Friday, June 27, 2014
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Publish a short story about your school!
Title: Come to Darko!
Grade level: 3rd-4th Grade
Subject Areas: English, persuasive writing, editing.
Target Audience: The Darko Community
Objectives: Students will practice persuasive writing and communicating, for the purpose of showing their friends and families that their school is a unique and exciting place to learn. Students will plan and revise their products and then publish them and share them with an authentic audience.
Scenario: You have been hired by the school’s director to create a picture book that tells a story about going to school at Darko.
What story could you tell other people about going to school at Darko?
Guiding Questions:
- What is special about your school?
- How is it different from other schools?
- What does your day look like?
- What are you learning now?
- Who would benefit from going to Darko? What does a Darko student look like? How is she or he the same or different from students at other schools?
Prerequisites: Students know how to
- Express their opinions and back their ideas up with at least two supporting details
- Students convey a simple narrative with some description
- Use a story generating application to support the creation of their story
- Utilize the camera function of the iPad or similar device
- Utilize color and balance to create an attractive visual product
Instructional Objectives and Standards:
4th Grade Common Core:
Writing W.4.1: Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting point of view with reasons and information. W.4.2: Write informative/Explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.
W.4.3: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
W.4.6: With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others, demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of one page in a single setting.
Speaking and Listening: SL.4.1: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one on one, in groups, and teacher led) with diverse partners on grade 4 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.
SL.4.4: Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience in an organized manner, using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes, speak clearly at an understandable pace.
SL.4.5: Add audio recordings and visual displays to presentations when appropriate to enhance the development of main ideas or themes.
Language: L.4.1: Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
Time Line:
- Introducing the idea: Who would like to write their own book? Introduce the 7 components of a story, and have the group create a poster with examples. The teacher can access the Storyjumper prompts to guide the class.
- Character
- challenge
- motivation
- setting
- obstacles
- Climax
- Closing
- Then In this activity, the class is divided into partners. Each dyad brainstorms ideas for the 7 components. Explain that the story has to be set in Darko either in this school year or next school year. Share the ideas and have the class vote on which components to use.
- Character development: the students introduce a character by creating a “baseball trading card” with the character and general attributes of the character. Mix up the cards, and the teacher selects cards randomly. Students identify heros vs. villains.
- Students fill in the worksheet to build the components of their story: Link to worksheet.
- We will make sure everyone has access to the website. The teacher hands out printouts with usernames and passwords. A letter goes out to parents explaining the plan for this learning experience.
- Review of the steps to create a story. Link to instructions.
- Students take pictures and crop and import them into their stories.
- Students write their stories solo or with a partner.
- Students review their work, checking for grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The instructions online remind students to watch for passive voice, and change into active voice: instead of “The ball was hit by John.” write “John hit the ball.” Take out extra words.
- Students review each other’s work and make positive suggestions.
- Students create their book cover, make a dedication, and save. Share your book online on your Kidblog.
- Families have the option to order copies of the books in paper form.
- Summary and reflections: What worked, what didn’t? What did we learn? How might we do this differently if we were to do it again?
Materials/Equipment/Resources: Kidblog.org, Storyjumper.com, iPad and/or computer with Internet. LCD projector or screen to share the steps/model how to use the website.
Student Product: Students create an ebook about going to school at Darko.
Standards Based Rubric:
Guidelines for Using Storyjumper Online:
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Teaching in the 21st Century
How will educators revise how we teach to promote literacy in the 21st Century?
Literacy was once about reading and writing print text. Teachers could close their classroom doors and teach simple reading comprehension and basic writing skills. It was enough for the teacher and maybe a few peers to review and assess the progress of the students. The world has changed radically over the last five years. Creativity and collaboration are skills that are core to 21st century literacy. Literacy today requires teachers to open the classroom door and communicate and collaborate in: graphics, videos, audio, text, and combinations of these. We need to speak and write as well as interpret what we access. A sound understanding of design, production and appreciation is required. Here is a standards based rubric that I created for the Smart Choices Project. Critical thinking is a skill that combines many areas of literacy: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, Thinking and Reasoning. All of these literacies in combination are required for people to interact successfully in the 21st century.
All of these changes mean that we need to teach differently. Educators must stay current with technology and methods for reaching our students. We can’t rely on conveying information and requiring memorization as assessment. Any of our students can check our sources and verify accuracy. We all have to be “learners”. Teachers have to be willing to guide and coach rather than control students. Young people today are very comfortable with devices, apps, and media of all sorts. They are way ahead of most of their teachers. It is easy for them to access global audiences and up to the minute media. Teachers don’t have to know everything- we do have to be willing to let our students use their skills to access information, and problem solve.
