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

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.

It's the End Already?

It has come time to evaluate what I have done this year with my class and what I will change for next year. I was reading on Silvia Tolisano's Langwitches Blog and she has a great post quoting Heidi Hayes Jacobs about assessment and curriculum. So I am taking the advice and I will take something traditional and replace it with a new kind of assessment. I am pretty excited about doing this. I want to do this with more of my curriculum also. I want to incorporate some of the programs and ideas we tried out with the students to get some better results.

The other thing I want to try this year is having our team use blogs and conferences during out PLC to learn more about best practices an try to find the best of what is out there and using those ideas to help us be better teachers.

My next idea I want to work on is having the students do more online research for subjects they want to learn about. This will be the fun part. My district frowns on free browsing on the internet for Elementary school students. I need to convince them that they can do it with the proper training and guidance. I need to train the students on how to use the internet and filter through the unnecessary to get to the good information. I will be working on that this next year.

I also want to put more information on our wiki/website for students to access and use. If there is a way for us to use ebooks, that is what I want to do, but I am trying to get what I can online for student s to access at school and at home. We will get there.

Technology is wonderful, but I need to make sure it is better and not just different. It is kinda like changing out all the light bulbs in my house with fluorescent bulbs. Is it worth the price or should I keep with what I am doing because the end result does not save me money? Will it make a difference for the students and the outcome I am looking for? That is the question.

Oh Where, Oh Where, Can my Program be?

When we start looking for new programs for the students and us to use, I have run across programs that are fun and exciting, but not very useful in the classroom. They are great games for the students to practice and use outside what we are learning, but do not make my job easier or let the students use the computers for actual learning. So that has been our goal, find programs that we can use instead of paper-pencil, or can take the place of another activity instead of adding something else to our day.

I love our Readabout Program by Scholastic. It has helped the students read Non Fiction better and in turn that helps their Fiction reading become better. We have always done some sustained-silent-reading time for the students. Readabout fits right into a day or two of that program. We do not have to take other time during the day to use that program.

The Wiki has taken part of our reflection writing and 5-minute writing practice and put it together in a medium that the students can not wait to write on.  Information and homework has been more available to them and we have less problems with homework and assignments not being completed.

So our job here is to find programs that work with us, with what we are already doing, that will excite and engage students in learning. That is what it s all about. The students and them learning... and us being able to play. But mostly the learning thing.

Care to Discuss it?

One of the great things I like about using a wiki is the discussion page. Having the students complete an assignment on the discussion page is a wonderful way to get the students writing and enjoying the method of writing. When completing a topic in social studies and science, having the students do a short summary about what they learned helps the students review information in the lesson. They have to recall and put into words the information they learned. It also gives them a place to review the information before a test. The discussion also gives the students the opportunity to read other student's information to help recall other information in the lesson. Students also reply to other students' writings to ask questions, give support, and comment on something they liked. It gives the students an opportunity to learn how to use writing to communicate with others. We have moved into an age where we are communicating by text a lot: texting, Facebook, email, blogs, and messaging. Students need to learn etiquette online when writing. The discussion page in one way to learn how to communicate with others online.

If you are absent...

During the summer we worked on the wiki by changing the pandemic stuff to "If you are Absent" information. We started wrting our lesson plans so students could get on the wiki and find their classwork adn homework if they were gone. This made it easy for studnets to keep up with the basic work we were doing. We started on basic subjects like spelling, vocabulary, and math. These subjects and pages the students could download nad complete. Then we worked on the reading and writing pages for students to know what we want them to do each night. The biggest task we took on in the 09-10 years was Social Studies and Science. We put together a page for each topic and included everything we would need to run the lesson as a teacher. We include the test questions, objectives, assignments, timeline, vocabulary, and materials (books we will use, pages to download, and websites to view and learn from). These pages are used to show what we will be doing and to complete discussion assignments on.

Pandewiki

At the end of the 08-09 school year the swine flu broke out and we were in pandemic mode at school. We had to take steps for the students so if they closed the school down for any period of time, we needed to have lesson plans ready for the students to complete at home. So we thought, and thought, and thought. What about putting it on the wiki for the sudents to access at home? So we starteddiscussing what we wanted the students to do if they could not be at school. We made pages for all the major subjects in school: Reading, Spelling, Writing, Math, Science, and Social Studies. Under each of the subjects, we put information that would help the stuents find what they needed to do and pages they could download for help and to turn in. It was very basic in the beginning, but we found it to work. We added a few weeks worth of spelling, vocabulary, math pages, and had a few reading and writing activities put on. The students could all access it from home if they had the internet. If they did not, we could get a copy of the pages and work run off and ready for them at the school. This way we only had about 1/4 of the students to run information off for. It made it so easy.

Wiki Wiki Here we go

It is time I get started talking about how I use the wiki in m classroom. This is the perfect place fr me to do that, so here I go. We(the fifth grade team) started to use the Wiki during the 08-09 school year. We set up a username and password for each student. We decided to use Wikispaces because of the simple set up and eae of use. We looked at others, but felt comfortable with Wikispaces.

We discussed security and netiquitte with the students. We put together a few pages and started showing the students how to do a few things on it. We showed them how to use the messages, a little about the discussions, and a little about collaboration.

We started with an activity to have the stuents use the collaborative part of the wiki. We posted an assignment to have the students tell one thing about them that other students would not know and do not sign it. This helped the students fumble around with it, accidently deleting each other's work and trying to fix the mistakes. We made it and it worked. We talked about the messaging and how I would send a message to let students know what was happening in class. They could ask me questions about assignments and such. It worked. Half way through the year, it started to slow down becuase we did not know what else we could use it for. A few assignments here and there with the collaboration and discussion, but not much.

It was a typical first year with something new. A learning experience, that was what it was.