Category Archives: Education

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Thanks For Your Input!

Some great responses to my question about whether or not I should have teachers in my tech-writing-field trip class sign-up for a blog or not. Thanks to all!

I’ve taught this class several times and I have always just talked about blogs, had them watch Will’s video about blogging, visited all kinds of blogs and had them leave comments on student blogs. But I think this time I will have them sign-up and make a quick post. I added to my presentation wiki because of your responses, so thanks again. BTW – next week one of my topics is Skype.

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Question About Getting Teachers To Blog

I’m teaching a 1 unit class right now about integrating field trips, technology and writing. This week one of my topics is blogging. We’ve already covered wikis (and registered for one), Flickr (and registered for an account) and more. I’ll have about 2 hours to cover blogging. For those of you that have presented on blogging, or been to a presentation about blogging, I have a question for you. Do you think I should make time to have attendees sign-up for a blog? What has been your experience – is doing that really beneficial? – is that an effective motivator to get teachers blogging? Should my attitude be that if even one person begins to blog it is worth the time? My tendency is to have them get a blog set-up, but I’ve had feedback that that is a waste of time – “If they get it they’ll sign-up on their own time.” What do you think?

OK, and if you think we should – which free blog should I have them try? I use WordPress, but I have it on a server – not a WordPress hosted site – I don’t have experience with free hosting. So which one is the best choice? Thanks for any help.

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Maybe My Class Is Doing The $100 Laptop Pilot For The US

Will Richardson and Chris Lehmann have posts today about the $100 laptop program in Nigeria. I commented on Will’s blog that it reminded me a lot of what and why I’m doing a pilot 1:1 program in my own classroom with 7 year old iBook computers. The screens are small and the screen resolution is even smaller and the CD player covers fall off occasionally, and they’re not “wicked fast” – but we are using wikis, Skype, Flickr, blogs, and much more. And actually we probably have a lot in common – 90% of my students receive free and reduced price lunch, few have access to technology at home, and the laptops we are using probably aren’t worth much more than $100.

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See any parrallels here? Hmmm … do you think they have access to Skype? What’s the time difference between Nigeria and Reno?

We have all lamented and wondered when the US will see the light and begin to implement 21st century tools in education at a much higher level than we do presently. I wonder if this program in Nigeria just might help us here. If the $100 laptop initiative begins to take off and the media covers 3rd world children using 21st century tools in meaningful ways, maybe, just maybe, people in this country will wake up and notice that it is not happening here and that will be the catalyst to jump start us on our way.

Learning is messy!

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Send Celest A “Cyber Get Well Card”

Celest has not been feeling well for weeks now. The doctors have changed her chemo and apparently it is not sitting well with her. Thusly we have not had her “join” us via Skype on a very consistent basis lately : (

We decided today to send Celest a kind of “Cyber” get well card – so most of the class managed to post a “feel better” comment to her lone blog post. They think it would be helpful if as many people as possible would also leave comments – so if you can leave her a short “get well” comment and/or a word of encouragement and tell her where you are commenting from It would be appreciated. You can read the comments her classmates left her so far also.

We have been blogging and commenting quite a bit this week also, so check out some of the other students’ posts as well if you have the time.

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Applications On The Fly!

David Warlick, Chris Lehmann and others have posted about teaching computer applications. I’m not sure if I’ve been “doing it right,” but for years I’ve taught computer applications sparingly. If I had just started out using tech with students I’d probably claim it was because with all the testing and all that entails I don’t have time to teach applications. But years ago when I wasn’t so encumbered I didn’t spend much time on applications either – or maybe I should say I spent only as much time on it as it required so that students could do the work and meet the requirements of the project or assignment we were working on. Much of it was “on the fly.” A student or their group would want to know how to do something and I would show them on the spot (or a bit later depending on time). Inevitably someone else would need to know and either I would show them, or the expert from the first group would show them. Of course very often I would note that soon they were doing things that not only had I not shown them how to do, but didn’t even know you could do – so sometimes rolls reversed and they were showing me something.

