So my students have been making wikis for awhile and I decided to make the last 6 we needed for our Reno Bike Project, project  by having them demonstrate what they’ve learned. We brainstormed as a class what information each wiki page should have and then I gave each group of 3 to 4 students one of the pages to make without any other guidance from me.

We are under a time crunch (9 days of school left) so this was hard for me to watch as the clock was ticking, and mostly the messy side of things happened. What’s going to be fun is watching these pages evolve in the next few days. We will review them as a class, in groups, and individually … and tweak them continually.

I do think I designed the brainstorming session today poorly and that made it harder for students to do their jobs than it should have been, so we will re-visit that tomorrow and go from there. If you’d like to watch the fun ensue here is a link to the main page (that is one of the pages one group is in charge of btw) that contains all the links to the pages the students have already made and are in the process of making now.

Learning is messy!

Tags: RenoBike Project, Messy Learning

Hey, and we even had lunch in between visits!!!

We had our latest experience with the “Around the World with 80 Schools” project today, and it was a great “messy” experience. Well it wasn’t all messy. To prepare each group in my class made a journal to keep track of “trips” we’ve taken – we will keep track on maps and archive blog posts …er… journal entries and maps and photos so the students end up with a hard copy of their travels.

We printed our covers on brown construction paper and then “distressed” them by rolling them up and squeezing them and then unrolling them and flattening them out some … then I laminated them to make them last.

Each group in my class was given a task to come up with a piece to share during our video-conference that they had to research and decide how to share: One group shared about our location with maps and an Earth globe, another shared points of interest though photos of our area, climate was one groups topic, describing our class – number of students, ages, nationalities, etc. -  another shared things we are studying, and lastly “favorites” – foods, music and the like.

Beforehand we traveled right from our school to the school we were visiting in Google Earth. We get there and look around a bit, note geographic features and then travel back and forth between schools to note all the features in between. In this case we did so rather informally, but you could make a bigger deal out of it if you wanted to.

Then when time came students opened a blank page in Appleworks (yes, Appleworks … it’s what we have that works on every laptop we have) to take notes about what happens, what they learn and just anything they want to. Afterwards they finish off their notes and then go right to writing about the experience. We do stop and share about the notes we took since we know different students will happen to catch different facts … then we finish up our posts and edit them and when that is finished post them to our blogs.

We’ve done this enough now that I’ve learned these experience raise interest in the students about the places we visit so we recently started to do an offshoot of our “Important Book” activity. We get 20 to 30 minutes to find certain information from a template I put on a wiki page – they just cut and paste the template right into Appleworks and then search and read the net for the answers. Note I also have them search for a photo (or photos if they have time) of the place we visited to put on the page. We’ve talked about this being typical behavior when you become interested in a place you visit to find out more about it. It’s fairly painless for them and teaches them some basic kinds of information you typically have to gather for a report on a city or country or whatever. After the 20 to 30 minute search period I give them 10 minutes or so to fill in the info and edit. We will post these on our blogs too and probably print out for our hard copy journals.

Both Skype events went very well … lots of questions asked and answered … our 5 to 10 minute experience ended up being over 40 minutes with Allanah King’s class in New Zealand. Both classes just kept asking questions. As part of our presentation we sing the chorus of our state song “Home Means Nevada” and that prompted Allanah to have her students sing right back to us.

Our morning session with Buenos Aires, Argentina went well also. They were pretty new to this so they mainly asked us lots of questions. They had used Google Maps to travel to see us.

So we communicated, researched, wrote, archived, took photos, used Flickr, blogged … all in all a good day!

Learning is messy!

Tags: Skype, Around the world with 80 schools, Argentina, New Zealand,

 

 

You might remember just a short 2 weeks ago we Skyped Alan Levine into our studies from Iceland. On Wednesday, just as planned, he showed up again, but this time in person … and he was bearing gifts. Coins from Iceland – one per student which we distributed around the room today. He also brought a few rocks which will show up during our geology unit a bit later in the year. As has been the case lately my students began questioning Alan about what had happened since our last meet-up and they took notes on their laptops so they could blog about their experience later. But then things changed a bit. Alan wasn’t just a resource, now he had become an audience too.

