to at a the Hot Springs Institute for Technology conference Schools Without Walls iPad workshop. At the workshop, teachers used the app Puppet Pals to create puppet shows to tell the stories of famous legends. To show the audience the puppet shows, teachers placed the iPad 2 on the dock which has a port for a VGA adapter, as shown in the photo. The adapter is connected to the the LCD cable which projected the puppet show onto the screen for all to see and hear.
by Tara Seale
To capture a wordle as a jpeg image using a mac, hold down the shift>command>4 keys. A small cross hair will appear. Drag the cross hair over the image of the wordle, and let go of the keys. The wordle image will be saved on the desktop as a jpeg image.
To capture a wordle as a jpeg image using a PC, use the screen capture key on the keyboard. This action will automatically copy the entire screen. Using either power point or paint, paste in the image. Use the program's cropping tools to crop the image so that you only have the wordle. Then save as a jpeg image.
Next, upload the image to Flickr. Right click on the uploaded image and go to properties. Highlight the URL located under image properties>location. Use this URL when inserting the image into a blog, wiki, or website.
Mashable's How Twitter Conquered the World in 2009I tried Twitter in early 2009, and I really didn't get it. I left a few measly tweets and thought there was nothing I could possibly say in 140 characters that anyone would want to read. I picked it back up again after a few months, and I lucked out by finding and following teachers who shared links to great resources that I could use in my classroom, so I began to share my ideas and to learn how to abbreviate and convey what I wanted to say in 140 characters. I currently use Twitter to keep in touch with teachers from all over the world @tseale.
Yahoo! News: The Year of Twitter and Facebook
and Time Magazine explains "How Twitter will change the way we live"
I am the master builder.Students tried their best to follow the rubric I provided in class, but I realized I had to create better models of a Twitter persona. I became Apollo and added my tweets to the rubric as an example. I also have to recommend the book Oh My Gods! by Scholastic for example tweets. The book even provides example Facebook pages for the Greek gods. I began to post my favorite student tweets on our class blog page to inspire students to create better tweets. See a few of my favorites below:
I made the god's angry.
I labored long and hard.
Shoot...you think you have a big mouth... you apparently haven't seen what I have eaten. (Cronus Persona)I used a Google spreadsheet to create a list of each Twitter account and a word bank for each persona that students had to research. Students filled out the spreadsheet as they guessed each identity, and they shared the spreadsheet with me when it was complete. If you are interested in seeing the links to my rubric, spreadsheet, and the directions I gave the students, visit the link to the Twitter Assignment on our class blog page.
Ha Ha King Minos you can't catch me now. (Icarus Persona)
Hey Theseus you know I am a better hero than you. (Hercules Persona)
I am so selfish...How could I have let it get this bad... a war over me... It's really not that worth it. =( (Helen Persona)
I can't wait to open my gift! (Pandora Persona)
This summer, I’m teaching a hybrid class for the first time; we meet half in the classroom and half online. Traditionally, the “seat time” for this course would be about six hours a week. I’ve tried to design online lessons and activities for three hours a week, plus there’s the usual amount of homework.
It’s really made me sit and think about how “teaching and/or learning time” can be calculated. I’ve taught this course many, many times in the traditional classroom setting, and I’ve taught fully online courses, but I’ve never tried a hybrid before now. To design each week’s online module, I took a week’s lessons and considered what would work better in the traditional classroom and what would work better online. It’s a huge consideration, and one on which I’ll need to spend quite a bit of time debriefing myself.
