Christmas Card 2010

Noir Stars Christmas

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Podcast Article

• I thought it was very interesting that the students who participated in this study were volunteers and were receiving no credit for their extensive participation. They must have been very motivated. When asked about why they choose to participate even though they got no credit, it seems like they did mostly for the experience and for the benefit of others - very impressive. I imagine that creating podcasts will be very motivating and engaging for students as they love their Ipods and often gravitate towards technology. But I wonder if my 9th grade students will be THIS motivated...I find that my students typically won't do much unless a grade is attached. I also wonder if we can expect similar results with all age groups of students as this study was conducted with college students. I imagine with some modifications (including a grade) a variety of students will find a similar podcasting activity very engaging.

• I was also very interested to read about the many schools and universities that use podcasts and Ipods in their curriculum, even giving out Ipods to their students. I think it is such a great idea to incorporate Ipod into the classroom. However, my school recently banned Ipods from the school. This new policy created quite an uproar among students (who used to listen to their Ipods in the hallways, after a test, in study hall, and at lunch) and even teachers who liked to let their students listen to keep them quiet (after a test or in study hall). From my understanding, the policy was created because some students were using the new iPhone to text in school (also banned) but claimed they were just listening to music and administrators couldn't tell the difference. I think it is a shame that my school went to such an extreme rather than investigating ways to effectively integrate Ipods and podcasts into the curriculum.

• Finally, I enjoyed the discussion of cooperation versus collaboration. I had never really heard them described as such - cooperation meaning splitting up the jobs, and collaboration meaning working together to complete a task. I have always used these terms rather interchangeably. Regardless, I think podcast or vodcast activities are great cooperative and collaborative projects to encourage team work, problem solving, and knowledge building. I am excited to do a podcast or vodcast project with my students next year.

Vod Casting

Vod Casting Brainstorming...

• Grammar lessons - students can make a vod cast to teach or reinforce a lesson on a grammar topic. They would use the images to reinforce their spoken words. Grammar Girl does post casts of many grammar topics. Perhaps I could have my students take one of the podcasts (or part of one) and turn it into a vod cast with illustrations.

• Short Story Project - I do a project every year where students work in groups to demonstration their understanding of literary terms as applied to short stories. They always include some type of creative element or theme. Perhaps I could have them make vodcasts to fulfill a portion of the assignments (plot lines, characterization, theme, point of view.)

• Humorous passages in Great Expectations - Great Expectations is typically the students least favorite work each year, but it is actually very funny once they learn to understand it and how to read the humour. They could make a Vodcast where they would have to "play up" the humor and add illustrations.

21st Century Skills

"There’s a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls—every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. “This is a school,” he declares. “We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.”

-Wallis, Claudia and Steptoe, Sonja. "How to Bring Our Schools out of the 20th Century" Time. Dec 18, 2006.

In the intro to this article, the authors point out that while the world is changing rapidly around us, education seems to be a bit frozen in time. So the question is, how is my school, North Hunterdon High School, manging to catch up and keep up with the times??

In many ways, North Hunterdon High School, is embracing 21st Century Skills and even leading the movement in our district, county, and state. Four years ago, as part of a literacy program, a group of 7 teacher, including myself, designed a course based on 21st Century Skills. This course, Advanced Academic Literacies (AAL) is geared to prepared students to be successful members and contributors to the 21st Century. The course is intended to train students in a variety of literacy skills that they can apply throughout their academic and professional careers, including reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, as well as information, science, economics, technology, mathematics, social, visual, global and multicultural studies. In reality when faced with time constraints and varying classroom dynamics, we cover some of these topics in greater depth than other. The course theme (adventure tour companies) engages students in working as teams to develop plans for a travel company and to create all the materials associated with running a business and operating an international tour, from the inception of a company name to the simulation of an authentic corporate presentation. Effective groups (and not all are effective!) are marked by team unity, work ethic, professionalism, and creativity. From mind-sparking and reframing to organization and time management, AAL students learn to (or at least have the opportunity to learn to) communicate, overcome obstacles, evaluate information, conduct research, transfer knowledge, apply revisions, embrace technology, and market their products. The fact that we were asked to create the course, given time to create the materials (we have no text book - all of our extensive materials are teacher created), and are currently entering our 4th year of teaching this required course is proof that my school has embraced 21st Century skills.

