Category Archives: Education

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Marzano Strategies Via A Web Cam and Marratech

I’ve mentioned that I have had a lot going on lately that has kept me from blogging very consistently. One of the diversions has been an online class about Marzano’s research based strategies implemented with technology support.

The class is being taught by Elizabeth Hubbell from Mcrel (Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning). There are about six schools in my school district that are participating in the class. Elizabeth doesn’t fly out every two weeks from Denver to deliver her lesson, instead she comes to us via Marratech, an online meeting place. Each of the six school sites participating in the class has a web cam and we can see and talk to each other and text each other if necessary.

There has been a certain amount of unintended comic relief in the occasional dropped camera or mic left open mistake. My school site was only able to marginally participate in the first two meetings because the person onsite that installed the software was only marginally competent, so we had some connection issues. However this week I … I mean the person, used my Mac and an iSight camera and it worked flawlessly.

The class is really supposed to be about using Marzano’s strategies (and it is), but one of the intended consequences of the class is that it forces teachers and administrators to use technology in meaningful ways that they are not familiar or comfortable with (hence the unintended comic relief – see above). We’ve only met 3 times so far, but each time participants seem to gain a bit more confidence in logging-on, getting the web cam to work and use the other features of the software. To me just that is reason enough to embrace this use of technology, I’ll wait until the end of the class in March or April to decide if it is a truly effective use.

Learning is messy!

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Our 1:1 Laptop Program Is Going Slow But Steady

Two weeks ago we passed out our newly “batteried” (I know … no such word) Key Lime iBooks (about 7 years old). Since then my fourth graders have learned how to get them out of the carts, started-up, onto the web, start-up Appleworks, save, access Flickr, drag a photo from Flickr onto an Appleworks document, some font and text size adjustment, center text or image, put back in the carts and a few other skills. We also have spent some of our time troubleshooting issues like computers that didn’t have the right version of Appleworks or had no browser installed and the like – which I knew we would deal with. I’ve also learned it is close to ludicrous to all go to the same web site at the same time (we are using original Airport hubs – 26 computers all going online at the same time is a traffic jam waiting to happen), but I am going to play with that some (not that we should have to do that very often).

I’ve felt like things are going too slow – but in retrospect we are doing fine – especially considering that the vast majority of my students have never done this before – never used a trackpad (not one of my 26 students), 2 students had ever had 2 windows open at the same time or knew that was possible. Depending on what happens with getting my “27th student” a computer for her apartment so she can Skype into the classroom, we might get a bit sidetracked while we learn a bit about leukemia and Skype and how we are going to make that work. We also need to start blogging. Think we’ll get that done by Christmas?

Learning is messy!

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Hoping To Make a “Web 2.0” Difference In A Child’s Life

About a month ago I was called to the office at my school (no I wasn’t in trouble) and I was informed that I was getting a new fourth grade student – not unusual at an “At Risk” school. Several years ago I had 21 changes in my classroom in one year – 11 new students entered and 10 students moved. What was unusual was that I was told I would probably never see this student.
“Huh!?”
“Well the student has leukemia and is undergoing chemo treatments and her immune system is shot – so she is being schooled by the home studies teacher, but she has to be placed in a classroom for administrative reasons and we chose yours.”

Later that day our school counselor came by with her file and I asked her if the girl’s family happened to have an internet connection at home because maybe we could include her in at least some class activities and lessons by having her “Skype“ into our classroom. Ann asked a few questions and left.

When I returned to my classroom from morning recess duty a bit later, there was a file sitting in my chair (probably because there was no room to be found on my desk). Inside I found a grant that Ann had already filled out and submitted to pay for a DSL line for the girl’s house and a web cam.

I thought I had an iBook that would do the job for the computer at her house – and that we were on our way. Unfortunately, the iBook is only 600 Mhz (which will support the iSight camera they got her, but Video Skype requires 800Mhz) – NOTE – I can’t do iChat because AOL instant messenger is blocked by the school district and I’d rather use a Mac because my whole class is using Mac laptops running Panther (OS 10.3.9) and it will be easier to give her directions and for her to follow along if we are using the same machines and software + we have to use Appleworks 6 because it is the only word processor that we have a license for and the online word processors don’t have some of the features I’d like – and I’ve got too much going on right now to learn and teach a new piece of software. We will use an HP computer in class with a web cam because that is mandated by the school district (another reason iChat is out and Skype is in – I need software that is cross-platform).

So we have feelers out for a Mac with at least an 800Mhz processor – we’re in the process of informing local media to see if that will help scare up the hardware we need. I haven’t told my own class about any of this yet – until I’m more sure this will all come together. I have a feeling, if I get this set-up to work, that they will benefit at least as much as she will. I must say that our IT department is totally supportive of this endeavor so I am optimistic.

