New Thoughts for Next Year

The year is coming to a close and we are wrapping up our final projects with the students. Now is the time to reflect and look to a couple ideas we have written down to try out next year.

Have had a successful time with the flipping and video lessons in our classroom. We have made it easier for students to learn and understand through the use of short videos to watch outside school and discussions and activities in school. We will keep working on the flip and how we will work the nightly home learning. The biggest change for us will come as we work on our investigations and activities during the day. It was such a successful change for us, that we had a tough time keeping up with new activities to fill in the time at school. A piece at a time is what kept us on track. W learned quite a lot. The students helped give suggestions and giving us feedback on the home learning videos and class work.

One idea that we have been toying with has been letting the students stand at their desks. We have students that seem to need to stand while they are working and we need to give them a place to stand and work. A couple of years ago we did some research on using exercise balls in the rooms instead of chairs. That has been successful. Most of the students enjoy using the balls as chairs. Some use them during class work, but change to a chair when it comes down to a test. Interesting. Using little things like this have really helped students be able to move a little. We are looking at raising a couple desks in the class about a foot higher. If students need to stand they can take their work to the standing desks and keep working. Giving a few different ads and ways to work will, hopefully, help students focus better.

I have been using a 40" tall table this year to hold my computer and document camera. No drawers and less table top to pile stuff on. I prefer to stand at the desk and not sit. It keeps me up and I move around the room even more than I had before. Getting rid of my desk and gong to a table has forced me to clear items into the correct places quicker and deal with items sooner.

One idea we used this year that was not as successful as we thought it would be was using email to keep in contact with the students. We used the messaging system on our wiki in the past and that was successful. The email was not as easy and successful. The students did not use it as much as we thought they would. We used Google Docs for our writing and that was a great change. The email, not good at all. W I'll head back to the wiki messaging next year. It also kept us from using the wiki like we had in the past. By not visiting our wikis we seemed to lose some of our timing. With the things that work come the things that do not. But we keep on trying.

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Just Step Away

It is the end of the year and there always seems to be more to be done than originally thought. I am not sure how this happens every year, but it does. No amount of planning will ever take care of the craziness of he last few weeks of school.

In this time of panic and need to wrap up assignments, tests, forgotten activities, and missed lessons is the student. They are also having intense feelings of getting things done, school ending, anticipation of summer, and warm weather. This is not always a good mix. Teacher panic and student anticipation of the end. It is time to step back and bring our old friend patience in. I always have to remind myself to take an extra breath with the same questions being asked at the end of the year. Taking an extra second before I ask where their assignment is. Deciding whether the conversation about what they did is worth the time or effort from me or them. Do I give up? No. They still need consistency, but this is the time of year that could be the difference between them hating me for a long time or coming back next year and wishing they were back in elementary school. More kindness and patience and less frustration from either of us.

Taking a step back will help the sanity for all of us in the class and wrap up the year with food memories and not one ugly blow-up. Step back, Glen. Choose your battles even more wisely. You will miss them. Really, you will.
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Quitter!

The hardest thing for me today was to not get in the way. My friends were working on a Model A flatbed and it was not starting. I had to just listen and do as I was told. I held the lamp and made a few short comments. I did what I could with my limited knowledge of cars, especially old cars.
While I stood there enjoying the collaboration of the group trying to fix the car, I thought it might be fun to buy an old car and rebuild it. I would look great driving an old car around town. It would be fun to go the all the car shows and get into a car club and hang out. After reading "The Dip" by Seth Godin, I feel I need to quit the idea that I should get a car and rebuild it. I am pretty good with doing something's, but cars is not one of them.
Quitting something that is not our "thing" looks a little different to me after reading "The Dip". I know we want everyone to do their best. We want all students to do their best and never give up, but I see now that there are students that do better at certain subjects and activities than others. Do we give up on the ones they are not good at? No. Should we encourage and find activities that will play to their strengths? Yes. Sound like I have a little work to do.
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Second Chances

I had a good friend get remarried a few days ago. He needed a second chance to be happy. Everyone needs a chance. As the year comes to a close we want to let other teachers know what is coming to their classrooms. I think this is a mistake. Every person needs to be able to start a new year with a clean slate. Students need the chance to be able to change. Starting with a strike against them is hard for a child to change. They live up to what they are told and act how they are expected to act. This year we need to resist the need to warn the next grade about the students moving on.

Need to Know

We had a big language program introduced to us last school year. We are now in the second year of using the program. As it was handed to us to take to our rooms, we were told we would be trained on it soon. We grabbed our boxes, papers, books, and other things and headed back to our rooms. What do we do with all this stuff? That was the whisper as we hauled our back to our rooms. The training came right before school started and we were wide eyed and wondering if we would ever get the whole program down.

About half way though the year I came to the realization that the program didn't matter. The program matters, but what really mattered was the teacher. No matter what program we have or what we are told to teach, the teacher is the person that disseminates the information and helps the student to learn. As the teacher, I need to know what I am teaching. I discussed it with my team and we started to learn the program and what it wanted us to do.

