Sharing

Another thing I've learned this year is to never underestimate the power of collaboration. As tired and worn out as I was this last week of school, I really am glad that we had the opportunity to get together and share our lessons and units. As I listened to others talk about their projects, I made mental notes of several ideas/tools/lessons that I want to check out in depth over the summer. For example, I am definitely going to incorporate student blogging next year. A few other reading/language arts teachers in the cohort used individual student blogs. Seeing examples of these blogs convinced me of their usefulness and multiple applications for my content area. Also, I was inspired to use my wiki even more as our class "hub." This year I mainly used the Eboard as I was used to it and found it easy to navigate. However, I believe the wiki has more functionality for the long run. So, to sign off I would like to thank CDE for this opportunity to learn and grow as a 21st Century educator. Happy Summer!

Obstacles

After reflecting on my participation in the E2T2 grant this year I've found that there were a few obstacles to creating/implementing exemplary 21st Century projects. The top two obstacles I encountered and still struggle with are lack of time and lack of resources.

I'm looking forward to summer to be able to do more personal research into project-based learning ideas. During the school year it is so hard to keep up on all of the "have-to" stuff much less investigating the myriad of online resources available for teachers. I have an extensive list of web sites to peruse this summer while planning my units for next year. I have fully bought in to the idea of project-based learning and hope to incorporate it better each year. I especially want to figure out a way to connect my students with students from other places and cultures. I did not manage to do that this first year.

The other obstacle was the lack of technology resources for the classroom. We have 3 computer labs at our school but they fill up quickly and are hard to get in as much as I would like to. Fortunately, I did have access to a set of ipod touches third trimester and used them quite a bit. However, I didn't have enough time to figure out how to sync them with my laptop or research additional apps to use in lessons. At least we got started with this tool and can use them more appropriately next year. This summer I plan to find apps and methods for integrating them into next years' units. Our school also has no video or digital cameras for student use. I found this to be a stumbling block, especially for my theme speech video project.

Obviously, there is much room for improvement in my school and in my classroom to incorporate 21st Century learning. But I do feel that through participation in this grant I have received awareness of the many resources to research and ideas for incorporation into my future lessons.

Approaching the Finish Line...

We're almost there. Another year come and gone. How do I feel as my second year as a middle school teacher closes? Well, once again I have learned SO MUCH! Some of the areas in which I feel I have improved the most are integrating technology (of course), embracing noise and action in my teaching style, and developing positive relationships with my students.

I have already blogged quite a bit about my journey of incorporating technology to inspire and engage my students. However, I would like to add that in the process I have learned and accessed new ways of doing things just for myself. For instance, I now use an online lesson planner instead of a bulky paper planner. It's awesome! Also, I have created some neat imovie presentations on personal subjects to share with friends and family. They are very impressed with my new capabilities!

As for embracing noise and action in my classroom, I have become much more comfortable letting go of the need to control every interaction and situation (not that I was ever able to but I sure thought I was supposed to try!). Now, I allow students to argue with each other in class, even when it is not scripted. For example, we are reading "The 6 Most Important Decisions You'll Ever Make," and most of the topics lend themselves to colorful discussion. Especially since we are concurrently working on debate techniques in their other class, I've encouraged then to voice their opinions and respectfully challenge each others' thoughts. It's amazing what they will come up with!

Finally, I have found that most of my students feel very comfortable with me and will often seek me out for help or advice. Many of my students are viewed as difficult, due to their background, ELA or SPED status, or prior reputation. Although they definitely test me, they know I truly care and notably curb their rebellion in my presence. I anticipate that they will return to visit me next year and remember me fondly. These relationships are the most fulfilling part of my job. They are what keep me striving to do better as I genuinely want my students to succeed in their education and in life.

Giving it a go...

