I Teach English to Great Kids...A Blog

This Teacher Texts

2012-01-30T15:39:00.000-08:00

   When I left the Google Teacher Academy in July one tool I was anxious to try out with my students was Google Voice. For those of you who don't know about it, Google Voice is a great free service that allows students and teachers to connect via text message and voice calls. There are a variety of options for how you set up a Google Voice account and myraid ways to use it. This post is based on my experience. Your mileage may vary. And there are a lot of other great ways teachers are using it too.
    I opted to select a new number for my GV account. I only connected it to my cell phone and not my home phone. I gave my students the number and told them they could text or call me.
    The kids were a bit surprised when I asked them to get their cell phones out on the first day of school and put in my GV number. "Wait, we can really text you?"
     "Yes, yes you can."
     After that the questions began to trickle in. Some were urgent pleas about dramatic life events, a death in the family, a house fire, a broken leg. Others were more typical, lost passwords, problems uploading a presentation, questions about missed work. Some times I could help, sometimes I couldn't.
     Never once have I felt like a student's text was an imposition on my time. I am always glad when I can answer their questions. And they are always polite and appreciative. As I scroll through my GV messages, my inbox displays just the last message exchanged; almost all of them say, "Okay, thank you."
    Google Voice has been such an easy way to make myself available to students. It's free. (GV is separate from you cell phone text messages.) It takes hardly any time to set up and manage. It does not impinge on my privacy. It's possible to set up 'Do Not Disturb' hours, but I haven't had to do that. I don't see why more teachers aren't using it. Most don't even seem to know about it. I went to a local CUE conference recently. There were five sessions about Google tools. Four of them were packed, but the session on Google Voice had just two people in it.

    If you are thinking of trying GV here are a few more things I really like about it. The text messages go to both my phone and my g-mail. If I am at my computer I can respond to the mail and the student will get the reply as a text. If someone leaves me a voice-mail on my GV number the transcript of that call goes to my email. The voice recognition is not perfect, but it helps.
   While I was one of those two participants in the GV session at the CUE conference I learned about teachers having students phone in their reading samples. Students can call your GV number and record their presentation or podcast. You can embed that recording on a site or blog.
   You can learn more about Google Voice here. I encourage you to try it with your students and let me know how it goes.

Digital Progression

2012-01-11T20:22:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we began reading "The Scarlet Ibis". As I was getting ready to pass out the soft sided readers with the story, I suggested the kids google it and see if it was already on line. It was, and almost all opted to read it there rather than carry around another book.

We proceeded, but we quickly reached a point where we wanted to annotate something in the text. I suggested moving it via copy paste into a google doc. That worked fine. We continued reading, but the students could only see the annotations on the screen up front, as they were still reading the original online version. So, I went to my docs list and dragged the file with the story into the view only folder I already have shared with my students. Most of them opted to open that.

In one period we went from a hard copy to a digital copy to a shared copy. The truth is I probably should have figured all that out before class, but in hindsight I think it was really good modeling that my students saw (and participated in) the transformation process. The moves were fluid, took very little class time, and each represented a big improvement in our workflow.

Modeling these ah-ha moments for kids with technology teaches them to question the tools they are using and wonder, is there a more effective way to do this?

The Final Minutes of NaNoWriMo 2011

2011-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

It is nearly midnight, November 30th, 2011. I am at home wrapped in a blanket my mother made, huddled at my laptop, circa 2005, and I’m writing a novel. I am almost finished really. Though the room is dark, and my husband and children went to bed hours ago, I am not alone. I am writing in a Google Doc and that doc is shared with my students, many of whom are up way past their bedtimes because they too are finishing their novels. Or, in several cases, they are already finished and they are here to encourage or harass me as I write my last few thousand words.

A few days ago I swallowed hard and shared my novel with them as viewers. They can not edit or even comment on it, but they can read it and if I am working on it at the same time they can join me in a chat window on the right hand side of my screen.

Trisha showed up first, “How’s it going Mrs. Roberts?”

I paused mid-sentence to reply, and then in desperation, I typed to her, “What would you do for revenge if your little brother sent text messages to your boyfriend pretending to be you?”

This was a serious plot question and, as we discussed possible scenarios, Able opened the document. “Mrs. Roberts, you’re still not done? How many words do you have left?”

I told him and he made the chat equivalent of hysterical laughter, “hahahahahahahah”

Something I might remember when I calculate his citizenship grade next week.

Eventually they had to go and I went back to writing. I had a novel to finish, but I was also desperately concerned about several students who were very close to finishing, but had not opened their documents that evening. Because they are all shared with me in Google Docs I can tell when they work on their novels. I kept checking my Docs list to see if they were editing yet. One by one each of them did arrive. I would chat with them briefly and then let them work, coming back every now and then to check their word count. In another tab I had the NaNoWriMo progress page open and I frequently refreshed to see who had won.

Chance stopped by. He had won several days before. He likewise wanted to know how many words I had left to write. Then, in an effort to be more funny than helpful, he started to tell me exactly how many minutes I had left, “Just two hours and three minutes left. Now two hours and two minutes left.” I ignored him and kept writing.

Julie opened the document, but did not engage in the chat for a while. She was reading. Her first chat message was to tell me how much she liked the first chapter. She was just in time. I was trying to remember if I had ever mentioned my protagonist’s last name. Julie found it in chapter four and let me know. As she read through the novel from the beginning, I raced to finish the end.

Leo was one who logged on late, but he only had a few hundred words to go. I greeted him and let him work, but a few minutes later he opened my document. “I NEED HELP!” he was desperate enough to use all caps for that.

He was having a small technical problem logging into the NaNoWriMo site. I looked up the username and password he had shared with me in a Google form at the beginning of the month and logged in as him. I had no problem. I pasted his novel into the word count verifier from his Google doc and told him he was 97% done. After I logged out he was able to log in himself again and eventually finished just fine, writing over 8,000 words. As with most students, this was the longest writing he had ever done.

As I was writing the last climactic moment of my novel, Troy opened the document and began reading. “Hi Mrs. Roberts. In the first chapter there is a place where you have a b but it should say be.”

“Thanks Troy. We will work on editing next week.”

“Are you almost done?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to leave you alone so you can keep writing?”

“Sure.”

“You sound like you are in a bad mood? Why didn’t you finish yesterday? Did you procrastinate?”

I took a deep breath and suggested that it was late and Troy should get some sleep. Three hundred words later my story was told, all parts accounted for, plot appropriately twisted, characters appropriately dealt with and loopholes casually left open for the sequel. I verified my word count and went to check on students still working.

Noel was still writing at 11:30 pm. She had won several days ago, meeting her lofty 30,000 word goal already, but she was still writing more. I suggested she could go to bed.

I left Donna still writing, less than a hundred words short, and destined to finish in time. She would be the last to finish, but she would finish.

I put myself to bed.

After a month of NaNoWriMo my novel is done. My students novels are done, but there is a new habit I can’t shake and so, I must add, this blog post is 923 words long. And that is really the end.

Negotiating NCTE 2011

2011-11-20T09:45:00.001-08:00

How fast can you learn? How quickly can you adapt? Which sessions did you go to today? How do we cope with a quickly changing world? How will I get all these books home? How can I get more books? Who are you waiting in line to meet? Where does this bus go? This food is how much? Which of these five fabulous sessions should I go to next? Where is that room? Where is the elevator? Should I be changing the way I teach? Will there be a projector in the room where we are presenting? Where can I get your slides? Where did I leave that Hunger Games poster? Which do you use more your sense of humor or your ability to recognize foreshadowing? (Asked by Gordon Korman, twice.) How should we teach grammar? How should we select texts? Should students be writing novels? What was that app again? Can I get from session M to session N in time? One thing I do know for sure, Vegas Baby!

Digital Pedagogy

2011-10-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

Next month I'll be presenting at NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) in Chicago with Karen LaBonte and Sarah Fidelibus, (a.k.a @klbz and @verbalcupcake.) Our presentation, aptly titled by Karen is, Fly me to the moon: Making that giant leap into digital pedagogy. (If you are going to NCTE we are presenting session C.34 in the Hilton Continental Ballroom.)

I proposed the session initially and sought out co-presenters on several social networking sites. Karen, Sarah and I have never met. We collaborated on our presentation in Google Docs. My post about that.

