A Simple Change

I am trying something I have done before but fell away from doing for some reason.  Basically, I teach in a 1 to 1 gifted and talented middle school program and during the first quarter while at North Middle School, I had the kids face the Smart Board/overhead while they sat behind the keyboard as pictured below.

Adam is a Banana

Although I am not usually in front of my classroom, when I was lecturing or presenting, I would be in front of the class, looking at the backs of the kids computer screens, and very often, kids would be doing something other than what I wanted them to be doing. Perhaps playing crazy birds, watching Davey goes to dentist, or translating Arabic into Japanese via Google translate.  Probably more often than I would like to admit. So this quarter, I changed it to look more like the image shown below.  The computers or in a circle around our work space and facing away from the center of our area of the library.

mr. a iz da bomb

Now I have the kids backs to me and the Smart Board.   I can see that each and every one of them is on the page I want them to be on and not playing crazy birds, watching Davey goes to dentist, or translating Arabic into Japanese via Google translate. When I am providing direct instruction, I force the kids to actually turn around and look at me. That way, I can tell who is listening and who is not. Something I hate doing is repeating instructions because someone was googling what the weather is like in Bhaktapur, Nepal. With my new classroom setup, it seems I have had to repeat instructions less often. I have had my room like this in the past, but somehow I went back to the old way. I hope I remember the new way from now on. It seems to have really improved my instruction in a very simple way.

On a personal note, I took the first picture above on Halloween of this year.  The kid in the banana suit actually belongs to me.  I think he was the one who was either checking the weather in Bhaktapur or translating Arabic into Japanese.

Butterfly

Forty three years ago, there were these two beautiful people who were going through a very difficult time in their lives.  Mary and Gerald were 16 and 18 years old and made what they called was a mistake.   They were pregnant and deciding whether or not to keep their future child or give her up for adoption.  Being devout Catholics meant for them that abortion was not an option.  I have talked with them some about this and the decision to give up their child did not come easily.  I think a lot of love and unselfishness went into the decision they made and that is why I believe so much good came from their decision.  The beautiful person they gave up for adoption at that time, was to eventually become my wife, the person in the middle at the top of my blog.  Had they not made the choice they did, I have no idea what my life would be like today.  I do not think I would be a teacher, nor would I have an educational blog.  In fact, in all honesty, I do not believe I would be alive, had I not met the beautiful woman in the lion dress 22 years ago.  The two boys at the top of the screen on either side of my wife would not exist and I have no doubt that my life would be absolutely 100% different if not for the decision those two people made 43 years ago.  I also believe the Children’s Museum of Montana would not be touching as many lives as it does, in fact, it might have already folded.  I know I would never have known so many North Dakotans if it wasn’t for that decision.  I hope I can thank them someday, somehow, and in some way for the decision they made.

Mary and Gerald

I remember hearing a story a wise teacher use to tell.  It was about how a butterfly flapping its wings in the Indian Ocean could put events into action that would eventually cause a massive hurricane in the Pacific ocean.  I think Mary and Gerald’s story is an excellent example of what that wise teacher meant when he told the story of the butterfly flapping its wings.  I cannot even imagine the impacts tiny things I say or do with my students or other people in my life might have for very large numbers of people I will never ever meet.  I am going to make more of an effort to make those tiny things have a positive impact.

Letting the Kids be in Charge

I tried something new this week on Thursday.  I knew the kids had to get all the definitions to our Animal Farm vocabulary down one way or another and I have been espousing my belief in PBL principles for a couple of years now.  So here is what I did.  I pulled the first two kids who came into class aside and told them they were going to be the leaders, the bosses, for class today.  Most kids responded in a pretty positive way.  I gave them the task of creating a wikipage that had each of the 40 vocabulary words, their top two definitions, and an image that represented the vocabulary word.  I told them they had a few minutes to plan while I explained what was going on to the other 10 or so students I have each period of the day in my gifted pullout classroom.  I feel a little bad for the first two class leaders, because I had no clues to give them to make things go a little easier, and maybe I shouldn’t have given later classes clues that I did…but it can be difficult for me, and probably other teachers as well to watch their students struggle.  I told them that whichever class created the best page would receive an automatic 100% on the first Animal Farm quiz.  Here are the results.

1. Period 2 Vocabulary Page
2. Period 3 Vocabulary Page
3. Period 4 Vocabulary Page
4. Period 5 Vocabulary Page
5. Period 9 Vocabulary Page

Some of my classes finished, others did not.  I know these pages will improve over the next couple of days as well because I know my students.