However, in many ways, North Hunterdon still needs to continue to get on board with this agenda. One semester of 21st century skills is not enough. We need to continue to train teachers about how to integrate these skills (technology, authentic problem solving situations, social skills, communication, team work, etc.) into all aspects of the curriculum. Many teachers are already very innovative and/or eager to learn new strategies, but others remain hesitant, sceptical, and even critical of these changes. Over the least 4 years of creating and then implementing AAL, I have been shocked by the resistance we have faced from, not administrators, but other teachers about the validity and necessity of 21st century skills. But on the other hand, I have so many supportive and creative colleagues as well. I guess like anything else in education and life, change takes time and is never easy. But I don't think there is any way to ignore that education is moving towards 21st century learning. And if we don't get on board we will be left behind.

Interactive Communicative Tools

What three key concepts or ideas did you learn?

• Interactive tools have the potential to simply increase the pace of questioning without allowing students enough time to think through their responses and to lower the depth of questioning by asking for fact recall rather than application and analysis of the facts. I need to be careful that I am not using interactive tools just to say I am using technology and ignore solid teaching principals. I see how this danger can be true, but my experience in the classroom is that interactive tools not only allow for greater participation and a lively and fun environment, but also require students to defend their answers and interact with each other when they disagree. (See my examples of interactive activities later in the post.)
• The reflection questions on typical classroom interactions are great "Check Points" for me to use to evaluate the thinking time I allow during my lessons and the depth of understanding I am asking for in my questions. For instance, I am reminded that I should be paying attention to length of my students responses, time allowed for discussion between students, and reflection time after discussions. In general, I think I do take these questions into consideration, but not always consciously. A good principle that I took from these questions is that the interactions I set up in my classroom should be a good balance of quick Q and A and more in depth reflection.
• As far as interactive white boards specifically, I liked the activity where students brainstormed ideas for solving a multiplication problem by writing them on the screen and then comparing their ideas with a more standard method. I think this is a great way to achieve student participation while still raising the bar for thinking - touching the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy - creating solutions, analyzing different methods, evaluating which method is best. I can see doing a similar lesson with sentence structure - giving students a poorly written sentence, asking them to revise in their own style, defend their word choice and syntax, and compare the options suggested by the class.

Do interactive communication tools lead to interactive learning? Why or why not?
I think that interactive communication tools can lead to interactive learning, but the teacher needs to use the tools in a way to create an interactive lesson and environment. For example, a wiki is definitely a great interactive tool, but is not always used for interaction. For some teachers, a wiki is simply an easy way to create a website to share information about a course such as a syllabus and homework assignments. They may choose not to use it to its full potential for student interaction where students actually create their own pages, edit each other’s work, or collaborate with peers to build a page together. Similarly, as discussed in class and in the article, white boards are often used more as projector screens than as interactive devises for both the teacher and the students. But clearly, as we have explored in class, smart boards are great for student participation when they write directly on the screen or navigate through websites. Teachers need to be taught how to use these tools to their full potential and need to explore them to find applications for their own classrooms.

How can educators be sure to use interactive communication tools to their best potential? List and describe three ideas.

Tablet PC – A tablet PC is very similar to a Smart board, but it is a lap top that allows the user to write on and control the screen with a tablet pen, or in some cases, a finger. Using an LCD projector, the images on the Tablet PC can be projected on to the screen in the classroom. Teachers can use this interactive tool in a variety of ways. Some of my favorites in my own classroom are as follows:

• Annotating (marking up) a text of a short story or novel to identity patterns, to analyze the text, and to visualize the reader’s “thinking process” while reading the text. I usually ask for volunteers to use the pen to record the thoughts and ideas of the class. Then we use the annotations to draw conclusions about the text - both form/structure and content.
  
• Completing grammar exercises, labeling parts of a sentence, paragraph, or essay, and editing and revising writing. Again, I usually ask for student volunteers to use the pen, or for exercises, I have students come up one problem at a time.
  
• Taking notes. Rather than writing on the board, I set up charts in a word document, and either I or some of my students write the notes directly on the computer. I would like to try using inspiration next year so that students can move the notes around to show how they relate to each other.

Using the tablet PC not only allows more students to participate in the lessons, but they LOVE the novelty of “writing on the computer.” I love that students actually fight each other over who gets to do the next grammar problem!!

Wikis - A wiki is a website that anyone (or anyone who has permission if private) can edit. They are very easy to use – very much like using basic word features – and allow for students to interact with each other in the classroom, at home, and even across oceans! One of my colleagues used a wiki to write letters back and forth between our school and a school in another country. Some of my favorite assignments are as follows:

• Researching the background of the Arthurian legend and then creating “book club” pages where students discussed different Arthur stories with my freshmen English classes.
• Creating Facebook-style profiles of the characters in Great Expectations in my freshman English classes
• Collaborating on country research with my freshman AAL academic skills classes.
• Designing a web presence for a virtual company with freshman AAL academic skills classes

Interactive polls and surveys. I have recently begun playing with different free survey tools to ask my students questions via the internet. Below is a poll I am going to use with my students at the beginning of next year.

Though this poll does not really assess great deapth of understanding, it gives me a base by which to structure other lessons. Polls can be structured in ways to assess more depth of understanding when desired. Free survey tools to check out are found on the following links:
http://polls.zoho.com/
http://www.polldaddy.com/
http://www.mystudiyo.com/

Education as a Necessity of Life

In the first section of John Dewey’s chapter on “Education as a Necessity of Life,” he explains that life exists or is “renewed” by the sharing or “transmitting” of experiences – “customs, institutions, beliefs, victories and defeats, recreations and occupations.” “Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.” We are born with perhaps only basic instincts but to live fully and to carry on the progress made before us and make more progress in the future, we need to be “educated” by those around us. This education can be very informal – learning from our parents, our peers, our environment, and it can be much more formal in a school – teacher to student – setting. But overall, life can not develop and expand without some type of education or transmission of ideas and experiences.

In the second section of his chapter, Dewey discusses the role of communication in education. “All communication [transmission of life] is educative. To be a recipient of communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.” As a human being, and as an English educator specially, I could not agree more with this statement. When we communicate with each other, we are sharing our life and experiences, and we are educating each other. Some people may be resistant to learning from these communications and experiences, but they are educational opportunities none the less. Communication is the key to developing as an individual, as a relationship, as a family, as a workplace, and as a society. For these reasons, I believe communication skills are imperative to teach in formal school settings. How interesting that communication is the tool for education but people must be educated in how to communicate effectively!

In the third section of his chapter, Dewey explains the differences between informal education and formal education in society. He argues that as long as people are truly living and not merely existing, they can’t help but “learn” informally from their surroundings – people and environment. However, “without…formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the resources and achievements of a complex society.” Formal education is imperative to fully teach all that life has to offer and to learn to specialize in certain areas of knowledge. Yet, as a society we need to be careful not to ignore the role of informal learning even when we are teaching the specifics of biochemistry or sentence syntax. Both formal and informal education need to be in balance throughout life.

Bloom's Taxonomy in High School

When I think back to high school learning, my first thoughts are of cramming for tests and quizzes the night before, on the bus in the morning, and even the period before. While I didn’t think about it then, reflecting on these “cram” sessions leads me to think that many of my assessments were testing more basic levels of Bloom’s taxonomy – remembering and understanding. I remember reviewing French vocab words and historical dates and battles and amendments. I remember flashcards for mythological characters and common SAT words. I remember learning the periodic table and geometry proofs. And for the most part, I could recall these facts on my tests and quizzes. However, if I had to take the same tests again tomorrow, I would have to cram all over again…

While many of my experiences in high school were based on the lower level of the taxonomy, I also had some assignments where I created projects, presentations, or essays that I both enjoyed and can remember more in-depth today – my research papers on CS Lewis, Little Women, and The Sound and The Fury, and my public speaking class with speeches on the Bengal Tiger, a childhood role model, and soccer positions. Interestingly, the assignments that I best remember and that asked me to evaluate and create my own products also directly tie in with my college major (English) and my current profession (High School English).

I think creating assignments at higher levels of the taxonomy is very challenging and takes active participation from the learner as well as the teacher. So I’m not surprised that so many of my learning experiences in high school were based on the lower half of the spectrum. Honestly, I think I received a very strong secondary education, even if many of the assessments focused on more basis recall skills and even if I don’t remember everything I learned. The facts and skills that I learned served as a foundation for me to build on throughout high school and college and as I began to focus on English, I didn’t need to remember all of the other facts…Overall, in high school, I think I learned to think critically and how to be a self learner throughout the rest of my life which definitely represents the goal of Bloom’s taxonomy.