What’s caught my initial consideration is how to measure “teaching and/or learning time.” If students sat in the traditional classroom for thirty minutes while I alternately lectured and led a discussion, calling on various students for intermittent responses, students could spend a good portion of that thirty minutes passively listening about the text. (Or perhaps surreptitiously texting… Ahem, I mean never…) If I create an online discussion thread where students have to post two questions and then answer the two questions posted by three other students (essentially answering six questions), students may spend fifteen to twenty minutes actively writing about and responding to the text. (While listening to music and talking on the phone? No. See, in a hybrid, I only imagine the online session behavior, and I imagine it is spent rapt. Some pencil chewing…Lots of text referencing…Shush. It’s my imagination, and a girl’s gotta dream…) So does that fifteen minutes of writing count as less than the thirty traditional minutes of listening? Do I try to calculate three literal hours of online work, or because the nature of the online work is more active (students have to “prove” they’re there by producing something), is the time calculation converted somehow? If hybrid students accomplish the same amount of assignments in a week I previously gathered from students during a fully traditional teaching of the course, can we call it done? Is time spent in class letting one or two students (or even ourselves) dominate a group discussion time better spent? What about the time spent waiting while late students are caught up or people without materials are assisted? It’s forcing me to look back at my traditional teaching and consider how well I spent that time…
I won’t really know my own answers to these questions until I finish the course and see these hybrid students’ research essays and final exams. Kind of a “the proof is in the pudding” philosophy, I guess…It’s funny. At first, teaching a hybrid kind of felt like getting away with something, but in truth, I’m more accountable for my time than in the traditional classroom. In the traditional classroom, I taught for six hours because I kept them six hours. Now I really have to think about what those three online hours need to look like to constitute me having taught them…It’s certainly a growing experience.
co-posted Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher
I’m a lucky girl. When I create content for online learning activities, the educational technology experts who work for my school system collaborate with me. Last week, I went to them with a dream. My students still struggle with reading their Turnitin.com reports; they don’t understand when a “match” constitutes plagiarism and when it’s incidental. To help them practice, I imagined creating an activity that branched. If students answer a question correctly, they would continue to a different question than if they answer incorrectly. This way, the activity can provide extra help to students who misunderstand a concept before layering on the next complex circumstance.
The experts greeted my dream with calm nods. “Yup. We can build that. Send us the content.” Oh! Okay! All systems go, right?
Since these magical people agreed to do the technical side, I started sifting through last semester’s Turnitin.com reports for screen shots showing the kinds of matches I want to help students distinguish. After I assembled half a dozen images, I started writing the first question. Question…feedback for correct answer…feedback for incorrect answer—Wait! Stop! I can branch out! Instead of writing feedback for an incorrect answer, I could write another question. In my better teaching moments, I greet student errors with follow up questions, trying to direct students towards the thought process that will yield greater comprehension. Now I could try and structure this computer activity to model that practice. (It’s not that I think the computer can replace me here, but as things currently stand with my students, I am not getting this Turnitin.com report lesson across to everybody. I decided to go down this road because I think students need to process this kind of critical reading independently to fully internalize it.)
Deciding to write a branching activity turns out to be very different than actually writing a branching activity, at least for my non-millennial brain. It hurt as much as my earlier attempts to be non linear. Flow charts and diagrams started to swim in my mind’s eye. How many branches would there be? Would the students answering follow up questions to incorrect responses ever get back to the trail blazed by students giving correct responses? Within half an hour, I felt hopelessly snarled in all the potential variables. My pedagogy bases itself on adaptability, so here I am knee deep in branching online activities when I love linear structure. Gosh, I miss the days of constructing linear activities exclusively. Sigh.
So I spent a few days feeling panicked every time I opened up my attempts at drafting this activity. Finally, I decided to write the activity from beginning to end as if a student answered every question correctly. What would the tree trunk of this branching exercise look like? What breadth am I trying to cover here? I needed to know the answers to those questions. Then, I looked at each question and imagined my follow up questions like traffic pattern clover leaves, looping out from the main trunk only to touch back again with a review loop of that concept planned for later in the sequence.
Will it work? Will it make any sense? Time will tell. I hope this kind of effort yields a differentiated learning tool that serves students well. Right now, I’ve turned the draft over to my tech wonders as I sit in a sweaty heap, exhausted by thinking outside my natural thought patterns. Do my students feel this way all the time? My goodness. No wonder they want to sleep through first period…
co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality TeacherOkay, okay. So I know Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” hit the world in 2001, but I just read it. I’d heard the buzz words of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants,” but I didn’t really know what they meant. I think Prensky’s considers his audience Baby Boomers; I’m thirty-five, so I’m not really an immigrant or a native. I guess I’m first generation!
