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.
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.
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.
For my formal evaluation this year, I have recorded my experiences as a first year gifted education teacher here in my blog. This will be my final reflection designed to explore successes, failures, and where I will improve instruction for my students in the future. And since I believe a video can be as meaningful as a well written essay…I had one of my students create a news story about what we did this year. I have embedded it below. I also created an Animoto video to show what we did with the Grant money we were awarded last fall. I might be pushing fair use a little bit, but I just love that piano song, and Coldplay never got back to me. Thank you, Jane, Shelly, and Mary for all your support.
My second group of students did their web conference with Dean Groom on Friday. This time I invited several members of my twitter PLN and to listen in and also provide feedback for my students. They included Gerald Aungst, Kim Harrison, Scott Merrick, Bronwyn Stuckey, Crista Anderson and Susan Wanke. Although we experienced a few technical difficulties and it was a bit hectic having thirty students in my closet sized classroom, things went off very well. The fact that I was able to increase my students’ audience to the extent that I did (with the help of what has become a very powerful PLN) may have been one of the coolest things I have ever done in my classroom. I have tried to get teachers in my school district involved in Twitter and Second Life type virtual environments for this very reason. It provides me with the opportunity to shrink the world for my students and show them that there are teachers in this world willing to truly go out of their way to help others.
In the first web conference Dean and I did, I didn’t ask a bunch of teachers to come, for fear that things would not go off well. That was probably a mistake, but I am learning to take more risks with web learning tools as I see the benefits of sharing my students’ work with other teachers on a global level. My students think it is so cool that not only did one Australian get to see their presentations and read their stories on our wiki, but other teachers around the world are looking at and evaluating their work. If you would like to read their stories and comment in the discussion tab on our wiki, please click here. Each chapter is linked at that page, and written on a google doc.
For my formal evaluation this year, I am recording my experiences as a first year gifted education teacher here in my blog. This will be my third of fourth reflection designed to explore successes, failures, and where I can improve instruction for my students. I spent my third quarter teaching at North Middle School.
To deliver instruction and collect student work this quarter I utilized a tool called a wiki. I will make the wiki public for a short time, so you can check it out. Click here to access it. I now have a complete record of everything we did, and I can modify permissions anytime I want so that I can share my students’ work with others whenever I find the need. I was able to get some help developing many of the activities completed by my students. Dean Groom and Angela Cooke helped me tweak and develop the activities to fit the unique needs of my students. Many of the activities we completed in our Utopia unit this quarter were designed specifically for gifted learners by the University of William and Mary. I utilized many of the resources they provided along with those shared by Dean and Angela.
The first activity we did was called “the Perfect Classroom Project”. Students were given the task of designing what they believed to be a perfect classroom. They worked with a partner or in groups of three to create “The Perfect Classroom”. Each group had to describe in great detail what their perfect classroom would consist of including ideal teachers, rules, curricula, classmates, furniture, and classroom layout. Each project had a visual component and a wiki page. The project wiki pages can be found by clicking HERE. This activity gave students a great introduction to the concept of utopia and also provided an excellent background for the remainder of the unit.
We read the book Animal Farm by George Orwell as students answered literary analysis questions as they read. I did not have enough books for all the students, but the book was available on-line, so I did not have to have a book for each student. Many of the students preferred utilizing the on-line versions of the book. The Animal Farm resource page can be found by clicking here. Wikis are so very simple and such an easy way to share on-line resources. There is also a wikimail component which provided me with a great way to share information with my students. It also gave students a means to share information with one another. Students were even placing links they found on the wiki that they believed would be helpful to their peers.
Each day we reviewed the assigned readings, students would complete a writing activity designed to get the kids’ creative juices flowing. The activities page can be found by clicking HERE. Students did their writing on their own wikipages, so I have a record of these activities and so do the kids (CLICK ME). The kids really liked these activities and did some incredible creative work, as you can see by looking over some of their pages.
The final assessment we created was a collection of short stories which were compiled, shared and edited on the following set of wikipages. Students were assigned the task of creating a short story that somehow incorporated one of the themes from Animal Farm. They created a commercial for their story along with a Power Point slide. They presented their slides to our class and then in a Web conference with Dean Groom which we recorded at the following link. I had been telling tales of Dean all year long, and many of the students believed that Dean was not real and something I made up, as I sometimes fabricate stories to amuse my students. Many of them were in disbelief when Dean led a Critical Friends Session in my classroom from 10,000 miles away and thought it was the coolest thing ever. The adobe presenter conference may have very well been one of the coolest things I have ever done in my classroom.
