WirEDteach

The Buzz on Teaching and Technology

Tweet, Tweet! Twitter in the Classroom

February 16, 2012 by · No Comments · education, Language Arts, Parents, schools and parents, Teaching, Technology, Twitter, web 2.0 tools, Writing

My colleagues think I’ve finally lost my mind over integrating technology in the classroom. I have established our class Twitter, @bhtweetworld,  much like the way I start out on any new adventure – one part information, three parts motivation – ready for whatever might come my
way!

I had some experience with Twitter on a personal level, but I never fully understood its purpose. The more I heard about it, the more I became inspired to send out tweets to the world hoping they were being read by someone, anyone? Then I decided to follow a few educators, writers, publishers, and agents. And the light bulb went off.

Twitter became a powerhouse of information, resources, and contacts of people just like me who were interested in education, kids, books, and writing. I could not believe the amount of useful information that was streaming through the universe. Now I follow authors, agents, and other educators who are willing to share their expertise.

I decided to set up a classroom twitter account to communicate with students and parents. I gained permission from my technology director to have Twitter accessible on my teacher computer. Then I created a Twitter account associated with school: @bhtweetworld .   I sent an email to parents introducing them to our Twitter, giving them the call name, and encouraging them to “follow” our class for updates, reminders about assignments, etc.

I tried to establish a “posting” schedule for myself . In my email I explained that this was a one-way communication only, that students and parents would not reply or expect return communication on Twitter from me. I have about 10 parents of the 60+ kids I teach following me, with a few students sprinkled in. This would work beautifully with kids who have smart phones and could download a Twitter app on their phone to be able to follow the class. This was set up at no cost to mydistrict.

This classroom experiment turned out well in my opinion considering the age group of kids I teach.  I believe that this would work best for older students, high school in particular.

If you have success stories using Twitter in the classroom, please share those experiences with me!

 

Tags: ······

Using Technology to Teach Language Arts

September 26, 2011 by · No Comments · Language Arts, lessons, standards, Teaching, Technology, web 2.0 tools, wikispaces, Writing

Today in class, I guided students through the steps of creating their own introductory wikipage for my Language Arts class. On this page, they included a welcome greeting using a “cool” text generator, uploaded a favorite picture using Morguefile.com, and added a favorite quote from a quotation site. These pages will be linked from a Student Pages site on our class wiki, and students will be responsible for maintaining them throughout the year. They will also develop additional pages in the future as our class progresses. I’m hoping my district will pick up student blogs using Edublogger soon, but no word on that yet.

Teaching Language Arts in a Different Way

You might be wondering how I justify using class time to teach technology when I have all of those TEKS to cover. Pretty simple. Language Arts is easily integrated into many different subjects, and technology is one that works particularly well. You should know that I am also this group’s designated computer teacher on Thursday, so I am working with two sets of learning standards, and I think I’ve found a way to mesh them together perfectly.

In creating their page, I was able to teach several concepts. For Language Arts I emphasized mood and tone, formal language, punctuation, and attribution. For technology I touched on design and layout, embedding html code,  and producing work for an audience. This is how our lesson unfolded.

Snapshot of My Lesson

After students logged in as users on wiki, they named their new page and the fun began. I demonstrated text editing in wiki using the text style editor. I was able to show students that they were setting the tone for their page based on the type of welcome greeting they chose. Some students used “Enter at Your Own Risk”  or “Dare to Enter My Page”, while others used “Welcome to My World”, and “Welcome to My Wiki”. Through these greetings, I showed students the importance of word choice and the effect it would have on an audience. Often times when students turn in a writing assignment to the teacher, I’m not sure they consider that writing for a real audience. So, I like to give my students the opportunity to publish work online and in other public areas. I was able to discuss the appropriate use of quotations and giving attribution to the author of the quote they selected.

Students were excited to be able to list a section of “Favorites” including books, food, colors, subjects, and many more! We reviewed using images and saving those in the “My Pictures” file for later use. We discussed copyright issues, but that will be an entire lesson for a different day.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the lesson was teaching the kids how to create their personal avatar using VOKI. Voki is a free software where students can create speaking avatars by either recording their own voices or using the text-to-speech feature. After students make the selections for their avatar – everything from clothing, appearance, and bling – they publish the avatar which provides an embedding code using html. I showed students the code, and we reviewed how to copy and paste html code to produce a desired result.

Overall, the lesson was a success. I will be evaluating the student pages in the next two weeks after students have had enough time to finalize selections and edit the page carefully.

Thanks for stopping by today. As always, I’d love your comments and feedback!

 

 

An Article Worth Sharing

September 14, 2011 by · No Comments · education, schools and parents, Teaching

A Break from the Buzz

While I was thinking about what I might post this week, I got a tweet  referencing an article that CNN ran entitled, “What Teachers Really Want to Tell Parents.” It was a guest column written by Ron Clark, author of “The End of Molasses Classes: Getting Our Kids Unstuck — 101 Extraordinary Solutions for Parents and Teachers,” Clark was been named “American Teacher of the Year” by Disney and was Oprah Winfrey’s pick as her “Phenomenal Man.” 

My first thought was that it might be a humorous spoof on teachers, but after I read it, I understood what it was meant to be…a sincere message to parents, a request of sorts, that I felt had some very valid points.

Let’s face the facts. There are bad teachers, those who are in the profession for the wrong reasons. But for every bad teacher, there are so many more who believe that teaching is a calling and are teaching because they love children and want them to learn and be successful in school and life. We are parents ourselves and realize that when you send us your kids in the morning, you are entrusting us with your most prized possession.

I found this paragraph of the article particularly insightful:

“This one may be hard to accept, but you shouldn’t assume that because your child makes straight A’s that he/she is getting a good education. The truth is, a lot of times it’s the bad teachers who give the easiest grades, because they know by giving good grades everyone will leave them alone. Parents will say, “My child has a great teacher! He made all A’s this year!”

This weekend I’m planning to download some new books for my Ipad. Clark’s will definitely be one I include in my list. 

 

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject! Drop me a comment.

Until then…

Melissa

Tags: ·······

Our First Wiki Discussion Posts

September 8, 2011 by · No Comments · education, Teaching, Technology, web 2.0 tools, wikispaces, Writing

Yesterday I posted on the Wiki discussion assignment I gave my 6th grade language arts students. After working on their rough draft documents, they were able to post them, some more successfully than others. Overall, today was a great learning experience for everyone.

Once all students had posted, I noticed that there were many errors in basic grammar, usage, and mechanics – exactly as I expected. My students are not accustomed to publishing for a real audience and have not been taught how to view and proofread their work critically. Today was the perfect opportunity.

With permission from several students, I displayed their posts using my multimedia projector. As a class, we discussed the posts and made both positive and constructive comments. Hats off to those students brave enough to put their work up for critique.

Here are samples of their posts from the assignment. Some are great, others…not so great, but the lessons learned today were invaluable for future assignments. By the way…I chose not to grade this first experience.

 

Would love to hear your thoughts and comments.

Until then…

Melissa

Tags: ·····

Assess Understanding through Wiki Discussion Posts

September 7, 2011 by · No Comments · education, Teaching, Technology, web 2.0 tools, wikispaces, Writing

Today I introduced my kids to posting a response on a discussion board topic. Depending on the age group you teach, some students may already be familiar with discussion groups, and most are certainly familiar with status posting on Facebook, Myspace, or other social networks.

In the professional world, we participate in discussion groups frequently, and somewhere along the way we were either taught posting etiquette or learned by trial and error. Don’t assume students will understand the difference between formal and informal language in regards to posting.  The language students use for social networking is not necessarily appropriate for academic discussion groups. So, before you allow them to participate, give them the information they need to post intelligently. Here are the posting guidelines I developed for my students:

  • Plan and Think – create a rough draft response: develop a draft in a word processing program or on paper
  • Edit and Revise – review your response:  Is it grammatically correct? Are names/words spelled correctly? Did you avoid slang terms?
  • Read and Consider – Read your post again: Did you address the topic/question? Did you represent yourself positively?
  • Post! – Be prepared to consider others’ viewpoints and comments

With these basic guidelines, students do well when given the chance to express their ideas in an online community. That community might simply be a school network or class group depending on your district’s Internet use policy.

My students will be developing responses to a topic I posted on my wiki relating to our class novel The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. This is an introductory activity and not really so much of a discussion as a response. But, it’s a great  first step. After I accepted students as members of our class wiki, we were ready to begin. Each student was given a unique username and password. If you are interested in setting up your own classroom wiki, you can read about that here or email me and I’ll be glad to help!

For the assignment, students were asked to summarize how the main character (Charlotte Doyle) boarded the merchant ship for her transatlantic voyage. My objective was to assess understanding and application of the  following skills:

  1. Summarization
  2. Four types of sentences and punctuation: declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory
  3. Posting etiquette and guidelines

Students logged in to the wiki, clicked on the Class Novels link and chose our current novel. On that page, they selected the “Discussion” tab at the top of the page and read my initial assignment post.

Write one paragraph (6-8) sentences summarizing Charlotte’s experience in boarding The Seahawk. Use each of the four kinds of sentences at least once. Be sure to use correct punctuation. DO a rough draft on WORD before.

I’ll be sharing the results from this first assignment here this week, so stayed tuned for some great student work!

As always, if you have questions, comments, or suggestions, I would love to hear from you. I would also like to know what you are doing in your classroom.

Until then…

Melissa

Tags: ·····

25 Word Story Challenge

September 7, 2011 by · 2 Comments · education, Teaching, Technology, Uncategorized, web 2.0 tools, wikispaces, Writing

I happened across the Twitter 25 Word Story writing experiment and challenge a few days ago and thought this would be a great idea to share with my 6th grade gifted class. The goal is to tell a story in exactly 25 words. To introduce them to the concept, I shared Kevin Hodgson’s Prezi  titled “Sixty 25-Word Stories”. I really didn’t do much more than that and hoped that some of them would take interest.

On our class wiki, a created a new page – 25wordstory. Wow! What I wasn’t expecting was that within the last 30-minutes of my 90-minute class period, students had posted more than 600 entries of their own. They went absolutely wild with the concept! Some were insightful, others funny.

With such huge interest from just one class, I decided to hold a contest for the best 25 word story entries.  The kids suggested we set up categories. Their ideas exploded, and the contest was getting really huge, fast! I convinced them to agree on just two categories: humorous and contemplative and one entry per student in each category.

Then I posted an open invitation to the contest and set up a deadline. After our grammar test today, I gave them time to work on submissions and post. I’m pretty sure at this point every student has entered at least one story. I’m planning to introduce this to my first and second period classes on Monday. I can’t wait to see if they share the same enthusiasm as my last period did.

Here are some sample entries I thought you would enjoy!

They were surrounded by burly men, their faces hidden by shadows. Why would they be after her? She knew there was no escaping them now. – Lauren

Water drips slowly into the stagnant pool below. I long for a drink of its crisp cool water, but my way is barricaded. – SarahM

I took a shower, to feel refreshed. I put on my pajamas and headed to my room. Thump. I turn around to find my sister! – Leslie

He stood there looking for his glasses. He was becoming so very frustrated. Sadly, he doesn’t have any eyes in the back of his head. – Riley

The hunter double checked his bag. Everything was there. He primed himself for the shot; no longer would this human take his well earned fame. – Charlie

Tags: ··········

Netbooks Are Here!

August 29, 2011 by · No Comments · education, Teaching, Technology, wikispaces

My students received their netbooks on Friday, so this week begins a new adventure in learning for us! The kids will be adjusting to a different style of instruction as most everything I do in the classroom is supported by technology through my wikispace. In a blog last year I wrote about the purpose my wikispace would serve.

 Here is an exerpt:

I wanted my wiki to be a hub for my students, an online spotwhere they could find resources, link to extended activities, post responses, and interact with classmates and me. I sent home an email to parents letting them know about the class site and what it had to offer. The response was very positive. So many times parents feel as though they don’t have all the information they need about their child’s school work. Now, they were able to access my wiki and find a wealth of information.

I still feel that the purpose I wrote about then is the same one I have in using technology in the classroom this year. But I want to add that my main goal in integrating technology in the classroom is to provide students with the necessary skills to be competitive in our society. They are, after all, growing up in a technological era.

Monday in Language Arts

To give you an idea of how Monday in 6th grade Language Arts looks, I’m giving you a snapshot of class today. Students entered the classroom and logged in to their netbooks and then accessed the class wiki. BHWIKIWORLD. They clicked on the link to Warm-Ups under their class period and read the instructions to begin class.

Planning in the Agenda

Students at Barbers Hill Intermediate use agendas to record homework assignments and learn planning and organizational skills. The warm-up activity required them to use the online homework calendar on our wikispace to record the week’s plans for Language Arts. Students and parents are also able to print out this information straight from the calendar if needed. This week my students recorded that on Tuesday we would have a journal assignment, library day on Wednesday, computer class on Thursday, and a spelling test on Friday.

The Lesson

To introduce the first spelling unit of the year, I had students open up Microsoft Word and type their list of spelling words for this week. After everyone was finished, I taught them a mini-lesson on copying and pasting from one application to another. Students copied the spelling list they had typed and then pasted the words into an online program called Spelling City for lesson extension . Spelling City is a free site site I like to use with my students. This site allows them to input their own spelling words and practice spelling and identifying those in a variety of games. I find this a much more effective than having students write their spelling words three times each.

After they had worked with Spelling City, I reviewed the word list with them on my overhead projector. Students were encouraged to ask questions and clarify any misunderstanding they had at that time. My own Word document, with the correctly spelled list of words and parts of speech, was then posted on the Spelling Lists link on wiki for students to access at home.

My students are adjusting nicely to the expectations of using netbooks in the classroom, and I’m confident they will take care of such a great privilege and learning opportunity in the days to come.

As always, if you have questions or comments about my blog, please feel free to leave a comment or email me at mjohnston@bhisd.net

Until then…

Melissa 

 

Collaborate with Google Docs!

August 24, 2011 by · No Comments · education, Teaching, Technology

 

The new school year has begun and my sixth grade academic team is already exploring ways we can use technology to collaborate and work smarter, not harder. Recently we explored a way to use Google Docs to coordinate some very important information – our first birthday luncheon of the year!

I don’t know about your team, but one of the things we do really well together is eat! I secretly think that has been the key to our 5-year Exemplary status as a campus, although I’m pretty sure the phenomenal teachers who deliver excellence each day is another component.

Back to the food. I’m thinking if push came to shove we could join up and write an award-winning cookbook and become famous like Paula Deen. Each month we celebrate birthdays with fellowship and food.  In the past, we would send out a group email announcing the luncheon date and ask everyone to sign up to bring a food item. To do this, they would send an email back to the luncheon coordinator. This meant the girl in charge would have to read through all of the email responses, and as they came in, compile and update the food list. The process, to say the least, was tedious and time consuming.

Enter Google Docs. Most of us have had some sort of training with Google Docs, but it was my colleague Selena who came up with the idea to use it for our birthday luncheon planning. Hats off to her!

We had our first birthday luncheon today for Rhonda who celebrated the big 50!! Using Google Docs, we were able to sign up to bring items for a Taco Stack and delicious desserts. When we returned to our classrooms, there was an email requesting a homeroom headcount for an upcoming field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts. And you guessed it… a link to a Google doc!

Until then…

Melissa

Tags: ·······

Give Them Tools and They Will …Dig Writing?

February 8, 2011 by · 2 Comments · education, Teaching, Technology, web 2.0 tools, wikispaces, Writing

As a reading, writing, and technology teacher, I have a pretty wide range of objectives and curriculum to cover during the year. I find that using a whole language constructivist approach works best in the 90-minute block, and I am really big on giving students the tools they need to be successful.

It is especially important to give kids tools for writing.  Gone should be the days when teachers assign the dreaded “What I did on my Christmas Vacation” and expect students to produce quality writing from a blank sheet of notebook paper. With the availability of web 2.0 tools including blogs, students can write for real audiences and receive feedback beyond the teacher’s smiley face sticky notes. My goal as a writing teacher is to help students develop their own voice and style.  This semester some of my classes will be helping me create a classroom blog, and we are really excited about the possibilities. I’ll be blogging about that in future posts.

Resources for Writing Tools…

Here are some online writing tools I use with mystudents that I think you might find useful as well. 

BHWikiWorld Writer’s Tools - This is a link to my classroom wiki handouts page. Students can access any of the resources we use in class from this site.

Houghton Mifflin’s Education Place -  If you are looking for printable online graphic organizers, this site has many choices.

Wordstorm - Wordstorm is great for brainstorming. It is a visual word organizer that creates a web or map of closely related words.  When students type in a word, the map is created and new words are generated giving them inspiration to expand thoughts and ideas.

Google Docs -  a free site offering “Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and form application…” Students can write and edit their pieces in a collaborative setting.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas about my post!

Best,

Melissa :P

How do you Wiki?

February 1, 2011 by · No Comments · education, Teaching, Technology, wikispaces

Nice to meet you…

When I was first introduced to wikis, I’ll admit I was immediately overwhelmed at the possibilities it held for my classroom. So after I signed up for an educator account, I went to Google and performed a search for classroom wikis. I probably spent a week just browsing different wikis and getting some ideas for my own. I found Vicky Davis’ page  helpful as a starting point. This gave me the information I needed to start organizaing my thoughts and ideas on what I wanted my own wiki to look like.  Then I wrote down a list of goals I wanted to accomplish with my own class wiki and jumped right in.

What Purpose Will Your Wiki Serve?

I decided that I wanted my wiki to be a hub for my students, an online spot where they could find resources, link to extended activities, post responses, and interact with classmates and me. I sent home an email to parents letting them know about the class site and what it had to offer. The response was very positive. So many times parents feel as though they don’t have all the information they need about their child’s school work. Now, they were able to access my wiki and find a wealth of information.

 Start Creating Pages…

My first page was the home page where I listed general class information about notebook order, class schedule, and class expectations. I wanted students to be able to access a homework calendar, so I signed up with Google calendars which can be easily embedded as a widget into wiki. This homework calendar can be printed out in the form of a daily, weekly, or monthly agenda. My students told me that they use the calendar as a reminder to find out when assignments are due and as a back up to their paper agenda.

Growing your wiki…

As you continue to develop your classroom wiki, it will take on a life all its own. I have continued to add pages, get rid of others, and expand my wiki until I think I’m writing myself out of a job. But, my teaching philosophy has never been that students should be filled with knowledge by one teacher standing in front of the classroom. There is so much more to offer students when you act a a knowledge guide and allow students to discover, evaluate, and create new information.

 

Best,

Melissa