I’m in the throes of setting up a classroom blog with Blogmeister (thanks Dave!) and I’m hoping to include her. Since our field trip last week we have been writing poems and journal entries that will become our first blog entries once I have the time to get that up and running. Busy, “Messy,” times here which is why I haven’t been posting as much of late. I’ll keep you posted on how things go.

UPDATE: 5:30pm PST – a local TV news person here just emailed me that she thinks she has a computer for us to use. : )

UPDATE: Saturday 12/9/06 AM – Turns out instead of donating a computer someone has offered to pay for a computer – I guess they will tell me who later. I like that it is someone in our local community though. : )

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Video Skype Demo Tuesday Anyone???

Well this worked for Wes last week, but his readership is just a bit higher than mine… I’m teaching a class tech class to K – 12 teachers – Tuesday, December 5 – from 4pm Pacific Time, until 7:30. I’d really like to do a very quick video Skype demo – 3 minutes is all I need – can anyone help me out? I know this is last minute, but a person I had lined up can’t now. Let me know and I’ll send you my Skype info.

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Our “Squaw” Experience






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Just before the cable car began its journey it rocked slightly when some sort of release was pulled, and a squeal erupted from the fourth graders – but it quickly diminished and then was soon followed by “ahhs” as the car lurched and then smoothly soared from its perch.

The day before I had handed out 5 digital cameras and 2 digital video cameras to the seven groups of students in my room. As they read their SSR books I made the rounds to each group and showed them how to use the camera their group was assigned and had each group member take a trial picture (or video clip). 23 out of 26 students had never used a camera before, but they caught on quickly and were excited about using them to record our journey and get the “landform” pictures we were seeking for our projects.

Cameras emerged from backpacks as we gained altitude, and the student that had been assigned by their group to take photos of our ascent began snapping pictures (click on my Flickr badge on the right side of this page to see over 20 of the 180 total pictures the students took). As the car cleared the first tower, about 1800 vertical feet from where we started, and the car rocked and swayed, a student standing close to me sputtered, “This is so cool!”

As you cover the final third of the trip to High Camp, granite boulders that were melted into blobs cover the ground below you. The cable car attendant explained that Walt Disney had his artists spend time here sketching and designing how the rocks and boulders would appear on the “Thunder Mountain” ride at Disneyland after he experienced this scene many years before.

At the top we emerged from our car and I noted that we really only had about 30 minutes to make our observations and photos outside and eat lunch before we needed to board the cable car for our trip down the mountain if we were going to keep our bus drivers happy.

The scene outside was amazing. I’m sure many of you would think I’m nuts … and truly I wish the weather had been clear and we would have had the view of Lake Tahoe that is available here … but I loved that the weather was somewhat marginal. The wind was blowing steady at probably 12 to 15 miles per hour and the temperature was 16 degrees. The thick wire fencing around the deck had frosty ice on the side facing the wind that was difficult to break off with my gloved hand. The flags waved stiffly in the wind. I strode out onto the deck and the students followed – cautiously at first, but then flooded the deck and lined the rail. My students traded off who used the camera in their group, as they had pre-arranged, and more pictures and video were snapped. The Olympic rings that adorn the ice rink garnered much attention, as did the swimming pool and spa (see my Flickr badge for sample photos).

About 5 minutes was all that most could take, but they weren’t running into the lodge … they loved it. I stayed out a few more minutes with those that wanted to stay and soak it all in and take more pictures.

While the students ate their sack lunches they were already reminiscing about the experience. After slamming down lunch we quickly caught the next car down … a news crew from Sacramento, there to do a story about the start of ski season, had had the great fortune of making the trip up the mountain with our rabble, and now they had the great fortune of timing their visit so they also joined us for the return trip : ). They got a student to help them by taping him saying some catch-phrase (that I didn’t catch) and he did on the first take so they were all high-fiving him and he was beaming.

All during the trip students were also writing in their “Field Trip Journals” – making assigned observations and gathering impressions that we will turn into poetry and informational paragraphs and captions for some of our photos. Today my class learned how to “word process” the first poem they wrote about the cable car on their laptops, and tomorrow we will grab pictures off of Flickr to illustrate them. Maybe we will even post a few.

Whenever I take a trip like this with my students – I am always reminded why I take trips like this with my students. Some have already mentioned to me how they can imagine how difficult it was for the mountain climbers we read about earlier in the year. This is how I want to do it. Experiences, messy experiences leveraged by tech and science and social studies and art and …

Learning is messy! – and a bit chilly!

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So Much Learning To Do – But So Little Time

Tuesday we embark on our second field trip of the year. As reported in my last post, we will be traveling to Squaw Valley to ride the Cable Car so we can get pictures, video and personal observations of landforms. In addition we are in the early throes of a project that ties science and social studies together quite well.