The last two years have produced a plethora of Web 2.0 tools that we take for granted today. Up until two years ago, Google applications were not nearly as user friendly or accessible as they are today. Today, we can go anywhere in the world with an iOS or Android device and collaborate easily using Google apps. These are available for free to most users. Schools can apply for Google Apps for Education, and provide supervised oversight for students to use GAFE. Every day there is a new and improved app to make creative production and collaboration easier and more attractive. Last week I bought an i Pad app for one or two dollars for Flickr. Now I can easily upload and access Flickr photos on my i Pad. In another example, I was using Padlet for a while, but it didn’t allow me to embed a Padlet on Kidblog for students to collaborate. I looked for alternatives, and found two possibilities- Coggle (from Google) and Stormboard. Coggle is a mind map program. Anyone can add to the mind map once it is embedded into a website. Stormboard has many options. I’m still experimenting with it. It is also having technical difficulties, but their tech support is very responsive.
About a month ago, while participating in a #caedchat, the topic of Design Thinking was raised. I followed up by participating in the #dtk12chat over the last three weeks. Design Thinking brings together the elements of learning at its best in the 21st century. Design Thinking is defined as “an approach to addressing challenges in a thoughtful and fun way, where you get to apply the 4C’s - collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communication - to your own work as you develop new solutions for your classroom, school, and community.” (“What is Design Thinking for Educators” in Edutopia, retrieved March 20, 2014). Design Thinking is a process, mindset, human centered, collaborative, experimental, and optimistic. Process is the place where learning happens, including self reflection and multiple revisions. We also understand that without a product, students will not see a purpose to their learning. Learners who see purpose in their learning are highly engaged.
The Design Thinking conversation shows that 21st century learning has to be much more than techniques, products, apps, and bells and whistles. Learning today has to be meaningful and personalized. If learners are engaged in authentic, well planned, collaborative process, working toward a constructive result, they will demonstrate mastery of content and 21st century literacy.
Design Thinking Resources:
Beginner's Guide to K-12 Design Thinking
Reducing Inaccurate Stereotypes about Design Process
Teachers Design for Education
A Taxonomy of Innovation
Making Education More Like Real Life Through Design Thinking
A Designer's Reading List
#DTK12chat
Monday, March 17, 2014
More Web 2.0 Tools
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| Picture of Dvora's Tweetdeck |
Web 2.0 Tools
The Edutopia Five Minute Film Festival provides links to a dozen quick tutorials for useful free Web 2.0 tools for the classroom. They include: Storybird, VoiceThread, Pinterest, Dropbox, Animoto, and more. Although I have experience using most of the tools, the tutorials still provide useful tips for using these in the classroom. For example, the Twitter tutorial provides instructions for sending Tweets directly to cell phones. This is a free reminder system for students and parents. I’ve been using Evernote for over a year, but it might be a useful tool for sharing information with students and parents. Once into a tutorial, it’s easy to go directly into Youtube and look for additional tutorials on the same tools and find new ideas.I have a subscription to Glogster. I don’t use it with the students, though. It is only accessible on the computer, since it relies on Flash, which makes it unfriendly to iPads.
Will Richardson’s chapter on social Networks emphasizes that young people today access social networks very frequently. Not only do young people use social networks to interact with others, they also use them to explore and research and share their personal interests. They learn from these interactions effectively teaching and learning outside of school. Facebook is quickly becoming popular with the older folks. A newer social network, which younger folks are adopting, is Ning. This network is organized around common interests. Social Networks emphasize collaboration and communication over competition. Richardson makes the case that whether we like it or not, our youth is accessing Facebook and similar social networks. As educators, we need to use these tools for own use so we can understand what our students are doing. How would we utilize these tools for our students to communication and digital citizenship? We would need to respect professional boundaries while using Facebook with students. Teachers are not friends, and we need to respect the privacy of the students and not expose them to our personal lives as well. A class Facebook page could be created that would be a closed group. The class could use this to share links and comments. The advantage of this over a class blog would be that students would be on Facebook anyway, and it would be more attractive for them to use it as a familiar tool. Ning, which is another social network, is self contained. It can be private. Teachers can have administrative rights to approve posts. With all the possible tools, it's important to be selective. It seems to me, that if a class that is already using kidblog,org, there doesn't seem to be a need to add an additional tool like these.
My Experiences with Web 2.0 Tools
Nothing that I do with media and tech comes easy to me. There are so many tools that I have difficulty deciding what to use. Once I use a tool, I have to figure out how to make the different tools work with each other. If I had older students, maybe they would be able to experiment and find solutions to these conundrums. In the meantime, I’m spinning my wheels as I go.