I set down very simple guidelines including the leaders are in charge and you need to be working on the task the entire time you are in class.  Also, all questions were to be directed to the class bosses.  Gifted kids are interesting in that many of them really feel as though they must be given explicit instructions of exactly what and how they are supposed to do everything…God forbid they should make a mistake.  It is something I work on them with, and hopefully help them improve upon.  Because as I tell them, I believe that their are no such things as mistakes, only opportunities to learn and grow.  My classroom was a little like real life on that Thursday.  Some of the leaders struggled as others really excelled.  My hope is that the kids learned some valuable lessons about working together to achieve a goal…and I think they did.  I plan doing more activities like this in the future.  It was a real Quadrant D type activity, I think.  Do you agree?

Zunal

Zunal is a sweet application. I paid twenty bucks for three years worth. web quests are an excellent way to differentiate in the regular classroom and also to help gifted students achieve objectives more quickly than it might take in an ordinary classroom setting. I used Zunal to deliver a 7th grade webquest and an 8th grade webquest to my students over the last week and a half. The web quests were easy to tweak and update as we moved through them and Zunal has a huge bank of webquests designed by other teachers that you can use, edit, and remix to meet your own classroom’s needs.

On a personal note, I was reading someone’s blog the other day and they said they don’t blog if they don’t have something they feel is worthwhile saying. I think I have felt that way before, but I think I am going to approach blogging a little differently his school year. I started blogging because it made me reflect about what was happening in my classroom. I plan to force myself to blog even if I feel at times that I have nothing to share. Forcing myself to reflect once a week or so can only help me improve my ability as a teacher.

Scoop It and Flipping a Classroom

Via Scoop.it – Flipping my Classroom

I learned a new program last night in this morning called Scoopit.  It is a content curator application.  I used Scoopit to find and start my own content curation page.  I am still a little bit confused about what content curation is I believe it is a way to manage the huge amounts of content that are flying at us everyday.

Any how I used Scoopit to post this article to my wordress blog as I am able to share my Scoops with a variety of other types of Social media.  This article is a terrific explanation about what a flipped classroom is and how a teacher might begin flipping their own classroom in small ways.
Click here to see the article

Birthday

Battle Buddy

I had my 79th birthday yesterday.  My wife and oldest son were out of town so I thought it might be a bit of a boring birthday, but it ended up being a pretty good day.  Whenever I was near my iphone, ipad, or computer, I received emails, facebook updates, and text messages from people who I am mostly fond of, wishing me a happy birthday, and wondering how I was doing.  People who I know for a variety of different reasons who have touched my life at some time in the history of my life actually knew it was my birthday.  Even my brother, Mike, who I hadn’t talked to in a long time, sent me a message.  I ended up calling him and we had a terrific talk.  I connected to a guy I went to basic training with nineteen years ago, who was the biggest thing I remember about that time in my life.  We became close friends during that short time and somehow lost touch.  It was so cool to see his facebook and what he was up to.  It was kind of nice to know they and others were thinking about me on what was my favorite day of the year when I was younger.

Two years ago, because people were just figuring out facebook, or the birthday feature wasn’t as pushy as it is now, no one would have even known it was my birthday, which was fine with me and I could celebrate my birthday alone and in peace. I have always been a bit of an isolator, I just have never been very good at connecting to people, so I thought.  I think it is the small bit of Aspergerishness I believe I possess that made (makes) connecting to others so difficult for me.  I think social media has helped changed that for me, is helping change that for me.  Before I went to bed, I went through my list of birthday wishes, and responded to each, stopping and reminiscing about how they had touched my life or how I had touched theirs.  It made me feel good inside.

Social media to me, is more than just facebook.  It is Jokaydiagrid, WoW, Minecraft, and Second life.  It is Twitter, Gtalk, and Skype.  It is my blog, Twitter, and Plurk.  (Anal retentive person, I said twitter twice on purpose).  It is my ipad, my computers, and my iphone.  And yes, it is also Facebook.  All these things have helped me be a better connector to people.   These things all allow me to share with others who I am in special and different ways, which is something I have always struggled with.  It has also allowed others to share with me, who they are in special and different ways.  To me, social media is all about connectivism.  I know that there can be some negative aspects to social media, but I believe that  Social media has made me a better person by allowing me to overcome my fear and inability to connect to others.

On a personal note, seeing some of my old friends facebook pages, made me think about how I use to spend time floating down the Missouri river on inner tubes and small rafts.  So that is what my youngest son and I spent a part of the afternoon of my birthday doing, swimming and floating in the Mighty Missouri, right where I use to when I was his age.  We finished the day off with a delicious Howard’s Pizza.

Chainsaw

Going through my wiki-mails from the end of last year, I found this message from one of my students. I asked her to send me a message regarding the meaning of life when she said that was what she was pondering when I observed and mentioned that she was not working on the assignment the rest of the class was.