What we found was that the program had some great information in it. I had no doubt that the research was done and the information was correct and the activities we were to do had been tried out before, but I want to see it for myself. But there is no way to find it out if I do not use it. If I just teach the lessons by reading the things I need to read and look for the answers that are printed in the book, I will never really know if it is working. I want to know what it is they want me to teach. I need to know the reasons they are having me teach these lessons and do the activities. What is it that they want from my students? What do I need to look for? What do I tell the student that asks why we need to learn this stuff? Learning the overall theme and looking how it was all put together and how I can work with it helped me in my lessons.

If I just go through the motions, I will never be the teacher I wanted to be the day I graduated from college. So out goes the fluff and in goes the real learning. These big programs. Our districts buy for us do have a lot of great information in them. I am finding that our program is pretty good. I enjoy teaching most of it. The are a few parts that seem to be added in as a second thought, but we work with it. The best thing is that as a teacher, I get to choose what to improve. I get to choose to differentiate with my students. I use the program. I like the program. I know what most of the program wants from me and what it wants from the students. I am still learning. So are the students. Thank goodness.

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How Much do We Flip?

My fifth grade team flipped our vocabulary lessons about six weeks ago and they went great. The students did their lessons each night or early before class. More homework was completed and the students loved watching the videos. Discussion about the vocabulary words were better because we were able to hear if the students knew the words and could use them properly in the sentences they were producing instead of just looking at whether they found the definitions. It is fantastic. It has changed our whole thought process of homework. Instead of having students practice or review problems, we will have them watch the lessons and do all the practice at school. Investigate the work. Learn.

So we are on to spelling. We will hand out words on Monday and have our students take the words home and watch the lesson at home. They will also sort the words as they watch the lesson. W tried one lessons with a small ground students last week and they cam to school knowing more about the words than normal. I do a short lessons bout the pattern that week and how words use patterns to help us understand what they mean and how to spell them. Every week I teach these lessons and they catch on to a couple words, but after watching the video, they knew so much more and remembered more about the words. Their tests seemed to be about the same, but their knowledge bout the words was greater. Since we differentiate spelling, we have about six groups, so the lessons will take a little longer to film. We will start with a few groups and move into filming all of them as we get better.

After spelling we will be working on Math. This is the subject that will have the biggest change. We are thinking that our key lessons will be the video. With that students I'll take notes, work out problems and write down questions. When hey get back to class we will have a couple problems for them to work out as a partnership and then we will discuss the problems and answer questions in our class discussions. We will work on what would normally be homework. In the middle of the class we will switch gears and do a review of past concepts and work through a few of those problems. That is the concept we have. This will totally change what we a doing now. We have students first review past concepts and then go into the key lesson we are working on. Once done with the key lesson we work on some problems and hand out homework.

Once we started the vocabulary we started to think about how much are we going to flip each night. In elementary school we teach a minimum of five subjects a day with a few subjects alternating very few weeks. This can become a big issue with flipping. What do we flip and which nights are we going to assign for lessons? How are we going to make that many videos each week and what can we do to make them more meaningful for the kids when we do them? Can the same lessons be used next year? Wow. This can get big. The one thing I worry about is the work at home. How much are we going to require each night for each student and are they going to have the time on the computer or DVD player to be able to get all the lessons done. I would hope they would have enough, but at my house, each child wants the computer to do work on and it can become a scheduling nightmare. I have more than one computer in my house and it still becomes a problem, but most people only have one. We might have to look at sending devices home. What would that look like and how would it be managed?

My team is going to the Flipped Conference 2012 this summer and we hope to have some of these answers worked about before the end of the conference. Being with people that have been doing this for a while will help. Gathering information and ideas will also help us in our own situation.one thing I know for sure, flipping has been great for me and my students. It will be fun to see what else we can do and what they can do because of it.

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When I'm Healthy, I'm Happy

My school district have started to host health classes each month the help keep our health costs down. I have gone to a couple and I like them. I am glad we are given the opportunity to learn more about keeping ourselves fit mentally and physically. I learned about something I have always known, but I seem to need to be reminded about. Exercise. Get up and move. Stop sitting so much and move around the classroom.
I decided years ago to get rid on my desk. I am now seeing the benefits of that decision. I stopped stacking so much on my little table, but I also stopped sitting so much. After that exercise reminder, I decided to get rid of my chair. I raised my dear and now I lean a little, but I try not to sit. I also bought a wood stool so it is uncomfortable to sit on for extended periods of time.
I also learned about stress-management. Thinking about anything will creat more of that thing. If I don't want to get sick, I should think about being healthy, not how to not get sick. I think the flipped classroom will help the relaxing as we do more activities and less lecturing. I am finding that most of the lessons are being learned from our videos. The one vocabulary word or th understanding of a single concept on that lesson is being found and I am concentrating on what counts instead of the whole lesson. That is less stressful for me. and more fun for the students.
Being a healthier and happier teacher makes for healthier and happier and more intelligent students.