So as students heard him mention seeing the Northern Lights, the Hekla Volcano, and other Icelandic locales, they would search and then pop-up to show Alan what they had found about whatever topic he had mentioned. They especially loved showing him photos. They even shared the web site from Alex our bicycle racer friend that had just been here the day before. Alan was quite intrigued by their enthusiasm, and I’m sure he thinks I’ve done just a masterful job of teaching them web searches. I’m afraid they are mostly self taught. We have worked some on refining searches when they get tough, but mostly what Alan saw was pure excitement.
A few students began searching for Alan’s name and looked for photos of him … “Is that you? – Is this you?” they would ask. Sometimes they would revel in finding photos of people that were quite obviously not him, but had his name and they check out his reaction when they would ask him if it was him. Alan played this up for them and would laugh at their “jokes.”

Besides showing Alan their finds the students were sharing with each other and some even changed their background images to photos they found of the Northern Lights or an Icelandic volcano or horse or geyser. Too much fun!

 

 

Another great experience!

 

Learning is messy!

Tags: AlanLevine, Iceland,

One of the highlights of my visit to Shanghai was tea tasting. Jeff Utecht took us to a tea shop and we not only got to taste different teas, we also learned how to prepare it. I bought several varieties and with Jeff’s expert bargaining skills and prodding they also threw-in a foil bag of loose jasmin tea. My students read some books about China while I was gone and it just seemed like a nice follow-up experience for them to do a  “Tea”.

This morning while I was taking attendance and doing lunch counts and the like, they were reading some web pages I found about the history of tea. Then when they walked in the room after lunch I had tea brewing. I didn’t have real tea cups, we just used paper, but I still taught them how to stick out their pinky finger while sipping their tea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the tasting I had them take notes while they breathed in the smells and decided what they smelled like, what it reminded them of, if it made them feel differently and what they liked or didn’t like about it. They did the same for the taste, described the color, and then sipped quietly while adding anything else they could think of to their notes.

Next I passed out tea biscuits which they learned to dip in their tea, but also eat without a dip. During this time I also had relaxing music playing quietly. To top things off we had fortune cookies and then just sat for a few more minutes and drank tea and talked. We all had a good time and they began writing about their experience before we moved on to other things.

A nice messy experience.

Learning is messy!

Tags: TeaShanghai messylearning

This short article is a great reminder that technology is NOT the “be all and end all” element missing from school – it’s an important part (tool), but there are other neglected pieces we need to re-emphasize to make our schools what they could and should be. Reuters has a story making the rounds this week about one of the most important parts:

Working with hands helps develop kids’ brains - Playing online vs. hands-on activities tied to cognitive decline, study says 

 

This is a very important part of the “Messy” learning this blog is supposed to be about. Note that for various reasons we have gotten away from the “hands-on” part of school as well as the physical activity / motor skills part … and while I’m on my soapbox I should note that this malaise is especially true with our most “at-risk” students since their schooling is more apt to be literacy centered instead of student centered.

Learning is messy!

Tags: Hands-onmessy learning

One of my favorite children’s books, and one of the best books for motivating kids to write is “The Mysteries Of Harris Burdick” by Chris Van Allsburg. We recently began a collaborative writing project designed by Lisa Parisi and me – Lisa gets the credit for doing the bulk of the set-up work. She set-up the Google Docs the participants will use, and the wiki page that explains the project. We also met a couple of times over Skype on weekends to pull it together along with numerous Twits and emails.

Students will write stories inspired by the drawings and captions from the book collaboratively. Members of each classroom are grouped in 3’s and 4’s (1 or 2 members from each class), to write about one of the illustrations. They will share ideas via Google Docs and video-conferencing on Skype to brainstorm, discuss and finally author their stories … all the time discussing where it should go next and helping each other proofread. The finished stories will be posted for all to see. Our first Skype session will be Thursday so that both classes can meet.

To prepare my students I had them write “Pass-It On” stories. They were given the beginning of a story:

Each student then took over the story and wrote for 10 minutes … after that they passed their story to the person next to them who then had to continue the story. We continued to pass them around their group, about every 5 minutes, until they got their own story back which they then had to bring to an end. We started to post some of the finished stories on our blogs, all should be posted by week’s end. This doesn’t mimic exactly how the project will work, but I wanted my students to have experience working on a piece of writing that wasn’t all their own.

Learning is messy!

Tags: collaboration, skype, video-conferencing, Google Docs