who was the best person to answer the political polist? Who will decide who is right within our school before we stop taking in other people's hand me downs?
I cannot wait to be done with my graduate degree so that I can go a little further and help educate people in my school to help them realize what is best for our students. It is not Alpha Smarts. It is new technology that students can use in and out of school. No where will there ever be an Alpha Smart for a kid to use when they are not at school!
Obviously...I am super annoyed with this situation. I am literally about to erupt with frustration but my title of this blog says, "excitement" because I am trying to stay positive until I have more time to invest in this cause at my school. Until then...
I am horrible at editing videos. I have students in my class that are better at video editing than I am. I can, however, record videos on my nifty iPad and then upload them to youtube to use with instruction. I have done this once this year since acquiring my iPad from Santa Claus.
My students chose topics from previous standards that they have learned in math this year and then I copied the pacing guide with all of the teacher's notes on it and gave it to them. They took about an hour writing scripts and making sure they had a good example problem to solve. One at a time students finished their scripts and then came into the hall with me the next day to record their video mini-lessons.
They turned out to be really good! I was really proud of them but I have a lot of ideas on how to make these types of videos even better. It would be nice to add music and maybe even have kids prepare some sort of powerpoint or story board with their practice problem on to incorporate into the video.
The to-do list continues to grow on things I want to learn how to do...funny how this blog has turned from things that I am really good at to things that I have no idea how to do!
Last summer was my first experience with online learning. For our final project we had to come up with a Web Based Learning idea using Web 1.0 technologies. Now that we have moved up in the world, and can incorporate Web 2.0 technolgy I have a lot of ideas as to how exactly this project could be even better!
The overall concept of my final project last summer was that classes all over the world would be particpating in a database creation. Each class would need to measure tides (can be pulled from a source such as Weatherbug or actually measured by older students) four times every day for an entire month. Students would then graph their data on a line graph over the entire month (each student graphing one or two days). Teachers would take a picture of these graphs to share with one another. All of the data would be pulled together and analyzed alongside the pictures of the graphs. Students would see the pattern in tides vary during the different phases of the moon. They are drastically different (very high/very low) when the moon is new and full while the change is not as radical during the other phases of the moon. By going through with this project students would solidify their knowledge of the phases of the moon and how the moon controls the tides.
One way I could incorporate Web 2.0 technology would be to have students use a discussion board to talk to each other about generalizations made about their data when they are analyzing the pictures and the graphs. A second idea I had would be to have students create a wiki on the project website talking about different concepts and vocabulary they are learning within this project! These two additions would make this project so much more interactive and real! The fact that the kids would be talking to the other students participating in the project would be so much more authentic than just having the teachers upload their pictures and data every month!
I have given a lot of my ideas to integrate technology within this blog over the past few weeks but now I have a question that I have always wanted answered. How do you use online books? The following link is to my school's website and these book databases that FCPS provides. I can most definitely picture using these books with younger grades as they work up their fluency within literature centers but how could I use them with my 6th graders? http://www.fcps.edu/GunstonES/ebooks.htm
The one time I have ever had students use these was last year when we went to the computer lab and the SBTS asked if she could show the kids these books. She didn't give me a way to integrate them into the classroom though. I guess some of my students could use help with their fluency and reading along with someone as they are reading to you defintiely helps. Isn't this just kind of a traditional way of teaching reading just slightly different because it is on a computer? Any thoughts on this would be very helpful because I would hate to have the opportunity pass by to use this, I'm sure, expensive resource! Thanks!
I have never podcasted before. I have used Audacity to record my class doing different reader's theatres which they love because they can hear themselves but I have never published these. While reading Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts by Will Richardson this semester I have had so many wonderful ideas! One of them was to use podcasts to as a final assessment for my annual poetry anthology unit I do with my 6th graders. I wrote the lesson this week and now I am super excited to implement it. The kids will create their little bare back book like they have the past two years in my classroom but this year they will become digitally published poets for a local coffee houses' XM Radio Station! I think this is going to be a fantastic way to introduce podcasting into our curriculum and I am sure the kids will come up with numerous other ideas on how to use podcasts once we have conquered this one! My clear outcome for this is to have students write poetry and reflect on their work by picking out their favorite poem they have written to publish as a .wav file. What other outcomes would work for podcasting?
So, I finally just finished my first Unit Reflection and got it approved by our professor! It was very exciting because I find it very difficult to write the reflections. It comes in handy for this week's blog on wikis though because part of my reflection was about how instead of having my students write Scientific Journals in my final unit plan like I had planned I had them create a wiki! The class finished up their unit on energy with this project I designed with the main goal of instilling the difference between renewable and nonrenewable resources. They did a lot of research on these and created PowerPoints on the energy sources they thought that Fairfax County should use to be more environmentally friendly. While they were presenting their PowerPoints we created a bar graph to show what each group chose. Once they had all presented their projects we picked the top 3 resources from our bar graph. They ended up being natural gas, solar, and wind. We went on to learn about how to create wikis. They even made an authors page and wrote about themselves. Here are examples of their final collaborative wikis on our top 3 resources! I thought they turned out great.
Last year I used wikis in my classroom when we created an online database of Revolutionary War Heroes. This turned out really well and the kids were able to learn about all of the people they needed to know!
So, do you have a project coming up where you could really test student knowledge about what they have learned? Remember to think about your goal before beginning. What do you want the students to learn?