The fourth graders recently learned our state song, “Home Means Nevada” and sang it at a school musical performance. We noted that it describes our state’s history and geography … so we plan to make a music video of “Home Means Nevada” and possibly even write a new stanza or two that include our learning and impressions of our state. The students will take pictures and video to include in our project as well as solicit them from others around our state that live in places too far for us to go (Nevada is over 300 miles wide and 400 miles long). Then we will edit it all together over a recording of the students singing the song.

We will also be taking observation notes in our field trip journals about what we see, feel, hear and do -  to use in writing other pieces (poetry, informational paragraphs, photo captions, etc.). If all goes well we might even have photos posted to my Flickr account Tuesday afternoon. I wish I could say we were going to blog about it, but that will have to come later when I can get a Blogmeister account going. Right now we are learning to use digital cameras, digital video cameras and laptops, along with learning how to make observations and write about them.

Learning is messy!

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1:1 – A Beginning

Wednesday I passed out a seven year old Key Lime Green Apple iBook computer to each of my 26 fourth graders (27 actually, but more on that at a later time). The new batteries finally came in last Thursday – and Saturday my 2 daughters helped me install them and get the computers plugged-in and placed in the carts to charge. I’m still short 3 power cords – but we think we have found a way to fix some of the old ones, so soon I hope they can all charge at once.

I demo-ed how to unplug them and carry them to their seats and turn them on –
right away 2 computers refused to start-up correctly (I finally got Panther to install on one of them today – the other just refuses to start-up from the install disk). We solved a few minor connection and date/time issues and got on the internet briefly –  and time was up (we are doing parent conferences this week so our days are short). We learned how to put them away, and that was day one.

Today we reviewed yesterday’s lesson and went to Squaw Valley ski area’s web site. We are going there on a field trip in 2 weeks to ride the cable car to the top, and I knew they had live web cams from various venues. We will be studying landforms, so we are taking digital photos and video of mountain peaks, valleys, moraines, etc. for a project we are working on. More later.

Learning is messy!

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“Are We Fixing the Wrong Things?” By Yong Zhao

Will has another post about driving change – so since I’m at it, another blast from the past (May 20, 2006 to be exact):

From “Are We Fixing the Wrong Things?” By Yong Zhao, – University Distinguished Professor of Education and Director of the U.S. – China Center for Research on Educational Excellence, Michigan State University:

“Creativity, and not standardization, may be the driving force behind an effective education system.”

Just 8 years ago 2 school principals and 2 superintendents from Singapore visited my class. They sat in the back while I introduced a math lesson on sorting, data collecting and graphing M&M’s by color (AIMS activity). As the students got to work in groups of four, the visitors in the back came to their feet and started talking and pointing. Next came the video cameras and a few quick clarifying questions. 50 Minutes later the students went home and for the next 90 minutes I was barraged by questions about the observed lesson. Next they wondered how they could get their teachers to teach that way.
I stopped them at one point and told them I was a bit confused by their interest in how things were done at my school. I reminded them that just the week before their country had, for the second year in-a-row, scored the highest in the world on the TIMMS and my school was rated as “Inadequate” per our ITBS scores. Shouldn’t I be asking them questions? They laughed and explained that their students were good at testing but not at being creative. “America invents almost everything,” they explained, all we’re good at is taking those ideas and making them cheaper. We want our students to invent and create like that.”

That’s why this section of Yong’s article smacked me in the face:

“Whereas U.S. schools are now encouraged, even forced, to chase after test scores, China, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, all named as major competitors, have started education reforms aimed at fostering more creativity and innovative thinking among their citizens. China, for example, has taken drastic measures to reform its curriculum. As the United States raised the status of standardized testing to a record high in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, the Chinese Ministry of Education issued an executive order to significantly minimize the consequences of testing (2002). As the United States pushes for more centralized curriculum standards, China is abandoning its one nation—one syllabus tradition. As the United States moves toward a required program of study for high schools, China is working hard to implement a flexible system with more electives and choices for students. As the United States calls for more homework and more study time, China has launched a battle to reduce such burdens on its students.”

And this:

Sim Wong Hoo, founder and CEO of Singapore-based Creative Technology, pointed out this very fact.

“The advantage is we come from a very conscientious culture. You tell our people what to do, they’ll follow the rules, they’ll do it. The downside is they are not as creative. We fixed that by having a U.S.-based R&D team that’s doing more advanced research.” (Levy, 2005)

I mean is this the best example (or worst, depending on how you look at it) of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence? While the decision makers here suffer horrendous test score envy, the countries we are the most envious of are trying their best to be us. Who’s winning? Certainly not our students.

There are several other articles available on Challenging The Status Quo on the ASCD web site.
I guess we were right: Learning should be messy!