Recently, while working on a last minute ISTE proposal, it was pointed out to me that 'digital pedagogy' is not a widely used term yet. A quick Google search turns up a few smallish groups using it within larger nings and a few references to the phrase being used in some university teacher education programs, but that's it. By the numbers of results returned "21st century learning" is roughly 150 times more common on the internet than "digital pedagogy" even though, in context they mean almost the same thing.

Digital pedagogy is the result of the process that is transforming education through the influx of computing resources into our classrooms. With increasing numbers of computers on student desks the methods and expectations of teaching and learning are changing. The rate of change however is highly variable; often dependent on the individual teacher, sometimes in concert with district initiatives.

I find digital pedagogy being implemented in two forms, or perhaps phases might be a better word because the first should lead to the second given time. Digital pedagogy is most often first implemented as a mirror of the existing classroom. In time digital pedagogy, hopefully becomes much more like a window.

The Mirror:
In the first, and most common case, I see digital pedagogy being a very simple mirror of traditional pedagogy. Teachers who used to give quizzes on paper now ask the same questions using an on-line tool. Readings that were done in a textbook are now delivered digitally as a PDF, Word document, or a publisher's website. In many cases students are still required to print their work to turn it in. The classroom is using less paper, but content and pedagogy are actually very similar to the way they were the year before.

There is nothing wrong with this mirroring. The process of converting what is comfortable for teachers and students to a digital format is a necessary first step. For many teachers it represents a huge, and potentially terrifying, leap. It requires them to learn a variety of new tools, take risks, rely on technology they may not trust, and spend time creating digital versions of material they are used to feeding into a copy machine. (Is it any wonder so many are reluctant to embrace educational technology?)

There are many great benefits to this first push to digitize. Students and teachers are both learning how the technology works. They solve problems together, learn to negotiate on-line spaces, figure out hardware and software issues, and share their successes. They are pioneering their own digital experience. And, to be honest, much of what you would see in my own classroom may be just a mirrored digital version of the classroom next-door.

The Window:
The second phase of digital pedagogy, the window, comes when teachers try something that can not be done effectively or efficiently without having technology in the classroom. These are the truly digital pedagogies. Many of these are just emerging, being used by comparatively very few teachers, and are still considered cutting edge. I'm working toward adding more of this to my own practice.

These transformational digital pedagogies often involve reaching far beyond the classroom. Skyping with an author or another class, building a wiki collaboratively with other students and blogging for a global audience are just a few examples of that. You can also see transformational digital pedagogy in student products that reach real audiences, involve long-term collaboration, and solve real problems. You will also see flipped classrooms, social networking within the classroom, and the creation of digital media by students.

I find the true value of digital pedagogy in the use of digital tools to promote communication and collaboration both within and beyond the classroom. We can use it to push our students to produce authentic products and push those products to real audiences. Our world has become digital and our pedagogy must as well.

Writing Mentors

2011-10-13T16:41:00.000-07:00

So the title of this blog is only partly correct. I do teach English and I do teach great kids, but I also teach future teachers and I teach a lot of educational technology to current teachers. Some days it really feels like everybody wants a piece of me, including myself. I'm responding to the demands on my time in one of three ways: Do it, Delay it (schedule for later) or Delegate it. I have not been very good at that last part. (My husband might disagree.) Then I spoke with a friend.

"You should have your university students become writing mentors for your freshmen English students." She was very proud of this idea, and she is the department chair for the course I am teaching at the local university.

Still that just seemed wrong. Using my pre-service teachers as mentors to my own students somehow seemed like a conflict of interest, like cheating, like getting them to do my work for me?

"I would be using them." I decried.

"Go ahead, use them." These were her exact words and, well, she is technically my boss, and the person in charge of their teaching program.

Comments on a student paper

So this week I asked my freshmen students to request writing mentors through a Google form. Only fourteen of them did that first day. That night I asked my pre-service teachers to volunteer to become writing mentors. Ten (out of 22) signed up. I matched them up, sharing the freshmen student writing that was already in Google Docs with a volunteer mentor.

The early results are fascinating. The mentors have the time to leave thoughtful and detailed comments on the student writing. The students love the feedback. Fifteen more students have asked for writing mentors. Even though several of the mentors have willingly taken on more than one student, I still have a waiting list of students who want writing mentors.

I am learning more about the pre-service teachers in my class by being able to read their comments to my freshmen students. I have seen that some really understand how to push a student's writing and others are more focused on minor issues. It has made me realize that commenting is a skill I must actively teach to the future teachers.

My attempt at delegation has lead me round full circle. Now when I open a Google Doc to view my freshmen student's work I find I am also analyzing the commenting skills of one of my university students.

Going to Google - GTA Seattle July 2011

2011-08-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of chalk on the raw concrete walls of the Google Seattle offices. Messages are scrawled, pictures drawn, arrows point to give directions (in case you weren't sure that those stairs went up.) An internet company whose products exist entirely in the digital world has chalk all over it's walls.

The GTA Banner

There is so much whimsy and child like energy there, that it can't be contained within offices and work spaces; it spills out on to the walls. Not surprisingly, the people are young, amazingly bright, very talented and did I mention, very young. After meeting the product manager for Google Docs, Jeff Harris, (via video conference) the question we all wanted answered (even if we didn't say it) was "How old is he?" (I would have guessed about 20, actual answer closer to 27.)

As expected, the Google Teacher Academy was a mind blowing experience. Its been about three weeks, but most of it is still vividly with me. Okay some of it. Wondering what we did? The agenda is not a secret.You can see the materials, but what you can't see is the energy to Lead Learners brought to every moment. You can't see Ken Shelton training us to oooh and ahhh when he demonstrated voice search. You can't see Molly Schroeder passing out the super hero masks or Corey Pavicich geeking out over ninja G-mail skills. I learned as much about bringing energy and enthusiasm to the topic as I did about the Google tools.

Our lunch break on day two.

Nobody goes to the GTA as a Google novice. I suspect I was probably in the bottom third as far as knowledge of Google tools, though I've been using Docs, and Blogger for four years. We all knew our stuff, but the lead learners just took everything to the next level. Like using forms for assessment? Try adding this script for grading. Already using Google calendar? Try setting up appointment slots and, oh yeah, give people a QR code to book them. Already familiar with youtube? Are you making playlists? Here's why you should. Do you like searching on Google? Nah, you really like finding. Here's a dozen ways to find it faster and easier. Oh and by the way, the average time span of a learning experience was something under ten minutes. Some went as long as 25, many were much shorter.

Besides the massive information hose about all things Google, there was a second stream pouring in as I tried to get to know more of the participants. Forty seven amazing other educators present and I didn't get a chance to really talk seriously to more than five or six.

Our follow up to GTA is an action plan due at the end of this month. I admit I was stumped. I didn't know what I would do, but then this week as our leadership team planned the all staff meetings for the opening of school I found myself using and suggesting ideas that could become viable action plans. The best is a Google site to help our PLC's track the notes from their meetings in a way that is transparent to other PLC's. So, I'm going with that. Along the way this year I will also try out Google Voice, teach at least a dozen colleagues about Google Docs, (and more about Blogger), present at NCTE about digital pedagogy, demonstrate the effective use of dozens of tools to the pre-service teachers I work with at USD, possibly present at several other conferences and of course, teach my students.

Wearing all the schwag, apron, glasses, hat, earphones, umbrella, and somewhere in there very small, my new GCT pin.

Google Teacher Academy Update

2011-07-01T13:08:00.000-07:00

Some rights reserved by Garrett Johnson

It's now been about four days since we were all emailed the news that we were accepted to the Google Teacher Academy or GTAWA as we call it most of the time.

Flights are booked, hotel rooms are reserved and Gwyneth found us a spot for a happy hour. Our bio page (Thanks Rob) is now up to 30 people.

Wednesday seemed to be the day for press releases. I know of three that went out including my own. One of them said that there were over 4000 applicants. That number didn't jive with my own searches on You-Tube, which turned up 100-400 videos depending on the search terms and filters I used. At the top end I highly doubt there were more than 500 applicants, but that still makes it quite amazing to be selected.

Wednesday was also the day that Google+ reached my radar. In case you've been living under a rock Google+ is a new social networking tool from Google. I'm on it (Thanks Sean), but I haven't played with it enough to really get it. I like the potential, but it is hard to see how well it will work when the trial is still limited. Invites aren't really available at the moment, but there is a loophole that allows a G+ user to send an update to someone by email. The recipient can click "learn more" in the email and get access to Google+. I've seen those directions posted on several blogs and an official Google blog, so it must be a loophole they've left open for a reason.

