Maybe Next Year We'll Do It

Here is a list of things we thought about this year, but didn't quite get to. Included is also a list new ideas we came up with.

1. Identity Day-have each student teach something about themselves. A report about one thing that makes them, them.
2. Spelling Tests on Google Docs - in fact we can do most of our tests on google docs and that will save a lot of paper. We have been told to cut back on paper this year, so we are looking at out laptop mini's to step up to do most of our work.
3. Tech minutes for younger grades - each month our fifth grade students will teach the younger grade students something they can use on the computer, this gives them time to teach and the younger students time to learn something new. This helps the student, the teacher and next years teacher. Students become more literate on computers and teachers that are uncomfortable with using computers, can get better.
4. More back channel discussions - these are great for topics and questions. I have loved using them during reading time. I love using them during a lesson when they are supposed to be listening and not talking. The more the student can input questions and answers, the better and more comfortable they become with communication.
5. Innovation Day. Having students pick a subject, learn a out it, produce something, and present it the next day. Having them do this all on one day. They can work in pairs. But they should have a product to show or discuss the next day. How many full days could we do this? Every two units in Language? Making it a part of the lesson and gear it to the units?
6. More articles to read during PLC days. This is the best way to get information from around the country. Reading articles from our own personal learning network.
7. Research. What else is out there that we can use in our classroom?
8. Pecha Kucha presentations. Integrating this format of presenting in our classrooms. Interesting format. 20 slides, 20 seconds each slide, 6 minutes to present an idea. Love it.

There is always so much to do in our classroom. New things we can try.

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Too Much Tech On My Hands

I have been looking for great technology to use with my students for many years now. I have found some great software and websites that have enhanced my teaching and student learning. Some apps has made it easier for the students and more work for me, and I have found some apps have made it easier for students and less work for me.

What I have also found is the amount of products that are out there and how I have been trapped in the notion that I need to use as many as I can for the students. I don't think this is the case. We don't have to use as many programs that we can. We just need to use the ones that will enhance the student learning. There are so many different apps out there to use and many of them do the same thing. I heard about Spicynodes a few days ago and I started playing on it. It is a fun program. After I made a project on it I found that it is the same as using Xmind. My students use Xmind when mind mapping. It is easy and not web based, yet we can post the finished products on the web. It is also similar to Mind42, which is also a beautiful mind mapping program. What we use is what is best for us.

We do need to keep our eyes open for useful programs that can be used in our classrooms, but do we need everything we can get? I don't think so.

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You Got Some Splaining To Do

Our Fifth Grade Team was asked to talk at a Title One meeting in Northern Utah. At first we looked at our schedules to see if that would be possible. Then we looked at what we were teaching to see what we would have to turn over to a substitute to teach. Some concepts are best to teach ourselves and, even though we have great subs, have the sub teach something else. We finally worked it out and we will be heading up on Friday. We will be talking about what we did to help our students do so well on the year end tests. There are so many things that we did and so many ideas we tried to get going last year that it would be hard to narrow them down

Our district Superintendent of Elementary Education visited with our school a couple of years ago and told us to "think out of the box". We were in the middle of the legislative time when our state lawmakers were deciding whether to take away days from the teachers to learn and prepare for the school year. He wanted us to do what we could to help our students with less money and less days to prepare our lessons in. So our school went to it and came up with a few things to change, morph, or get rid of. This was the start of what we did to help our students.

We looked at a few things to change in each subject in our grade level. We refined our lesson plans in Social Studies and put the lessons and activities on a wiki. Spelling became more of a focus and we added word sorts and Kagen Activities to help practice their words. Science was retooled and we took the lessons, added experiments and activities, and limited the lecturing where possible. Guests were invited to help teach the curriculum. Zion National Park Ranges aight about land forms and erosion while Discovery Gateway sent a presenter to show off experiments with matter. We wanted the students to have fun with what they were learning, but we made sure the learning was happening.

