Math Project

web 2.0 and 21st century education

Check this out.  I hope to write something similar this summer and I am inspired and motivated to get cracking.

Open publication - Free publishing - More web 2.0

Let Out the Creative Beast

View more presentations from Betsy Streeter.

I found this at  http://kylepace.com/ .  I intend to share it with my 8th graders on the last day of school.  I hope that it makes them think and maybe inspire them to find their own creative ‘beast’ over the summer.  We give them so many rules and definitions for the first eight years of school and then we are shocked when they cannot think outside of the box.  I even found this to be true this year with college students.  They want to know how to get an ‘A’.  Therefore, they do just the bare minimum and do not renegotiate the terms of what needs to be done.  As an educator I am looking for the essential elements in any assignment that I give but I am also looking for the new and exciting twist that shows personality and creativity.  This might just be using color on a poster, adding a different element, or whatever to take the project to the next level.  Very rarely do I find students excited about what they turn in.  When a student is excited by their final project then I am too and it gives me hope that we have not killed off all of their creativity with our list of essential knowledge we think that they must have.  In any year there are a few, however that inspire me and they are not always the straight A’s.

Test Scores

Image from http://whatedsaid.wordpress.com

This week at our school we are taking the ‘No Child Left Behind, test for the third time.  We make all of the students do it three times even if they excel the first time.  As you can imagine middles school students begin to shut down and see no relevance in a test that does not impact their classroom grades.  My own personal child, that is a Senor this year, has taken A.P. Calculus, Chemistry, Physics,History, and English but has not managed to pass the ‘science test’.  What do I say to her?  Wow, what a failure you are!  Or do I suggest that online testing is not for everyone, or ‘hey it is not the end of the world’ and even I an exemplary educator, whose job depends on the students passing the test, see no relevance to it.  Move on with your life.  She has stated that she knows that all of the other parents will be pointing and laughing at her because she will be one of the ‘stupid’ students without a special tassel denoting that she has passed all of her NLB tests.  She says this and laughs but I wonder if she really does care and sees herself as ‘stupid’.  If so then I have done a terrible job parenting this smart, beautiful, caring, dependable, hardworking, sensitive, and funny young lady. 

I know that in my classroom I focus on the learning process.  Yes, there are certain concepts, facts, and vocabulary words that have to be presented and regurgitated by the students.  As a parent and an educator I have the overwhelming need to have my own children and my students learn to be learners.  I want them to participate in their lives and not just watch them go by.  If I can just get a few to be thinkers, leaders, and committed learners then I will have had a successful career.  So far I have been successful on the home front and I know that I have actually reached a few middle school students as well.  Therefore, as of this minute I am patting myself figuratively on the back and I hope to go to school tomorrow on another Monday and start the process all over again.

Going To Calgary

I am going to the Smart SEE convention in July.  I entered the Smart SEE contest and luckily was just informed that I will be attending the conference with 50 other educators in July.  I am extremely honored and excited because I use my smart board 8 hours of every school day and I spend a lot of time developing interactive lessons with the tool kit.  I try to share with the other teachers in my district and hopefully I will learn a lot of new things this summer.

Is anyone else going?  If so, what are your expectations?  How do you use the smart toolkit?

A fantastic organized list of tools

http://sites.google.com/site/jmstechnology/web-2-0-tools

JMS Technology has organized a fantastic list of tools for both students and teachers.

Teachers as Master Learners

http://weblogg-ed.com/2010/teachers-as-master-learners/

“What I want are master learners, not master teachers, learners who see my kids as their apprentices for learning.”

I enjoy my day with the students best on days where they are the active learners and they are mentoring each other and me.  It reaffirms why I am a teacher when I see students ask questions, make connections, and then teach another student.  When we model being life long learners then we are fostering the future.  Most days in the classroom are fun and learning takes place but on those special days when you can see the gleam in a students eye as they discover something for themselves and they are able to communicate it to someone else then I know that I am in the right profession.

Tech News April 2010

great idea for IWB screensaver

http://primarytech.globalteacher.org.au/2009/04/

What a good idea.  You should check out what she is doing.

The possibilities are endless! Here’s how to do it…

1. Make a slide in PowerPoint as normal
2. Save the file as a Device Independent Bitmap
3. Click to save every slide
4. Go to Display in the Control Panel
5. On the Screen Saver tab, click My Pictures Slideshow, and in the Wait box, set the amount of time you want to elapse before the screen saver is displayed.
6. Under Screen saver, click Settings. Under How often should pictures change?, set the slider at the interval you want between pictures
7. Under Use pictures in this folder, browse to the folder in which you saved the presentation or slide and click ok!

I wish I had one of these for the classroom.

My summer goal is to be artistic and creative and make one of these for my classroom.  Wish me luck.  Maybe I can even get my students to create me one????????

