Category Archives: Education

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Staying Connected

One of the tough things about teaching at an “At Risk” school is the turnover. In the last 4 weeks we gained a new non-English speaking student and lost 3  (almost 4) students. I’m rolling my current class to fifth grade next year and came to realize yesterday that out of my current 25 students only 14 will be with me next year. A few have already moved out of our attendance area and had to be issued a variance in order to finish out the year here, and 6 more students will be lost to the new boundaries they’ve drawn.

One of the students we lost 2 weeks ago has made a reconnection though. I woke up Saturday morning and checked my email and there was a new blog post waiting for approval and some comments. They were from Maija:

*I Miss You All!*
Hey you guys I’m here on my computer, and I had nothing to do, so I thought, hey I should go on our class blog!!!! So I did, and I started commenting people (if that’s okay Mr. Crosby?)!!! And I decided to write a blog saying I miss the good times we’ve had together!!!! And I really missed that!!! Like Mr.Crosby said “Has any of you gone to a new school?” I have and I know how it feels now!!! I was nervous, and scared! But once you get used to it you’ll be fine!!! Thanks Mr. Crosby!!!!
I’ll talk to you guys soon!!!

I guess it is about the connections.

Connections are messy?

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We’ve Had To Stop Skyping Celest Into Class

It’s actually good news.

I was finishing getting ready for students this morning when in walked our counselor, Celest and her mom. They had news,  Celest won’t be needing to Skype into class anymore because as of today she is a showing-up and-sitting-in-a-chair-in-class-like-everyone-else member of class. The doctors surprised them last week with the news and they decided to surprise us. So we’ve gone in a matter of weeks from a possibly life threatening infection. To Here’s your seat right here. How cool is that!?

Heres the proof: Pink shirt, just to right of center.
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A picture I really didn’t think we’d take this year!

And below taken in January.
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Learning is messy!

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The Cost of 1:1

workinghard.jpgWe read all the time about how cost is one of the disincentives to technology in schools, and certainly I don’t know if my current experience is anywhere near what does or would usually be the case, but I left this as a comment on Tom Hoffman’s blog and thought it was worth posting here too:

“My 1:1 laptop pilot is going pretty well so far with old Apple iBooks – 7 years old – we use Appleworks because it “came with” and iPhoto and iMovie and web browsers and Flickr and blogs and wikis and all kinds of free math and language and science software – haven’t paid for anything but new batteries – once (AND I’m rolling this class to fifth grade and plan on using them for an eighth year). I don’t know if laptops will usually last this long – they aren’t the latest and greatest and the screen resolution isn’t fantastic – but I haven’t found anything I wanted to do yet that they won’t do (I expected that to happen by the way – “sorry guys we can’t use Fun Brain, the computers are too old” but that hasn’t happened yet. We paid over $1600 per originally so we’re down to almost $200 per year per computer, but the price has dropped close to half and current computers have more power etc.
Maybe it depends on what you want to do with them??? But so far we’ve done everything we wanted to. I do have to use a newer computer when we video Skype, but how often would you need more than one computer doing that in your classroom at the same time? Not that I would necessarily start a 1:1 laptop program in Kindergarten – but 7 years means our current 6th graders (I’m in 4th) could have received these laptops in K and still be using them today as they leave sixth grade.”

So … how far offbase is my experience?

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Award Winning Students

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Tonight was the 7th annual Lumiere All School Film Fest here in Reno. My friend Paul McFarlane, an English teacher at Hug High in Reno, started and continues to make this superb festival happen (Yes, Hug High School, named for Procter R. Hug, a local judge).

My sixth graders from last year won for best science film for their movie about fossils. And my current fourth graders won for their “Inclusion” movie – (downloaded now over 50,000 times, but only viewed on YouTube about 14 times since I posted it there last week). Congrats class!

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Vidcasts of Grace Corrigan Visit And YouthBridges Skypecast

Here are the links to video of Grace Corrigan’s (Christa McAuliffe’s mom – the teacher in space’s) visit to our classroom. Well worth the time. You will see me occasionally intrude into the presentation because I put the laptop running the Skype feed in the best possible spot if I wanted it to be in the way. In my own defense It’s where it is when Celest joins us and it just didn’t occur to me I know dumb.

Full disclosure – I edited out the 5 minute plus – “school announcements” that overwhelm Grace’s presentation. I also cut it into 2 seemingly obvious chunks. The first is Grace’s presentation to the students – although I didn’t get the camera turned on right away so I missed the beginning – the 2nd part is the question answering part. I think you will agree that Grace connects well with the students.