I proposed the idea to one of my classes of creating an electronic newsletter to cover their 7th grade year and they were very enthused. Typically, the middle school yearbook tends to have a stronger focus on 8th grade and it costs 30 bucks. So, my students are going to create a four page newsletter using one of the Word templates. We brainstormed to make a list of all of the field trips and special events from the year. From this list, they've chosen these sections for the newsletter: Sports, Teachers, Events, Drama, and Fun Stuff.

For the sports section they want to incorporate interviews with players and coaches, season overviews, and final stats. For the Teachers section they brainstormed ideas like birthdays, baby pictures, a goodbye interview with Mr. Cuevas, an introductory interview with Mrs. Vanwel, an update from a former beloved teacher and an article on the BCMS Teacher of the Year.

We're starting to research and write this week. Then we'll spend the last few days in the computer lab putting the newsletter together. I'll put a copy on my portfolio wiki page for you all to peruse at your leisure:)

Computer Lab Issues

I have to share how frustrating it is to not be able to use the computer lab during testing weeks. We have 3 labs but they are all currently in use for NWEA testing. For two weeks! It makes me realize how much I and the students rely on and enjoy using technology throughout the week. Fortunately, we have the ipod touches so I've been able to adapt some of the lessons to incorporate them.

In my opinion, one of the best ways to help our students stay organized would be for them to have their own laptops or ipads. That way EVERYTHING would be in one place. It would eliminate the excuses like, "I left it at home," "I forgot," "I couldn't do it because I don't have a computer at home." Students could set reminders for assignments and projects due. They could keep track of refer back to individual goals and test scores. Teachers could communicate all reminders and critical information via e-mail. Students who miss school would be able to see exactly what assignments they missed. All notes a student takes would be there and organized by class. Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it?

Obviously, there are possible issues to consider such as students not staying on task and using their computer for something other than what they should. Also, big considerations like cost, IT needs, insurance, and off-campus internet access would have to be addressed. I'm convinced this is the way of the future. Wouldn't it be great if our students could be on the front end of this new wave?

ipod touch

The kids love this tool! It provides instant motivation and engagement. So far we have used the touches to participate in a couple of debates. To do this I bring up todaysmeet.com with the projector, students sign in with their name followed by pro or con and then start making arguments. I tally up the points afterward and declare the winning side. This week we will be preparing for a debate on the resolution: rodeo and ranching practices are humane treatment of animals. Last week the students got an eyewitness account of a team roping event at our "Cowboy Day." The students will also read an affirmative and a negative article and then compose their arguments. We'll conduct the debate as previously mentioned. Next week, they will choose a resolution on which to write a persuasive essay in the negative or affirmative. The ipod touches really helped to set up the excitement of a debate and gave students a chance to participate in one and practice persuasive/argumentative skills before beginning their essay.

Cowboy Day is here!

This Wednesday is the big day: our field trip to the Eagle River Center to ride horses, swing ropes, pet a bunch of critters, and watch exciting equestrian feats. The 7th graders will be gaining eye witness access to a topic they are studying for their debate and persuasive writing unit: treatment of rodeo/ranching livestock. The 6th graders will use the experience to help them in their endeavors to compare and contrast North American rodeos with Mexican charreadas. And of course, we're all going to have a lot of fun! Someone from the Vail Daily is even going to show up to capture the excitement. I have Scott Jones of Colorado River Ranch donating time, horses, and cattle. He and his crew will conduct a mock branding to help students visualize how it is done. Alecz of One Spirit is bringing a couple of her horses for kids to ride while she gives pointers. Also, I have several parents who have volunteered either to chaperone a group of students or lead one of the horses. I have asked all of the volunteers to bring any extra equipment or cowboy gear they have so that students can check it out up close and take pictures of themselves dressed up as cowboys/girls. For my ESL students this experience will be very effective at drumming up their background knowledge and serving as a motivator to continue studying this subset of American culture.

Not much time left!

With 6 ½ weeks of school left, I am realizing that there is still a lot to do! Will we get it all done? Will my students be ready to move on to the next grade? Will they have acquired the learning and skills expected of them? I definitely feel more confident than last year at this time, and I suppose that my confidence will increase in regards to these questions with each year to come.