Years ago when iMovie first came out we did a project where every group in my sixth grade had to produce a video about a geology topic (What is a rock? What is igneous rock?..) After we had been working for weeks most groups had finished all their shots and were ready to edit. However, 2 groups were still finishing up so I quickly ran around and downloaded each group’s video onto a laptop and showed them how if they clicked on a clip and pressed play you could watch that clip. I didn’t have time to show them more. I went back to work helping the 2 unfinished groups get their final shots set up and of course it took much longer than planned (it was very “messy”) I soon realized that the finished groups could have watched all their clips 5 times over – and yet a class that was prone to being noisy and off track if they didn’t have very specific things to do – was literally “humming” – just low talk and deep concentration on the laptop in their group.

I kept wondering exactly what they were up to. I would ask and glance at their goings on and they were still viewing clips, but it wasn’t until later that I had time to visit each group to see what they were doing. I was amazed! Each of the 5 groups that were done had figured out how to pull their clips down to the edit strip and put them in order. “How did you even know to do that?” I asked them. Shrugged shoulders and “I don’t know, we just did,” was always the answer. Their only frustration was that they thought the videos would be dumb because the beginning and end of each clip had stuff that needed to be cut out and they didn’t know you could do that. When I showed them that … the real excitement started.

The same is happening right now with my fourth graders. We spent some time this week cut and pasting URLs from web pages about animals into an Appleworks document because I plan for us to make numerous wiki pages and that is one skill they will need to have. I also showed them the shortcuts for copy and paste (command “C” and command “V”) and they wondered why I hadn’t taught them that before. My answer? “You didn’t need to know that before, and we didn’t have time.”

Learning is messy!

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My Classroom Blog Is Open For Commenting

My fourth graders’ foray into the blogging world is now open. We are still discussing a name, so its current name is… “Name Goes Here” … which we laugh about, but we are trying (probably too hard) to come up with the perfect name. So anyone out there that would like to (please!) feel free to read some posts and comment. We are trying to blog a lot this week … we brainstormed some topics they want to blog about – some had a list of over 20 possibilities. You will note that most of my students are Second Language Learners (mostly Spanish, but also Vietnamese, Filipino and Portuguese). We will be trying to add posts all week.

Blogging can be messy!

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Hmmm … Does This Seem OK To You?

“The government contractor that set up a billion-dollar-a-year federal reading program for the Education Department and failed, according to the department’s inspector general, to keep it free of conflicts of interest is one of the companies now evaluating the program.”

Check out this article on Washington Post.com:

Program’s Creator Is Hired to Assess It
Associated Press
Sunday, April 1, 2007

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Can It Be True? Free WiFi?

I heard about this earlier today. Google is offering free wifi that is easy enough that you can install it yourself (or you can opt for professional installation for a price). What implications will this have for schools and learning? How will school districts react? What about the general public? What is your reaction? Almost to good to be true! Share any thoughts you have about how we could leverage this to make a difference in students’ lives.

Learning is messy!!!

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Youthbridges Audio Skype Interview Experience Podcast

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Ten days ago we had the opportunity to link up for an interview with the 8th grade students in Lee Baber’s class at YouthBridges in Virginia. The participants included Lee’s class, my class in Sparks, Nevada – Elderbob Brannan in Texas, and Celest (a student in my class that has leukemia and attends class via video Skype) from her house. We were scheduled to begin at 9:30am Pacific time, but everytime we all got on … the Skype call dropped. Lee finally figured out that it happened every time Celest Skyped in – so she just Skype called her – I got her Celest’s phone number and Lee called it using Skype – problem solved. This was not terribly interesting for my students – but was a great lesson for them how things don’t work and you problem solve (or at least try) and just maybe you get things to work. Elderbob has posted the interview as a podcast if you’d like to hear it.

Update: Lee Baber has posted the podcast at YouthBridges too.
Lee’s students had written questions and sent them to us days before the interview so that my students could consider answers beforehand. This should have worked well, and it did, just not in the way I expected. Most of my students are second language learners and one of the things we have REALLY been working on is understanding a question before you try to answer it – ask about what you don’t understand. My students did not do a good job of this and they realized this after the interview when we de-briefed about it. They felt the questions were hard to understand – and I asked them why they didn’t notice that beforehand … they finally realized it was because they didn’t think about the questions deeply enough when we went over them in class and it wasn’t obvious to them until afterwards when they knew they had had difficulties answering them.

