Time Flies -- Hodgepodge Thoughts

Until I looked at the date on my last post I hadn't realized how long it has been. Time flies when you are doing all that testing. Not that the kids were tested in my class, but they were tested some days in my room, resulting in my having to take my class elsewhere. But Lisa (testing coordinator)really tries hard to make sure I don't move unless she absolutely need the room. I normally act all grumpy, but she does excellent job of rescheduling around my classes. Thanks, Lisa!!
Baseball season started up, especially Double-A here in Wichita, which means the Wranglers are off and running. It hovered between 33 and 40 degrees all weekend and it was COLD. I prepared for it but its a bummer when you buy a hot hot dog and its cold before you get to your seat. I still had ice left at the end of the game so I guess its a mixed blessing. I have front row seats behind home plate and just to the left so I can see all the corners of the plate between the batter and the catcher. Perfect! The Wranglers normally look very rough at the start but this year they look more like they have in May not in April. I take this as a great sign of things to come. They aren't as polished as June but hey not even the Majors are this time of year.
The kids' comments on my class blogs are starting to show improvement in some of their writing. About half of them are writing more and the quality is getting better. The last 8th grade blog comments actually stunned me when I saw who was writing the best comments. Way to go guys!!

The Reading Meme

Picked this meme up from Coach Brown at A Passion For Teaching and Opinions and Ms. Cornelius at Shrewdness of Apes.

*Look at the list of books below.
*Bold the ones you’ve read.
*Italicize the ones you want to read.
*Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) – ah yes High school lit during the days of feminism I got more girls angry at me over this book than anything else that I’ve ever done. Which is saying a lot.
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)- Frodo lives
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)- I try to read this series at least once a year
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien) – I even own the Simillarion and Farmer Giles of Ham
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)- If I didn’t read it the students in my class would have burned me at the stake.
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling) – See 11.
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling) See 11
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King) – I must confess I don’t like Stephen King ( Yes I heard those gasps)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)- see 11
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien) Hated the spiders in the wood loved the trolls
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Marte)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) –
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)l)

30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert) – Great Series although I don’t like the ones by the son as much. I loved his White Death
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) -
34. 1984 (Orwell) Classic from school
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)-
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay) Had a lot of trouble dozing off through most of this one.
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible -. I like the newer translations better than the King James
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) Could not put it down was fascinated with the extra details.
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) –50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)- See 11
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)-
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice) –65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo) -
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving) the second strangest book I’ve ever read.
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White) -
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck) –
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind) –
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding) –
93. The Good Earth(Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton) is there a junior high that doesn’t teach this book?
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
101. Jurassic Park –
102. Learn Me Good

Two authors that I wish were here somewhere Chris Stasheff – I consider his Wizard in Spite of Himself a true classic of fantasy fiction, and Rick Cook, mainly pulp type fantasy fiction but I love his blend of computers and magic.

Deal with the Savages

I've been thinking a lot lately about the problems I have with my 8th graders, who are a somewhat unique group when it comes to technology. They've grown up with technology and they all really like to use it, which is par for the course. But when it comes to learning something new or using a new tool they are very resistant. If they haven't done it before they really do not want to do anything new. What this means is they love to listen to music and take pictures with the camera, but they don't like having to organize pictures into a video or write out a script. They also have no clue towards most technology vocabulary, even stuff I know they've been using since 6th grade in my class. There are a few kids that have web access of their own at home who are classic digital natives, but the rest are basically clueless about most web technologies, and they don't want to learn how to use it.
I guess its more a sub-culture thing because they can't interact (web wise) except at school. They tend to be more like people who were not born into technology. When I taught classes 10 years ago to other teachers on how to use Office or the Web they would act a lot like this. If they had never done it they would resist trying to learn it and need step by step help, but the second time we did something they would take to it really well with a minimum of help needed, even though it was a new task.
I've taken to following a three step procedure with my 8th graders whenever we try something new:
1st I show them a PowerPoint and explain how to use the program.
2nd We show them previously done examples and "play" with the program/tool.
3rd We give them a quickie assignment that is simple and easy to succeed with. This "quickie" will probably take two to three days while they become comfortable with the program. After doing those three things, then and only then, will they be ready to proceed with the task I really wanted for them to learn/perform. Of course it takes a lot of time to get them through these steps. But I have found I can't take any shortcuts with them without a huge amount of whining and giving up.
Do other people find they have to do this with people that are not 'comfortable' with learning the new technologies? I wonder what steps other trainers have found to succeed.