The girl sat in a desk with no meaning to it. Bland. That’s all she could think of as she looked around the room into the lifeless room. Others were laughing and enjoying their day, living as if there was no tomorrow. “When will I have that?” she thought. Slam. A hand with a little to much hair flew down in front of her. “What the bloody bells do you think you’re doing?” The girl’s subconscious thoughts were shattered by his crackling voice. “Get to work.” As she thought, she could only find that what there was to learn in the class, is the meaning of life.

She turned to her inner being. She found that only the meaning of life was inside herself. Not around her or on her but within her. She found the meaning with the smile she flaunted and the tears she cried and the hope inside. Her love for the play Romeo and Juliet, her love for her family. It was all there. Even though the cripple faced teacher was the chainsaw to her tree, she still found learning without a book, or pen.

- Alex J.

I have some talented students I think.  I hope I am not the cripple faced teacher that was the chainsaw to her tree.

2010 – 2011 School Year Final Reflection

Andrew Howe - North Dakotan Farmer/Chinese Teacher

Summer has been happening for about a week now and a post about my school year has been brewing in my mind…well, for pretty much the whole school year.  This post will focus mostly on the second half of the year in which we completed a unit on China.  I met a man last summer who was moving to Jishou, China to teach English to middle school students there and I told him it would be very cool if we could somehow connect our classrooms.  He thought it sounded cool and we shared skype and gtalk details with each other and ended up doing some pretty cool things, I think, with our students.  Much of what we did could have been done better, but it was the first time doing what we did for the both of us.

Jishou Middle School #1

The purpose of this post is to share what we did during the course of the year and possibly get some feedback from people like Dean, Jokay, Angela, Kim, Scott or other people in my PLN who might possibly glance at my blog every now and again.  The best way to do this is to simply share my students’ final projects.  Each student made 5 wiki pages which they linked together via a navigation bar at the top of each page.  One of the best example navigation bars/websites can be found below.  I believe the navigation bar at the top of each page allowed each student to have what was the equivalent of their own web site.

Erica’s navigation bar

4Erica’s Homepage

4Erica’s Blog page

4Erica’s Chinese Province Project

4Erica’s Chinese Pen Pal page

4Erica’s Chinese Language page

Each student created a homepage that had the purpose of sharing with their Pen Pals and their classmates who they were.  The home page was a kind of biography or compilation of their lives up to this point.  Students also created a blog page where they were assigned blogging tasks at various times during the quarter.  The Chinese Province Project page was a place for them to gather research and display their prezi, glogster, or powerpoint that demonstrated the important aspects of the five themes of geography for their chosen province, municipality, or autonomous region.  The next page down was the Chinese Pen Pal page.  Each student created a one-slide biography of their pen pal which they shared at the end of the quarter.

刘容- Maddie B.

They also posted the slide on their wiki page along with the letters that they wrote to one another as you can see if you take the time to look at Erica’s example or any of the students examples.  We used audacity to create the major components on the final page.  Mr. Howe was kind enough to stay up until 2:00am china time a couple of days and teach my students some common phrases that his students used and also help my students prepare questions for two meetups we had via QQ towards the end of the quarter.  Students created audio files on their Chinese Language Pages where they practiced their pronunciation of several of those phrases.  What really impressed the Chinese students was the fact that we made the effort to learn their language.  They (the Jishou students) had a belief that most Americans were too arrogant to attempt to learn something about another country’s culture.  I believe it allowed them to be more open with my students when we held our two meetups.

一中的学生 - Jishou Pen Pals

When I do a unit like this in the future, I will do a couple of things differently.  First I will definitely make the province project more problem based.  Each province in China, faces unique problems that students could use as topics to incorporate the 5 geography themes.  The research they did, did not have as much purpose as it could have had.  Secondly, I will not start exchanging letters until the quarter I begin the unit.  Students were a bit confused when they had to change Pen Pals when I switched middle schools during the year.  I will also take any suggestions of ways I could improve this unit based on anyone’s evaluation of my students’ projects.  Any feedback anyone has on this blog post (I don’t believe I finally made 100) is greatly appreciated.

A student at East Middle School created the Animoto below to share what we learned during the quarter.

jishoumeetseastmiddleschool – Peace2, posted with vodpod

Thank You Jishou – 视频 – 优酷视频 – 在线观看

We made this video to share with and thank our Jishou Pen Pals some of our talents and also to share some of the Chinese Language we were learning.

Figuring out how to use You.Ku was a bit of a challenge as I only know about 50 Chinese Characters…but as you can see I managed.  And if you wait until the end, you can hear us having a little bit of fun trying to learn a very difficult language.

First Day of Summer

Originally uploaded by teacherman79

Here we are on the first day of summer. The bus is more ready for camping now than it was before we went. It is organized and can now leave our garage to go camping in a moments notice. I slept in the bottom and Adam and his friend, Trew, slept in the top. They said they heard a bear in the middle of the night…but I think I am just starting to snore.