I appreciated that in our E2T2 text, the authors admitted that project-based learning is flexible and changing, and probably never perfect. I have to make a concerted effort to let go and realize that I can’t script or plan for every nuance. I tend towards perfectionism and like to be over-organized. However, this experience of project-based learning and incorporating technology has helped me relax a bit and learn to go with the flow. I have realized that I am more flexible than I previously thought and that unforeseen events can even be good!

I do enjoy change so it is probably a good thing that I decided to be a teacher. Even a successful and well-planned project is going to be different each time by changing the most important variable- the students.

Unit update

Well, I’ve been reading a few more chapters of Project-based Learning with my unit in mind. Good timing! I’ve been writing down ideas like crazy. The basic premise of the unit is debate and persuasive language.

Here are my notes: give groups of students pro and con sides of an issue, they read together and highlight best arguments before beginning debate with todaysmeet.com and ipod touches; Show examples of strong vs. weak arguments, have students rate; Reflect/review The Great Debaters movie using todaysmeet and ipod touches; Have students reflect at least a few times during the unit on their wiki pages; Use wiki as project home: post examples of persuasive writing, use calendar, checklists, rubric, and jing screencasts; Use screencasts to give feedback on writing; find student debate examples on youtube; search the internet to find out if there are online debates students could participate in; require an interview as a source for the persuasive paper; students use wiki to collect and organize notes or other web-based organizer like Desire2Learn of Moodle; check out research tools: ASK for Kids, del.icio.us bookmarking and Citation Machine; have students read draft to an adult, record questions or alternative viewpoints to address.

Wow- looks like I’ve got a plethora of ideas to research and consider in order to make this unit engaging, motivating, and effective for my students. I'd better get to work!

E2T2 Unit

We're pretty close to starting our unit. It falls in the "cowboy" theme I have going for the last part of the school year. Students are going to investigate controversy and write a persuasive essay. In the beginning of the unit students will use ipod touches to interact with each other by sharing opinions on a few topics. One of the topics will be animal welfare and rodeo. We'll use todaysmeet.com (thanks Noel and Stephanie!) so that students can participate in an open debate after reading some articles on the subject. Towards the end of the unit my 7th graders will create a newsletter highlighting the unit and publish some of their writing.

One very exciting part of the unit doesn't include technology at all (although if anyone has any suggestions how I could do so send them my way) but is a huge motivator. We're taking a full day field trip to the Eagle River Center so my students can get first hand experience with horses and other livestock. There will be horses to ride, miniature donkeys, goats, steers, and roping lessons too! Last year I brought my horse to school, this year I'm stepping it up a notch with a full day of activities. Volunteers welcome for this huge undertaking!!! Call me to sign up.

Monk-e mail

Today was one of those rare days in the technology realm when everything works perfectly according to plan. As part of a unit on "The 6 Most Important Decisions You'll Ever Make," students were to explore Sean Covey's website. I was going to have them read the author's short bio and then be ready to share something they learned about him. However, as I was perusing the website I noticed a link to "cool links." There I found Monk-e mail- a hilarious site that allows you to compose an email with special effects. For example, you get to dress your monkey and choose the setting. Best of all, you can write whatever you want the monkey to say and he'll deliver your personal voice message in an e-mail. So, I created one first and had the students listen to it. It gave them instructions to compose their own monk-e mail with something they learned about the author. After creating their own, they were to send it to my e-mail. I was able to assess whether they read the bio and learned anything about the author. It was one of the most enjoyable assessments ever! And it was obvious how much fun they had with an assignment that would have normally been ho-hum.

Middle School

So, I now have almost two years under my belt teaching middle school. Why is it that I am still so surprised at how different one day can be from the next? I will have a day or days where I feel such a strong bond with my students, feel so lucky to have my job, and think that maybe I'm getting the hang of this teaching thing. Then, the very next day I am convinced that I am the most inept teacher, the students aren't learning a thing, and that they must be out to get me! Fortunately, I now know enough to not get too discouraged because it can and will turn around just as drastically in a positive way.