We have published their collection of stories using a program called Blurb Booksmart. You can purchase the book by going to the following link. If you would like to purchase a book for one of my students, please let me know. I can provide you with a discount code and a shipping address. To view the book online, you can access it by clicking here.
We continued working in Quest Atlantis where I assigned a mission called the Plague Unit. It is a Persuasive writing unit which fit right in with what the English teachers at North talked about when we met at the beginning of the quarter to discuss what We would be covering in ECS. I provided the students with more structure and a unit guide to help them through the process of collecting information and defending their opinion. And I believe the success of this learning tool continues to increase as I continue becoming more adept at utilizing it in my classroom. The increase in structure and exposure to the program helped students gain a better understanding of how to navigate through the program and the mission more effectively. Also, the fact they were all working on the same mission increased the amount of collaboration that occurred between students. We spent a few minutes line dancing one Friday afternoon. The kids had a ball as you can see below.
Finally, the second component of the grant I won last fall dealt with delivering some type of professional development to willing teachers. I did five sessions covering five applications that I have used in my classroom and in my professional practice. Topics we covered included googledocs, wikis, social bookmarking, second life, and twitter/microblogging. More than 10 teachers reaped some benefit from the sessions, (I hope). Even if they didn’t, I learned a ton about teaching and demonstrating applications to teachers and hope to continue sharing some of the things I have been learning. My PLN has been so kind in how much they share with me. I plan to share some of what I have learned with others in the future by teaching two workshops this summer at the Montana Institute for Educational Technology (MIET). I will also be teaching a class at MSU College of Technology next Fall about virtual environments in education. I have found that I kind of enjoy teaching teachers even though only a few teachers came. I really learned a great deal about delivering professional development. Below is the PREZI I utilized for the session we did on Second Life and Education.
In conclusion, I am looking forward to going into the final quarter of my first year as a gifted and talented educator. I plan to continue utilizing web tools as a means to encourage students to collaborate with others and share their work and ideas with a larger audience. I have settled in to this position and continue becoming increasingly comfortable as I work my way through the year. I am learning and developing new skills each week that help me be a more effective teacher. I hope that both students and teachers I am dealing with are benefiting from some of the concepts and ideas I am trying to share.
For my formal evaluation this year, I am recording my experiences as a first year gifted education teacher here in my blog. This will be my second of four reflections designed to explore successes, failures, and where I can improve instruction for my students. I spent my second quarter teaching at East Middle School, the other middleschool in our district.
Quest Atlantis in the Vista Lab at East
We continued working in Quest Atlantis. Since a big part of the grant I won dealt with incorporating Quest Atlantis in my classroom, we spent a little more time working on quests at East than at North. I had all students working on the same mission at East, and I also provided them with a mission guide to help them record where they were at with their missions. The increase in structure and exposure to the program helped students gain a better understanding of how to navigate through the program and the mission more effectively. Also, the fact they were all working on the same mission increased the amount of collaboration that occurred between students. When I do missions in the future, my plan will be to assign the same mission to each class during each quarter I have those students and also provide some type of guide to help direct them through different aspects of their mission.
I posted two of the East news stories above and below and if you would like to see the rest of them you can click here. I re-examined the rubric I used to evaluate the students’ news stories and re-designed it to reflect what I was looking for in a final product. You can access the new, improved rubric by clicking here. Students truly appreciate having a rubric to help guide them when they design a project. Although there was a rubric during the first quarter, the new improved one was far more descriptive and gave the students a better idea of the characteristics of an effective news story. Also, I had students from a friend’s classroom in Australia commenting on and evaluating the work of my students. Students were genuinely excited when I shared with them that there were Aussie students watching and evaluating their videos and appreciated the feedback that was given to them via the web.
ECS Shout Outs, a microblogging application I have been using with my students, continues to be an experiment for my students and me. Some students “get it” and utilize it far more often than others. I was hoping it would be more collaborative than it has been, but by nature, it is probably too informal to be as collaborative as I would like. Still, I was able to get students sharing with students and teachers on a more global basis, a goal I believe twenty-first century classrooms should have. I pasted a few of my favorite shouts below.
ECS Shout Outs
Finally, a new tool I have been utilizing to collect both assignments, information and feedback from students is Google docs. An example of one of the forms I used can be accessed by clicking here. The information I collected from that form is gathered in a spreadsheet for easy evaluation and access by me or anyone else I want to share it with. The spreadsheet for the above form can be accessed by clicking here. I think google docs are a fantastic way for students to complete assignments, evaluations, and reflections and easily share them with the teacher or others designated by the teacher.