Ranting on the Perils of NCLB

Talk about left hand and right hand not knowing what they are doing. Three years ago I had to fill out a survey questionairre to determine if I was "highly qualified" in the subject that I teach. One week after filling it out and sending it in I was told I had not sent it and I had to do it again. This time I walked it downtown and was shuttled from one board office to another until finally I got to the one lady who was keeping the questionairres to find out: "Oh, I have the other questionairre I just haven't processed it because Technology teachers can't be "highly qualified" in Kansas. There are no state standards in Technology." Apparently that is a requirement before you can be highly qualified.
Now three years later, my principal gets a memo that I have "failed to fill out the paperwork to be "highly qualified" and I must attend a mandatory meeting at 7:15 downtown to be shown how to complete the paperwork correctly. Meanwhile the state still has no standards and most of the other teachers on the "Corrective Non-compliance List" are in the same boat I am. They are the other Technology teachers.
What is the deal? Do these administrators not understand why "highly qualified" can't be reached? Why do they react like we are slime trying to crawl under the radar?(I was offended by the tone of the memo) Nothing has changed or my subject coordinator would have been all over it having us fill out the paperwork. (He's great about doing that stuff). I'm going to have to write up lesson plans for 1st hour (there is no way the meeting will get done and I'll be back before class starts)and fill out a bunch of paperwork that will end up being put on a shelf because it can't be processed because the state doesnt' have standards for the area I teach. If these administrators don't know this when they are "in charge" of this matter then why are they in charge?
I know I'm raging against the machine, but It's been an exhausting week and next week is even more of the same. I just hosted my school's chess tournament, (which went very well because I had wonderful help). Special ed and ESOL started testing this week for the KSCA's (state level tests) using my room during my planning period. Next week the rest of the school starts the KSCA's and I'm teaching technology in a regular classroom while they use my lab for testing. I'm dealing with it! But this memo is a flashpoint moment. I don't need some administrator acting like I haven't done my job and setting up a meeting to tell me to do it right when its already been done and it's all for nothing because there are no standards to be highly qualified in! (more raving)

Random Thoughts

Between basketball games, parent conferences, secret Valentine's, and all sorts of other stuff I haven't had a lot of time to get much done. I'm the type of person who works on something, then works on something else, then comes back and finishes the 1st thing. Lately, there has been a whole lot of something elses all come up and no coming back to finish. My desk is looking like the bottom of a California mud slide with paper talus instead of mud. Its actually covered my LCD projector. I had a list of things to get done but it was buried about Tuesday and I haven't been able to excavate that far down. How does the shortest month of the year generate the most paperwork? This happens to me every Feb.
New thought. (It was the Feb. that triggered it.)We have finally had a true winter this year. It seems that for the last fifteen years we have a couple of very cold days maybe one bad storm and a few dustings and then a bunch of days of 60, 70, or 80 degree weather. It's a bad enough problem that when I went to buy a coat in November the best I could find was a lined windbreaker, nothing for a true winter. I wonder if the stores will stock something good next year. I have yet to see a true coat on any of my students this year either. There is one here at school but he is not in my class. Most of my kids just wear hoodies and whine about being cold. When I was in Jr. High I wore a parka and sweated to death half the time. Go figure.
Back to the orginal thought. I found my desk calender and changed it from Tuesday to Thursday and actually saw some desktop when I picked it up. Maybe there is hope. Time to put on the hard hat, bring in the backhoe, and get to work.