I think many of us would have made an effort to get into Google+ early anyway, but GTAWA has definitely given that some extra incentive.

I got in to the Google Teacher Academy!

2011-06-27T19:49:00.000-07:00

So this is an interesting experience and I feel really lucky to be having it. This morning, three days early, I got an email telling me that I was accepted to the GTA. I was in public, checking my son in for a cool summer session about inventions and I had to contain myself so as not to embarrass him. Also I was about 40 minutes late. Our drive to the school and the paperwork process had kept me from checking e-mail sooner. (Confession: I sometimes even go several hours without checking email. That's over.)

By the time I got to twitter I was already 50 minutes behind. I announced my fabulous good fortune with this tweet. (It's important to word these things carefully.)

I also might have mentioned it on my Facebook page. Congratulations rolled in. There were suddenly all these new fellow soon to be GCT's to follow and talk to on Twitter. And then the organization began. Alice booked a block of hotel rooms and posted a spreadsheet to organize roommates. Robert started a doc for us all to add a bio to. Several of us, Aaron and I that I know of, started Twitter lists of GCT's both current and forth coming.

It makes me wonder if it isn't part of some larger social experiment. Take a bunch of smart people who know their tech and see how fast they can coordinate a trip to Seattle. Could make a good reality TV show. To add challenge perhaps the next GCT should be in a third world country. (Is that PC? Can I still use that idiom?)

But we haven't all found each other yet. There is no master list of who got in. (Well there is, but we don't have it.) We can only go by those who announce on Twitter or use the #gtawa hash tag (And some of the people using that are not attendees, but current GCT's sending us congratulations.) Only ten people so far have added their bio to the page Robert made. Aaron's GCT Twitter list only has twenty people. There are 30 other prospective GCT's out there.

So, I offer you a scavenger hunt to find them. Check Twitter, search Facebook, look at your Linked In updates (note to self, update linked in profile.) heck, look at MySpace if you're into that. There are Nings, there are Google groups, there are tech forums. Leave NO social network unturned. No one should arrive in Seattle out of the loop. Over and out.

The Summer of Ed Tech

2011-06-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

My summer plans are a product of my choices and I’m choosing to LEARN. Fortunately there are many opportunities for me to do that. In a way it’s my own self directed masters degree in ed tech. I wish I were an accredited university capable of awarding myself a degree, because I plan to earn it.

At a minimum I’m scanning twitter and various blogs daily (okay several times daily) for the bits and pieces that flow into my instapaper and make up the bulk of my professional ed tech reading. Then I get cozy with my ipad (loaner from school) and read through those, learning, emailing links to colleagues or students, marking favorites, retweeting the best of the best and sometimes adding the link to my class facebook page.

Then there will be three days on digital literacy with the San Diego Area Writing Project. I hope to learn more about podcasting and other digital student products that are far outside my normal tech comfort zone.

I applied to the Google Teacher Acedemy in Seattle, for the end of July, but I won’t know if I got in until late next week. Please cross your fingers for me and if you have one minute watch my application video that shows just how motivated my students are when I'm not looking even three days before school got out.

I was asked to be the “Digital Teacher Leader” for my school next year. This is a new position (my principal gave me a release period for this) that our Ed Tech department came up with to facilitate tech integration in classrooms. The district has been rolling out 1:1 for the last two years and there needs to be more site based support. I was planning to support my colleagues anyway, but it’s nice to have a title to go with it. The position also comes with four days of training in early August from Intel and ongoing training next year.

During the rest of August I’m teaching five workshops for Ed Tech, assisting with a sixth and attending five more as a participant. I’ll learn more about video editing, one note, edmodo, Kurzweil, Activinspire. I’ll teach about Lan School, blogging, LiveBinders and Golgster, but I learn more about everything I teach, so the teaching counts as learning too.

Then I must make choices. I’m presenting in November at NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) about digital pedagogy with three colleagues I’ve never met. I was planning to show the teachers there how my students use the chat feature in a Google Doc to have a “discussion” about a text while annotating it collaboratively. I think I will still do that, but I think now that even more exciting options will be coming for and from my classroom and my colleagues classrooms.

Lest you think my summer is nothing but educational technology, I will get eight days of curriculum writing with my grade level team. Fortunately I taught them to use dropbox. Then there will be three days of planning the PD for the rest of the staff with the admin team; looking forward to working more ed tech into that as well. Somewhere in there I may find seven free days in a row to get away to the river and soak my toes in the swimming hole where the only Internet is dial-up and therefore not worth mentioning.

The Paperless American Lit Final

2011-06-16T14:18:00.000-07:00

Last week I was able to give my first ever entirely paperless final. I’ve had 1:1 laptops in my room for four years, but the batteries were never strong enough to make it through two back to back two hour finals. With new netbooks this year the paperless final became a possibility.

I was inspired by @TeachPaperless who shared his all digital Human Geography final in January. His approach was to have students complete a number of tasks and create a separate blog post to answer each task. My students haven’t used individual blogs this year, so I had them create a Google Presentation and use each slide as the answer to a different task.

I presented the tasks list to the students through the class blog and they responded by sharing an presentations with me in Google Docs.

This was my first time creating this type of assessment so I wanted to see what students retained from the semester, use a variety of question types, use a variety of technical skills and keep it interesting for all of us. The final product was a presentation of 15 slides covering ten assessed tasks. Sometimes two slides were necessary for the task. I did not count the title slide or the last slide.

Some questions required students to write original responses. Others asked students to find and paste in specific information or images along with citations or the URL. I told students that I would be happy to help them with technical issues, but that I could not answer questions about content.

Final exams tend to reinforce a grade that the student already has and I found that here too most of the time. Well prepared students who had studied and done the course work all along found that much of the content came easily to them and in some cases they were able to paste in answers on the final based on responses they had written earlier in the semester. Students who had struggled with the material struggled with the exam as well. But there was another group. Students who had not done much of the course work but still did quite well on the final.

There were 5-6 per class who did much better than expected. Perhaps they had studied hard in fear for their grade or perhaps the format of the final had something to do with their unexpected success.

The questions are posted on the class blog.

An exemplary product: (Published with student's consent)

The exam turned out to be more rigorous than I expected. Almost all students worked very intently on it for the full two hours. Few finished on time and many asked for extra time. Initially there was anxiety about some technical details. I learned they need more practice adding images to slides during the year for example. But in the end only 2-4 students per class ended up with incomplete exams.

I would give a paperless final again. I think I would be more careful to ramp up the tasks. On this final too much of the difficulty came early on. I think that had to do with the chronological nature of the questions. I would require more student writing, but also more opportunities for students to pull directly from their earlier work.

Assessing the finals went more quickly than I expected. Many slides could be assessed with just a quick look. I assigned 1-5 points per slide and then added them up. The trick was communicating the grade to the student. I ended up using the speaker notes on the first slide to enter a grade, but I had not told my students that I would be doing that. So, they probably don't know where to look. These are things I'll be able to tell them about before hand next time.

One more great example: (Also published with student consent.)

Using ActivEngage With Students

2011-06-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

The folks in our ed tech department made a video of me using ActivEngage with my 4th period students for the first time ever. (I practiced with third period for one day before this.) There were a lot of extra adults in the room to watch the demonstration.

The future's so bright... Senior Exhibition

2011-05-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon the seniors at my school presented their senior exhibitions. This involves a portfolio that the panel reviews ahead of time and then a presentation to the panel about their high school experience, their passion and their future plans.

My panel saw:

a future chemist, currently the captain of the football team who is headed to UC Berkly with a Regents scholarship to study chemical engineering,
the senior class president, former competitive gymnast who is the only cheerleader to be going to college on a cheer scholarship and wants to work in radio.
a student who spends every Saturday feeding the homeless and aspires to run a homeless shelter.
an AVID student whose life has been turned in a new direction by that program and now plans to attend college and potentially medical school as well.
the son of divorced parents inspired by his stepfather to attend college and study aeronautical engineering in hopes of someday working for Virgin Galactic or NASA.

These are the children who will shape the future, and even though I only taught one of them, I am proud of all of them. Yet while they head off to college with clear goals and the ambition to achieve them, I wonder if we prepared them enough. Could we have given them more?

I found myself telling the future rocket scientist that there are astronauts that he could follow on twitter. He didn’t know that. All of them had to create a resume as part of their portfolio, but do any of them have a linked-in profile? Do they know that their future employers, landlords and blind-dates will check their digital footprints? I’m not sure.