When we tested, we added two little things that made a big difference to the testing outcome. We tested in our own rooms to make the students feel comfortable and we made them explain their answers. We take all our year end test on computers. Testing in our rooms helped the students feel like they were taking another test in our rooms instead of taking the test in the computer lab where we visit once a week. We had parent volunteers sign up and get trained on the ethics of testing and on how to be in the testing environment and observe, but not help the students. Parents were not allowed to be the same rooms as their students.

Having the students explain their answers helped them focus to get the right answers. It made the students that hurry through the test slow down and have to think about why they answer the questions. We had them fold a paper into 32 squares and show their work in math or explain their answer in language and science. When the test finished, they turned in their scratch paper to the Escher to look over and then destroy. Students are allowed to u scratch paper on all tests, the paper just needs to be destroyed after the test.

These are not the end of what we will do the help our students succeed, but they are the start of our journey to helping these kids succeed.

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A Trip to Korea... Without Leaving My Classroom

Our school has had the opportunity to have a few Korean interns spend a couple weeks at our school observing, learning, and teaching. It has been a great opportunity for the school. My class had two wonderful interns teach them culture lessons about Korea. They learned how similar and how diferent our countries are. Birthdays are very different in Korea compared to the US. The games the students play there and what we play are different. The school schedules are very different, and yet they are similar.

The one thought I had from this whole opportunity is how important parents are for their children to learn. School is longer in Korea, but as I spoke with the korean interns, I found that we were similar in curriculum and style of teaching. THe biggest difference is the after school time for the Korean children. Parents have their students study and work until late at night each night to be prepared for the next day in school. There are tutors and classes they go to. We tend to have a different idea about what happens after school. Children should have a little time to play and relax with minimal homework in elementary school. And yet I wonder how our students would improve if we had tutors or classes until late each night for the students? We do pretty well in America, but the legislature is looking for higher test scores and the schools are the ones facing the blame. I see it as not one situation is to blame, but how will society change so the change can come to society?

The other thing that was interesting is the technlogy comparison. The elementary schools do not have any more computers in them than a normal school does. My school has a 1:1 in the upper grades and the schools our interns were from had only a couple computers.

So should we compare ourselves with other countries that have more of an educational focus at home? What are we willing to do at home to help our students? Do we even want to put forth the idea that we as parents need to do more and give up more personal time to help our students? What do we want with educaional change?

Uh, Oh, He's Reading Again

I have been reading a couple different books about teams, collaboration, and community in the classroom. The Art of Collaboration by Jono Bacon is a good book about online collaboration and building teams. Reach by Jeff Utecht talks about building networks and the use of wiki's, blogs, and online communities to build a network. These books have taught me quite a bit about how to put teams together so they work well together.  This will be come a major part in my classroom. I have put together teams and they worked, but I am looking for more. I will go over what I intend to do in the next couple days as I get it all put down on paper. I will be taking all the books and synthesizing them into a manageable plan to use for fifth graders.

One book I read was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. This book is about success and what helped successful people become successful. The one thing I came out learning, as a teacher, is that I need to provide opportunity for my students.  Do this already for my kids. We take vacations and go to places most of the kids in my classes have never been. We do not go to lavish places, but we do things and see things to give our kids experience in many different areas. This is what I want to do with my class. This is one reason I want a one:one computers in my classroom. Each child will use and become fluent with using and managing the computer. They will be able to research a topic and cross reference to see f it is true or not. I want to give them a chance the creative with their writing and ideas so they can make our world better. They are the future. They will be using technologies that have not been thought. Up. I want my students to be the pens that will think up these technologies and ideas for the world. I want them to make our world q better palace this is my mission. This is my teams mission. This is my schools mission. To build a better opportunity for our children.

The Learning Starts....for Me!

I have taken my summer to learn a little more about education and what is out there in education in the world. I want to get better at teaching. I want to see what else I can do to help me teach the students. What ideas are out there that I have not heard of or that can refine what I have been doing? So spent time with Ted. Ted.com is a website about ideas. Great ideas. The cutting edge ideas... about everything. Ted is a collection of presentations from Ted Conferences over the years. This has become my personal professional development.