Musings on the Future

Where to start? I have read so many blogs lately that talk about David Warlick (2 cents Worth) and Web 2.0/School 2.0. So many ideas tumbling around without the peices coming together, they look and sound like they might fit, but I just can't seem to fit the right match to each peice of the jigsaw puzzle. Is it because I haven't been able to see all the peices? Since I do most of my reading at school some of the links, especially to social networking sites (myspace) and photo sites like flickr, are blocked so I don't really know what they do except in a general way. Or is it because the frame of my puzzle is my 'new' curriculum, which is really ten years old with new updated software. Could it be that the new Web tools don't truly fit well with the older ideas? Some of them, like wikis and blogs, I can see putting in to the curriculum like a animation cell going over a photograph. They add new meaning and a slightly different purpose to what was their before. Would this be enough? Are the curricular tasks and goals enough? A lot of what I read about preparing learners for the future makes me think, No this is not enough. I feel like I'm preparing them for the recent past, not for their future.
While I was comfortable and training people, students and staff, for operating with purchased software and using the Internet (what I have come to know now as the Read only Web 1.0) the rest of the world trotted on and is creating itself anew. Last October, a door opened and I glimpsed this new world I had never seen or thought about before. I like the taste of this new world, the feel I get whenever I try to test the waters. But this is taking me off into a new direction and my school district would prefer I follow the old path. If I choose to go the new direction I will have to take the curriculum and use the new tools to meet the goals. This sounds and looks doable until I start thinking about the obstacles that I have to find a way around; the filtering policy, the district's trend of everyone doing the same thing at the same time so that students that are transient don't have any difficulties stepping into a different classroom. Following the goals using the new tools would be a parallel path not an identical one. What to do? The district path is easier and comfortable, the new world, the world of Web 2.0, of online tools, of Creative Commons, feels and sounds enticing. I see the results of these tools where ever I look outside of school. Now that I know they exist I can spot them, they are no longer blurred images in the window as I drive by, unrecognized and unknown. I can see the new path and it seems to follow the Real world, the world outside of school better than the old path I was on. The powers that be have not looked through the door like I have, or they have glimpsed and continued on.
The peices keep moving over and around each other. I pick up one that looks like it will fit, but when I try it its close but something just doesn't let it match to the frame. I can't leave the frame there is no way that would work. How do I get these new peices to work the way I need to make them work. This is going to take a lot of time, thinking, and experimentation. I just can't stop thinking about the puzzle, I know the answer is there, I just need to find that key peice that links the puzzle frame to the Web 2.0 center. Where is it? What is it?

Copyright Wonderings

Lately these days copyright issues have been occupying my mind quite a bit and this morning I got off onto a side track. When did copyright start up? Long, long ago (about the time I started school if you ask my students) an author would write a scroll and if you had a copy, purchased from or given by the author, you would commission a scribe to copy that scroll for you. Sometimes that commission's price would include letting the scribe make their own personal copy that they would then be able to make copies from. Unless you were buying from the original author none of that money ever made it back to the author. Author's were supported by a patron or their own personal finances.
It had to be sometime after the printing press was invented and the scribe evolved into the publisher. Now the author would take the book into the publisher and pay to have it published, the publisher would make multiple copies and either give them to the author to sell, or more commonly, sell them and send the author a share of the proceedings. Protecting this share must be the origin of copyright issues. How and why did this get turned around? What happened to build the 'system' we built today? I think this would be interesting to know. How did a bard's songs that were loved so much they were remembered and sung by the audience evolve to the mp3 copy of today? That would make an interesting show on the Discovery channel I would think.

Blog Comments Away

Well, my second group of students have all had their first taste of blogs. My seventh grade at G Wiz 7, my eighth grade at G Wiz 8. I wrote the post and they all wrote comments. Between district policies and the way Blogger2 works I haven't figured out a system where they can write the posts themselves. I'll work something out, but I wanted to get them started slowly. I'm hoping that as they read their comments and comments from others it will motivate them to get better at writing. I have had two students that have already rewritten what their comment contained after they looked at it online; now if I could just figure out how to delete a comment without deleting the blog post.
Its gone very well. I've tried to not censure them for their writing, but we have talked about do's and don'ts. Some of them don't really write a lot and it showed in what they wrote. Strangely enough some of the comments I'm happiest about are the worst ones; in grammar and length. Some of my students that never would write more than a one word answer to an essay question actually wrote sentences. The spelling may be wrong, but this is a big step in their performance. Writing for the Internet may have motivated them just enough to write, something they wouldn't do for me on paper.

Hitting the Wall

I knew it would happen eventually and now it has. I've hit a wall, well actually two walls really. I've picked up all these new Web 2.0 tools and have been trying to use them in my technology class. Mainly this has been experimentation with my students being voluntary test subjects. But I've picked up so many tools I can't decide what to try next and I'm forgetting some of them before I get a chance to use them. So I'm hitting a wall of not enough time.
I'm also hitting another wall with trying to find a way to introduce these ideas to my students (who are stuck just understanding Web 1.0) They love the tools, especially after they've used them a couple of times, but they don't visualize the concepts on what this can do for them. They see it as a tool in class not in life. Part of this is only one in three of my students have Internet/computer access at home.
Normally hitting the wall just means I need some time to let the ideas simmer at the back of my brain, then after a while everything pops into place. But new ideas keep popping up and I don't have the time to simmer, ergo frustration city. I'm not happy with the fact that things are going past me that I want and I catch on to them, test them, figure out how to use them, and teach them without being overwhelmed by other choices. I've got twenty-five cents and I'm loose in the candy store with too many choices. Or to follow through with the simmering, I've got four burners on the stove and seven pots to cook in, what to do, what to do, what to do.

Well the new term has started and I've been using the PowerPoints and screencasts that I prepared to make sure my students had some prior knowledge before we started doing an assignment. I post them as I create them on the class website.Mixed results so far, I found out I need to slow down the speed of the PowerPoints so they can read them better. I guess I overestimated their reading ability. I didn't get all of the screencasts made that I want so I am still working on that. Sometimes I worry that I am doing overkill, but since my students last semester didn't have any prior knowledge to build upon I've tried to prepare for anything they need. I'm looking forward to the first video project that they do. Some of the kids take it seriously, some don't, but that's normal in any class. If they can get through the first project without a lot of problems then I'll feel successful.

Old dog learning new tricks

Isn't it amazing how sometimes when you try something new, something you expect to fail and blow up in your face, but you try it and are stunned by how well it works. Today I tried something I had never done before with my eighth graders. Instead of standing up and going orally over three "important" PowerPoints we needed to cover at the start of class I gave them the option of looking at them on their own. I know that sounds like a recipe for disaster, especially with a group that can be talkative and hyper at the drop of a hat. But it worked!! Of course I offered a big carrot, earphones, after a small discussion of responsiblity they could listen to music while they watched the PowerPoints on their own and give me a paragraph summary of each in Microsoft Word, (Same document). I had read some blogs about how a way to increase student learning was to enable students with choices and I thought I would try this with my 8th graders. Am I Suprised! Not only did they get busy and spend most of the time actually watching the PowerPoints and writing their summaries, but I had some students that I know are not the best readers actually ask me about some words (something they had never done in the past.)I kept an eye on the class everyone was staying on task working on the job and almost all of them got two of the three PowerPoints done in one day. If I had done it orally we would have completed one a day barely. Skimming some of the summaries that they wrote,the summaries are better than what I would get the old way too. All it took was linking the PowerPoints to my website and some 99 cent earphones, go figure. The more activities I pick up from reading the blogs online the more excited I get. My classroom is evolving and I l-i-k-e it.

Wisdom and Learning

After discovering the MIT OpenCourseWare website and trying to share my excitement about freely accessing all this college level knowledge, I came to a disappointing conclusion. Even though my peers are teachers, my passion for learning things for the sake of knowing them makes me weird. I really would have thought that they could get excited about the idea of taking college course for free, even though there would be no records aside from the knowledge you would learn. I was wrong. It seemed to me this would be learning in its purest form, just for the sake of knowing. I never stopped to think the others would not put it that high on their list of things they truly desired.
After the abrupt letdown of making this discovery, I was thinking about how I define learning, wisdom, and intelligence; and what is learning's most essential components. Wisdom, in my definition, is not just the accumulation of knowledge, but being able to apply that knowledge to a problem or circumstance in a positive way. You can know everything possible about a thing. However, if you can't do anything but rattle it off verbatim, it doesn't seem to be very wise, after all that's trivia, thus trivial.
My three essentials for Learning, in order of importance, are 1. Prior Knowledge 2. Desire to learn 3. Intelligence. I sure many would disagree with my order so let me explain.

Number 1: Prior Knowledge
In my years of teaching <26> I have had classes that were all advanced kids, remedial kids, and of course the normal heterogeneous mix. I have found no matter how smart I thought the group, if they didn't have any prior knowledge of what I was trying to teach, even if it was a somewhat simple task for me, they would struggle and I was in for a very long day. Last semester I actually had a group that had so little prior knowledge about making commercials it took me weeks to get them to where they could put together a video on their own. No vocabulary, no knowledge of the parts of a commercial, how to sell a product, or what a script was; in their minds, commercials were just short little movies for entertainment. Until you give them something they can relate to in their own life, that they can build on it makes no difference how much they want to do it or how smart they are, you are going to have problems getting them to learn.

Number 2: Desire to Learn
Any teacher that has had their own class has known a student who wasn't the brightest light, but would always produce the best work, but not the highest test scores on your exams. It wasn't because they were smart as much as the fact they worked their butts off to succeed. These students had a desire to learn that brought them to success in learning. The same teacher can also name a student who had all the potential in the world, but had no desire to learn in their class and so failed the course. Not because they were stupid, but they made no effort to learn because they didn't want to know.

Number 3: Intelligence
Long ago, when I was getting my first degree at KSU, there was a professor who impressed me so much I took every course he taught. His name was Tom Parish and he had a definition for Intelligence that is the best I have heard in any class, then or since. Intelligence is a measure of the speed you assimilate knowledge. Even after I finished school and started teaching this always has seemed to be a great definition. When multiple intelligence research came out it made even more sense to me. My brother who struggled to make B's in school, has always been able to look at a machine or device, take it apart, and put it back together correctly. While I, who glided through school with A's, have to have a manual with an exploded view or I can't figure out squat. You can have someone who has an extremely high IQ and they do things that are incredibly stupid. Normally this is because they didn't have the prior knowledge they needed and they just tried something only to have it blow up in their face.

Intelligent people with the desire to learn will pick up the knowledge they need for understanding quickly, and then pull even, or surpass the others with the head start of a large prior knowledge base, but they have to accumulate some prior knowledge first, or they don't succeed, no matter how hard they try. Thus I rank them in this order. I would be interested in finding out what others think.

Buzzed

Wow! I had read other bloggers when they talked about the thrill students got from other people writing comments on their blogs and thought to myself, "That'd be cool for my kids." But when I was reading Nancy White's Full Circle Online Interaction Blog and saw her quote from my blog, Whooosh! That was a major thrill, I was so pumped up I couldn't sit still long enough to type a response. Thank You Nancy. While I was walking the adrenaline off, I couldn't wait to set up class blogs for my students for this new semester. I wanted them to feel the rush and excitement. It was nothing like what I expected, it was better. As I was talking to some other teachers about my excitement, they got excited and wanted to create a school-wide blog so we sat down and came up with a topic and then got busy setting up that blog. What was really neat was the group I was with runs the gamut of kids for our school, normal classroom, AVID (college prep), and a special ed teacher (who actually was even more excited about the school blog idea than I was). It's interesting how a little spark at just the right time becomes a flame, let's just hope its perpetual, not a flash fire. More about the school blog later.

Ruminations

It's the last day of the semester and one of the tasks I have each class do is write a summary of the class. They tell me what they liked, what they didn't like, and what they would change if they could. They have to explain why on each of their answers. I always take these print them out and read them over the weekend. Normally there are no surprises, but there is always one or two ideas in each class that are worth some serious thinking. I have put in some changes as a result of some of the things they have told me. Since I have found it valuable to have my students do this I thought I'd do this about my semester.
My sixth graders were great, every time they were introduced to something they acted like eager puppies, not only were they excited about doing it, they were bouncing around trying to show their friends and sharing how they did it. Lots of energy all focused on the task. Wonderful stuff. How do I get my 7th and 8th graders to show that kind of excitement?
My seventh graders did well for the most part, but lacked the focus and excitement of the sixth graders for the most part. We were doing the new curriculum and trying a lot of stuff I had never done before. Really good learning experience for me, I found a lot of pitfalls and traps to avoid in the new materials. Which means I spent a lot of time correcting my 7th graders and trying to get them to use the materials in the correct way. A lot of time will be spent over the break thinking of how to structure each assignment so these learning pitfalls don't happen and the kids are not sidetracked.
My eighth graders, well, I tried some stuff to prepare for the new curriculum next year and ran into massive problems. Most of my kids had no prior knowledge or experience to build upon. Everything had to be reexplained over and over getting simpler and simpler. Finally I had to give up and go to other activities that I had done with the 8th grade before, but by that time I had lost them. Just before the end I had gotten most of them back, but by then it was too late. I've taken steps in my planning to not repeat those mistakes next semester. I think I have found solutions to the problems I ran into, but it was very frustrating for me with my eighth graders this last semester.
Personally, I have gotten very excited over discovering the "Web 2.0 tools" including blogging and screencasting. I have been doing a lot of online researching and feel like Rip Van Winkle waking up to a new world. I have been doing a great deal of thinking about how to bring these and other tools into my class and how to share them with the rest of my faculty. Some progress with the former, a lot of fear and tension about the latter. This is one of my goals for 2007 to bring at least three faculty members into the blogging community.

Musings on What I've learned in 60 days

After having experimented with several of the new Web2.0 "style" technologies, I've become very pumped with the idea of working them into my curriculum. I've tried a wiki, Photo Story 3, blogging (my own), screencasting, and a few others. Some met with a lot of success, some didn't. Part of the problem with the few that didn't work in my class was I had no idea how to give directions to use it with my kids.
My eighth graders are mostly "digital savages", even though they have grown up with the technology, they do not have exposure to using technology beyond the basics, either because of economics at home, being newcomers to the US, or some other reason. Because of this they are still Web1.0 consumers, not Web2.0. They really have to have things explained, not just the purpose for using a program, but the way they use it. Programs they have used before several times are not a problem, they jump into it and function well, but anything new I have to drop down into first gear and really plan everything out.
Finding out about screencasting and blogs has really helped me out on this. Now I can record the directions on how to do an assignment while I actually work it out. I then save it and link the screencast to my webpage. Any of my students that missed the first explanation or need it again can follow along with the screencast. This gives it to them in both oral and visual directions, not to mention the written copy of the directions (also linked to the web page.) I'm in the process of doing this for all my assignments for all three grades, but it's already proven its worth with my 6th graders who have shown up with copies of missing work that they did at home using the web site.

Cool Stuff

Ever since I started teaching Technology I've had one problem I couldn't find a way around. Anytime I tried to do a reading assignment on technology or a technology issue the text was way too hard for my kids to read. However, I stumbled across called "Cool Stuff and How It Works" by DK (ISBN 0-7566-1465-1). Written by Chris Woodford, and Luke Collins, Clint Witchalls, Ben Morgan, and James Flint with gorgeous illustrations by Kevin Jones, Andrew Kerr, and Lee Gibbons. The page layouts are a lot like webpages, except the illustrations are better than any webpage I've ever seen. It doesn't water down the technical terms, but it does a wonderful job of either explaining them or writing/illustrating so that they are easy to understand.
Here at my school I've tried to do a reading assignment at least once every two weeks and in the past it's been a chore because I basically have to read it as a class and stop and explain everything. NO MORE OF THAT! The students take to the articles in this book like ducks to water. I just wish I could afford a room set so they would all the colors of the illustrations.

Names Change

I thought I had come up with a fairly original name when I changed to Blue Man's Blog. Based on the fact my favorite color is blue, I always wear blue, etc. etc.. But when I saw the special for Blue Man Group on the television last night I figured I better change so I don't have an arguement over copyright.

The last week has been very interesting wrestling with my new e-machine at home. It constantly is trying to update my Microsoft products to versions that I don't want, and it always interupts what I'm doing to ask me if I want to update. If it was human it would have gotten the hint about thirty times ago. I haven't figured how to turn that off yet. I have the automatic update turned off, but the reminder system sees to be controlled elsewhere. I don't know which is worse the updates or on the few updates I do want the validation testing my Microsoft. Its enough to make me start thinking of a different OS.

That got me thinking about the fact that over the last twelve years, between school and home, I have used 17 different OS on 41 different machine platforms. Just counting my personal computers its 7 OS on 12 machines. Bizarre.

Setting up a Web Page

Hurray and Bummer. I'm excited that I've finally gotten my website for class up and running and bummed because I'm already exceeded my allotted space and haven't even touched what I want to put on it. I have some really great examples I want to post and some PowerPoints I've created based on ideas from blogs I've read, and some screencasts I've done to help the kids with their assignments, (not to mention let the parents know what we are up to), the more I do the more ideas I come up with. I really am getting into it. But the lack of space is really going to be a downer. I sent an e-mail to tech support to see if the district will give me more room, hopefully they will.

Screenposting works

I finally got the time to try creating screencasts, and I am even more excited than ever about doing them. I'm using Microsoft's media encoder and going over class instructions on how to do different assignments. It's going to be great once I get all of the twenty or so I have planned because then the kids can not only read the directions but follow them and listen on the computer. I am currently building a webpage to post the links to each screecast on. I'll also post some examples of each assignment. I have discovered a few bugs: When I use PowerPoint I need to have the quality set up to high, and when I use Adobe products I have to turn the quality down to medium. I also need to remember not to have the mute button on. But these are minor problems.

K12 online conference

The K12 Online technology conference was just the thing to get me excited about doing technology again. It has been a very hard year with my students who truly will not try to do anything new and trying to put in a new curriculum in the 7th and 8th grade. I was also depressed that the curriculum was basically the same stuff from 10 years ago with updated software. I think that putting some of the Web 2.0 tools the conference talked about will make a difference; both to my students and myself. I was also excited to some free online programs that give me the tools to do things I would have to purchase major software to do. Now if I can figure out how to blend the old curriculum and the new tools, then I'll be ready to go.