New Projects: Busy as Little Bees

What am I doing? Busy as a bee. I thought I'd just share some recent projects and tools we are using:

Preschool: We visit PBSkids Games section. Not exactly ground breaking, I know.

Kindergarten: They just started learning about patterns so we visit the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives and complete their various patterning activities.

First Grade: They're learning about money/making change/selling items so we use Jump Start First Grade, The Money Challenge and The Lemonade Stand to reinforce those skills.

Second Grade: We just finished a several week unit using Scratch programming to create animations of the bean plant life cycle. Here is an example of one. Now, we are beginning Martin Luther King Jr timelines using Timeline Maker or SumoPaint (the kids choose).

Third Grade: They just finished a Microsoft Word unit (not terribly exciting) and are now beginning keyboarding. We use Type to Learn 3 and some old school keyboarding drills as well. I even have a very old word processor I show them and give them a chance to try out!

Fourth Grade: They just finished a copyright unit that I designed and described here. Now they are starting a keyboarding unit of practice.

Fifth Grade: These students just created blogs for the book Kokopelli's Flute. Each student chose a character from the book and composed one blog post per chapter as if they were keeping a journal. They were graded on creativity (did they use a song or poem instead of just text?) and communication skill. They were also graded on their commenting skills with other kids...they had to comment on at least 10 other blogs. We used Kidblog. They're set to private at this point. So we can't share here.  Now they are using Masher to create short travel videos for South Africa. It's our very first time using this tool and I'm nervous. Our tools in this year have not always gone well (Glogster shut down mid project, MyFakewall functioned horribly, Nota had glitches). Kidblog was awesome so I'm hoping for another score.

Technology for Beginning Teachers

This week, a colleague and I begin teaching technology basics to a small group of area teachers in a "Beginning Teacher Institute" offered by Independent Education (formerly AISGW). There are only a few sessions and our task was to figure out what beginning teachers need to focus upon the most in their first year of teaching. We set up a grou.ps page to introduce the idea of developing a PLN and are posting our first day's lecture there. For the first time, I'm using Issuu instead of Slideshare. So far I'm impressed:

Open publication - Free publishing

Free Educational Software List/Description

Just reposting the "Free Classroom Software" page that Thane Terrill posted on his "Technology on a Shoestring" blog. What's neat about this list is that it's categorized by subject and all are applicable to education. Idea: Have my students in 5th grade choose one to research, review and then submit the review to a content-area teachers here in our school. Love it so far!!

Evaluations for Digital Projects

As Understanding By Design, and backwards planning teaches us, the goals and assessments should be the point from which we start when designing curriculum. Although I do not follow this exclusively, I do think it's a good practice and one of the areas in which I feel most challenged is grading. Admittedly, I don't grade as rigorously as I would like. This is the result of many different reasons, not just laziness. However one of the reasons is that I've never had it made as straightforward a process as I recently discovered it COULD be: The September/October 2010 Learning and Leading with Technology featured an article about this topic entitled "Where's the Beef?: Adding Rigor to Student Digital Projects." The author, Bernajean Porter, cites the NCREL "Nine Scoring Traits for Digital Projects." Each scoring guide is divided into two parts that make total sense: content and craftsmanship. Perfecto! It's exactly the combination I seek in all the projects I design for students.

The article goes over other important facets of project design but I got the most out of the scoring traits. I'll be trying these out immediately for sure.

Judi Harris and Professional Development

A while back I mentioned contacting Professor Judi Harris at the College of William and Mary about how we might better manage Educational Technology Development at our school. A few weeks ago, my colleague Joan Jones and I finally made it there. Joan is our school's curriculum coordinator, so I thought she'd benefit from Dr. Harris' wisdom as well. It's not exaggerating to say that what we learned was profound. Dr. Harris is one of the most down-to-earth, yet engaging and well read persons with whom I have had the pleasure to work. She referred frequently to the Diffusion of Innovations model as a way to understand how all professional development/innovation in general evolves as it is implemented. What's significant about that is understanding that you'll only reach a small percentage at first, but then with time, others will adopt and that new skill or technology will be diffused throughout the environment eventually--excepting the farthest reaches, those folks called laggers.

We developed a plan for addressing overall professional development at our school based on a two hour conversation with Dr. Harris. She helped us to see that we must first begin by helping our teachers the same way we'd help students--by identifying the ways they learn best and by creating a common vocabulary for a professional learning community.

Steps:
1. Use one of our contacts at Organizational and Professional Development Services. This company has worked for the county in which our school is located, as well as on the state level. He specifically addresses learning styles, communication techniques and team building skills and change management.
2. Contact Judi Harris about speaking at our Inservice Day in Fall.
3. Organize Fall Inservice, including a long-term plan for faculty to demonstrate our long-term commitment to the process. (learning styles, communication techniques and brainstorming curriculum development themes). Possibly a survey?
4. Create committee for curriculum development.
5. Committee led by Joan conducts research (common vocabulary) about related curriculum themes suggested by the teachers and present to faculty at first whole-school faculty meetings after school begins.
a. Devise ways for teachers to engage with the new curriculum themes during the year.

I don't know how this will all go, but it's exciting to be around at the inception of a large-scale redevelopment process. We are hugely grateful to Dr. Harris for the time she spent with us.

Friend or Frustration?

A friend, Sarah, sent me a New York Times article entitled New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology about how a greater and greater number of teachers (mostly high school and college) are seeing phones, computers and other technology as distractions without educational component. Of course, I can see their point. If I am sitting in a meeting with a computer, I am more likely to become distracted than if I did not have one. It's a draw, a lure away from the events transpiring in front of me.

The only time that does not apply is when the discussion or lesson is so very thrilling that I simply must watch and listen. So, as a teacher, does that mean that every one of my lessons has to be so very thrilling that a student cannot not listen? Must I, as Neil Postman puts it, amuse them to death?--my death, that is, since I would kill myself just trying to make every single lesson amazingly entertaining. And isn't that doing our children a disservice, because when, in the real work world, are they going to be entertained in meetings? It's the most I can do not to walk out when my time is being wasted.