I've also found myself surprised by the degree of care, concern, and love I feel for these "tweeners." I quite vividly remember the awkwardness and volatility of my own middle school experience, and I think that this helps me relate to my students. At times I am also amazed by how entertaining and funny kids this age can be. Even on the down days I end up laughing more than I ever did in any other workplace. I believe their humor keeps me youthful- in my mind at least. Where else can you get this as part of your benefits package?

Spring...

...Is on its way! I can feel it. It has infused its way into my every thought, even into my curriculum planning. As I was at the store buying seeds and peet starters for my own garden, the thought came to me to bring my love of growing living things into the classroom. For such a unit the vocabulary options are endless, higher level thinking skills ingrained, and instant engagement almost guaranteed. Why not? I started searching the internet for lesson plans and projects related to plants. There are tons: plant parts, cells, functions, life cycle, forcing blooms, greenhouses, and bird houses, oh my! I will easily be able to pull and adapt those that will fulfill the standards I still need to incorporate this year. I am going to collaborate with the science teacher so that I can reinforce the concepts my ELA students will need for that core class. I'm looking forward to sharing my excitement and love of learning about plants with my students. I know how greatly my own enthusiasm affects theirs.

Ooops! I just looked outside. Snow. Lots of it. But, I am not going to let that dampen my bright, sunny thoughts. Come on spring...

Argh!

What a frustrating week! On Monday, I was fully prepared after spending hours over the weekend finalizing the lesson plan and creating the model video for our theme project. I had the computer lab booked, and the set up instructions on the eboard for students to create their own accounts at masher.com. As usual, it took a while for the students to create their user names, passwords, and in some cases mailinator e-mail accounts, to successfully register with the site. I have 17 students in this particular class. Once they were all up on masher the trouble started. "Mrs. Blick, Mrs. Blick, it's not working," "Mrs. Blick, I can't hear anything," "Mrs. Blick, it's frozen!" Yes, the site must have been overloaded and only a few students had functionality to work on their videos. The following day I separated the students into two groups and had one group work on an alternative activity in the hopes that fewer students logged in would free up the site. However, there were still several students whose applications ran far too slow and they were unable to make any progress. So, after 3 hours in the lab working on this project we have very little to show for it. And with CSAP coming up, I'm hesitant to spend any more time on it. What have I learned? Well, that even the best laid plans don't ensure success every time!

Do Web 2.0 Right

This article defines three elements that shape how the teachers they interviewed use web 2.0 tools in their classrooms. The three elements are instituting daily practice, carefully considering the audience, and teaching and enforcing appropriate behavior. I will consider how these three elements affect my efforts to incorporate web 2.0 activities in my classroom.

First of all, daily practice is a struggle as we have just one classroom computer. Therefore, I usually schedule at LEAST one to two days a week for each class in the computer labs and create assignments for students to access on my eboard. I can't wait to try out the ipod touches Kimberly wrote a grant for and is currently using with her students. I am already compiling many applications for daily use with that tool.

The second element is consideration of the audience. I believe that with middle school students this is critical and will make or break an activity. I love the idea of using blogs as communication between myself and individual students. I think they will be much more open to sharing ideas of a personal nature if they know only I will be reading it. I wonder if there is a way to create a blog where others cannot access the content? I will look into it. However, I also think a spirited debate on a less personal topic would motivate all of my students. For example, in my Cowboy unit students write a persuasive essay on their view of the treatment of animals in rodeo, ranch work, or charreadas. I would like to first have a web 2.0 debate for students to argue their position before writing their essay. This way they will see other perspectives before settling on their own stance.

Finally, the article discusses appropriate online behavior. The main idea I took from this element is to limit access to a particular class. For example, I created my first class wiki to be used by all of my classes. Now, I can see the advantages and would prefer to have a separate wiki for each class. One, it will give the class ownership, and two, it offers more security to students as they know only their class will have access to it.