Thanks again to Lee Baber and her students at YouthBridges who Skyped the event for us and added their questions. All in all a great experience. Enjoy!

The sound is not real loud (but not bad either) because the camera was in the back of the room. I boosted it as much as I could but depending on your speakers, you might need headphones.

Click the photo below to see the vidcast of Grace’s presentation: 13 + minutes
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Click the photo below to see the vidcast of Grace’s question and answer period: 24 + minutes

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Why Spend The Time To Teach Research, Critical Thinking and Social Networking Skills?

I received the following email today:

“Please pass this along to anyone you know, this needs to get out in the open.

Recently Marines over in Iraq supporting this country in OIF wrote to Starbucks because they wanted to let them know how much they liked their coffee and try to score some free coffee grounds. Starbucks wrote back telling the Marines thanks for their support in their business, but that they don’t support the War and anyone in it and that they won’t send them the Coffee.

So as not to offend them we should not support in buying any Starbucks products. As a War vet and writing to you patriots I feel we should get this out in the open. I know this War might not be very popular with some folks, but that doesn’t mean we don’t support the boys on the ground fighting street to street and house to house for what they and I believe is right. If you feel the same as I do then pass this along, or you can discard it and I’ll never know. Thanks very much for your support to me, and I know you’ll all be there again here soon when I deploy once more.

Semper Fidelis,

Sgt Howard C. Wright
1st Force Recon Co
1st Plt PLT RTO”

Now to most of us this had “RED FLAG” written all over it. But the person who forwarded it to everyone on our staff just saw a seeming injustice and wanted to help spread the word. To me this is a lesson on why we cannot just avoid teaching kids the tools and spaces of the net and how to use them effectively and ethically. This also points out why we must spend more time on teaching critical thinking and analysis – how to question what we see and read and hear – I won’t link to it here, but this is a similar lesson to what many have taught using the MLK web page that is really a white supremacist site in sheeps clothing. Teaching students to be critical thinkers needs to be done anyhow, we leverage that when in doing so we teach students to use powerful tools that will enhance their learning in a myriad of ways.

The end of THIS story is happy by the way, because after getting feedback from a number of us, the sender followed up later in the day with this:

After sending the e-mail this morning, I did some investigation and found the following. Sorry if it upset any of you, as it seems to have
caused a stir. I had received the e-mail several times and simply passed it on, something I will make sure not to do in the future! Always research first…

Comments: It’s unclear whether Starbucks ever actually refused to donate coffee to U.S. Marines in Iraq who requested it, but if they did, it wasn’t because, as the above email claims, “they don’t support the
war and anyone in it.”

Marine Sgt. Howard C. Wright, who authored the email in May 2004, subsequently issued a mea culpa (currently being distributed by Starbucks in answer to queries) in which he said:

Almost 5 months ago I sent an email to you my faithful friends. I did a wrong thing that needs to be cleared up. I heard by word of mouth about how Starbucks said they didn’t support the war and all. I was having enough of that kind of talk and didn’t do my research properly like I should have. This is not true. Starbucks supports men and women in uniform. They have personally contacted me and I have been sent many copies of their company’s policy on this issue. So I apologize for this quick and wrong letter that I sent out to you.

In its own response to the email rumor, Starbucks explains that while the company has “the deepest respect and admiration for U.S. military personnel,” corporate policy prohibits direct donations to U.S. troops because the military doesn’t fall under the strict definition of a public charity. Individual employees are free to donate their weekly pounds of take-home coffee, however, and according to Starbucks’ statement many have done so.

Learning is messy!!!

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Fun And Motivation With FD’s Flickr Tools

Years ago I came up with an idea for a writing prompt that I felt was pretty “schema neutral“-  all kids would have experience enough to be able to write a story about this prompt. I call it “A Day As Your Shoes.” Several years ago Corbett Harrison, who among other things had the concept for and started the Writing Fix web site and still maintains it, put my prompt on the site. He made it an interactive prompt to mimic how I have students brainstorm their ideas. Since all students have experience with shoes (at least in this country) and going to school – they will all be able to bring schema for this story.

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This year to add to the motivation and creativity I had the students make the covers for their stories by taking pictures of their shoes and using Fd’s Flickr Tools – Magazine Cover to design their bookcover. We took pictures with a digital camera and downloaded into iPhoto on their laptops. Each student designed several covers so they could build at least some expertise with the software before putting together their final product pictured below.