Here are a few examples of my experiences with Web 2.0 tools: I used Kidblog.org and Explain Everything in the classroom with 7-8 year old girls. We were working on story elements and History, linking these with the Purim holiday. The students drew pictures of Esther and the Purim story. I asked them to take pictures of their pictures and either post them on their blogs or start creating a project in Explain Everything. We weren’t able to post the pictures and videos on Kidblog from the iPads. In addition, anything that was on one iPad in Explain Everything was not available to the other devices. We needed a plug-in on kidblog to access the media on the iPads. I didn’t have the expertise to determine how to do that. We also needed a way to save media on Explain Everything so we would be able to share it with each other. I was able to upload pictures from my iPad and a short video to my Google drive. It took some work to find where they went. I took my questions to my colleagues on my PLN in Twitter. Previously, when I asked questions this way, I didn’t get responses. This time, I was already in conversation with a local Jewish educator. He used Explain Everything to flip his Prophets class. He didn’t know the answer to my question, but other folks on our shared network of educators took up the conversation. We resolved the issue in part, and I was able to continue with my work.
I wanted to play with Animoto, so I took a 6 second video that I had saved in Google Drive, downloaded onto my computer, and edited it in Windows Movie Maker. Then I imported it into Animoto. I didn’t have a free teacher account because I didn’t have a school email. Rather than paying a fee, I created a sample 30 second video and was able to embed it on my class kidblog. I wondered if I was making extra work for myself, or if this was the only way to make the different tools talk to each other.
I’ve been using Evernote for over a year. It’s a perfect tool for taking notes and setting up reminders. I would recommend it to students as a time management and note taking tool. It requires an email address, however, which some students don’t have access to.
A Web 2.0 Tool for Critical Thinking and Youth Activism
Richardson introduced a Social Networking site designed to help the less fortunate called TakingIt Global.org, I decided to investigate Takingitglobal to find out more about what they did and who they were. I was particularly interested in finding out if they had any kind of bias or agenda which was in conflict with my personal values. The home page was attractive and inviting. It used a tag line of “Inspire, Inform, Involve.” The site stated that it was designed to encourage young people from 15-30 years of age to be activists. Being Jewish, I looked to see there there was any reference to Jews or Israel. There was an article about the Israeli delegation to the U.N taking part in the U.N. Human Rights organization. There was an online video link on the topic of violence in activism, questioning whether it was justified or not. I couldn’t find any link to an archived video. I found that the site was supported by the U.N., Oxfam, and Greenpeace. These organizations had a record of discrimination against Israel. Although Arabic was featured as an option, I didn’t see any Hebrew on the site. After investigating this site, I would recommend that Jewish students access it and explore it carefully. I would even recommend that they take advantage of the resources found there, and use them to communicate and connect with other young people. I would caution Jewish youth to be on guard while there, and to be on the lookout for anti-semitism.(Here is a link to a Wikipedia article on the site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TakingITGlobal.)
After reviewing tigweb.org, I sent the link to my collaborators on the Smart Choices Project curriculum. I suggested that they investigate it. It would be a resource for the program for our Jewish students to communicate with other young people globally who were activists. This would a practical experience in critical thinking and determining bias, with an authentic and current audience of peers.
Resources:
This is a tool for creating interactive videos that engage learners:
This is a blog post on two apps that can be used for reading comprehension:
Video making made easy:
Second Life: A college student reviews the pros and cons of Second Life, and decides that although it IS a social network, it takes up too much time, and she prefers her first life:
Twitter in the classroom: instructions for setting up mobile notifications for students:
References:
Richardson, Will, “Social Networks: Facebook, Ning, connections, and Communities”, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Third Edition (Kindle version), Corwin, 2010
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Podcasts, Vodcasts, and Streaming Videos in 21st Century Learning
Using podcasts and streaming videos in the classroom is a good way to provide flexible access to learning materials. For example, the teacher can create an audio or video a lecture and students can access it to prepare for an interactive class. Teachers can review their teaching effectiveness by reviewing their own audio podcasts. Podcasts can be used to interview guests on specific topics. Maya Payne Smart’s article in Edutopia explains how elementary school teachers can use Podcasting and streaming to publish and distribute student work to a Global audience on the Web. Students work in partners or small groups to create a script, and then read the script into an audio device such as a microphone and computer or iPad.