I spent time with Sugata Mitra teaching me about how kids can teach themselves. I found that I need to stop pushing the information to the students and I need to present and let them learn or give them time to teach themselves. As we use technology in our school I have heard teachers say that we need to know how to use the computer completely before we teach the students. We can't let them go on their own because we don't k now what they are doing. We are not going to know everything so we need to let the students go (with some guidance) and have them show us what they are doing. We can have them teach the class if they find something new. We want the students to stretch themselves and yet we prevent them from stretching by holding them back from teaching themselves. I need to let go.


Another I learned from was Ken Robinson. I had heard about him on a few other blogs so I listened to his ideas about creativity. I will be looking at my class to see where I can increase creativity in my class. I learned that I need to let kids come up with ideas. I want them to feel comfortable to come up with crazy ideas. In another presentation about Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age, Randy Nelson talks about improvisation and how improve is going with any idea. Go with every idea. When an idea is stopped, it goes dead. I want kids to have the opportunity to present their ideas without having to have these ideas getting squashed. Building creativity will mean I need to hold back on toning the kids down. I will try providing a place on our wiki that the students can type in their ideas so we can all remember what it was. Using a back channel will also give the students a place to ask questions and write ideas.

Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005. It is one of the greatest speeches about how to "connect the dots" in our lives. It is not just because I am an Apple guy, but it is a great speech. Steve shares a few stories from his life that might have gone a couple ways, but he made the best of what he had and moved forward. The dots were put n the page and now he can connect them to see where he was and what helped him get to where he is.

A few other presentations I enjoyed were...
David Logan on Tribal Leadership
Tim Brown on Creativity and Play
Elif Shafak on the Politics of Fiction

Walking a Tightrope Without a Net..book!

I have been doing a lot of reading this summer about using our students netbooks better. I have found a few programs that I want to use. As I was reading Dave Warlick's blog he mentioned using Xmind as a brainstorming program. I was using Freemind but Xmind is so much easier to use. So I will be installing it on the student computers when we start school.

I was searching around on the net and ran into a blog by Brad Flickenger. He talks a lot about using netbooks in the classroom. He has some great ideas about using them in the curriculum, classroom management, and basic netbook stuff in the classroom. It gave me some ideas about having the students sign a netbook contract. We will put together a few rules and consequences for the netbooks. He also mentions that he has the students do a monthly maintenance checklist to keep them clean and orderly. I will be putting one of those together also to keep them running as well as giving the students a sense of ownership for their computer.

One thing Brad talked about was using flash drives in the classrooms. If the students have their own computers, why use a flash drive? I can see a few reasons why we should use flash drives. Taking documents home for use on their computers and going from one computer in the school to the computer lab to complete a reports or to show a presentation. I have not been sold on the Google Docs yet for Elementary School students. I want to use it, but I have parents that do not want (or do not have a computer) email addresses for their children. I want a way for the students to get a Google Docs account, but I am still trying to figure out how to get all the students an account. I was hoping that Google would let me put a class of students into a group so I can manage them. I am hoping that we will get to the point of having parents set up the account for the students. We will see this coming year.

I really like his idea about sending the students a question each morning before school for them to answer in the morning. We have the students do Morning Work (a language question, geography question, analogy question and a math question) and work as partners to complete the questions. Adding a message on our Wiki would be a great addition to the morning work. It could be a starter for Social Studies, a topic in math, language, or even a situation in class. So many ideas. I can't wait.

Wiki-What-ia?

I have been reading a book by Clay Shirky called "Here comes Everybody". He talks about how Social Media have changed our lives and how it keeps on changing. He started telling about the beginning of Wikipedia and how it evolved from Nupedia.

As he was telling the story a thought came to me about school. We could make an encyclopedia on our wiki for the students to add information on. When students complete a report they can add the information to the wiki. When the next year's students start on their report, they can gather information from the school wiki and then add information the found that was not there. They will be required to come up with at least three sources for their report. One could be the wiki, but they would need to find other information to add to the wiki, or find information that will dispute what was already there.