Google Form
In conclusion, I am looking forward to going into the second half of the year. I plan to continue utilizing web tools as a means to encourage students to collaborate with others and share their work and ideas with a larger audience. I continue to hope that my students are learning as much as I am in this adventure I am experiencing of becoming a gifted ed teacher.
I am being evaluated by a new person this year as it is my time in the good old evaluation rotation. The principal (Jane G.) at one of the middle schools where I am a gifted and talented teacher is doing my evaluation, and my goal is to record some reflections upon what went well and what didn’t go so well during the school year . I thought that doing that here in my blog would be a perfect place. I am keeping a journal on a Google Doc as well, but I figure end of quarter reflections here in my blog might be a great place to not only reflect, but also to share some student work.
My first quarter was exciting, frustrating, fun, and not-so-fun, all at the same time. I was so use to the job I was doing as math lab teacher for the past 7 years that I believe I was becoming a little complacent in my willingness to try different methods of teaching and new things in my classroom. I mean, if what I was doing in math lab was working well, and it was, why should I change a bunch of things. I believe the attitude I just expressed in that last sentence was leading me to stagnation. I was ready for a change in my career and still grateful that I made the effort to make that change.
I took my first real crack at Project Based Learning this quarter and had some successes and also some failures. The best teachers and research both support that PBL is a great way to get kids motivated, engaged, and learning. I think at times I forgot the driving question that I crafted in Washington, DC with my friend Dean Groom last summer. I also wasn’t as sure as I could have been what the end product was going to be, which was a bit problematic considering that PBL principles state that you should begin with the end in mind. Anyhow, the end product that kids created ended up being a news story on the career they were hoping to have when they became adults. I wanted them to find someone to interview who held that career, and many of my students were really afraid to make that initial contact. Many kids interviewed teachers, partly because teachers were the easiest person to interview, and partly because some of them really had an interest in becoming a teacher. When I teach this unit again next quarter, I plan to give students more freedom with regards to how they decide to conduct their interview, possibly letting an actor or friend stand in for the interviewee. Also, I should have had students research their career before they conducted their interview. Part of the reason for this I feel was my lack of foresight into what exactly the end product was going to be. I still believe the project was a good idea, and I plan to do a similar one, with a few adjustments, next quarter at East Middle School. Many of the final projects were very well done, as you can see from the two news stories around this paragraph. The ones that were very well done were probably well done not so much because of how fine a job the teacher did, but as a result of innovation and creativity on the part of the students. Man, I have some creative and imaginative students!
You can find more of my students’ final projects by clicking here. Please, if you have time, give one or two of my students some feedback by commenting on their News Story by clicking on their episodes permalink.
Something that I also tried this quarter was an application called Shoutem.com. It is a microblogging application that I used as a way for students to communicate with each other about a variety of things. I believe it was very successful with several of my students as it gave them a way for anytime, anywhere, communication with both their peers and their teacher. Kids enjoyed creating their own web page and designing their profiles. They also enjoyed the social aspect of the application. I plan to use the same account with the students at East Middle School, so that the students I had at North Middle School can share and communicate with each other via this awesome learning network application. As more students see its usefulness in their own learning process, I believe more kids will begin utilizing it for that purpose. Hopefully, students who see no purpose behind our Shoutem account will learn from the kids who are gaining the most through the application.
Finally, I began utilizing Moodle with my students as well. It was a bit clunky and difficult to get use to, but I think the kids like it, and it is a great way for students to share ideas and work with both their peers and their teacher. I need to let go of my need to have a hard copy assignment if I am to truly utilize Moodle to its full potential. It would be nice if it were more like Shoutem. I believe that security/fear issues keep teachers from using the web to its full potential. The ability to have a larger audience to share ideas with is the purpose behind twenty-first century learning. I want my students to have feedback, not only from me, but from their peers from their own school, peers from other schools in other places, teachers, and teachers from other schools and other places. Twenty-first century applications via the WWW will allow students to gain that feed back if we get over that fear.
I told my first class of the day that they were like Guinea Pigs, an idea I was given by a retired gifted education teacher. I felt haphazard at times in my delivery, and I am sure it came across that way to many of my students. My hope is that my students learned one-tenth as much as I did during my first quarter as a gifted and talented teacher. If they did, I believe I can consider my first quarter a success! Last spring I wrote a grant proposal which included much of what I have tried to do during this first quarter. So someone at Qwest or ACTE must think that what I am trying to do in my classroom has value, because I was awarded the grant near the end of the first quarter. Without the ability to collaborate with some very fine teachers in my PLN on the other side of the globe, I would never have been able to win that grant. That collaboration is exactly the type of thing I hope to share and instill in my students.
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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.