The future looks bright. Everyone of these new graduates will make the world a better place. I just wonder if we could have taught them more about it.

Docs for English Teachers

2011-05-24T15:42:00.000-07:00

This was part of a technical how-to workshop for English teachers at my school. These slides were accompanied by a live docs demo.

Why my students are like really big rocks

2011-05-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

The asteroid hurtles through space on a direct collision course with earth. When it hits there will be a fiery explosion, shock-waves, death and destruction. Few will escape and the effects will be cataclysmic. This has happened before and it will sometime happen again. Scientists are searching the heavens for this planet killing asteroid. You see the sooner they find it the better chance they have of altering its course.

You can, theoretically, change the course of an asteroid. But you have to find it early. There is an inverse relationship between the distance of the rock from earth and the amount of change you need to make in its path to keep it from hitting us. So if they find it years before it comes close to us then it might take only a small impact to throw it off course and send it away from earth. But, if they find it late, say a few months or even weeks before impact then it will take a much larger bombardment to push it enough in a new direction to avoid earth.

There is also in inverse relationship between the time a student has before graduation and the amount of pressure and intervention educators need to apply to push that student toward success and away from cataclysm. The more time you have with a student the more likely you will be able to alter his or her orbit and if you can change that trajectory just a little bit early on, then time will magnify the progress that student can make.

Nine months ago I talked a student into taking the SAT. He didn’t want to. He was heading to the local community college like his friends, maybe. I sent him down to the counseling office to get a fee waiver card. When he came back to get his things he said he would register at home. I checked with his Mother. She agreed I could keep him after school. He spent 45 minutes going through the process to register for the test with a lot of help from me about things he didn’t know: things like GPA, class rank, which courses he took, which majors he might be interested in and which testing location he should choose.

Taking the SAT allowed him to apply to colleges he otherwise wouldn’t have. He was accepted to a four year state university in Northern California. He will be leaving home in the fall. He will meet new people, learn in a new environment and establish his own identity. His orbit will change.

It was just one momentary push. One after school hour. One bit of encouragement and this young man has changed the path of his life. Seeing his direction change made me offer after school SAT registration help to all my students and many have taken me up on that.

In education people talk about the need for early intervention and the early intervention is often an intense structured even overwhelming process. If it is taking that much effort to move the student in a new direction then it’s not really early intervention; it’s remediation.

There are so many opportunities to change a student’s path in life. Those chances are sometimes so small and insignificant looking at the time that it is easy to miss them. Our slightest push can bring a child crashing down or spin them toward a distant star. Kids are like really big rocks, if you can alter their course early they are much less likely to crash. Push your students away from cataclysm daily.

Goodreads in the Classroom

2011-03-28T12:32:00.000-07:00

Last week when I had to take my class to see their counselors in shifts I needed an engaging activity they could do without much help. I asked them to sign up for Goodreads accounts, send me a friend request and rate some books.

The results are fabulous. On my Goodreads home screen I have a list of all their activity. If I click on a particular student I can see a list of all the books he or she has rated and reviewed. I can comment on their ratings and reviews. If I click on a book cover I can see the ratings all my "friends" (students) gave that book. Once a week I even get an e-mail update of all the activity my friends have had on the site.

Today I noticed that two of my students gave five stars to a book I have been meaning to read, but neither reviewed it. I commented back to them and just asked why they liked it. One of them, a very at risk kind of kid, just replied, DURING LUNCH, from her PHONE to tell me more about the book.

Several students are sending each other friend requests and discussing the books they have both rated. Some students who were absent Friday signed up over the weekend and others did it in class today as soon as they heard about it.

Tips:
If you don't have 1:1 laptops it's worth taking your class to a computer lab to get them started on this. Even better if the lab is in the library and they can check out books too.
If you (or your students) have smart phones there is an app for Goodreads.
If you already use Goodreads a lot with your own friends you might consider setting up a separate account to use with students.

A little figurative language

2011-01-25T12:37:00.000-08:00

We've been scouting figurative language in poetry for awhile, but that's not as much fun as writing your own.

Today we needed to work offline and so this little paper based activity fit the bill nicely for part of the period.
I asked my students to draw a smallish circle on their paper and write an ordinary common noun in the circle.
THEN I explained that they were going to use that noun in examples of the five types of figurative language we've been working with: metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole and idiom. I gave them an example of this using "table" as my word.

It was so fun to watch them work out their examples with the word they chose. And, because each of them chose different words, they had to be original.

Finding Like Minds: The triumph of social networking for teachers

2011-01-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

I do teach English to great kids and there is some great learning happening there, but there are also some wonderful synergies going on in the adult world that I wanted to post about for a moment.

A few weeks ago I got it into my head that I wanted to put together a session for the annual convention of the National Council of Teacher's of English about the ways the digital world is changing my pedagogy in the classroom. This presented a few challenges. First, there aren't very many people I know locally who have the digital opportunities I have to change their pedagogy. That is coming in quickly, but not here yet. Those who I do know locally were unlikely to be willing or able to travel to Chicago in November for the convention.

Knowing that NCTE vastly favors panel presentations over individuals I set out to find those few teachers who could fit both needs, a. using technology to change pedagogy and b. be willing to travel to Chicago in November.

I posted on the EnglishCompanionNING, Twitter and a Facebook group I belong to for English teachers. It worked. I got a response from each one and put together a group of great teachers who are using technology to change their teaching and they are all willing and eager to attend the convention.

We drafted our proposal collaboratively in Google Docs and I used a Google Form to collect the contact info I need for the participant data form.

I did not know any of these teachers before. Two of us are west coast and two are east coast. We have never met and likely won't until we are all together in Chicago. Without the social networking tools available and widely used by teachers I would never have found these women. Now we will collaborate, present together (hopefully), and likely work together again in the future.

What the web does best...

2010-12-16T12:25:00.000-08:00

I went to a workshop tonight about Web 2.0 tools. I picked up some great tips to leverage Facebook and smartphones, but the best part came from one of my students.

During the workshop she sent me a chat message in G-mail and asked for help with her paper. I opened it in Google Docs and then opened the chat window in the document so we could chat with her paper right there. She asked if she was on the right track. She missed class today, so I asked her to go look at the class blog to see the presentation from today's lesson that I had just posted there.

When she came back to Docs a few minutes later she used the chat window to explain exactly what she had learned about thesis statements from the blog. Her answer was perfect, but also totally in her own words. She confidently told me she would be fine now and thanked me for my help. All I did was make the lesson available and tell her where to find it.

You should know that this young lady is at risk. Her grades are poor, she often struggles to understand material, and the reason that she missed class today was because she was suspended for defiance when she ditched the VP as he was walking her to detention on Tuesday.

Tonight however, she was trying to do her work. She reached out to me and luckily I happened to be there. She was able to use the blog to see what she missed in class and then use that to help her with her writing.

I went to a workshop to learn about more ways for using Web 2.0 tools, but it was my own student who showed me what the web really does best.

P.S. I actually wrote this post several months ago. I've waited to share it because it contains information about a specific student, but now I know she won't be recognized and I have her permission.

Interactive White Boards (IWB's) are coming

2010-12-15T12:09:00.000-08:00

Last week I got to go check out the newly installed Promethean Boards at MBHS. I took pictures. Generally I like this version better than what the IT department was putting in Math classrooms last year.

For one thing these are "portable". The stand can be moved several feet, but remains limited by the umbilical cord that connects it to the wall. This means you may be able to adjust the angle to the wall, helpful in our wedge shaped rooms in the 800.
Another improvement is that the projector only extends about 15 inches out from the board. Much more compact and possible only because of a cool convex mirror system.

Also they look cooler. Note the nifty dark gray border with built in speakers, redundant to the sound system for the classroom, but still good backup speakers.

Note too the large platform at the bottom. I'm a little worried about tripping on that.

The silver lining of the bottom platform is (almost literally) the drawer built into it that you can use to stash secret teacher things like cables. It even has a lock.

The actual board is still going to be about 12 inches from the wall. This creates "shadow" areas on either sides of the board that students can't see. For example students sitting on the right side of your room can't see the wall for several feet on the left of the board and vice versa. It's a problem.

The image at MBHS is still too small. Note the dark areas where the projection does not fill the board. Supposedly that is a software problem with the projector that Promethean is coming back to fix for them. Hopefully that means we won't see it.