Streaming videos into classrooms is a common practice these days. Many teachers use YouTube to upload materials or to access educational videos for instruction during or after school hours. The problem is that YouTube has no way to filter inappropriate videos, so many school have it blocked. LAUSD allows teachers to bypass the firewall one hour at a time, providing that the teachers choose only appropriate materials. Alternatives to YouTube are TeacherTube.com and WatchKnowlearn.org. TeacherTube is appropriate for schools, but content is much more limited than YouTube, and when I tried to open the page, I wasn’t able to . The Watchknowlearn website has videos which are organized by topic, grade level, and Common Core Standards. I found one site called The We Do Listen Foundation that offers free animated books for children ages 3-8 to help them with life skills. It provides useful activities, including discussion topics and coloring pages. Unfortunately, this website uses Flash. Students would need to use Puffin on their iPads, or access it on device that uses Flash. It is important to check out all resources to determine how they might be used as part of a curriculum design, and also to make sure they are accessible on all devices. In addition, many of the videos on Watchknowlearn are hosted on YouTube, which may not be accessible on the school network. For higher education, iTunes U offers access to many higher level learning and university podcasts. Some of the podcasts are free, and some have a fee. Edutopia has a very useful iTunes U collection for teachers, including podcasts on Project Based Learning. Radio Willow Web offers free student made podcasts on iTunes.
Jacqueline Mangieri, in her article on using screencasting in online learning, explains that this is an effective tool to bring the classroom to the student. Online instructors can provide a welcome video, deliver instructional lectures, provide feedback to students in asynchronous time, and provide a place for students to post their own screencasts. The article includes links to free screencasting tools.
How would I use podcasts or vodcasts in my classroom? It would be important to plan and organize this in advance. It would need to be to be a part of my overall unit design. I am using Understanding By Design to plan instruction which targets Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions. We’ve been working on a unit that includes interview techniques, the holiday of Purim, and the concept of History. The Purim unit emphasizes creativity and communication, research methods, and problem solving. Here is a link to the Purim Unit.
Producing a Podcast or Video Production: We were coming close to creating storyboards for our Purim interview project. My students were planning a video or audio production. I had several formative assessment tools that I used to pace my instruction, including Google forms, observation, work samples, and so on. However, over the last week, it became clear that this project would not be realistic at this time. We needed to keep tasks simple, and reteach rules and procedures. The students wanted to create their own play, but they didn’t understand what kind of organization or work needed to be invested in this kind of project. My standards based expectations would require them to create the play with scaffolding and work collaboratively step by step to complete a finished product..
We will need to backtrack and take care of basic procedures and expectations before we will be ready to produce a play. We will be using Class Dojo. I will call a meeting with the class and discuss our change in plans. I have attached a podcast of the students sharing their opinions about Class Dojo to this blog article. I will ask the students to listen to the Podcast . This can be followed up by additional Podcasts with students reflecting on ideas for improving collaboration and citizenship.
Reflections: All the bells and whistles that technology provides can not be thrown in without careful planning and management. Educators must practice the science and art of pedagogy to support students. We must emphasize citizenship, ethics, literacy skills, meaningful learning, and formative assessment to adjust the process. There is no way to make this simple or to make this a quick fix. With implementation of these kinds of tools, we will have students who will be prepared for adult life in the 21st century.
Terms:
podcasts- audio programs on the Web which users can listen to any time, and subscribe to for future reference. They might include sound effects, music, presentation slides, and videos. Podcasts are created by
YouTube- the most popular site for publishing self made videos of all types. This might be blocked in schools because it is not easy to filter out inappropriate and biased broadcasts.
Teacher Tube- an alternative to YouTube, is monitored by educators, and accessible at most schools.
Screencasting- when users capture the activity on their computer screen. Teachers can use this for tutorials, support materials, or narrating presentations.
Live streaming- users can create online TV shows for use in the classroom.
References:
“7 Things You Should Know About Podcasting” Educause Learning Initiative, Published June 2005. For this, and additional resources, go to this link.
Jacqueline Mangieri, PhD, Using Screencasting to Engage and Build Community with Online Learners, in Online Education, Sept. 23, 2009
Maya Payne Smart, “Listening to Themselves: Podcasting Takes Lessons Beyond the Classroom”, Edutopia, accessed March 2, 2014
Resources:
#CAedchat 3/02/2014 on the topic of student created videos- topics and links
Free Open Source Podcast Platform
Instructions for creating your own podcast using Audacity
Ditch That Textbook: Broadcast with Podcasts: Summer 2013
Podcasting in Education: What are the benefits? Colin Gray
Cliff Ravenscraft’s Podcast Answer Man
Cliff’s Video Tutorials for how to podcast:
White House Student Film Festival
Interviewing the Students about Class Dojo
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