Oh, Flip. Here We Go

The time has come to flip the classroom. We have decided to take our classrooms to another level. During our team meeting before we went to Christmas break, we talked about having more simulations in our classrooms. We loved giving students tasks and becoming someone from history to teach about the Native Americans or the Revolution. Having time to play games with words and showing how fun math has become an afterthought in our planning and not at the forefront. After discussing the things we would like to do in our classrooms, my team decided we need to flip our classroom. We did a little looking around and found information from innovators like Karl Fisch and Jon Bergman/Aaron Sams. After some research we started setting up our plan.
Flipping a classroom is not an easy thing to do. Just thinking about it gave one of our team a headache. So let me start with what our flipped classroom looks like. We found a great infographic to explain what we are looking at doing. Our idea of what we will be doing is having students learn short lessons on video at home and we reinforce and investigate the concept with activities at school. Simulations, activities, games, and discussions. Sounds good to me. It will create a little more work, but as we do it more, it will get easier.
So we decided to start small and take it a bite at a time. We will start with our vocabulary lessons that are part of our homework each week. Instead of teaching a lesson about the weeks vocabulary words each Monday, we will have the lesson done at home with a short video. Having students write out the words, meanings, and examples on Monday takes time. Writing takes time. So changing it up by having students write at home will give us time to do a reading activity with students on Monday. The stories will use the Vocab words in the reading so we will be introducing the vocabulary words in the reading. Students will watch and work on a 5 minute video on Monday and one on Tuesday night to complete the lesson. On Wednesday we will have an activity using the vocabulary words instead of finding out if they have the information correct on the paper. The questions they anew will let us know if they understand the word or not.
Starting out with a small flip will help us find the bugs and problems we need to work out. The teachers are pretty excited about the flip. The students were pretty excited about the flip. There were a few negative comments, but mostly for students that look for the negative. We did discuss each comment that came up to make sure we thought about the different issues. We hope to be adding more subjects in the next.

A Flip with a Twist

Just read an article in the New York Times about a forced flip of classrooms in Idaho. I am not sure the Idaho legislature gets the idea behind technology and what can be done with it. The idea of having teachers lecture less and have more time to help students in the classroom is right on. For everything? I am not sure that will happen. There is too much for students to learn in the classroom and we do not want students to burn out using the computer. Flipping a classroom and having students learn a little at home instead of doing their "homework" with their parents will have the students digging deeper at school in their subjects. Parents will be less frustrated and can listen to the lessons to see what we a talking about at school. But having students do all or most of their work on computers may look great on paper, but the tech companies are not teachers. A living breathing teacher needs to help students find and get more out of a lesson. I found out a long time ago that technology is great, but it will never be able to take the place of a good ol' teacher. Computers have to be programmed to have a teaching moment, but teachers are programmed to use teaching moments when they are needed and at any time. One computer idea does not fit all classrooms. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Running on Empty

I hadn't written for about two months when I wrote my first post a week ago. Sometimes life gets in the way. We get a lot of things going in life and things we want to do get pushed out of the way. It happens to everyone. We get a new project that takes longer or more involved than we planned. In the game of life we have these emotional times in our lives when we just get overloaded. Sometimes it's a family problem or just a feeling there is too much on our plates. We just need to buckle up and proceed with caution. A few things I have learned over the years in these situations have helped me keep me moving and in control.

1. Family needs to come before everything. No matter what happens and how involved we get into our work or whatever situation we are in, we need to remember that our family keeps us grounded. Spending more time talking and doing things with the family will help keep them close. The first response is to push others away, especially those we are with all the time. Bringing them closer helps not only us, but them. When we have a problem and we stay close to them they feel that family can help them when something crazy is going on in their lives.

2. Rely on those we work with. Having a great team around us will help in times when we need to pull back a little. They will feel it and will put in the extra time because we all have those times when we need to concentrate somewhere else. Having a great team also means that we have worked our plans in the beginning so it is easy to plan each week within the overall plan we put together. 

3. Remember to take a little time with ourselves. Take a few minutes here and there to rethink what is happening and clear up any thoughts. I usually take a few minutes in my classroom after school or a few minutes at night when the kids are in bed.  A few minutes with my guitar or some soothing music will do it also.

4. Be nice to those around us. This is the hardest thing to do when we are overloaded. The problem is that no one else thinks about us being overloaded. They have those same feeling and we can't expect them to pity us as we work things out. Life goes on. Kids still need to learn, we still need to teach, and we need to be nice.

5. Last but not least is talking to someone about what is happening. Letting our spouse or team or close confidant will help us keep in perspective. We don't always need a problem solver, we just need to talk. Writing a journal of feelings and thoughts helps also. 

I read about all the things we need to do to keep us going. There are so many things pressing on us these days that we feel overloaded once in a while. The key is to not let it run our lives. Let it pass through our lives And go on to something else. This too shall pass. It really will.