A big thanks to the English teachers at MBHS, and Doug McIntosh for letting me come visit with my camera. And also thanks to Dave Kootman from Promethean who showed us the basics of using the software for an English class.

Using Google Docs Chat Windows for Literary Analysis With Students

2010-12-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

Last week my students read "The Story of and Hour" by Kate Chopin. They spent time on Wednesday reading and discussing the story with their group. They worked with the group to find the theme and the evidence for the theme. On Thursday I wanted them to write independently about the theme and evidence in their own English journal, but they needed to look back at the story of course and they ended up having discussions in the chat window of their shared document for the story. Those conversations were rich and one of them became the topic of my previous post below.

I decided to push them a bit further. On Friday I gave them an new story, "Passing Days" as a shared document, but instead of sending them to their groups I left them in rows to read the story on their own. After some time to read it I told students to "chat" about the story using their document chat window. The room was silent, every group was discussing the story, pulling in quotes, asking each other questions, but it was all online. By having each group's document open I could see all of their conversations. Students liked it. Their conversations were focused and productive. One student said, "It was so quiet in here, so I could really concentrate on the conversation." Another added, "And we didn't get off topic the way we do when we are talking in a group."

This week we have moved to Emerson. I wanted them to look closely at "Self Reliance", so I tried using the chat window again in combination with an audio track of the excerpts we were looking at. I played them a paragraph and let the groups "chat" to figure out the meaning of the text. It took us two class periods to listen to all four and a half minutes of the text because the student conversations were so rich. It was like running six simultaneous small Socratic seminars. At the beginning of the second day I showed the class the "transcript" of one of the groups from the day before. This was a good review of the material we read before and also became a teachable moment about how to chat online, support one another, ask questions, stay on topic and add ideas.

The chat window in Google Docs used to be an annoying distraction that I tried to keep my students away from while they were working in their writing groups. Now I find using the chat window in Google Docs with my students has become an excellent educational tool.

Google Docs chat window is a window into student thinking

2010-12-02T13:17:00.000-08:00

Today my students were working on their second day of trying to figure out the theme of "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin. Yesterday they worked in groups of six to read the story and try to figure out the theme and find the evidence. Each group had a document shared in Google Docs with the story where they could highlight, make comments and write on the story itself as a group.

Today they were working on their own to write a paragraph in their English Journal in GD about the theme using the evidence their group found yesterday. They still needed to use their shared document with the story and that shared document comes with a chat window, so that the group members could still communicate with each other even though they were no longer in a group. I was monitoring the chat windows of the six documents in play and students knew they were allowed to use this for communication and even to ask questions. Talking was prohibited.

Until this point I had not seen the chat window used this much or this richly. Student dialog within the chat window gave me great information about their thinking about the task at hand. At times I commented on their questions or reminded them to focus, but mostly I just watched their thinking evolve. It was messy, but fascinating. I captured one group's chat by copying and pasting their comments into a new doc every few minutes. I changed their names and edited just a bit for clarity, but this is mostly their raw discussion.

Notice how they answer each others questions as they navigate the task. They express confusion, frustration, provide support and answers and Don even shares his final product.

Don has opened the document.
Andee has opened the document.
Don: you guys /: you guys took like ALL the evidence & I can't find any . Help meeee pls .
Sandy has opened the document.
Mrs. R: What do you mean they took it? You can use the same quote
Don: ohhh ok nevermind (:
Arthur: There in the middle of the paper Don
Charlene has opened the document.
Sandy: hey me ayudan?
Arthur: Mrs. Roberts what are we supposed to be doing?
Charlene: no le entiendo
Sandy: your are suppose to be writing in your english journal
Andee: yea we are
Arthur: what are we suppose to write in our English journal?
Andee has opened the document.
Don: yeah but what do we write about? :O
Sandy: something about theme
Charlene: about the theme
Sandy: yeee
Don: of the story ?
Charlene: yeaahh
Andee: yea
Don: or on what we commented on the paper
Sandy: yeee   loook this is what i wrote   I think that the theme is that they character rather be dead than not have their independence.
Don: that's what you wrote on your english journal ?
Sandy: do you guys kind of get it now?    yeee kinda
Don: yeah somewhat . how long does our entry have to be ?
Arthur: so we just write about what the theme is?
Sandy: yeah the message of the story
Arthur: oh ok i get it now... thanks kid
Don: oh , okay . It makes sense now (: lol
Sandy: member yesterday ms roberts was talking to you Arthur and you were talking just write what you said down
Arthur: oh ok get it now
Don: I N D E P E N D E N C E (:
Charlene: how much do we write ?
Sandy: AMEN Don
Don: idknow ? -_-    @Sandy , Lmfao . alrighty .
Sandy: enough like 5 sent.
Charlene: grrrrrrrr :/   im confusedd
Sandy: hhhhaaaaaaaa how?
Don: Tiger , lol .
Arthur: so like a paragraph?
Sandy: umm yeahh
Don: (:   yessssssssssssssssssss
Charlene: whatever floats your boat :]
Sandy: Don do your work     haha stephy nd i say that
Arthur: all of you do yur work!
Sandy: HA;)
Don: stephy ? whose that ? hahaaa    & im halfway done [;
Sandy: STEPHANIE menso
Don: :O I know no such person
Sandy: Charlene helpp mee!!!
Don: hahaha
Charlene: it shows she wants to be independent ?
Sandy: thanks.
Charlene: welcom :]
Sandy: HA...
Don: ha ha ha ha ha   i laugh lol
Arthur: hahaha
Charlene: time is almost up.
Don: :O stop scaring me >___<
Sandy: hahhaa heyy how longg??
Charlene: how long what?
Arthur: like 3 mins... i think
Charlene: not even like 1   :O
Sandy: the writing   TIMES UP
Charlene: told you
Sandy: you didnt tell me anything
Arthur: do we get more time or what?
Sandy: Don what does malluga mean?
Don: okay guys this is what I wrote, hold on BRACE YOURSELVES
In the story, “Story of an Hour” has a rare theme. The theme is Independence. The lady from the story was dependent on her husband since the day they got married. But when he died she realized that she had to be strong about things and make herself become independent. She felt free at last now that she had realized she could have been independent a long time ago, but never could be because of her husband. The author also stated that the character would rather be dead than to not be independent. I used this quote tho support my evidence, “She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.”
woah lol
Charlene: sounds like an A+ to me
Sandy: its good
Don: : :D do you like it Ms. Roberts ? (:
Arthur: no she doesn't
Sandy: hahaha she put you on hold
Don: yeah she does , DAM you guys are haters . haha .
Charlene: haha :D
Arthur: hahahahaha
Sandy has left.
Don: bye .
Don has left.
Arthur has left.
Charlene has left.
Andee has left.

Of course this is just a beginning. They have a long way to come with their discussion skills, but the interaction is authentic, academic and supportive. It's been a good day. I would be interested in your thoughts.

Smart Phones For Teachers, or "Hello? This is the 21st century calling."

2010-11-08T16:39:00.000-08:00

I'm considered very tech savvy by most who know me, but you'd be shocked by my ancient cell phone. It's over five years old. (That's about 95 in cell phone years.) I can text from it if I have 20 minutes to spare and I can even take a picture, if you consider grayish blobs pictures. I will also admit I'm a bit cheap. My current Verizon plan covers both my husband and myself for under $50. Switching even just me to a smart phone would more than double that. (Have I mentioned I'm a teacher with a mortgage and two kids?)

Still, I've been seriously considering upgrading myself to a smart phone for a while. But many of the motivators for the upgrade are coming from the educational applications I want to use it for, such as being able to instantly post pictures and video to a blog or get e-mail and texts from students where ever I am. A few days ago it occurred to me that what I probably really need to do is write a grant proposal.

I think giving students access to me beyond the classroom is a big part of it. During the hours right after school I am blacked out to them as I attend meetings, run errands and pick up my own kids. Often I sit down at my computer after eight and find e-mails from students asking for help that were sent at 4:30. With a 3G connection I could have taken a moment and responded sooner.

I know there are charters where teachers are given cell phones and required to be accessible to students. I love that idea. I'm willing. Sign me up. The photo and video capabilities of the phone make it useful in class, and the 3G access makes it useful beyond the classroom.

I don't know for sure yet what it would cost or how it would work. In my dream world someone would walk into my room, hand me an iphone or droid phone and say, "We want you to pilot a smart phone for teachers program. Here's a phone. Here's the number. Use it and report on what happens for you and your students. If it works well and helps students we will give them to more teachers." Six months later I'd be giving workshops for teachers about how they can integrate their phones into the technology they already have going.