This is true “Messy” learning. Now I can remind them and “beat them over the head” with what happened and they will have the schema to know what I am referring to and hopefully become better thinkers – and this is just about as important a skill as I can think of – being aware of what I know and don’t know which is such a common issue with elementary students and even more so with kids of poverty and second language learners like my students. They will also be able to notice themselves that they have improved and that awareness is key. Lee and I have already talked about another possible Skype discussion and I hope we really mange to follow through so my students (and hers) can use what they learned from this experience.

Elderbob’s audio recording will be something we can go back to as a benchmark – what was good and what wasn’t. We already have reaped the benefits of this experience. We have been working for quite awhile on stories about being our shoes for an entire day. This week we read them aloud to the class and we reminded ourselves about how much easier it is to listen and enjoy an oral presentation when it is read with feeling. They did a great job.

We’d like to thank Lee and her students at Hillyard Middle School and Elederbob Brannan for getting us together.

I am posting below the debrief notes my class recorded immediately after the interview:

What was hard?

Set-up took a long time – tech issues. Made it boring at first.

Hard to hear.

We were just sitting and listening.

Not that many questions and the questions were hard to understand.

Too long between questions – dead air

What went well?

The Youthbridges students got it to work!Lots of students got to say something.

New way to use Skype – more than one person.

Got to talk about something good we have done.

We got to learn about other people in other states.

The experience of getting to talk to people we don’t know.

Felt like people were interested in something we had to say.

What could we do to improve the experience?

Work on giving more detailed answers, more articulate – explain more. People will find that more interesting to listen to.

Be more willing to answer – just try.

Speak-up – talk louder.

Think more about the questions and ask about what we don’t understand – ask for clarification. Give more thoughtful answers. This would make it less boring – be active thinkers/learners.

Have a better way to get students to the microphone more quickly.

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From The Mouths of Babes – Our Contribution To Stop Cyberbullying Day

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Click photo to see video “Don’t Laugh At Me”

Four years ago my class of fourth graders was struggling. After almost every recess there was anger and tears about teasing and exclusion from games. We spent too much time in class dealing with these issues (at least too much time during that early era of test prep fever). We had been using the curriculum we had downloaded from Peter Yarrow’s – Don’t Laugh At Me web site, so they had seen the video that came with that. They felt they could do a better job and work on getting along with each other at the same time … so we did. We read Crow Boy and The Brand New Kid and others. We wrote every line from the song on separate pieces of chart paper and taped them up around the room. We discussed what each line and word meant, and brainstormed in small groups and then whole class how to act out each line.

Next, each group was randomly assigned a line to act out. They had to decide who in their group would act out each part, decide on props and location and repeatedly act it out for the rest of the class to be critiqued. We learned the song, because we were going to record ourselves singing it – but the students did not like how it was going. Someone suggested we just use the recording of Peter Yarrow singing it – that led to a discussion of copyright law (since they wanted it posted on the internet) and how artists don’t own the rights to their own music. They asked me what it would hurt to ask … so I emailed Peter’s representative … and to make a long story short the next day we heard back that we had permission if Peter could see it first.

We shot the video – while still doing other activities to work out our “issues” – and sent a VHS copy to New York. Several weeks later we heard back that Peter had shown it at a conference in Atlanta and it had brought him to tears (he later recounted that story with the class over a conference call). When Apple Computer wanted to use it we had to get permission from the song writers – Steve Seskin and Sony Records signed off as did Allen Shamblin and his record company (later that spring Steve Seskin visited our school and sang to the school and came to my classroom for a short discussion with my class).

I have no idea how many times our video has been viewed, but over the years I have sent copies to schools and libraries in 20 states, Korea the Phillipines and The Discovery Channel.

So did our bullying problems disappear as a result? Yes … er no … well both. They got tremendously better and when we had a bad spate of attitude, even when they were in my sixth grade class … the video would always come up and we would end up talking about why we made it and much more often than not the air would be cleared and we would have at least a a day or so of attitude adjustment.

I see some of these students from time to time (they are now eighth graders) and they always ask if the video is still online or tell me about seeing it recently.

One of my best memories however was that any time we would show the video in class … even when they were big, hormone-ized, attitudinal sixth graders – about 2 bars into the song – it would start out low and then build to a sing-a-long – the class would sing and when the video faded out it would be quiet and faint smiles to grins would illuminate most faces in the room.

When this class was in fifth grade (I rolled with them to fifth and then sixth) our local PBS station asked us to make a 60 second public service announcement about racial diversity – here is a link to “Being Different Is A Solution, Not A Problem.”

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