So, I have a few changes I want to make based on the information in this article. I think the first thing I will do is create the separate wikis since I already know how to do that and it won't take forever to figure it out. One thing at a time...

Be Flexible

If there's one thing I've learned from incorporating technology into the curriculum, it's that you'd better be flexible and ready for anything. Unfortunately, technology is not always reliable and you may have to shoot from the hip when it lets you down. For example, just this week I had two flops. First, I had my assignment all planned out to begin with a BrainPOP video and activity on Information Privacy. So, there they are all logging in and one by one I hear "Mrs. Blick!" and "It's not working!" Sure enough, for some reason that one video would not load on any of their computers. Second, I told my students that they would be creating a video presentation to go with a speech they'd already written on a theme to unite our school. I gave them examples from Youtube to look at of what I had in mind for them to create. Well...I hadn't researched quite enough to find the right application to create said videos, and now I'm not sure it's even possible without spending money to buy the tool. imovie won't work for our purpose because the flip cameras have disappeared from our school, and animoto takes "several weeks" to respond to my request for an educator's account. What's left for free is a measly 30 second picture show that doesn't allow for more than 20 characters of text! Still haven't figured out for sure what to do about that. Anyways, headaches aside, I'm still on board and will continue my endeavors to incorporate technology more and more. I'm just sayin'....it's good to be forewarned that you'll probably encounter an occasional glitch in the matrix!

I have so many ideas!

Seriously, I do. I just wish I had the time to pursue each one. There are so many exciting possibilities for lesson planning and 21st Century Learning. The applications tumble around in my head but the reality is that I have to pick just one to work on at a time. Even then, the hours I spend researching for one lesson quickly add up. It's Sunday, I've been at it for 3 1/2 hours, it's getting dark, and if my husband wasn't here to remind me of life's other occupations, I'd be here for a few more. But don't worry, I took Saturday off completely and enjoyed some rest and relaxation.

My current time-suck is a lesson I'm creating related to a speech my students began writing on a theme to unite our school. I perused YouTube for 45 minutes just looking for a few examples to inspire the kiddos. My goal is to have them create a video presentation to go with their theme. They will use text from their speech, inspirational quotes, music, and graphics that will inspire their viewers to embrace the message. The next step in the lesson planning is for Mrs. Blick to select the tool and figure out how to use it herself. Hmmm...I wonder how many hours will that take?

Testing

Agghh-Testing! It's not quite as exciting as 21st century learning, that's for sure. But, it is reality and I'm determined to help my students learn how to be successful testers. Now, I'm not sure how this ties in to my technology journey but it's what is on my mind this week so that's what I'm blogging about.

We just wrapped up CELA testing and CSAP will be here in no time. I don't know that my students, all ELA and a high percentage SPED, have often felt the satisfaction of a test well done. Therefore, this week we are beginning Larry Bell's UNRAAVEL, a method to tackle reading comprehension tests. I believe that just having a game plan to attack a reading passage will help my students immensely. It will give them a place to start and some feeling of control if they have concrete steps to follow. Afterward, we'll spend a while learning how to write "Better Answers" to standardized test prompts. This is based on a text by Ardith Davis Cole called Better Answers: Written Performance That Looks Good and Sounds Smart.

I plan to have my students write pre and post reflections on this process and hope to see a new confidence emerge towards test-taking. Stay tuned!

Jing

This week I finally made my own screen casts with Jing, something I'd been meaning to do for a while now. What a great tool! With an entire class in the computer lab, I'm able to show multiple students how to do something at the same time without saying a word! After three months of school, some of my students were still struggling to save documents to the server. Well, not any more. I keep the Jing video on the eboard for each assignment so they can re-watch as needed. I also used Jing to show students the first steps to setting up a Powerpoint for their book talk. It considerably lessened the number of repeat questions from students and they got a lot more accomplished in one period. Now that I know how easy it is to use it will become a regular part of the implementation of our computer lab activities.