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Let’s Re-Visit-“Working, Breathing, Reproducible, Intriguing Models”

I haven’t posted in awhile – been one of those convergences of report cards, parent conferences, inservices, family activities, etc. I have several posts in the works – might even get to one today or tomorrow. In the meantime I feel the urge to bring back one of my most popular posts in reply to Will Richardson’s recent post. Here it is:

Students blogging, creating content, manipulating text, graphics and video, designing and producing projects and all that technology and Web 2.0 has to offer – Wow! It’s so obvious what dynamic, mind stretching and engaging platforms technology, problem-based and project-based learning are!!! Or is it so obvious?

Who gets the most excited and visionary about this stuff? – Probably anyone that might actually be reading this post. I’ll bet few if anyone that isn’t already doing “Messy” learning is checking out this or any other blogs that teach, preach or discuss it. We hear about “The New Story,” or “The Read/Write Web in the Classroom,” but who else but the choir reads, hears or cares about any of it?

The gurus trip around the country and the world physically and virtually to spread the word, but who goes to these conferences or subscribes to these podcasts (or even knows what a podcast is?)? The masses of teachers and administrators looking to be enlightened? No! (well maybe a few, but VERY few) The early adopters that see and saw the implications straightforward are the few and the brave. So the questions have been asked and numerous and various answers have been proposed about how to change how school is done and how using these “New Tools” fit into that scheme and how do we get the message out?

Do the gurus continue to guru? (How do you guru? – don’t ask,  just try to follow along) Yes, that is certainly part of the equation. Do we continue to blog about it? Absolutely! The conversation is the point! What is missing are the models – the working, breathing, reproducible, intriguing models. We need ongoing models of all the power of what this looks like or we get nowhere.

Yeah I know there are examples out there – but my staff and my administrators and my congressman and senator and school board probably aren’t jetting out to Maine to observe Bob Sprankle’s class or any other of the teachers and students doing this kind of school.

YOU IDIOT!!! – You’re thinking or maybe yelling at your monitor – you and your staff can go to Bob Sprankle’s class or any of a list of teachers using blogs and video and web 2.0 applications via the web!!!! Yes, yes I know – cool down – I know that. I can pull up one of Bob’s productions – for example his class made a recent vodcast about how they produce their podcasts – way cool – I GET IT!

BUT – (notice I made it a big but) I GET IT! I could run around my school and district showing teachers and administrators Bob’s kids’ vodcast and I might even get a few people excited – “ but most WON’T GET IT! You can’t just show most people – you have to show them and explain it to them and then answer their questions and then show it to them again and then explain it to them again and then show them how this relates to things they already do – takes the place of this and makes it even better and does this and this and this! I’m telling you they will think the vodcast was kinda cool- would be an interesting thing for their kids to do once if they had the equipment and the time and someone to show them how to do it. But they won’t get it until they experience you doing it and getting them to do it- several times – and talk about it and have them notice their students’ reaction and learning and how they talk about it and how excited their parents get about it. Wes Fryer talks about Face 2 Face – that’s it! that’s what I’m talking about.

So where is everyone that does this? Are there whole schools that do this? Districts? Where’s the list? – we should all post it and send it around – where will people see this that is as easy and as accessible as possible? Is there DATA that goes with any of these teachers or schools or districts that do this? (yeah, I don’t need the DATA but some will require the DATA). Maybe there’s downloadable video of some of this – I know where some is – where’s a lot more? Better yet, are their teachers – “Old School” teachers that have come to this that can speak about what their experience has taught them? I think that would be a powerful “New Story.”

We need working, breathing, reproducible, intriguing models available in many places for many to see and experience to leverage the gurus and the online examples. Should we build the clearinghouse – any volunteers?
Learning is messy!

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Tech Integration On The Run

9 Promethean ActivBoards will be installed in classrooms at my school next week. This will bring us up to 11 classrooms that have them installed (out of about 26 classrooms) – the teacher next door, who like me already has one installed, is concerned because in many of these classrooms the installation of the ActivBoard will cover-up the regular whiteboard in the room – this is because there is asbestos in the brick classroom wall – so to install the boards without having to call out a hazmat team they screw it into the existing whiteboard. So why the concern? He is afraid we will be running around doing “just-in-time” training for teachers that are going to be thrust in one day from using markers to using software and hardware with minimal training.

They have had some training – but it was 2 months ago when the boards were originally supposed to be installed. We are having once-a-month training the rest of the year, but that won’t begin for a few weeks – so it should be interesting. Fortunately, the teachers involved are enthusiastic about teaching with the boards and integrating technology into their teaching and 2 of us have been using them since the beginning of school and are comfortable with tech. We have teachers in grades 1 through 6 involved and we are being researched as a focus group by the local university. I have my running shoes ready – I’ll keep you posted.