This could be an ever changing and building source. We could use it for all reports we do. We would add more people each year and more information each year. we would have our very own elementary Online Encyclopedia.

Reflections

So what did I do this year that I liked? Here are few of the ideas that we will keep.

PLC- I have loved the power we have working together. Our lessons have been better and more refined. The opportunity to hear other ideas helped me. I have become a better teacher because of it. I used to keep some of my ideas to myself so my class had a few extras, but that is not what teaching is about. I want others to see what I am doing and to use it if they want to. I also want everyone's ideas so I can get the best for my students. In a PLC team the students are not mine anymore but all the team students. We take credit and criticism for all that the students do or don't do. The year ending scores are a reflection of what the whole grade level does, not an individual teacher. We share students successes and failures. We share planning and lessons. We share activities and ideas. We share.

Computers- at the beginning of the tear we had a 2:1 ratio with our mini laptops. It was great to have the students working together to get work done. We have gone to 1:1 ratio and that has brought some great opportunities with testing, research, and writing. One thing I want to do more of next year is dropping assignment onto our Utips website. Utips is a state-run testing practice site that gives teachers a drop-box for students to drop assignments in instead of printing everything. This will help with our morning work.

Morning Work- We have used the 4 question bell work for years and it helps give us time to teach a language mini-lesson for grammar. We have used a single paper for each week and I would like to change that so we are checking the work over a period of time and not each week. We review all the questions each day and students are called "by the sticks" and they explain their answers. Turning them in is more of a formality rather than an assignment. I wonder if we could Morning Work into the breakfast club activity with the planner? Hmmm. We will talk about it.

Math- We will still use the math books for the work and practice. The Topic tests will be put on Utips to use less paper and for a better view of how the students do overall. When the students get a problem wrong on the test they will write the problem down in their math books and take them home to correct their work. Parents must sign the corrections and they come back to school. The math book will have notes about the topics we are working on and they can use that information to help correct their homework. One math book for notes and practice. They can use the book for the check-up to help prepare for the topic test.  The Periodic Test will always be on paper and students will have to show their work on a separate paper (Folded into the amount of boxes needed so each question has a box).

These are a few of the changes we incorporated this year. There are so many more to add for next year. There are so many good ideas out there.

That's Entertainment!

My team finished our last major project in our classes. What a project. I have made movies with my class before. I love teaching the movie making process to students. All the ideas, writing, storyboarding, planning, preparing, performing, and best of all, viewing the final product. This is a new way of doing our films. We have done individual films in our rooms and have put together some pretty big productions. With us doing PLC's and seeing how powerful it is we decided to incorporate the while fifth grade into one big film. This gave each student an opportunity to have as big a part as they wanted and to be able to do more with the filming.

We started out picking the subject of our movies. Our Social Studies Curriculum is about the United States and so we went with U.S. History. We had decided weeks ago that we would each do six movies in our rooms. that would give us 18 short films to put together into one big film and we would have a Journey Through History. And so we did. We split the topics into different perspectives of the different groups involved in the topic. When we picked the Revolution, we split it into three topics; British, Hessians, and Americans. All three groups we set during the night before the crossing of the Delaware by George Washington.

We picked the topics and assigned them to our four-person groups in our classes. We wanted to keep the movies down to about 2 minutes and everyone in the group needed to be in the movie. The could use others from the class, but the main characters needed to be from the group. Each group researched about their topic and wrote a short script of the major points to help the audience know what was happening and what people felt a that time. Once they had a story and dialogue, they tackled the storyboard. they were allowed 6-12 boards to tell their story. The hardest part of storyboarding is fitting what needs to happen in the story into something that looks similar to what they want and still being able to film it on the elementary school grounds. It is kinda hard to film a ship scene in a big storm.

After the students filmed their shorts we had them edit their own films. They used their scripts and storyboards to keep themselves on track. We gave them a short overview on how to use iMovie 08 and turned them loose. They worked pretty well with their group and put together a basic edited version of the shorts. The teachers came in next and did a final edit of each film. Thus is where we get to refine the cuts, make sure the sound is loud enough, and they followed the script. Anything that should not be in the film is cut and a final product is produced. When each of the films have been finished, they are exported and combined into one bug film in Final Cut. This is we add in sound effects and colorized the film so it has a consistent look. It was then burned and shown at our Film Festival Night. Parents are invited and popcorn is popped.

Overall the students get real writing and organizing experience as well as getting a final product that they can keep forever. Making movies is a great experience for the students. As a teacher, it makes for a great final test in writing, organization, research, and presentation.

Your Homework For Tonight Is...

I have always had mixed feeling about homework. I never liked it as a child because I felt it was always busy work and I wanted to play and do other things. I didn't do much homework when I was in high school because I was too busy. I had friends to be with, fun to have, and high school was a place I went everyday to be with friends. The education was more of a by product of my social life. As a teacher I can see the benefits of having homework but we need to rethink how it should be done and why we need it. If it is not needed then it should not be handed out just to have it done. Busy work was never something I wanted to do... Unless I had to get something done during class then I gave the students something to enjoy. Killing them with work just makes them hate to work.

When students get home from school they need to have time to do other things if they want. They need to spend time with their family and friends. They need to participate in extra-curricular activities if they so choose. They need to have time to relax and do kids work(play). They need to explore, run, build their interests, research, build their talents, or do what they need to do for their family.

Homework can take away from these activities and make it harder at home for the student and the parent. Then there is the issue of the parents not understanding what needs to be done. When the student does not know how to do the homework the parents might have the same problem. There needs to be a safety net for the parents to either be able to do the math we teaching or we need to make sure the child knows how to do it.

So what do we do? We need to do a few things.
- There has to be a reason for the homework. We can't just send home a page because it is the next one to do. If the child needs to practice then send home a couple practice problems. There is no need for a big page of drill and kill. A few problems will help the student and the parent know the work and the. Have time to do other things.
- The safety net for my team is the parent signature. If the student cannot do the work and they give it an honest try, they are supposed to ask a parent to help them. If the parent does not understand what is too be done they sign he homework and write a small note saying that they tried. The teachers will see that and know that they tried. Safety in not understanding and yet they tried to get it done he best that they could.
- Homework should not take very long to complete. There should not be a hundred problems to do each night. 6-10 problems a night for math, 30 minutes of reading is more than enough for each child. If there is language or writing. The problem and time limit should be the same. Writing for 30 minutes and no more than 6-10 problems.
- 5 minutes of work for each grade level. (2nd grade=10 minutes of homework) I have not considered reading homework. We should be reading everyday and so that does not count for me unless I have a specific book a student needs to read for a specific reason. Take home library books are homework. They are sent home for the student to read and the student has no say in which book they get. That is not fun, that is homework.

Homework should have a meaning and an understanding to the student that they need it to be successful. We all need to see a need to do something. They might never see the need but it should be explained to them and they should know that it is important even if they do not like it.

Homework is not a bad thing, it just needs to be managed wisely so we help students and parents learn what we want them to know and not learn to hate education.

The Three E's in Education

The three E's is a blog post from David Warlick on his CoLearners blog. I found it very interesting and enlightening that he would want to change the three R's to the three E's. He wants to change the three R's to Exposing information (Going beyond what is there, evaluating the information, organizing it, and decoding it), Employing information (adding value to the information that is there), Expressing ideas compellingly (producing a message that will attract and audience and communicate an idea). I am not sure that exposing is the right word to use, I would have used Evaluating instead. In elementary school we evaluate information to find out what it does for us and how we can use it in math, reading, and writing.

I see the students not relating to the basic of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic in this world of technology and innovation. They are seeing innovations monthly and using most of them within a short period after they are presented. Students need to learn to Evaluate information, Employ that information, and Express that information to others in many different ways. How are we as teachers doing this? What can we do to not just teach information, but teach how to get it, evaluate it, and use it? This will be our challenge over the next generation.