Periodic table my students need

One of my goals as an 8th grade physical science teacher is to show my students that the elements of the periodic table are not just symbols.  I spend a lot of time sharing with them the ways that the elements are used in their lives.  This is a poster that I do have in the classroom but now my students can have access to it online as well.  Hopefully, I am making science real and when we move from memorizing the symbols for the elements into discussing the common compounds in their lives they have an appreciation for the materials that they continually interact with.  I like to think that they find it interesting that gold, silver, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen are not the only interesting elements in their daily lives.  A little Na in the car airbag, As in LED’s, and Zr (almost a girl’s best friend).  Every teacher at every level would benefit from sharing this resource with their students.  Use it in English to write an essay to convince the board of a company to keep this element on its shelves, have students use the symbols to spell real words with (COW-carbon, oxygen,tungsten), how many words can they come up with.  Use your name and write it in elements (Alice- Al, I, Ce), and simple math games what is the sum of 2C and an O).  I could go on and on.  Have fun with this by jinging the elements and making trading cards at bighugelabs.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/bpes_new/bpes_new_uk/STAGING/local_assets/downloads/secondary_resources/pt_preview_080409.jpg

Reasons to Use SmartBoard and the toolkit

During the class (Tech221) I shared with you why I thought using smart board and the smart toolkit was a useful tool for classroom teachers.  I recently came across the following list put out by Vanessa Cassie, Jan. 2010 (http://blog.sharpsav.com ), where she very succinctly and much more elegantly then I can or did, outlines the usefulness of smart board as a classroom tool for every teacher. 

1. Capture on the fly note: I will print notes for SPED students or those that have been absent, or with broken arms

2. Show a video: digital streaming has become the only way that I show video content anymore, especially in short clips

3. Model a skill or an experiment: using a ruler, a microscope, organizing an essay

4. Add a bit of magic: fading in and out, using the toolkit to add sparkle

5. Conduct the lesson from one locations: quickly jump between applications with touch screen: I don’t have to run back and forth to my computer to change screens

6. Provide good visuals that can be manipulated: pictures big enough for everyone in the classroom to see

7. Organize all the elements of your lesson in one place (add attachments and url’s), embed all of the pieces: I don’t have to try to remember where I put something that I know I want to use in the lesson

8. Page record the lesson for absent individuals or replay as needed

9. Just to operate in the same medium as the students.  Interactively.  Of course, the best is when the students are manipulating the board, playing review games or demonstrating something that they know

180 tech tips.com

http://www.180techtips.com  I can’t believe that I have never run across this site before.  Many of the tips are very basic but I have found after working with teachers in my building and other regular folk that sometimes it is nice to have access to a resource that can quickly answer your most basic questions.  This site does just that and I highly recommend teachers signing up to get the daily tips. You never know when you will find one that will provide you with an answer to a questions you didn’t know you needed to ask.

Readfresh is dead

Unfortunately, one of my favorite web tools, Readfresh,is dead.

I have been using it for about 5 months and having shared it with lots of people I am sad to say that it is closed.  I don’t know what happened and I am not sure what tool I will use to access my favorite blogs.  I liked this tool because it let me easily see the pages and not just the url’s.  I could click on each page and be instantly directed to that site.  I know that there are other tools out there but readfresh was easy to use. I am extremely sad at its demise.

Student Wish List

http://sites.google.com/a/students.halldale.org/tech-tool-reviews/home

Here is a site put together by 8th grade students on what kinds of web 2.0 tools they would like to use in their dream school.  What would you add?

Originally posted by http://rsu2teachertech.wordpress.com

xtranormal- Kingdoms we need for our Planet!

Podcasting with fotobabble

http://www.fotobabble.com

fotobabble is a fun and free tool that lets you podcast a short message that is attached to a picture.  You can then embed it in your blog or on your wiki.

I think that I have found a new tool that will let me send messages to my parents.

 

 

 

Death by ‘Power Point”

From Arizona K-12 center: http://azk12.org/blog/

Most of the teachers that I know are still using power point to give lectures with and to have students produce projects.  It’s not that I still don’t use it but it is my starting point and not the end.  Recently I made a power point on cyber bullying for a presentation that I have to make to our middle school staff next week.  I made the power point, then I saved it as jpgs and put some of them into a glog.  I then made a video of them with photostory, and I made a slide.com presentations as well.  My goal was to show my fellow teachers how to take a simple power point and change it up.  Students could easily accomplish these alternatives once they have their power point, then they could get feed back from people outside of their own classroom.  Plus it just adds a lot of fun to working on a project.  At least I think so.

Plus I came across this at the Arizona k-12 site and found that it makes all the points that I wish I could have said so creatively.

Life After Death PowerPoint from EMT Media on Vimeo.

Classification Alphabet Project 2010

Classification Alphabet project 2010

The students were to make a poster that represented an animal that started with a particular letter from the alphabet. Then they were to find its classification from kingdom to species, plus add a picture, and a few other pertinent details.