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A Grace – Full Visit

Update: 4/29/07
Find a link to the podcast below (my first ever podcast btw).
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Friday, Grace Corrigan “graced” our classroom with a visit, and that might seem like just a cute play-on-words, but if you had been there you would agree. Grace is Christa McAuliffe’s Mom (Teacher in Space tragically lost on the Space Shuttle Challenger debacle). I was told to expect her about fifteen minutes after school started and she appeared about fifteen minutes before school started, so much for my, “We’ll get the students in and settled first” plan. But it didn’t matter. They came in and found their seats, some said hello – I had explained to them the day before that because we were Skyping her visit and trying to record it and video tape it, that I would be busy and they would have to monitor themselves and each other – they did a great job!
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Lee Baber and I (mainly Lee) got the Skype connection to work – we had planned on meeting over Skype the day before to check the connection and discuss what to expect etc. –  but both of us were so busy that that never happened. We did manage to connect about an hour before, after I managed to interrupt another Skype session her students were doing.

We had a bit of a tentative start, I intro-ed from my end and then one of Lee’s students did an intro for the podcast they were doing – and Grace was off – well for a few minutes anyhow. Right as Grace was engaging the students, our school’s morning announcements began. But that didn’t stop Grace, she just kept on going right through – today’s lunch menu, Thought-for-the-Day, and a scolding for leaving too much trash outside after, “outside lunch” the day before. I noticed at this point that Lee had sent me a text message on Skype, “Brian, we seem to be picking up some kind of noise; what is that? “Just morning announcements,” I texted back. “Oh,” replied Lee, who I’m sure was really impressed at this point at the professional manner in which the presentation was going. And that impression was reinforced a few minutes later when the office called me over the loudspeaker to tell me to do my attendance (even though it was done). You have to understand that we complain all the time how loud things come across our PA system, but there is no way to adjust it or turn it off.

Anyhow, undeterred Grace continued – she showed them a short film about Christa and continued on her theme of  “Reach For The Stars!” She took questions for about 25 minutes, took a photo with the class, shook hands with any student that wanted to, autographed a picture of Christa for us, and was gone. I scanned the picture and printed out a color copy for every student in my class. 18 of my students were able to ask her a question, and at least half that number of the YouthBridges students asked a question too.

I want to thank Grace Corrigan, Lee Baber and her students and Paul McFarlane a high school English teacher that started and runs the Lumiere Film Festival – and he teaches our school district’s Digital Video Class with me – he chose my class as the one for Grace to visit.
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My class began blog posts about the experience and their field trip the day before to Animal Ark. Lee emailed me that she thinks the recording went well – thanks to her and her students. All-in-all a super experience for all involved. As soon as the podcast is edited I’ll put a link to it here. Once I get a chance to edit the video, and if it is any good I’ll post it. I just wish Celest could have been a part – a few students mentioned that too.

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Podcast – Click here for podcast of Grace’s visit.

Recorded 4/27/07 Length: 31:51

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Christa McAuliffe’s Mom, Grace Corrigan Visiting My Classroom Friday!!!

Update Friday Afternoon: We did make it work and it was great! (Thanks Lee!!) Picture(s) and more in awhile.

Friday morning Grace Corrigan, Christa McAuliffe’s mom (Teacher in Space on the Challenger Space Shuttle) will be in my classroom speaking to and with my students and answering their questions. In addition, Lee Baber’s YouthBridges students will be Skyping in from Virginia, and hopefully others will as well. Lee and I have been trying to work out all the logistics without actually managing to communicate with each other, which is always very exciting. I wasn’t able to let her know if we were really on until Wednesday night and then I was gone all day Thursday on a field trip  the 3 hour time difference doesn’t help, but I’m confident we will make it work… make it work … make it work …

We are trying to videotape her visit and to record the audio for a podcast. If I can manage to post how you can be part of this I will but chances are it will be very last minute. I can tell you it will start about 9:15am PDT. You might find out how to be part of the Skype on the YouthBridges site.

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Inclusion Update 4-25-07

I’m afraid this week’s update is not good news. Celest has been sick from her Chemo for weeks and that has developed into an infection that has progressed to the point that she was airlifted to a San Francisco Bay Area Children’s Hospital that specializes in treating leukemia last week. Now we hear that she will probably be there for a month … at least. This is a potentially life threatening infection. She has had this happen before and come out OK. Please keep her in your prayers.