I’m not devoted to Prensky’s theories, especially since by his designations, I’m teaching “legacy content,” namely reading, writing, and logical thinking, for which Digital Natives don’t have a natural taste. Lucky English teachers, eh? He suggests that those of us teaching “legacy content” need to employ “future content,” which involves technology. I didn’t find that earth shattering. However, when Prensky writes: “Today’s teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of what is important, or of good thinking skills. But it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other things,” it caught my attention. Elsewhere, Prensky writes: “Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to ‘serious’ work.” Prensky’s list rings true to me, and I’m trying to give it more thought.
Over the summer when I can get some distance from the daily mental burdens of grading and classroom management, I like to ruminate about how I teach. (I’ve always joked that my summer lesson planning always goes so well because my imaginary students love everything!) I see Prensky’s list as a challenge, and I’m going to brainstorm how I can make some “style” changes to better communicate with my sometimes restless natives:
Quite obviously, I need to give each of these elements much more thought. I don’t think Prensky has all the answers, but I did think his list gave me a lot to think about this summer.
co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality TeacherOkay, so I’m not the teacher I like to be every day. Some days I’d evaluate my own teaching as “eh.” Yesterday, my lesson ended 10 minutes early. Now, in my own defense, it’s an hour and forty minute class working on remedial grammar and writing skills in a course I’ve never taught before, but still, ten minutes is too long. To boot, I gave a quiz, and I didn’t notice a kid had his cell phone out until a colleague walked by my room. As we gave our little waves to each other, I saw her eye drawn to said student. I scurried over and took care of it, but my cheeks still burn to have been that teacher. Here’s the honest truth: Despite caring intensely and working hard, sometimes, I am that teacher.
I can’t put my finger on an exact pattern. I’m not that teacher too often because I hate the feeling of knowing my lessons have fallen short, so I step it up after a day like yesterday; however, I can’t say these days are totally rare either. Sustaining quality teaching isn’t easy, and there are days I struggle for the enthusiasm and attentiveness it takes to be more than a moderator of activities.
All this has been on my mind as I read a good piece in The New York Times about the use of clicker technology in the classroom. One of the teachers in the piece talks about the prep work involved in loading clicker technology with the questions needed for review. I use clickers in this oh-so-long-grammar-review-by-the-end-of-the-110 minutes-none-of-us-cares class. (Our school uses a technology called Turning Point.) It’s true that I have to load the questions into a PowerPoint-like format before getting to use it, which can be time consuming. Fifteen grammar questions take me about fifteen minutes to create. (I’m usually copying content off of handouts; I’m not originating the content.) However, now I have the questions made for each semester I teach the class, so that payoff is pretty big if the content stays static, like with grammar.
Why am I discussing clickers along with my own mediocrity? Because I think clicker technology unnecessarily intimidates teachers…My class yesterday? We did about twenty minutes in a clicker session, and it delivered me from total mediocrity to merely intermittent mediocrity. (Hey, some days I’ll take what I can get!) Even though I felt low energy, I could lean on the clicker technology to create momentum for my class. The deadly, “Let’s go over the homework” part of grammar practice becomes more dynamic when students click in their responses. I can see whether or not everyone has at least guessed at each question; whereas, when we check homework without clicker technology, I find it hard to engage more than the student I’m currently calling upon for the answer. Once I know everyone has responded, I push a button and a Who Wants to be a Millionaire-type bar graph shows the range of responses in the class. Students who don’t understand get to see they are not alone. We all get to see progress as more and more students get the answers right as we move through the review. That’s gold in a grammar review session; very rarely do students really feel like progress is being made.
Pretty much all this happens while I push a mouse. By investing fifteen to twenty minutes a day in preparation, I get to use this clicker lesson in every class of that prep I teach forevermore especially when it’s January, and I’m stumbling a little. In my humble opinion, teaching for twenty to thirty years is a marathon requiring patience, enthusiasm, faith, intelligence, integrity, forgiveness, and lots of energy. There will be days along the way when I’m not impressed with myself. Incorporating techniques like clicker technology can help me keep moving on days when I might otherwise stall. What other experiences do people have with clickers? What say the teaching masses?
co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher
