Book Flood gathering momentum.
Called into school today and found a spare bookshelf! Yippee. Talked to our General Assistant and he has suggested I get the boss to buy the materials and he will make the shelves. He says it will be cheaper, quicker, nicer shelving and fit where we want them. Isn’t he a darling.
Also bought some cheap baskets and have gathered a heap more books from local charity shop and by raiding my own shelves. I think I’m going with a mixture of genre and types: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Realistic Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Autobiography/Biography/Memoir, Non-fiction, Poetry, Picture books/Graphic Novels, Short Stories. Kids will be asked to read 3 of each and will be able to choose 10 of their own to make up the difference. I think these categories will work well with our programme and satisfy our text requirements.
My next job is to “mark’ the books with coloured tape and put corresponding tape on the baskets. I’m using coloured electrical tape. I know you can get it in pink, purple, orange and different greens but not so easy to get in Australia. If any Australian readers know where to get some, where I don’t have to buy boxes of it and it’s cheap, please let me know.
To begin with I will be using a mix of my own books and the books we have available for free choice reading already. There’s quite a lot of these since we have had mixed reading boxes for units in year 9 and 10 and have kept the remaining books when sets have gone out of fashion. They have already been accessioned through our Library and the kids will need to borrow these through the Library. They can do this as a Textbook loan so that they can keep the books longer and have more borrowing power.
Also finished cleaning out the filing cabinet in the staff room, so am feeling both virtuous and organised.
Book Flood
This is a term used by Kelly Gallagher in Readicide that roughly corresponds to Donalyn Miller’s immersion of students in books in the classroom. As I said in my last post I’m keen to revisit ‘surrounding’ my students with books. Gallagher teaches secondary students, as I do and has a similar view to Donalyn, in terms of giving kids time, space and choice. He approaches the need to balance the teaching of the class text (often iconic or classic texts in the cultural heritage) in some interesting ways, but I plan to talk about that in a later post, so back to the subject of my post – the book flood.
I did a lightning quick re-read of The Book Whisperer noting in particular the approach, goals and methods, and then thought about how this might work in my classroom. Some of the things I’m grappling with include the ‘genre’ approach that Donalyn uses to frame the 40 book assignment. I’m not sure that will be the most useful frame for my students and am thinking about how our syllabus and programmes have some specific requirements, such as close reading of : two works each of fiction, non fiction, drama, film, variety of poems or study of poets. These always drive the close study and critical analysis focus of our programme. The other requirement is about ‘experience’. The syllabus says:
The selection of texts must give students experience of:
- a widely defined Australian literature and other Australian texts including those that give insight into Aboriginal experiences and multicultural experiences in Australia
- literature from other countries and times
- Shakespearean drama
- cultural heritages, popular cultures and youth cultures
- picture books
- everyday and workplace texts
- a range of social, gender and cultural perspectives.
While these give a little more guidance, they are mostly too broad to frame the reading, particularly for developing readers in Year 9, so I am trying to find frames that will work with my students. Gallagher’s list of “101 books my reluctant readers love to read” (p119, Readicide) has some potential categories, that I think could be used to organise the books in the classroom, but I’m thinking I might just ask the kids what will work best for them from their perspective of needing to find books they really want to read.
As far as the reading assignment is concerned I’m torn between a mixture of genres and text forms. So far I’m working with: Australian Authors, Aboriginal Experience, Multicultural Experience, Other Countries, Other Times, Young Adult Literature, Poetry, Picture Books, Informational and Autobiography/Biography/Memoir. I can already see problems with the mixing of Australian authors and Young Adult Literature and feel like genres will help students to identify texts that want to read more easily.
Anyone tried implementing Donalyn’s 40 book assignment in a secondary classroom? How did you frame the assignment? Did you use genres or some other categorizing approach? What success have you had? What refinements can you suggest?
The Book Whisperer, Part 2
Just finished The Book Whisperer and want to go back and read it again. It must be my year to revisit things I did in my first years of teaching. Like Awakening the Heart, this book reminds me of things I used to do and the passion I had for teaching reading and writing that I have some how lost over the last decade. I think it coincides with becoming Head Teacher. Maybe now I feel comfortable enough in that role to be a teacher again!
I loved the book so much I sent Donalyn an email , and I seldom do that. I have already culled my home shelves for old favourites for a class library and plan to raid the stored boxes of books in the shed for more. I’m planning how I am going to get some shelves into my room and a trip into town to check out the Op shops for more books. And I’m not going to spend Term 1 doing Naplan practice! I have a secret desire that my seniors will start asking to borrow the books when they are surrounded by them and plan to have some space devoted to Related Texts for Belonging and History and Memory.
PS if you are interested in resources I have set myself the goal of adding a resource/lesson plan to the Lesson Plan page every week. My first offering is a workbook on the play Two Weeks with the Queen. It’s not your usual kind of workbook so have look and feel free to adapt. Created for Year 7 in 2011, it worked well with my very noisy, energetic, lively Gen z-y (my term for those on the ‘cusp’)
The Book Whisperer
Another great read. I got my copy of The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller this week and am about half way through. The author’s commitment to creating lifelong readers is reflected in her enthusiasm and ideas for taking our love of reading into the English classroom. It confirms my own belief in the value of a free choice reading programme and providing time for kids to read in class. I am planning a rebuilding of free choice reading in class in our faculty plans for this year and Miller is helping to shape how I might do that. Her description of the ‘underground reader’, a student who is already an avid reader and just wants to get on with the current book brought back memories of hiding a book in my desk in primary school and reading it in my lap when I had finished other work or while waiting for my turn to read the next section of ‘The School Magazine’ which we read aloud in class. I couldn’t help thinking back to last years Year 7 that definitely had a few underground readers. For some reason I didn’t get our reading off the ground until later in the year. How they must have suffered!
Miller sets a goal of 40 books a year for students and reading across a range of genres. The high expectation generated by this goal and the use of genre to support the work in key units are ideas I plan to take into my reading programmes this year.
Awakening the Heart
I have just finished reading Awakening the Heart by poet Georgia Heard. I enjoyed it very much and I think she would be delighted that her book has re-awakened my joy in reading and writing poetry with students. Something I feel I haven’t done a lot of, over the last few years, and something I always loved as a young teacher. I think a love of poetry is what led me into teaching English.
Georgia’s book is about the importance of bringing kids to poetry in a positive way and for them to learn that poetry is ‘food for all’. She says, “One of the most important life lessons that writing and reading poetry can teach our students is to help them reach their well of feelings — their emotional lives– like no other form of writing can”. Right now, I think that is a really important and significant goal for our current students, and goes to the heart of the debates about subject English. There are many wonderful ideas and inspiring stories in her book that make you want to go into the class room right now and begin. A book to add to the very best books all English teachers should read.
One of my personal favourites from the book is the Living Anthology Project, where kids choose and place poems where people will read them, like waiting in line at the canteen or at the office, or for the bus. Inspired by the Poetry in Motion project, it made me think about the ways we traditionally teach poetryand how to turn our poetry teaching into project based learning. My idea is that this year we ask year 7 to create their own poetry project which might be a Living Anthlogy project or could take some other form.
English teachers tend to love books, and I am no exception. When it comes to buying school related books, most teachers seem to buy the books that they can use directly in the classroom. The textbook kind. I am not a great fan of these books and my clean up of my resources and shelves has led me back to books I have collected over the years that inspired me in all kinds of ways. The kinds of professional reading I like are the books that go to the heart of teaching, about how and why and invariably they are books that make me rethink what I do and lead me to some kind of creative innovation, taking me beyond the writer’s ideas into my own, like Teaching Literature: Nine to Fourteen (Benton and Fox) and If you’re trying to teach kids how to write, you’ve gotta have this book! (Marjorie Frank). These are books worth sharing with beginning English teachers, because these books will help them re frame their theories about what teachers do and what English teaching is all about. May be you have some other suggestions?
Revisit! review! reteach! revise!
As a professional learning task this year our principal asked that we explore Close the Achievement Gap (from the In a Nutshell series, Hawker Brownlow). I led the discussion on Chapter 4: Revisit! review! reteach! revise!. The chapter explores the concept of ‘leaving nothing to chance’. For me it was a recognition that I had been leaving revision to chance.
So this year I have consciously revisited, reviewed, retaught and revised. I discovered that a quick quiz at the end of a lesson or a week later was a powerful learning tool, that there are lots of different ways to improve recall, that they have to know the story of a Shakespearian play really well to understand anything else about it, that kids need serious memory training and that ‘re-teaching’ needs to be programmed explicitly.
With this aim in mind I have been working on a ‘jeopardy’ game using a ‘flipchart’ on Yeats’ poetry and ‘memory’ games on key words and concepts.
I used a ‘memory’ game on language devices with year 10 who are in the final preparation stage for their SC Literacy test. Who would think that a simple memory game (turning cards over and matching a device with an example) would generate so much enthusiasm from a bunch of Year 10 boys? The whole group of boys became totally involved in the game shouting instructions to the kids whose turn it was at the board. Amazing! Then they wanted to play another one!
Fun with friends
At this time of the year I’m doing a fair bit of professional learning with colleagues. On Thursday I ran a workshop on using cooperative learning in the classroom using some year 7 classes do ‘demonstrate’ how it works. This proved to be a really useful model for working with other teachers. The teacher talk both on the day and since has been really inspiring, with everyone trying out new things in their classrooms. We need to do this more often!
Cool Games and Interactives
I was looking for some games for year 10 and found some fun revision games for year 10 first period tomorrow (in a computer lab). They are a bit sick of the Multiple Choice SC Literacy generator at the Board of Studies site. I plan to use BBC Games for 14-16 years and some grammar games from Learning.org. Judging by their response last time I let them loose with some games there should be a lot of ‘peripheral learning’ going on. We might also have a look at Power proofreading and an online crossword on technical language at Wicked
I also found ClassTools.net Games for education which has templates so you can design your own. Haven’t tried it yet but I will. This one could be really handy for creating my own resources for the Interactive White board. Another useful site in my search was Teacher Tap: Interactive Tools which had some good links to game sites.
More useful things
The games were a huge hit and not just with year 10. Have been poking around online today and found some other useful sites. I’m preparing Module A: Richard III and Looking for Richard and came across Film Education which has some great notes and study guides on a huge range of films. I think this is a very interesting pairing of texts (and a refreshing change from Blade Runner and Brave New World). I’m planning to show the film first because I think it will engage students in a closer reading of the play itself as well as give them some insights into authentic questions about the play as a play.
Revisited TeacherTube. What a great site this is – have visions of an assessment task where students create a 3 minute video on Richard III and Looking for Richard and post it on TeacherTube!
NSW ETA Annual Conference
As usual, had a great time, caught up with lots of teaching friends, made some new ones and came away inspired. Thanks to Darcy and Kelli for their enthusiastic support of new ways of engaging students. Can’t wait to try out Wiki’s and blogs with kids! Also came back very tired with loads of end of year admin work to do ….
Holiday To Do List
One week til end of Term and 5 weeks holiday! Yippee. I always start the Christmas hols with a wish list. This year’s list:
family time …
eat healthy and get more exercise …
party!
lots of gardening …
lots of reading …
clean up teaching resources and filing
prepare some work for school…
play with new technology…
get a bigger monitor screen …
Yep!
Thought so.
Same list as last year!
7 things you really don’t need to know about me meme
Darcy Moore tagged me for this so I’m having a go.
1. I didn’t know what a meme was until I googled it and then I got too much information
2. I broke my leg in two places when I was 14 (at a Girl Guide camp) and carried a hip to toe plaster caste for 5 months. It weighed more than I did at the time.
3. I’m shorter than I look
4. I used to ride a 5′ red surf board (until a truck ran over it) that had a really weird surface design because the guy who made it (son of parent’s friends) got drunk when he was applying the surface coats. I rode it anyway.
5. I played International scrabble on line until I got bored.
6. I made myself a long black coat with a white peace sign on the back and wore it to a local dance when I was 16. I thought I was really cool.
7. I can recite The Man from Snowy River
I tag
Thinking Routines
It has taken me a while to get back to this. The beginning of the school year is always busy but this year was busier than most – might have had something to do with my New Year’s Resolution: have more fun. The moral of the story: if you party with friends all weekend you don’t have much time left for school work and blogging!
The last edition of Metaphor had some great articles (Well done Mel Dixon and team!) and I was ‘specially interested in Thinking Routines, an article by Matthew Bentley, so I spent some time checking out the Harvard University’s Visible Thinking website. It is a great resource, easy to navigate and ‘plain English’ explanations of the theory and the practice. I plan to try out a few of the routines in the weeks ahead.
Our Year 10′s are working on ‘Voices of a Generation’ this term. The main concept is that language enpowers us and throughout history people have used language in many creative ways to change their world. We begin with protest songs, take a look at Romanticism and move on to to famous speeches. Kids are asked to consider how they can be the voice of their generation and the ‘tools’ they have to do this. So I am going to try out the Thinking Routine ‘HereNow/There Then’ after we compare Dire Straights’ Industrial Disease and William Blake’s London. Should be fun!
Another great little site I’ve been using with the Interactive Whiteboard is SpellingCity.com. It’s a handy site where you put in a spelling list and the site generates about 15 games as well as a ‘test’ feature and a ‘teachme’ feature. Have a look, it’s free and easy to use.
Poster fun
I discovered Glog’s today – what a lot of fun this will be in English lessons. Many thanks to the OZteacher mailing list and to Judith Way.
My first Glog
Judith pointed me towards the Global Teacher blog. Looks like one to visit often.
Revisiting Animal Farm
Still feeling snowed under but having fun just the same. I began a unit on Animal Farm with my year 11 Advanced course class this week. I had forgotten how good it could be in a classroom as I haven’t taught it for about 15 years. I started with some work on fables and fairytales and the kids responded well to the challenge of going beyond the simple and obvious and delving deeper into the nature of these tales and how they reflect values and ideas about human society.
If you haven’t had a look at Teachers Love Smartboards I have to recommend it as a source of terrific sites, especially if you are starting out with an IWB – so many great resources. In the last post there was a link to FlashcardDB – an interactive site where you can create sets of flashcards that work well on the IWB. I started with a small set on some technical terms for year 11 and plan to create their revision quiz on their research homework with it. It is very easy to use and kids should have a lot of fun with it.
I’ve also been poking around Australian Screen. This is the Australian National Film and Sound Archive site and it is truly tremendous. So many resources for Australian teachers and many of the clips have teachers notes as well. I was looking for something to inspire Year 10 who are creating their own presentations on ‘Voices of a generation’ and found a 3 minute clip on Oogeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), a short clip from Forever Hold your Peace showing a High school student delivering a speech at an Anti-Vietnam war rally and another on Helen Lothan Robertson (1848–1937), a pioneer of female trade unionism in Australia. That should shake them up!
Another high note this week was seeing one of my colleagues using the IWB with a year 8 class. One of our regular relief teachers, Anna, found herself last period with Year 8 in the Connected Classroom. She had done a quick search at lunchtime and found an interactive site, Myths and Legends from E2BN. With only a quick look at what the site could do Anna and Annie, a beginning teacher on her first day in our faculty, were able to engage the class in working together to create a story using the IWB. The kids ‘held the pen’ and demonstrated the golden rule of IWB – the kids must have the power to engage with the technology.
I also managed to set up Google Reader, sign up to Delicious to manage my increasing bookmarks and set up a Contact email list for my Year 11 class. Darcy would be proud of me!
Creativity, Procedures and ‘old dogs learning new tricks’
What a lot we pack into our days! Last week we hosted a visit from acclaimed author, Jen McVeity. Jen has delivered her workshops ‘Seven Steps to Success’ both in 2007 and 2008 and we asked her to come again this year. Jen’s creative writing workshops are fun, stimulating and the emphasis is on inspiring creativity in kids. Her mantra is a simple one: keep it short, make sure it’s fun and teach the microskills. Just as we learn a skill in sport, writing narratives needs to be broken down into the ‘serve’, the ‘lob’ and the ‘backhand smash’. If you sign up for the newsletter Jen revisits each of the steps in her course with great classroom ideas.
This year Jen delivered a workshop on ‘The Final Four’ to a mixed group that included teachers of English, Drama, Aboriginal Studies, History, Visual Arts and Geography. Jen’s steps are about narrative but aren’t just for English teachers. The steps can be applied to all topics for writing and writing narratives is a great strategy for increasing literacy and deep knowledge in any subject. In fact, some really interesting things happen when you apply the ‘story graph’ Jen uses for planning to writing a speech or a reflection on learning!
Now, about ‘old dogs learning new tricks’. I bought myself a copy of Harry and Rosemary Wong’s The First Days of School after reading about it on Marie’s Learning Curve blog. I thought it would be useful for the beginning teachers I work with as well as offer me some fresh ideas. You can read Harry’s column on effective classroom management at Teachers.Net and there are lots of great ideas. I meant to just ‘dip’ into the book but ended up reading the whole thing. While the chapter on effective classroom management is a winner, it mainly confirmed the things I do (teach kids the ‘routines’ that make the classroom run more smoothly). I realised that I do these things because I learnt the hard way, through years of experience and days of frustration in the early years. Harry’s message is that all teachers need to learn these things early in their teaching career, or we lose those teachers because the classroom becomes too frustrating and not at all fulfilling.
The chapter that really got me thinking was about ‘writing good assignments’. Once I figured out what Harry meant by ‘assignments’ – lessons! – I was confronted with what is probably a self evident truth to everyone else out there: telling the kids what the lesson concept is, identifying the learning objectives clearly and then matching both the lesson strategies and the ‘test’ to these objectives guarantees better results.
Now I know I do these things most of the time in most lessons but just the same, I started to think about how well I was doing it. First thing I did was help some year 10′s with an assessment task on researching a ‘voice of a generation’ and then preparing a presentation for the class. The original task had 6 broad ‘steps’ to guide students. Taking Harry’s advice I broke down each step using ‘verbs’ from Bloom’s taxonomy and then finishing the sentence. There were 15 things kids had to do to complete the task effectively!
Here’s an example: ” Step 3 – Research the life and context of the world your composer inhabited” became:
- List the main events in the person’s life.
- Describe the historical events that impacted on the person’s life.
- Explain any social changes during this person’s life.
- Explain any events that influenced this person in a significant way.
- Describe the medium this person uses.
- Describe the audience this person addressed.
I was a bit stunned – no wonder some of the kids were having trouble with the task! I’m sure I verbalise these sub steps when talking about the task but we all know how well teenagers listen!
Needless to say, I’ve been looking at all my lesson preparation in a whole new light! So, we are never too old to learn new tricks. Which is just as well, since the DET in all its wisdom and after spending lots on training Connected Classroom teachers to use Activstudio software, has decided to change to ‘Notebook 12′ for Smart boards. Just when I thought I had mastered Activstudio!
Thinking about laptops and learning
Lots of rainy days these holidays so I have been revisiting my website and thinking about how we are going to manage classrooms with laptops.
My first real foray into using technology in the classroom occurred when I got a new computer some years ago, complete with MS Frontpage. With the help of the Ozteachers mailing list I learnt to create a website and spent another rainy holiday immersed in thinking about how I could use it in the classroom. The website has been through many revisions since then and with the purchase of a new monitor (I had been using the 17″ for a really long time!) and a wide screen I discovered the site didn’t look so good and had really small font. I also realised the site was being accessed more by teachers than students at my school and that it had become a ‘filing cabinet’ for websites I’d found that would be useful later.
This holiday I learnt to link to a word document in the website. About time some would say especially when it is so easy to do. Anyway, I’ve spent some time tidying up pages, linking to word documents I had saved that will be useful in the classroom, as well as putting in some units I’ve used a few times to share with other teachers. This led me to thinking about how I might use the website and the linked documents when year 9 get their laptops some time in term 2. I am wondering how others will approach their use in the classroom and can already imagine some great teaching opportunities and engagement of some students as well as the need for some new classroom procedures! Being able to put a lesson plan with embedded links on the website may be very handy when students are able to go directly to the page.
But I did personalise my laptop!
It has been a while since I posted – too many other exciting things to do, like read and rest and try to stay on top of marking. Laptops have arrived and like many other DET staff I have been playing and thinking about how I will use them in the classroom. I don’t have a year 9 this year and this is useful, since I usually have ‘free’ periods when year 9 are on and should be able to support the teachers in the classroom. I think we are going to have a lot of fun with sorting out what we are all talking about – have a look at my ‘personalised’ laptop – I know it isn’t the digital meaning but it sure makes it easier to find mine when they all look the same!
But I did personalise it!
I took mine into class on the last day of term and my year 10′s helped me find some things – and showed me how to use the bluetooth – we identified everyone in the classroom who had their mobile phones turn on – talk about Big brother.
I’ve finally signed up to twitter. I think I’m going to have to go wireless. How will I keep up with checking everything regularly and still get my daily dose of family and TV, unless I can multitask and twitter at the same time? At least the laptop would allow me to do that.
I’ve been doing some PL with other faculties and spent a very enjoyable day with one of our HSIE teachers. Mark has put his hand up for the new IWB in HSIE and we are in limbo with Activstudio until we get regional support with Smartnotebook, so I looked at all the ways you could use the IWB without using a flipchart – turns out there were heaps of interactives and other resources available on the net for his subject area. He also liked the collection of literacy and numeracy games links I have put on the school lesson drive. This has been really useful for other teachers in the school. The kids told them where to find the page! I’m a bit disappointed the DET didn’t stick with Activ studio – so far I haven’t found Smart resources as easy to use or find. Promethean planet has such a huge resource bank and all it needed was for more Australian teachers to upload their stuff.
Well. It is beautiful day outside so I’m off for some R&R in the sun.
Pre Trial jitters
It’s that time of the year again. HSC trials on next week and year 12 have been practicing writing in 40 minute blocks. It’s the time when I look back at what I’ve taught and compared it to what they have learned. This is when they discover ‘learning’ also means remembering! And I wish I could restart the clock at term 4 last year and start all over again. However, I can’t, so must focus on what I can realistically do to support those whose minds have been elsewhere and those that really haven’t read the text (I couldn’t understand it miss, so I gave up!) and those that think a page and half essay is enough. Message to self – revision, revision, revision! And enough with the TLC – be a nazi when it comes to homework and participation in class.
There is some light on the horizon – I have been a nazi with my current year 11 and they are keen and enthusiastic most of the time. And year 10 are in the middle of selecting courses for year 11 and year 7 are just plain fun.
I’ve continued on with twitter – and am steadily increasing those I follow. And joined a ning – steep learning curves here. I’ve spent a bit of time this morning updating website – year 11 like being able to check the lessons they have missed and with all the flu going around lots of are trying to keep up to date online. Year 11 have their work placements over the next few weeks and then a trip to the snow (educational of course). This usually means that the less motivated students take time off – leaving a big continuity hole in the middle of term 3. I am hoping that the website links will keep the Advanced classes on track.
The English staff are off to ‘Moving to Notebook’ training this week – swapping from Activstudio to Smart Notebook. Our school will get an injection of funds next year (National partnerships funding) so more IWB we hope. We are also joining in the Festival of Laptops conference – using the VC suite. A very busy tech time for us all.
Now I am off to do the weekly shopping, enjoy the sunshine and avoid marking.
Laptop magic
I should be marking trial papers but needed a break. Last week was ‘big’ in terms of professional learning. The VC suite is in my classroom so I was able to assist other teachers to participate in the Festival of Laptops conference. They discovered how easy it is to use and were really happy with the sessions provided through Macquarie Uni on using laptops in specific KLA’s and for specific software. Then the HT meeting participated ina VC presented by Pip Howell on Cool Tools for DERvices. This was a great presentation with lots of really useful links and ideas for any teacher.
The English staff were also scheduled for ‘Moving to Notebook’ Training. Our regional Implementation person, Ross Woolfe, was happy for us to view the Laptops in English session at the Festival. Another inspiring presentation from Arthur Phillip High. We then spent the rest of the day learning about Smart Notebook (and unlearning Activstudio). I am a big fan of Activstudio, but I can see that Smart Notebook offers more for the classroom. I just think the ‘bells and whistles’ are better in Activstudio and are not so visually boring.
Now I just need abit of time to ‘play’ with Smart Notebook!
Back from Cairns and laptops arrive
My week off was an absolute delight. We revisited places we had gone 34 years ago (in an orange Kombi, much thinner then). Very nostalgic. The weather was beautiful, I loved swimming with Wally on the Outer Reef and didn’t think about school once.
I did read Time Management from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern that I picked up at the Airport. An interesting read. The tip I liked best was to estimate the time things will take and plan accordingly, instead of making a great big To Do list and thinking that you will get through it all, then feeling stressed when you don’t. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. I thought I might share some of these ideas with senior students. Do they know how long it takes them to read ten pages, making notes at the same time, or a summary? Do they know how long it takes them to complete each stage in writing an essay or story? Could be useful when they are trying to manage the competing demands of the HSC. She also had a reverse idea – decide how much time you want to spend on a task and keep within that time frame. I think that’s the one I need to work on, especially when I am ‘playing around’ on the computer.
The week away was quickly followed by Equity2009 conference in Sydney (with a short break at school to finalise Trial marks!). I enjoyed the conference, but the best bit was introducing four delightful students to Sydney for the first time. Great ‘tourist’ route – catch bus down George street to Circular Quay, catch ferry to Darling Harbour (checking out harbour landmarks as you go), walk through Darling Harbour, past Convention centre and Exhibition Halls, through China Town and past Paddy’s Markets, back to Hotel. Thanks to Deputy Jennifer for playing tour guide.
Highlights of the Conference included hilarious presentation by Dr Christine Richmond on Behaviour Management, implementing MeE framework with Wayne Sawyer et al, Dr Jennifer Gore on Quality Teaching and Equity and finding out more about National Partnership funding (yes, we are one of those 512 schools). I’ve been reading Christine Richmond’s books over the last week, between finalising HSC assessments, checking reports, preparing year 11 exam and revising with Year 12 – 2 weeks to go! Teach More, Manage Less is a good starter book on behaviour management for teachers, with some food for thought for those of us who can’t remember the steps to learning how to manage and seem to do it ‘effortlessly’ because we have been doing it for so long. It has some good ‘checklists’ for self analysing what’s going and wrong and steps to take to improve your management. Lead More, Manage Less is more for Head Teachers and Deputies who have a role to play in supporting teachers’ behaviour management and I haven’t read much of this yet.
Of course, the really exciting thing this week is that year 9 got their laptops. We start ‘for real’ on Monday and the English faculty has decided to begin with Digitally Yours (Thanks Curriculum Support, great resource). We are also reviewing a policy document shared by Jameson High, looking to adapt it to our needs. Kids were excited and keen to get started. As one kid said: ‘I feel really smart using this, Miss!’
2009 ETA Conference
Ok so I haven’t blogged for a while but I have been having a lot of fun with nings! I’m here in Darcy’s workshop on Blogging and Leading at the conference and we are setting up blogs. Darcy also used a cool tool SurveyMonkey.com to gather information on the participants. More soon, Have to do something else, Darcy says!
New year, new challenges
It has been so long since I’ve blogged I’ve forgotten why I’m blogging. I think I began with the idea that it was a useful thing to do given the arrival of Laptops for every year 9 student and a feeling that I would like to share my experience with others. After 30 years of teaching, mortality and dementia may become an issue. The English Companion Ning has largely filled the latter need and I’m not sure I will even use blogging with the laptops. I read a lot of blogs and really enjoy them and they certainly stimulate my thinking quite a bit. So, I’m thinking that I may need to rethink the nature of my blogs and allow myself the freedom to blog on whatever is occupying my thinking at the time.
I haven’t done much with technology at all these holidays, for which my T4 vertebrae is very thankful. Not by choice – Internet Explorer bugs were just too annoying. Finally this week I went back to Firefox. One thing I didn’t do was find a web hosting site for my website and this may take some time to sort out. I’m determined this year to be selective about what I can manage.
School holidays are nearing their end, always a week before I’m really ready to a) think about school or b) do any of the things I need to do before school goes back. After a hectic three weeks of family and social stuff I finally managed to spend some time just reading and relaxing – read lots of crime fiction and fantasy and spent some quality time with the dog, husband, pool and garden. It’s our 33rd Wedding Anniversary today and we are going to see Avatar at the local cinema. He is being very generous since he has no interest in SF or Fantasy at all. At the back of my mind all through the holidays I’ve been worrying about our HSC results in 2009. They weren’t what I was expecting and I’ve had lots of moments of extreme self doubt followed my optimism and ideas for ‘doing better next time’. I’m also going to seek professional help since I have a tendency to think I know what I’m doing and I feel I need to check with somebody independent. Whatever happens I will overcome the glooms and return to school with a vision and a plan. Bit like a marriage really.
Nings, Laptops and vocab games.
Well, I created a ning for year 10! I’ve set their first task – to join the ning and write about their best holiday experience in a blog post and then comment on a blogpost from another member of the class. I haven’t taught with the laptops yet, just observed and assisted, so I’m keen to see how I am going to adapt my teaching style to the laptops and use the IWB at the same time. For the time being I’ve made the ning private – just between me and the kids and their parents if they want to participate. I plan to hit the floor running and get them using their laptops in class to join the ning and complete their profiles at the beginning of the first lesson. The blogpost will be their homework. Once I started really thinking about my ‘first lessons’ I actually started to get excited about going back to school.
Laptop Mayhem
What fun technology is! I taught my first lesson with laptops this week. I had sent my year 10 class an email and began the first lesson by asking them to check their email. Problem 1 – only two thirds had actually brought their laptops to school on the first day. Problem 2 – about 3 couldn’t remember their passwords and another 10 didn’t know how to check their email. Problem 3 – the DET access failed and no one could use the internet. Despite the potential for disaster we had a great lesson. We talked about using laptops at school and home. I explained what a ‘ning’ was, since I had created one especially for them (but couldn’t show them on the IWB because the internet wasn’t working!) and began introducing my procedures for the year. Oh, and I have one student who hates using the laptop and had planned to hand it back in because she didn’t want the responsibility and was going back to pen and paper! Can’t wait for next lesson. Always optimistic, the cybergods will fix it all over the weekend, won’t they?
In a perfect world…
In a perfect world I’d be able to use the ning I created for Year 10. Unfortunately, I don’t live in a perfect world, and the ning is blocked and will remain blocked by DET. It seems even a closed private ning might encourage students to create their own! And social networking has to be handled with care. I thought I was…. Oh well… sigh. I got very discouraged and haven’t yet looked up the alternatives suggested: wikispaces and edublogs. I will when my inspiration comes back. Year 10 were understandably disappointed. After all the principal had already joined and had promised he would read some of their entries and I was inviting their parents to join. I think they were secretly quite excited at being treated as responsible young adults with something to say.
One thing that has surpised me is the number of students who don’t bring their laptops every lesson. It seems they are a bit disillusioned with the technology or maybe they are just too heavy? I have seen a growth in the numbers bringing them over the last week, since I am planning my lessons around using the laptops for some aspect of every lesson. I’ve also noticed that when they don’t bring the laptop they make sure they have their notebook and pen and write down whatever we do with the laptops including site addresses and ‘how to’ instructions. So maybe the enthsusiam will return as we progress through the year.
Website changes
I know, I know, my resolution was to post more often. I’ve just spent some quality time with Google reader catching up on favourite bloggers and finding lots of new resources. I’ve also finally bitten the bullet and organised to move my website to a hosting service that will answer my emails and has a phone number with a person on the other end. In the process I registered a domain name. Boy was that tough! I can’t use the title of my website, ‘English Matters’, as the domain name. Apparently it is actually owned by someone and I can buy it for $14,000! Obviously it is time for a reinvention so the new site will have ‘lyntiernanenglishclassroom’ in the url. Boring, I know but everything I tried was ‘owned’ and I needed to keep some connection to the original purpose of the site, resources for kids and teachers I work with. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Bright Ideas always has…well…bright ideas. This one is from Chrissie Michaels and should work well with laptops. Instead of a ‘book report’, kids can create ‘book trailers’ using Windows MovieMaker. Looks like fun and I’ve been very conscious lately on the need to use the laptops effectively. Our school is currently surveying on who is using them and how often, since we noticed about 20% of kids were regularly not bringing them to school. Many, when asked, said they ‘hardly used them’. Teacher training and time is part of the problem, as is the lack of wireless access in most of the school. I’m still managing to use them every lesson, but I have wireless access in my classroom. I’ve been using SpellingCity for weekly spelling tests and practice and we use OneNote for our lesson notes. I’ve only just started learning Moodle and am looking forward to a quicker method of student access to resources than email.
My next job is having a really good look at the National Curriculum proposals. As you can see, I’ve been putting that off as well.
Yes, but what are they actually doing? (with the laptops!)
Easter break is a good time to take stock. I’ve been thinking a lot about how engaging my lessons actually are with laptops. As this is my first term with the laptops there have been some management issues and I am working out how to shift my teaching practice. I’m missing team work a lot and trying to work out ways to get kids collaborating. I’ve also noticed that kids stop getting their laptops out or using them if there isn’t a clear reason for doing whatever it is we are doing with a laptop. We have just started using Moodle as well so my time has been divided between playing with Moodle and working out how to set up our courses and planning lessons that use the laptops in a constructivist way.
I spent some time today going back over the DER resources and thinking about how I might use them in Term 2. I love the movie trailer idea and plan to get kids to create a movie trailer for a section of the novel we will be reading. I’m also thinking about getting them to create a video blog for the main character. One resource I’ve found that opens up a few ideas is LiveBinders. In the last unit I created a LiveBinder on ‘Social networking’ with sites that commented on the impact on social networking for teenagers. Students had to look at the site and respond to the question: Should we be worried about social networking? This worked well for some students. Others had difficulty scanning and locating information and it might have worked better with a ‘shared’ focus.
I’ve also been reviewing a few ideas I had collected some time ago. Jamie McKenzie’s The Question Mark has some useful ideas about asking the bigger questions and creating slam dunk digital lessons. Lots of browsing time this holidays.
Is anybody out there?
I’ve had a super frustrating time lately. Mega issues with home computer has meant that I have been without a home computer for about two weeks. I’ve been able to connect and get some work done using my DER laptop but the screen is so small! Must drive the kids crazy. I’ve also been trying to migrate my website to a new host in the middle of home computer having a hissy fit. Despite this I have kept working on my goal to try out software and other resources with Year 10 laptop lessons.
This week we used the laptops to create mindmaps on charaters in Guitar Highway Rose. We used bubbl.us instead of FreeMind (which we all thought was too limiting anda bit boring visually). Kids picked up how it worked really fast and it works well on the IWB. I’d like to experiment with the “sharing” function. Has anyone tried it? Before we used it I reminded students of the security aspects of “social networking” since it is a social networking site, even if it doesn’t look like one.
I’m still struggling with the pedagogical shift in using the laptops and trying to maintain a student-centred focus and collaborative team classroom. I’ve noticed in the past that whenever I am using new skills or strategies in the classroom I shift into teacher-centred mode. I think it is a fall back position for coping with risk taking and not being completely sure how something new is going to work.
The other thing I’ve done is start a ning for our local area English teachers. After our combined Staff Development Day there was a lot of interest in sharing and helping each other so I’m hoping this is a way for people to do this.
Has anyone used the DET BlogEd resources yet? I’ve tried to begin a class blog but I think I’ve hit the wrong button somewhere, it seems to be just my blog which really limits kids participation.
As for my title this week. I don’t think anyone reads this blog and feel like I’m talking to myself. Not that I mind talking to myself, but it does seem a bit self-indulgent. So even if you just look sometimes – a little feedback would make my day!
Stretching the boundaries and listening to the kids.
The laptop learning journey continues. Year 10 and I have explored using the BlogEd further. We used the ‘article of the week’ idea and linked it to the novel we are studying, Guitar Highway Rose. The unit is The Human Condition and I’ve paired the novel with Taming of the Shrew. Each fortnight I am posting a related online article and some ‘starter’ questions. The choice of articles are related to significant themes in the novel and later in the play.
An example:
I linked to an article on “Growing up Saudi, Part 1 Boys” that explored the constraints these young people face and some very underground acts of ‘rebellion’. The blogpost was titled “courtship, dating and rebellion” (The links to the novel and play should be obvious). Here is my post:
Rosie clearly likes Asher. Asher is not so sure about Rosie. Still, there is some kind of connection if they are prepared to run away together, even for a few weeks. Read the article Growing up Saudi, Part 1 Boys This article is about expectations. How do the Saudi boys fulfill expectations and rebel at the same time? Do you think Rosie and Asher are fulfilling society’s expectations of the way teenagers react by running away? What kinds of expectations does your family have of your behaviour? Are the Saudi boys rebelling in any way? What do you think they would think about Rosie and Asher running away together? What do you think about Rosie and Asher running away together?
Th kids responded in some interesting ways. It did generate a discussion that got deeper as it went on. We’ve found that this task doesn’t work so well as homework, so we have a blog session at least once a week where everyone gets on line and ‘blog comments’. We put it up on the IWB as well which seems to encourage students to join in more and allows kids without their laptop to comment – they get to use this IWB. I’m waiting to see if as they become more confident they will check into the blog from home or at other times. The class also decided that comments had to be a certain length (at least five lines). This arose from students noting that other students were just agreeing with comments and didn’t really add much to the discussion. I plan to return to the Saudi article on girls later when we are looking at Taming of the Shrew. I’ve also found it useful to send a group email when I’ve posted. We’ve decied to try the blog out during term 2 and then evaluate. We may continue or try something else in Term 3.
In using the laptops every lesson I am constantly checking with the class on the meaningfulness of the tasks we are doing. Kids are starting to tell me when we need some ‘techno’ training with something I may have assumed they can all do. The kids are doing a reading assignment on the novel at the moment where I’ve given them choices and suggested ways they could use the software or internet sites to ‘deliver’ their work. I keep stressing that I’m learning how to do this laptop thing as I go along. This task is due soon and the kids have to email me a word attachment with web links, written work or images. One of them finally asked if I could show her how to email an attachment, so next lesson I’ll do a demo on the IWB for those who need it.
I’ve been reflecting on the change in my role and management strategies to put into place to accommodate the change in my role. If I’m not careful I can end up being “all over the room” as kids ask for help with a wide variety of things. So one strategy I’m starting to put unto place is coaching each other. I’ve always done this but now I’m implementing ‘Ask three before me”. This naturally leads to more student movement in the room. I’m enjoying being “in” the room with the kids, rather than out the front which is where I normally direct the lesson from. Incidentally the IWB actually made me more out the front than usual! The kids are also offering to ‘show’ how to do things at the IWB.
How about you? Have you some interesting/amusing/useful laptop insights to share?
Laptops, IWB and changing the role of the teacher.
My classroom is undergoing an interesting transformation. As I come to terms with my changing role with laptops in the room, I started to feel that I needed to ‘teach from the centre’ instead of teaching from the front. So this week my classroom got a bit of a revamp. Teacher’s desk moved to the back centre, tables grouped in sixes (instead of fours), table groups angled in to the middle, remote keyboard and mouse on the teacher’s desk at the back. Soon there will also be an additional ‘normal’ whiteboard on the back wall. That will give me three normal whiteboards as well as the IWB. I wanted the extra boards so that we can ‘leave things up’ and we still use the normal whiteboard for note-making and brainstorming quite a lot.
The first response from the kids was positive. They liked the ‘change’ and the novelty. Year 10 (who had suggested the change) were happy and I noticed that it immediately changed who was ‘running’ the IWB. Since I wasn’t out the front, kids stepped up to find sites, follow links, complete a quiz etc. Not me! Pretty neat! In one simple move I had created the flexibility I needed and shifted the focus away from me as the sole person in charge of the IWB. Suddenly the IWB became interactive!
Has anyone used Museum Box? I regularly visit Bright Ideas blog and think this would work well with laptops and be a very different research assignment. We do character life boxes as a task when Year 9 study a Shakespearean text. I think the Museum Box would be a very techno alternative. What do you think? Have you done anything with the site?
New website
I have a new site: http://site.lyntiernanenglishclassroom.com
I’ve had a website for about ten years. I began building the website to support my work in the classroom and delivered a whole terms work in the first year for year 10 via the website and using a computer lab. This was way before IWB, Video conferencing, laptops and most kids having access to a computer an the internet at home. over the years the website has become a place to ‘store’ links to sites and organise the links into topics such as poetry, plays, speeches, writing etc. Obviously before the development of sites like Delicious and Diigo. With changes to Microsoft products and Windows my site became redundant sometime in 2009. I could no longer update the site, fix links or change any materials I had uploaded. After a few stops and starts I managed to organise another host and a domain name. Then followed a difficult time trying to upload the old site to the new host. I built a completely new site in an attempt to overcome some of the issues. The new site has my Delicious tags embedded on the front page. Much easier for me to add new links and for others to go directly to links. I also started uploading lesson material in Word documents, so others can access the material and adapt as they need. I’ve also included some pages on new technologies, with links to sites I like that work well.
I would be very interested in your thoughts, suggestions and feedback.
Edmodo, and Student teachers.
I discovered Edmodo last week and am in love with it already. What a great site! Perfect for working with 1:1 laptops and easy to join, for kids and teachers. I began by creating groups for my year 10 and year 11 classes and sent them a group email with the join codes. It doesn’t need kids to register with email addresses, you can keep it closed or make some posts public and is not blocked by DET!!!! I especially like the file sharing Library and that students can upload assignments. Another great feature is posting assignments and then as students upload their work it tells you how many have responded. Have you used it? Any advice for a first time user?
I had planned to ‘enrol’ kids in class time but as usual, a technical hitch. For some reason my IWB internet connection has gremlins. Very frustrating and after three service calls this week, no change. Despite this kids have been joining up – their wireless connection works fine!
We have a school Moodle but I think Edmodo is much easier to use – very simple to share files through the library and you don’t need to do a course to learn how to do it. I like to do a lot of my prep at home because I am too busy at school and get a bit tired of the amount of download I have to use to organise material with Moodle, not to mention how slow it is with satellite broadband.
One of my daughters is currently studying to be …. an English teacher. I have really enjoyed hearing her thoughts and ideas over the last few months and her questions have ‘tested’ my memory, assumptions and philosophies. Her questions about how I plan my lessons were a real test. After 30 years of teaching I don’t seem to write much down. I know I walk into the classroom prepared, knowing what I am going to teach and what I expect kids to get from the lesson and how I will do it – it just seems to be all in my head! I had offered her and some of her Uni friends some ‘work experience’ time, mainly because she had expressed her concerns about not knowing what to expect and not remembering much about the classroom because she is a ‘mature age student’!
Yesterday she and a friend visited our school for the day. I really enjoyed having them both in our staffroom and classrooms. They had some time in some classrooms, looked at resources, visited the Library to look at our new Senior Learning Centre and played with the IWB for a while. I made sure I ‘planned’ year 10′s lesson in a bit more detail than I usually do!
I think it is really valuable for potential teachers to ‘visit’ schools. I know they do a couple of pracs (professional experience and internships) but I think time spent ‘helping out’ in a school would be very useful and create a stronger teaching service in the future. They have so much insight and a different perspective and we older experienced teachers have much to ‘pass on’ that is lost when we retire. It’s like we keep reinventing the wheel. If you have a Uni nearby why not open your doors to some student teachers? Or maybe you are part of a programme already running?
Missing in Action
I haven’t blogged for a while and you probably didn’t notice. My husband and I are at the age where our parents’ health is an issue. Unfortunately my mother in law became ill and died recently and not long after my beloved Dad had a stoke. Life does go on. At the same time my beautiful daughter did her first prac as an English teacher and loved it, after doing many other things over the 12 years since she left school. We have had lots of great talks about teaching, what I do, how I do it and more importantly why I do things in certain ways and my teaching philosophy. She has certainly heard most of it before but until now hasn’t really understood the context. While I was away from my desk the wonderful team of teachers I work with pulled together and managed all sorts of difficult situations. I am so grateful to them and so proud of my team.
At this time of the year we are all reflecting on what worked and what didn’t and evaluating our programmes. I’ve been thinking about my first experience with laptops. I can see why some teachers might still be avoiding. They can be so frustrating. The issues around sites not working or kids not having their laptops multiplied throughout the year. Learning lots of new software programmes and trying to manage electronically “handed in” work, not to mention Moodle were all not highlights. Despite this I am still enthusiastic. Fantastic slideshows by students on all sorts of things and Edmodo.com are useful starting points for next year. I’m also rethinking blogs, wikis and how I introduce new programmes. Somehow mindmapping online is not so much fun as big sheets of paper and lots of coloured pens. What I have learned is to start slow, do one thing at a time and teach the software with lots of demonstration. I’d be interested in other people’s “first” impressions after our first full year of 1:1 laptops.
Too many balls in the air
It’s the last day of the New Year long weekend in NSW and the first time for a while I’ve had the time or inclination to look at other people’s blogs or write my own. As I mentioned in my last blog I have been grappling with some trying times and some really wonderful stuff too. My Dad has had to go into a Nursing home and I’ve spent some time going back and forth to ‘home’ to support my Mum(8 hour drive!) This will continue into 2011. My daughter also got her first prac report – truly excellent and I am so proud of her.
As we all do at the end of a school year I have been rethinking the things I’ve done in 2010 and thinking about the things I’ll do in 2011. The laptops have certainly posed some new challenges and I am busily thinking about how I will tackle those challenges in 2011. My first priority will be getting kids to use them! Year 10 2010 made some insightful evaluation comments on their use of laptops so far. The bad news was that few of their teachers seem to be using them – me. They also commented on a school rule we have that students must bring a notebook for every subject as well as the laptops – in case the laptops weren’t working or the teacher wanted the kids working in their books. Their complaint about the ‘weight’ and the pointlessness of bringing both books and laptops was significant I think. Needless to say- we worked out a compromise pretty quickly. In 2011 notebooks will stay at school.
Another comment was on teachers’ level of comfort with laptops in the classroom – they had clearly recognized that asking teachers to use a tool they themselves were not experts in was asking a bit much. This was said kindly and respectfully – not as a criticism of their teachers which I found quite endearing. While they were willing to bring their laptops on days when they had English, many had dispensed with them on the other day. This is an issue I have already taken up with my colleagues and executive. While we have had plenty of professional learning opportunities for teachers there is some generational resistance to insisting kids use the laptops and more leadership is needed in this area.
The kids also did not see the laptops as something that had any impact on the quality of their learning, while IWB’s were considered to have added to their engagement in learning and quality of learning. This is an area I would like to explore a lot more in 2011. I have been thinking about how to get kids using the Web 2.0 tools more effectively and ‘organically’ – because they choose to not because I tell them do do it this way. I am going to start with edmodo again and really spend more time on teaching kids to use it, before moving on to other tools. One thing I will try to avoid this year is trying out too many tools, which is what I did in 2010, hence the title of this blog.
My New year’s resolution is to juggle one ball at a time.
Where I’m from
I’m starting to think about school and planning lessons and playing around with internet to find resources. My year 7 class begin the year with a unit called Belonging and we use Nadia Wheatley’s picture book My Place along with some other texts and lots of poetry. I wanted to find some “models” and also a text for their first homework sheet. It proved to be a bit difficult ( so if you know of any online resources that might fit here please let me know). Eventually I found a nice story by Frances59 about her crazy family. I was rally looking for something about “home’. personal recounts of the way people feel about ‘home’. It got me thinking about how even though I haven’t lived at ‘home’ for 35 years, it is still ‘home’. This has become more significant lately because the house I grew up in and the ‘home’ I go back to will soon be sold.
My Mum has decided it is time to go into a retirement villa, near where my Dad is in a Nursing home. This is something she and Dad have talked about doing ‘when the time came’. Well, the time has come and it is the best thing for them. It has still had quite an impact on me and my siblings. On a recent visit to my Mum, my husband, Paul, and I talked a lot about how lucky we had been to be able to go back to this place so often. I grew up in Port Stephens, NSW. Shoal Bay to be more accurate. (There is a pic of my favourite view of the heads at Shoal Bay in the Flickr stream). I was born in the community hospital there and my parents moved into the house where they have lived for 48 years when I was five. I still remember Dad developing the garden and planting the lawn, the cubby I set fire to playing house and Mum throwing the clothes I hadn’t picked up off the floor out my bedroom window to greet me on my return home from school. It’s where I met by husband when I was 16, it’s where my kids had their first Christmases, where I learnt to swim and surf as a teenager, where my sisters and I were married from, where we came back to after living overseas for a few years. Most of all it is a beautiful place that taught me to appreciate natural beauty.
I do sound very attached and yet where I live now is home too. Our family life is here and it will also be a hard place to leave, filled as it is with our family memories. Now I live on ten acres, with gardens and horses, a creek and lots of Australian wildlife, a long way from the beautiful beaches of Port Stephens. I wonder if I will ever leave here and call some other place ‘home’. Neither Paul nor I can imagine living anywhere else. Sometimes we talk about maybe retiring somewhere else but it never seems to get much airplay. Home is very much a place but it seems to be more than just place. It is family and memories and milestones too. Things that actually do remain long after we have left the place where they happened but in some strange way also tied to those places forever. So while this is my home, where I grew up will always be home too.
Time flies!
I can’t quite believe my last post was so long ago! Life has been racing along at its usual hectic pace. Perhaps I haven’t felt the need to blog because I have been having so much fun playing with Edmodo with my classes and hanging out in the Edmodo language arts community and on the English Companion Ning. If you haven’t tried Edmodo yet and you have classes with DER laptops you have to try it. It makes life so much easier! Without a great deal of effort you can be “integrating technology”, sometimes without even trying.
My Year 11 class have been handing in their writing assignments this term using Edmodo assignments feature. This has been a revelation. A high rate of return, straight from laptop to me, no messy email attachments, and I have actually enjoyed marking them “online”. I could have used Word comments or got them to save to PDF and used various markup tools but that would have meant saving their work and attaching a file to the “Note” I left for them. Too many extra processes. So, I opened the file, read the work and began commenting on their work in the “Note” box as I read – a bit like a think aloud. It didn’t take long, my comments were much longer (and probably easier to read) and I found myself putting more responsibility on the kids. For example, since I couldn’t underline spelling mistakes I would say “You have five spelling mistakes”. This put the onus on the student to find them, a learning experience in itself. Interestingly by the last piece there NO spelling mistakes in any kids writing.
I also found that my comments were more explicit. Perhaps because, even though they could only be seen by the student, it was after all cyberspace and we all know that once something is in cyberspace it is there forever and will come back to haunt us one day. I think I was careful to write comments that were clear, supportive, constructive and that I would happily defend now, or anytime in the future. That is, they were clearly evidence based and I used the evidence in the comment.
The kids seem to enjoy using Edmodo. We have a bit of ‘chat’ going on during lessons which is minimal, not distracting, comes up on the IWB so I get a laugh too, and probably keeps the real world chat to a minimum. Using Edmodo everyday has also meant ALL of my Year 11 students bring their laptops to school!!!!! How cool is that!
Time Out
I’ve had a bit of time out this year. I had a simple fall early this year that caused a compression fracture in my left tibia. It is taking a long time to heal and I have had time off work. I’m back now, although still on crutches. These really slow me down! First week back has been busy with a great project I am working on with English teachers in our district. We are a rural district and our project is about improving outcomes for our top 25% of students. Distance, cost and access are real issues for us, despite the advantages of the internet. We had a very successful day on Friday, not least because we were able to meet each other and talk. We have lots of plans but our first need is to be able to continue our conversations in a way that is easy and allows for collaboration and sharing resources, both for students and teachers.
We have started an Edmodo group and I am really excited at the possibilities this will offer in terms of our own professional learning and for our students. Our teacher group has a range of skills and all our schools have video conferencing so we can meet in cyberspace for mentoring and collaborating on texts and teaching units. I think Edmodo will make it possible for the network of teachers to drive itself. I am also hoping that the opportunity to work through Edmodo with students in other schools will be seen by the students as a incentive to be more engaged and motivated to aim higher.
I’m sure other teachers are collaborating to improve outcomes for their students, perhaps through Edmodo, perhaps in other ways. I would be very interested in hearing how you went about it, the issues that came up and your solutions.
Revising in English for the HSC
These are the last few weeks of school for 2011 HSC students and we have been busy writing practice essays and adding some depth to our thinking about each module and its concepts. Over the years I have worked through many ways of helping students to prepare for this exam, not least with my own kids. How to summarise effectively in English often presents problems for students. Unlike many content based subjects where a list of headings from a textbook and memory cards can help a lot, in English students have to think about the concepts and essay question, draw on everything they know about the topic, select from their knowledge to answer effectively, as well as write an effective essay all under exam conditions. You can tell by the length of that last sentence how overwhelming that can be.
This year I experimented with a great piece of advice from Mrs Langford’s Weblog. She suggested students prepare for Module A by thinking about the ‘big questions” in the texts for Module A and organsing notes under these big ideas. She concludes: It is important that you integrate your notes by organising them under key ideas rather than summarising each text separately. Integrated notes lead to writing integrated responses.
I really liked the thinking behind this and tried it out in the classroom with the Area of Study. Students thought about the “big ideas” about belonging on their own and then combined in teams to share and write down three “big ideas”. They had to write complete well thought out sentences, since I wanted them to practice writing topic sentences they could use in their essays. We selected 7 of the ideas as a class. We then had a discussion about how an idea was related to a text they had studied in the AOS. With some prompt questions we pushed that thinking to include the techniques the writer was using and evidence from the texts. I then moved students into teams with one “big idea” each and we played ‘Speed Dating”. Each team had a few minutes to add text, techniques, quotes and evidence to the big idea on the sheet and then moved on to the text ‘big idea’.
It was great fun requiring some high energy from tired year 12 students, and produced lots of deeper thinking and revision of texts. By the end of the lesson we had a very useful summary that students could refine and add to and that was set up especially to support their essay writing.
I’ve since tried it out with year 11 who are also preparing for exams. The response from Year 12 was very positive, with students keen to repeat the exercise with their modules. It is nice to find a workable, high energy way to keep Year 12 working in the midst of what can be a trying time at school!
School Certificate English Exam revision games, NSW
While we are celebrating the demise of the external exams as of 2012, we still have to get this lot through the exams for 2011. I have been using games (mostly online freely available fun) over the last few years to keep Year 10 going when their minds are already fast forwarding to jobs, maybe HSC, car licenses, work experience, big Year 10 final overnight excursion to fantastic resort(!), leaving school early and summer holidays.
I have been using a Literary Terms jeopardy game I first found through Jefferson County Schools website and I sincerely thank whoever created it! We have played the Literary Terms Jeopardy game throughout the year, usually after lunch period on Friday afternoon, or whenever it was our faculty’s turn to look after the ‘remainders’ when the rest of Year 10 were off doing something wildly exciting. While there were some aspects of the game that were useful to revise student knowledge for the Literacy exam, there was other material, relevant to our course, but not really useful for this exam. So I finally got around to creating a few more. I know – the exams aren’t on next year, but I figure some of it will still be needed for students entering HSC and we will still have bored kids left at school on Friday afternoons.
First I googled making jeopardy games and found Jeopardy lab – great site. It’s an online web template, free, and very quick and easy to use – make sure you don’t forget the password you used to create it! So I did one on language devices. Literacy exam revision is aimed more at reminding kids of the kinds of things they need to write about in both the short answer and should use in their own writing in the Writing section of the paper. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the previous game but still easy to set up, and quick. Once created you can send the url to the kids and they can do it on their own, in groups or as a class. It also has a handy scoring tool – adds and subtracts for you.
I also checked back to the original site where I had found the Literary terms games. Turns out there was a whole lot of templates you can use to create a variety of PowerpointGames The advantage of the Power point game is that you can add your own “bells and whistles” and there are some good tutorials out there for creating games. Powerpoint 2007 Hints helped me solve the problem of showing what questions had been already selected and I also experimented with downloading ‘wav’ files (legally) that could be added as sound animations to keep them interested and laughing. I set up another game based on the “language features” questions in the multiple choice section using terms that had appeared in the exam papers for the last two years, SC Language features jeopardy.
I think I can take this further by getting the kids to create their own games, of different kinds. They do seem to enjoy this approach to revision and they do learn the material – they get better each time we play!
Do let me know if you try any of these games in class, or create something to share.
The excitement of new technologies.
I love using Edmodo! It has created a very different learning environment for students but most of all it has pushed me out of my comfort zone and taught me something I wished I’d learnt an eon ago. When Edmodo added the Quiz feature I quickly created a quiz that reviewed the first few lessons of a new Module I was teaching to my Advanced English (HSC NSW) class. It took about ten minutes. This set me on the path of setting weekly homework through Edmodo assignment and quiz features for the whole module. I liked the ease with which I could set tasks and the way Edmodo tracks the turning in of tasks for me. I also liked that Edmodo records students grades. Since I don’t want to spend hours marking, even if it is easier in digital form, I focused on setting short tasks that built skills and was relevant to the learning objectives for the week. The most students were asked to write was two well structured paragraphs, although, as one student said “That was a really hard question!”
Some things I learnt were:
- A short task that has a higher order thinking skill is doable (and therefore more likely to be done), easier to mark and actually develops the critical thinking skills kids needed to learn.
- The tasks progressed from revising some work done in class to going beyond recount to analysis and evaluation.
- The relationship between learning objectives for the week and the homework seemed to be a key feature in the increasing quality of their answers over time.
- The grade book feature insisted kids be accountable. Edmodo kept telling kids they had Late assignments.
Since the new Annotate feature has been added, the marking is even easier, without the need to open documents, mark and then re save and resend. I am keen to see how I can keep up the momentum in the next Module.
30 Year Gold Star
I guess it’s official. I got my 30 Year certificate from the DET on Tuesday at our end of year Christmas lunch. It is a funny sensation. It actually doesn’t feel that long and I still think I have a lot to learn. Every time I work with a new group of kids or a new member of staff or listen to my beginning teacher daughter I am reminded that I know very little. I am challenged to think in new ways about the job I do, and I keep having this thought “why didn’t I think of that?”.
I am taking a break from cleaning out my filing cabinet and folders at home. I have to do it now. It’s all over the spare bedroom and we have guests for Christmas! And yes I have found some things that are 30 years old. Am I still using them? No, but they do remind me of things I thought then and ways I taught that are probably embedded in my thinking now. It is quite exciting. It is also very therapeutic. I am chucking a lot. I want to get it down to ‘manageable’ and easy to find. I have discovered the best system anywhere, any time is a simple alphabetical system. Finally. It only took 30 years!
So how do I decide what to throw out? Our current syllabus and programme helps. Not much use keeping things that have been superseded by more innovative thinking. No point keeping grammar sheets – there is a lot more around on the internet that is a lot more fun. Do I keep my personal notes on texts I have taught? Even if I do refer to them, I know I will make a new set of notes next time I teach that text anyway. And they will focus on completely different things because my frame of reference has changed.
Anything on Shakespeare seems worth keeping, and there is such a lot of it over the years! Great ideas for getting kids writing seems worth keeping too. Kids still need to be inspired to write, that hasn’t changed much. And poetry. Poems and ideas for teaching poetry. And there is a lot of that too! I must really like teaching poetry, because I can’t bear to part with a good poem.
Notes from 30 years of professional learning and conferences? Not much I want to keep. What ever I was excited about I used straight away, so the rest obviously didn’t inspire me that much. Thinking skills and pedagogy? Yep, still like trying out ways to challenge kids to think. Still interested in the craft of teaching and how kids learn.
I am procrastinating, I know. I need to get back in there and finish it. A few gems have turned up. A few years ago I did a presentation on “ten things I learnt this year” at Annual Conference. It must have been a good year. Looking back over those ten things I covered a lot of territory. Naturally it got me thinking about the things I learnt this year, so here’s my list:
1. How to set ‘a reasonable amount of homework’ – thanks to Edmodo. Set things that kids have to think hard about but don’t have to write a lot. Focus on the really important thinking they need to do and the really important skills they need to practice, like writing a well structured analysis paragraph with evidence. And do this every week, without fail.
2. How to teach kids to write better essays (I know, I have a million ways to teach essay writing and I am still experimenting!) Teach them how to write a well structured paragraph. Teach them how to write different kinds of paragraphs for different kinds of essay questions and different modules. Model it and make them do their own in the next lesson or homework task. Use the videos on “Building a PEE paragraph” Give them a formula for writing the introduction and make them practice it until they can go beyond it.
3. Get kids to do some short writing at the beginning of every lesson. Link it to the current work, revision of last lesson, concepts for the next lesson, fun writing. Follow it up with sharing in lots of different ways. Give them a half sheet of paper to write on and collect it. You get a lot of insight into their learning and what they still need to learn.
4. Never forget the joy of performance, or the deep knowledge and understanding that comes from performance.
5. Plan lessons that only take one lesson.
6. Keep finding new ways to get kids engaged in making their thinking visible. They just loved ‘illuminated texts’!
7. There are only two rules for the classroom. Good manners and everyone participates.
8. Kids actually do like reading. Don’t stop.
9. Make connections. Plan units so that the texts are constantly referred to in exploring a ‘big question’. Choose the best texts, not just those that are available. Don’t try to teach everything about the text. Focus on the things they will actually need to know about to do the assessment task or the exam. And make the kids do all the thinking.
10. If it is not working, try something else. Keep trying until you work out what works. Then keep doing that.
11. And …. there is nothing like a good game of jeopardy to keep them buzzing right to the end of last period Friday!
Now, back to the filing cabinet!