In business the knowledge workers get issued Blackberries to increase their productivity. Seems to me teachers are definitely knowledge workers.

Fifteen years ago, when I first started teaching, most classrooms in my district didn't even have regular land line phones. It was a big deal when the district put a phone in every classroom. It will probably be another fifteen years before they figure out that they should put a smart phone in the hands of every teacher.

Google Forms: Have you seen the possibilities?

2010-11-06T07:03:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

I'm glad you are interested in learning more about Google Forms. Please visit the link below to get started.

Link #1: Pre-session Survey.

You can follow along with the presentation here.

Roberts' Favorite Forms

When we are done please visit the post-session survey link below and also the evaluation form from SDCUE.
Link #2: Post-session survey

Thank you for coming to learn more about Goggle Forms.

Link to form we made together.

Education Solution

2010-10-16T19:41:00.000-07:00

You will all be happy to know I have solved education. I don't know why I didn't see it before. It's really just a matter of simple Math. I'm an English teacher and I still figured it out.

You see there are basically three parts of my role as a teacher: plan, teach, and assess. You can give them other names or quibble with me about the semantics later, but that is basically it. And, yes, you can add in all the other hats like counselor, nurse, psychologist, mediator, facilitator, mentor, coach, IT specialist, and on and on. We all know teachers do much more than teach. You can probably also factor in some job time spent on various meetings not directly related to planning, teaching and assessing.

I could explain in detail what each of those means to me, but the only part of that which is really relevant to my solution for education is the fact that each of the big three all require about the same amount of my time. So the problem with education is that the system is not set up to allow a full time teacher to spend equal time on all three. To do so we often work 10+ hours a day and weekends. Easily 50-60 hours a week and still don't get it all done.

Lets do the math. A full time high school teacher teaches five classes and has one preparation period. In my district teachers are also expected to work another hour and a half to make up "the balance of an eight hour work day." That's what it says in the contract. I read it years ago and it has always amused me. But, if it is really important to you I'll go look it up again and make sure it still says that.

Anyways, teachers get about 2.5 hours of non-teaching time for every five hours they spend with students. (These are rough numbers) So on a good day, when there are no meetings, no students staying for tutoring, and no technical problems to solve etc. We have roughly 15 minutes per class for planning and 15 for assessment. That's it. At that rate it would take me a month to grade each essay I assign, IF I grade nothing but those essays for a month. You can forget looking at daily homework, entering grades to the online gradebook, grading short answer quizzes or any other form of assessment. Once the class turns in those essays, my assessment time is spoken for for the next 18 school days. Deal.

Planning gets the same 15 minutes per class. Do you now what kind of lesson you can plan in 15 minutes? The kind like this, "Open your book to page 181. We are going to read the story together [because I didn't have enough planning time to re-read it myself.] Then we will answer the questions at the end." And that is a big part of the problem with education in America.

Being an amazing teacher I can sometimes create brilliant lessons in five minutes, but most of the time, the vast majority of the time, I need way more than 15 minutes. You can see for yourself at my class blog. The link is over there on the right side somewhere.

You probably saw this coming, but the solution to the education crisis is time. Teachers need more time for planning and assessment. Instead of five hours teaching and 2.5 hours for planning AND assessment. We need equal time for all three. Ideally, in an eight hour work day we would plan, teach and assess for 2.6666 hours each. I can see you laughing and calculating how many more teachers we would need and what that would cost. I'll compromise. One hour of planning and assessment for each hour of teaching. Four hours per day of each. Stop laughing.

All across the country exemplary teachers are getting highlighted. The one thing they all seem to have in common is an abundance of time to plan and assess amazing lessons. Sure they put in those extra hours on a voluntary basis because they are dedicated individuals. They deserve all the awards, cheers and pats on the back we can give them. But dedicated individuals won't solve the education problems our country faces. Telling every teacher that not working 50-60 hours a week makes them uncaring slackers won't solve it either.

If you want to reform education give the teachers more time to do their jobs right. Then sure, hold them accountable, but hold the students accountable too. Give my kids a test that matters to their future and then you can tell me that their scores reflect what they learned as a result of being in my classroom for a year. Give them a long, boring, tedious test that does not affect them in any way at all and you've just got a big waste of state dollars, but that's another post.

I enjoy being a good teacher and a good mother. I enjoy both so much that I refuse to teach full time. I have a 60% contract. That means I teach three periods a day rather than five. I also earn 60% of the salary. By my contract I should work 4.8 hours a day. That has never happened. I am on campus daily for seven to eight hours and I often have work to do on the weekend. But, full time or part time, all teachers need more time for planning and assessment and it's time our educational system recognized that the educational process begins way before the first bell and continues long after the last.

Shared folders to the rescue...

2010-09-22T20:51:00.000-07:00

I've been using writing groups in my English classes for five years. The process got much better once my students all had laptops. We used Google Docs, but students still had to share their paper with each of their group members for each assignment.

Today we made a great leap forward. Writing Groups got started much smoother. Students spent more time reading and discussing their writing. I complimented my classes on their excellent first day with writing groups, but it was the shared folders that made it possible.

Late in the afternoon yesterday I wondered if it would be worth the tedium of making six group folders for each class, adding the correct student essays to each folder and then sharing each folder with everyone else in the group. Ok, perhaps tedious is an understatement, but worth it, yes, very worth it.

1. I already had every student essay shared with me in one folder. Within that folder I created the group folders labeled by period and group number. This took about five minutes per class.

2. Google Docs kindly allows a doc to exist in more than one folder. So, for example, I selected the six student documents that belonged to students in group one and then clicked the folders button. That brings me a drop down menu of all the folders I have in GD. I checked the box next to the group one folder, but I also leave the box checked for the folder where all the student docs are already. This took about 20 minutes per class.

3. Once I had a folder for each group I opened that folder and clicked "share this folder" next to the folder name. The dialog box that pops up can be dragged, so I moved it lower and then used the owner e-mail addresses on the documents to write in the e-mails of the students in the group. This was slow but still only took me about 15 minutes per class. [Google could easily automate this for me by adding an option to share a folder with the owners of all documents in the folder. I plan to ask for this.]

4. When the students came to class they found new folders in their GD accounts. Some needed to be shown the "folders shared with me" part on the left, but most groups figured it out very quickly. The decided which person's writing to look at first and got started.

Best part is that any document they add to their shared folder is now shared with their group. I won't have to repeat the folder process until next fall. (I like to keep writing groups stable.) I will have to teach students how to add a doc to the shared group folder, but I think that should be simple.

These options might have saved me time, but cost a bit more class time:
I could have had the students create and share their group folder by pulling together one student from each group after they had collected e-mail addresses from their group.
I didn't need to add the documents to the folders. I could have shared the folders and then had students each add their own doc, but there would have been many confused looks.

Overall, I think the instant gratification of having docs already shared and folders ready to go kept the focus on the student writing instead of on making the technology work. It was worth my time to set up the shared folders that groups will use all year long.

For more on how I use Writing Groups in my classroom see my site full of resources.

Stickers, why didn't I think of that?

2010-09-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

The best thing I did at the beginning of this school year was make stickers, ok labels. I gave every student a label printed with the name of the course, my name, the class blog address, my e-mail addresses and my phone number. It was a very simple thing that seems to have made a big difference.

Tips if you want to try it:

Use the labels that come 10 to a sheet. They are about 2" by 4".
Find the label template in your word processor. (This is the trickiest part.)
Make one label and copy and paste into the other sections.
If you teach more than one course use "find and replace" to quickly change the course name on all ten labels. I also used it to change the blog address.
Before you print, be sure to go into the printer properties and change paper type to labels. This vastly improved the quality of my labels. Not sure why it matters, but it does.
Distribute to students to stick in a useful place (planner, binder etc.) and keep extras for new students who join you mid year.

My Docs Tips

2010-08-22T15:39:00.000-07:00

A colleague, @socratech, recently asked on twitter if anyone had any examples of the way they use Google Docs in the classroom. It turns out I had a lot to tell him, so I thought a blog post would be good.

Those of you who know Docs know that it includes forms, spreadsheets and presentations as well as actual documents. I'm going to focus the tips here just on the documents part. I promise more posts later about my tips for the other parts of docs. These tips will be most helpful for people already a bit familiar with Docs. If you are brand new to Google Docs I suggest you start with this cool guide created by Richard Byrne and follow his awesome blog Free Tech For Teachers.

Ways I use Docs in my English Classroom:
1. English Journals: Each student creates a Doc called English Journal. They add to it (from the top) all year long. It includes quick writes, notes, questions and answers, warm-up type activities, vocabulary they need, etc. Almost anything they would put in a regular notebook. I grade these every 3-4 weeks on a rubric.

2. Essays: What English class would be complete without them? Students create a new Doc for each essay and do all their work for that project in that doc. Pre-writing activities or notes get pushed to the bottom of the doc and the "final" essay is at the top. I can use the docs "Revision History" (under file menu) to see earlier versions. (I sometimes catch plagiarism that way.)

3. Sharing: The beauty of Docs is that students share their work with me AND their peers. All students are in a writing group that stays together and they share their documents and get feedback at group meetings. For more on the ways I use writing groups (with or without docs) please visit my page on Writing Group Resources.

4. Collaboration: Because multiple students can contribute to the same Doc at the same time I have found Docs make great collaborative activities. At the end of the semester students work in groups to go back through the course blog. Each group takes a month and contributes links to relevant material from that month, but every group is adding to one Doc that I shared with all the group leaders (and they shared to their group members.) So while group one is adding material from September, group five is adding material from January. At the end of the period the class has a co-created study guide that summarizes (with links) all the material they are responsible for on the final. Link to blog post with their results.

5. I use Docs to publish anything I want my students to see and then just link those pages in the appropriate part of my class blog, either as a static link on the right or as part of a daily blog post. I have a doc called Homework. I add to it as needed and, because a published doc automatically updates itself, the students can always find the correct homework from the link on the blog.

Very Important Tips:
1. When teachers are using docs with students they will have hundreds of docs shared with them (sometimes all in one day). It is critical to have a good organizational system. I tried having a folder for each period and then assignment folders inside that, but It worked out better to have a folder for each assignment and lump all student work for that assignment into it. (Made grading faster for me anyway.) Experiment with different organizational patterns, but please use folders. (Update note: Google Docs now calls folders "Collections")

2. Also crucial is to give students a consistent way of naming their docs. Mine was this: Period#, Initials, Assignment name. So if Dave Hernandez is in my third period class his English Journal would be named 3DHEnglishJournal, His memoir would be 3DHMemoir etc. It is a huge waste of time to have to open a document to see which assignment it is. And, while the initials don't always tell you exactly which student, they do narrow down the search.

3. Also, I always tell my students that I grade from the bottom. When an assignment is due on say, Friday, I know I won't really get to grading them until Sunday. Students can keep working on their papers (for me anyway). When I do sit down to grade I start at the bottom so that I am grading papers that haven't been touched recently. Therefore a student who is actively still revising gets to be graded last. (I'm in favor of kids working on their writing.) Since it can sometimes take me a week or more to grade all of the papers for a major essay my students get the extension if they are still working.

4. Make students share a doc with you the day they create it. You can watch their progress and see who needs help sooner.

5. Check to make sure ALL of them have shared their docs with you well before a deadline. This helps to hold them accountable for getting started and sometimes there are sharing issues. Many times students get my e-mail wrong and I don't get their doc, or they named it wrong and I can't find it.

I hope these tips will help you use docs with your students more confidently. If you have other tips to share please make a comment below.

When Ripples Become Waves (Not the Google Kind)

2010-06-16T20:36:00.000-07:00

I recently read a blog post by Tom Barrett. He wrote about seeing ripples, little bits of his teaching practice showing up in other places as a result of his interactions with other teachers. Today I realized a rather large ripple, possibly even a wave has passed through my school as a result of one very small interaction I had last November.

In the fall I attended a technology focused conference put on by the California League of Middle Schools. I went to great workshops and even delivered my own session about the way I use Google Forms, but about the ripple. I attended a session about Google Wave by Brian Van Dyck. I tried Wave, but I don't really use it. I couldn't get my students very interested in it. Brian used a Prezi as part of his session. It was the first time I'd seen Prezi, but I only found it to be mildly interesting when compared to what I thought Wave would turn into. Wave fizzled for me, but Prezi lingered.

I made a Prezi myself to see if I could do it. Nothing fabulous, just a dynamic way to get my student's attention before their first semester final. I did not make another one and I still haven't, but I mentioned Prezi in a meeting and later sent the participants an example of one that was much better than mine. One of the senior English teachers, Michele McConnell, showed Prezi to her students, who were preparing for their senior exhibition. Some of those students showed it to their friends, who decided to use it also. A few weeks later many seniors had prepared Prezis.

My student teacher, Ms. Brandecker, had seen my early attempt and then saw a senior's exhibition that included a Prezi. She was working on a poetry unit with her class and wondered if they could use Prezi as part of their project. Working in teams they made very simple Prezis about the poems they had found and written. (Student created Prezis) They presented them today.

From a simple ripple, a small part of something I saw at a conference, something I mentioned in a meeting, the Prezi has become a wave at our school. (Not the Google Kind)

Ways with Word Clouds

2010-04-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

New: 52 Ways to Use Word Clouds

Most English teachers at my school will have netbooks in their classroom next year. This opens up numerous possibilities and one of those is word clouds.
A word cloud is a group of words created from a larger text. In the cloud the words that appear larger are the words that occur most often. This is a word cloud based on the text of this blog post.

Word clouds have a lot of potential uses in the classroom. Students can create word clouds from their own writing, from webpages, from mentor texts. The word cloud gives readers and writers another way of looking at the text.

In this article Nate Sliver used a word cloud creator to generate word clouds based on the comments of people on both sides of the heathcare debate. Then he wrote an expository essay around his images. (Please click the link and go see his article. It is a great example.) http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/03/two-pictures-tell-story-on-health-care.html

Students can do the same thing with an issue related to their curriculum. They could also use a word cloud comparison to look at two different works of literature. Because a word cloud distills a text to it's largest (and smallest) ideas students are required to make inferences, see patterns in ideas, and wonder.

Word clouds can also be used to introduce a complex text. The teacher can create a word cloud before the lesson and ask students to make predictions about the text based on the words they see in the cloud. Last week I made a word cloud from the text of a chapter of The Great Gatsby and then asked students to predict from that before we read.

There are several different word cloud creators on the web. The one I used for the clouds in this post was Tagexedo. It allows you to enter text by copy and paste or to enter the URL for a webpage you want it to pull the text from. You can also play with the fonts, colors, shapes etc. of your creations.

Also check out this great post by Tony Borash about using word clouds as a pre and post assessment tool.

Two Days In The Life of a High School Teacher or Never a Dull Moment

2010-03-24T11:31:00.000-07:00

It's Wednesday, so it hasn't even been a whole week and in many ways it's been a very average week.

Monday I broke up a girl fight in my classroom during passing period. Fights are fairly rare at my school and I haven't had one in my room for over two years. This altercation began in the hallway and then escalated. I yelled at them to stop, kept other students back and then eventually found the wits to have a student call for security. In the aftermath their were clumps of hair on the floor and a pearl earing that I took down to the office and returned to to one of the combatants.

That afternoon I spent over an hour calculating and submitting students' grades for the six week progress report, and then creating a lesson for Tuesday, before rushing to pick up my own children. Late that evening I finalized a book order for the English department that we needed to put together quickly before the budget gets frozen.

On Tuesday I had to tell two seniors that they did not pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) and that they would not get to walk in our school's graduation ceremony. I also got to congratulate five others who passed on their last chance and will get to walk with their class.

Later I held the beautiful one month old baby of one of my former students. The student is in the marines now and he is training in North Carolina before being deployed to Afghanistan. His girlfriend, the baby's mother, is a senior still and she came to visit campus before she returns to classes in two weeks. She knew I would want to meet her daughter. The baby closely resembles her father. His picture, in full marine dress uniform, is on my bulletin board from the day he came to tell my class about his experience in boot camp. He got to see her for a day before he left California.

In the same day I had a lunch meeting with my student teacher and her university supervisor about her excellent progress this semester. And in the afternoon on my prep period I was able to see the second half of a presentation by a comic book artist who was showing students the very sophisticated computer tools he uses to create amazing artwork.

Along the way I taught lessons, took attendance, wrote passes, counseled students about their options, reviewed student work, fixed computers, wrote e-mails, called parents, and received a really nice thank you note.

Forty eight hours is not enough to absorb the heartbreak, violence, hope, inspiration, congratulation, ordinary, and extraordinary that makes up a typical week in a high school.

Blog vs. Website-- Which will you use in your classroom?

2010-03-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

In the last week three different people have asked me why I prefer to use a blog with my class rather than a website, so let me explain.

You must know that my preference for blogs does not stem from ignorance about websites. In the last fifteen years I have created, built, maintained, managed and removed numerous websites related to my teaching experiences; from my earliest webpage created as a student teacher, through those I created while teaching middle school, to the one I had to make as part of my masters program, one I created in a workshop about Google Sites and even the one I still maintain as part of my school's larger site. I know a lot about websites. They are great for a lot of things, but not for my classroom.

A website is rather static. Even in a world of web 2.0 a website (at least those easily created by tech novices) just sits there. You can put content up and take it down. You can add pages and take them down. A website is great for things you want to leave up for a while. It is not well suited to daily changes. A blog is.
If you don't know me then you need to know that my students have 1:1 laptops that they use almost daily in my classroom. My blog is their starting place. They turn on, log in and go to the blog. (Do not pass Go. Do not check your e-mail on the way.)

When they get there they will find the instructions I just gave them repeated in the text, the links to the resources I need them to have and anything else I think they might need to know that day. They have access to the whole internet and we regularly use Google Docs and other sites for productivity, but the blog is the hub.

Why can't I do that with a website, you may ask. Well you can, but if you plan to change the lesson daily or at least several times a week your page is going to get quite long. It also won't come with a nice interface that will allow you to easily attach key words to each post, or automatically format the date and title of each post for you. Your web site posts also won't have a way for readers to leave you comments on each post.

The real magic of the blog is the way it automatically archives my posts. Everything I've done with my students for the last two years is archived and searchable on my blog. Want to know how I taught Walden last month? Search Walden and scroll down. You'll also find how I taught it last year and the year before that. Want to know how I've taught reading standard 2.5 about assumptions? Search that. You'll see that one year I taught it with political speeches and another year I used first person narratives. Very handy for me as I plan lessons and invaluable to my student teachers.

What about the students? Obviously, either a blog or a website can help students catch up on the work they missed if they were absent, but what about preparing for a test? Last semester my students made their own study guides for finals by working in groups to identify the key material we covered in each month with the help of the blog archive. I published their guides in Google Docs and linked to them in a blog post. Then I used the student created study guides to tweak my final exam. One of the teachers who asked me about class blogs admitted recently that he spent over five hours on a Sunday making his students a study guide. Do you think they used it much? Even if my students never went back to the study guide they studied as they created it.

My favorite part about the blog is the gadgets. Most blog templates have a column for gadgets. These are things you can add like linked lists, polls, text boxes, and a dozen other things. They stay there until you take them down. You can have a linked list with links to your syllabus, assignment sheets, rubrics, and anywhere else you want your students to be able to find easily. Polls let you ask your students questions anonymously; things like: How's your project going? or Did you like the last piece we read? Text boxes give you a way to explain important policies etc. There are even gadgets that allow you to embed other functions from outside sites, like a cluster map of your blog visitors or a slideshow of images.

Blogs are made to deal with information that changes frequently. They are user friendly, easy to update, searchable, flexible and fun. They are also easy to create for teachers (and students). if you don't have a classroom blog yet you can start one in less than five minutes. There is a button at the top of this page on the right side that says create blog. Click that and get started.

Addendum: For more ideas on how to use a classroom blog take a look at the slide below created by Richard Byrne. Mr. Byrne has an amazing blog you should follow http://www.freetech4teachers.com/

Online Text Selection Supports Standards Focused Learning

2010-02-22T15:02:00.000-08:00

There was a time when the only texts I could give my students were those in the textbook (and anything I could legally copy). I'll call that the dark ages and we won't speak of it further.

Today I teach in a room where all my students have laptops. There are many implications of that, but lately the one that interests me has been the impact 1:1 has on what my students can read and the ways they can interact with their reading material.

I've come to a point where I really can identify which standard I need to teach and then choose texts that support that. Certainly there are texts that should be taught as classics, but this year I am much more concerned about the critical reading skills my students need to develop. I am finding that the California standards push student thinking in good ways.

Our current focus standard is Reading 2.5: Analyze an author's implicit and explicit philosophical assumptions and beliefs about a subject. Certainly there are texts in our textbook that I could use to help students master that, but those texts don't relate to each other well. They would not follow thematically or chronologically.

By using the much larger range of texts I can find on-line I am able to put together a unit that makes sense to the students thematically (views about nature), chronologically (westward expansion) and cognitively. Because the texts are online students can copy and paste key sections into their journals for further reflection. Using an online highlighter they can color code the text to identify assumptions and statements about nature.

Recently we've been following a theme of nature in American Literature. I've been able to send my students to a page with over 150 Native American stories. Each student read a different story and collectively they determined how Native American Literature views the natural world. We were also able to read William Byrd's account of the history of Virgina, classic examples from The Fireside Poets, excerpts of the journals of Lewis and Clark and Sarah Raymond's diary about her family's trip across the plains in a wagon train. None of which were in the textbook. All of which challenged student's reading skills and gave them an opportunity to search for the writer's assumptions. Blog Post to Students for Lewis and Clark Readings

Online text selection supports standards focused learning.

A Poe Story

2010-01-05T14:59:00.000-08:00

    Yesterday I asked students to write in their journals about a warm up question that related to the Poe tale we were about to read. I knew they would finish at different times and, being a good teacher, I was prepared for that. I had provided them some links on the class blog that would give them some more background information about Poe.
    Almost immediately a boy in the back called me over. "This looks boring," he said, pointing to one of the pages I had linked him to.
    I agreed, but I hadn't sent them there to observe fabulous web design, just to get a little more info in the few minutes they had. I told him to suck it up, sometimes school is boring etc. and walked away. But I changed my mind as I took a step and went back. "OK," I said, "if that site looks boring find a better one. You have the whole internet in front of you find me something cool about Poe. Send me the link when you get it."
    A few minutes later he called me over. "You've got to see this."
    I walked to the back of the room and was immediately struck by how boring looking the page he showed me was. It had a small picture of Poe and a paragraph of dense small text. I chuckled and pointed out how "boring" that page seemed to me.
    "But you've got to read it."
    I did read it. The paragraph was about Poe. It described his gambling problems, his alcohol problems, how old his wife was when he married her and a few other salacious details of his life.
    My student waited with a smug smile on his face for me to finish. "Yes, I said I know all of that. The pages I sent you to tell most of the same information."
    "Oh," he said, a little deflated. "But, I didn't read those."
    I reminded him that he shouldn't be so quick to decide something is boring before even trying to read it. He reminded me that information you find yourself is infinitely more interesting than information your teacher gives you, even when it is the same material.

Sometimes I Wonder

2009-11-12T13:30:00.000-08:00

I teach a lot of great kids. Many of them learn to write better and to think better than before they entered my room and they come back and thank me and tell me I made a difference in their lives. I wonder though, about those I never see again.

My students are struggling against issues that make school challenging. Teen pregnancy is a reality for 5-6 kids I know a year, new mothers and fathers. Seriously violent and dangerous neighborhoods are the places my students take a bus home to. Abuse, neglect, poverty, language barriers, learning disabilities, nutrition issues, lack of health care, drugs, alcohol abuse, are all par for the course. A few years ago many students had jobs after school. Now they can't find them.

Their issues aren't unusual in America. I know these burdens come to school with many children everyday. What I wonder though, is how some students cope with all of this and still learn while others use their baggage as an excuse to sit down and rest. I see students daily who have given up on school and can't wait for me to give up on them so they can get back to resting, coasting, cruising, crashing. I wonder where the resilient get their strength and how to teach resilience to those who lost it or never had it.

I wonder what their turning point was. When did these boys (and they are most often boys) get so lost? What was lacking in their life? In their experience with school? Who pushed them in the wrong direction? How did learning become lame? When did they fall behind? How do I get them back?

I know all of those answers are as individual as each person. And I know in a general way how to reach each of them. It can only be done though, one by one. Like a doctor who moves among the wounded of a massive battle, I can't spend enough time with each casualty. But I am stunned by the realization that I must choose. Overwhelmed by the idea of deciding who to focus my attention on. Unable to fit them all in the spotlight I've left them all in the dark. Shouting directions into the shadows and wishing they could hear me better.

I wonder if my resilience is slipping? I have not lost the will to help my students, but my shoulders ache with the weight of their needs, the pressure of their test scores, and the burden of their potential futures.